This site is the digital companion to my paper, “Electro-Sensitives: Neurasthenic Echoes of Feminine Pathologization.” The paper is an expanded chapter from my dissertation research on applying feminist approaches to studying disease and theorization of postfeminist culture to the study of technologies. This project was supported by a New Directions in Feminist Research Fellowship from the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. The site consists of brief summaries of the major sections of the paper, a PDF of the complete paper, and an interactive Korsakow video.

TECHNOPATHOLOGIES
From electric lights causing blindness and insomnia to cell phones causing cancer, electric communication technologies have a history of associations with mental and physical illness. I refer to these associations as technopathologies. My research explores them in terms of cultural discourse, not medical science: I am not investigating whether any disease is real or not, or definitely caused by technologies, but how cultural discourse and representations of technology and sickness suggest ideals and expectations of technology use. I’m not investigating if sitting too close to a TV will really hurt your eyes, but what such warnings, or horror movies about fatal text messages suggest about technology users. Who and are sick, unhealthy, abnormal, bad users? What are they like? Who, then, are healthy, normal, good users?

FEMINISM
My method of studying disease as exaggerated expressions of cultural ideals is based on feminist work on gendered diseases, such as hysteria, anorexia, bulimia, and agoraphobia. Whereas such work analyzed diseases as related to ideals of the feminine gender, I analyze diseases as related to ideals of the technology user. The chapter here first discusses a somewhat familiar gendered disease, neurasthenia. Considered a variety of mental and physical illnesses brought on by overstimulated nervous systems, neurasthenia was believed caused by modern technological society and women’s liberation. This 19th-century diagnosis is no longer used in the West; its gendered treatments were famously critiqued in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” A less-familiar text I use to study neurasthenia and pathologized femininity is Possessed, a 1947 Joan Crawford film made when the diagnosis was giving way to schizophrenia and other conditions. I argue that today neurasthenia echoes in debates around electrosensitivity, a variety of mental and physical illnesses brought on by hypersensitivity to electromagnetism. Finally, I employ feminist theorizing on postfeminist cultural sensibilities as a way to gain insight into cultural expectations of technology use and see the user as in many ways a postfeminist subject. Through this, I demonstrate using as my object of study differential media culture, which critically examines:
1. Technologies of communication as portrayed in cultural discourse, rhetoric, and representations
2. How these play out both ideologically and in actual media use across vectors of difference: different bodies, genders, geographies, national identities, etc.

Derived from feminism, differential media culture is sympathetic to critical race theory and queer theory as well. As employed here, its point is to show how the history of femininst research and theory on gender, the body, disease, science, and technology all emphasizes and underscores aspects of technological relationships and expectations not as apparent through more generalized modes of media or technology studies.