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‘I’ve heard things you people wouldn’t imagine’: Blade Runner ’s aural lives

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Metaphors of aliens, robots and other fantastical beings are often employed as shorthand for autistic difference. While such rhetoric can serve to dehumanise a disabled minority, the same otherworldly subjects have also provided meaningful spaces of cultural belonging, identity, and community for autistic fans. This thesis positions the fantastical screen as a space of cross-neurotype encounter where shared experiences of estrangements can be productively encountered and explored. It is led by the work of neuroqueer theorists Melanie Yergeau and Julia Miele Rodas, whose analyses of neurodivergent embodiment in social rhetoric and literary texts have enabled innovative discourses of a poetics of autism. Developing this work for the screen, I establish how cinematic and televisual techniques align with neuroqueer thinking, before delineating the ways in which this approach enables dynamic critical incursions on the understanding of autism and estrangement. Moving to analysis, I follow autistic interest in Ridley Scott’s science fiction dystopia Blade Runner: The Final Cut, to reinterpret its postmodernist aesthetic as neuroqueer expression. The film’s cyborg characters are recast as neurodivergent individuals framed by an aesthetic attitude of empathetic attachment for atypical worldly resonance. In the TV sitcom Community, I locate a neuroqueer narrative agency in the trickster dynamic of its celebrated but under-theorised autistic hero, Abed Nadir. I analyse three episodes where Abed negotiates his neurodivergent expression via the invitation of fantastical energies, thereby positioning estrangement as a key methodology for embodying autistic difference. In conclusion, I offer the fantastic autistic and the fantastical screen as powerful allies in the articulation of neuroqueer divergence and the negotiation of cross-neurotype communication.
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Memory is central to the way that cultures produce, negotiate and contest ideas of nationhood. This work examines how, as an aesthetic mode of nostalgia, the black and white image was used in the 1990s to establish and legitimate particular kinds of memory within American cultural life. It locates the production of visual (monochrome) memory in different forms of cultural media and explores how attempts were made in the nineties to authorize a consensual past, a core memory - what might be called an archival essence - for a stable and unified concept of "America." The 1990s were a period when liberal ideologies of nationhood and mythologies of Americanness came under particular, and intensified, pressure. In a time when national identity was being undermined by transnational political and economic restructuring, when ideas of national commonality were being challenged by an emergent politics of difference, and when the metanarratives of memory were straining for legitimacy against the multiple pasts of the marginalized, the desire to stabilize the configuration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity became a defining aspect of hegemonic memory politics. By considering monochrome memory in nineties mass media, I look at the way that a particular "nostalgia mode" was used stylistically within visual culture and was taken up within a discourse of stable nationhood. By examining the production and visuality of aestheticized nostalgia, I make a cultural but also a conceptual argument. Much of the contemporary work on nostalgia is bound in critiques of its reactionary politics, its sanitization of history, or its symptomatic contribution to the amnesiac tendencies of postmodern culture. I explore the subject from the vantage point of cultural studies, mediating between theories that understand nostalgia in terms of cultural longing and/or postmodern forgetting. I account for the manner in which nostalgia has become divorced from any necessary concept of loss, but, also, how particular modes of nostalgia have been used affectively in the mass media to perform specific cultural and memory work. Critically, I examine nostalgia as a cultural style, anchoring a set of questions that can be asked of its signifying and political functionality in the visual narratives of the dominant media.
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