Traverse Fantasy

Feminism has a metaphysics problem. This isn't specific to feminism: it's just that feminism is a label applied to a variety of discourses which all claim to have the same political premise or subjective vantage, while differing in both respects—usually this is visible when describing white feminism, bourgeois feminism, liberal feminism, cishet feminism, in contrast to some idealized black feminism, proletarian feminism, radical feminism, trans feminism. It's a hall of mirrors no matter where you look. But I'm interested in the discursive function of "essentialism": a theoretical term which encapsulates a critique of naïve materialism, that one can't reduce social phenomena to a superficially materialist basis, which became a cudgel against any materialist analysis in general. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir in  The Second Sex  first distinguished between sex and gender, not as objective scientific reality versu...

This is a paper I wrote for a seminar on archaeology (specifically on the field's philosophical premises with respect to the relationship between history, the past, and artifacts) in 2020. Not perfect, and I adored my professor for that seminar, but fuck OOO! Object-oriented programming is a useful paradigm to organize data and model an interactive system. In A Theory of Objects, Abadi and Cardelli enumerate three components of a mechanical model to simulate a system: analysis, design, and implementation (Abadi 7). All three aspects involve the use of objects, in different senses. The authors illustrate this through a mechanical model of the solar system. Analysis involves the modeling of the sun and its orbiting planets, floating in space. Although it is understood that the planets orbit around the sun, the behavior to rationalize this is not innate to the planet-models themselves. Design involves the modeling of planetary orbits using mechanical tracks and gears. There is no suc...

This is a paper I wrote for my first semester of undergrad in 2018. I actually wanted to expand it into a thesis about the economics of online platforms (business people say stupid shit about it) before I shifted my research wholly into Greco-Latin poetry, but I still like the analysis and sometimes wish I could refer to it. So, here it is! Sorry for any eighteen-year-old bullshit. Also I removed the footnotes because they were annoying to reformat, but the works cited section is still there. Shout-out to my professor who was an English literature guy forced to teach engineers how to write. He was very entertained by me, I think. And he was a great professor! Very patient with the STEM freaks.  Introduction Social media is a mode of discourse specific to the information age, an evolution of the personalization of commodities and the commodification of personality where users relate to each other in a manner not unlike celebrities and brand images. As a new means of communication...