Nathan Rambukkana
My work centres the cultural study of discourse, politics and identities. I track flows of discourse as they move in and out of the public sphere influencing both individual and group identities, embodiments, and politics—both within cultural groupings and between those groups and the larger structures of society.
Specifically, my research addresses topics such as digital intimacies, the relationship of intimacy and privilege, hybridity and mixed-race identities, the social and cultural aspects new media forms, and non/monogamy in the public sphere. It is situated disciplinarily at the nexus of communication and cultural studies; methodologically within discourse analysis; and draws theoretical energy from a wide range of sources such as feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories; semiotics, affect theory, event theory and psychoanalysis.
My book, Fraught Intimacies: Non/Monogamy in the Public Sphere (UBC Press, 2015) explores the increased mediation of non-monogamies since the early nineties—in every medium from television, to film, to self-help books, to the Internet—and how such convergent mediation opens these discourses up to societal scrutiny, as well as transformation. By exploring the privileged logics that frame our conceptions of intimacy, I explore the political and cultural implications of how we frame non-monogamy broadly in sexual discourse, as well as how the public sphere presences of three major forms of non-monogamy (adultery, polygamy and polyamory) display a complex relationship with “intimate privilege,” an emergent state in which one’s intimacies are read as viable, ethical or even real.
My new research is on the history of digital intimacies. This project investigates the intimate potentials and problematics of social media forms, drawing critical insights from intimacy theory (a subset of queer theory), but extending its ambit to consider multiple forms of digitally mediated togetherness. This project employs discourse analysis in combination with digital humanities methodologies to investigate past, existing, and emerging forms of digitally mediated intimacy. These include such topics as hashtags as technosocial assemblages; MMOs and avatar infidelity; the politics of race-activist hashtags such as #Ferguson; haptics and digital touching; and the emerging sex robot industry. In conjunction with this project I also edited the collection Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks (Digital Formations series, Peter Lang, 2015). This collection investigates the diversity of publics that hashtags address, with politics and positionalities ranging from subcultural and community maintenance; to speaking back to state, corporate and societal power and privilege.
I maintain a blog at http://complexsingularities.net.
Specifically, my research addresses topics such as digital intimacies, the relationship of intimacy and privilege, hybridity and mixed-race identities, the social and cultural aspects new media forms, and non/monogamy in the public sphere. It is situated disciplinarily at the nexus of communication and cultural studies; methodologically within discourse analysis; and draws theoretical energy from a wide range of sources such as feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories; semiotics, affect theory, event theory and psychoanalysis.
My book, Fraught Intimacies: Non/Monogamy in the Public Sphere (UBC Press, 2015) explores the increased mediation of non-monogamies since the early nineties—in every medium from television, to film, to self-help books, to the Internet—and how such convergent mediation opens these discourses up to societal scrutiny, as well as transformation. By exploring the privileged logics that frame our conceptions of intimacy, I explore the political and cultural implications of how we frame non-monogamy broadly in sexual discourse, as well as how the public sphere presences of three major forms of non-monogamy (adultery, polygamy and polyamory) display a complex relationship with “intimate privilege,” an emergent state in which one’s intimacies are read as viable, ethical or even real.
My new research is on the history of digital intimacies. This project investigates the intimate potentials and problematics of social media forms, drawing critical insights from intimacy theory (a subset of queer theory), but extending its ambit to consider multiple forms of digitally mediated togetherness. This project employs discourse analysis in combination with digital humanities methodologies to investigate past, existing, and emerging forms of digitally mediated intimacy. These include such topics as hashtags as technosocial assemblages; MMOs and avatar infidelity; the politics of race-activist hashtags such as #Ferguson; haptics and digital touching; and the emerging sex robot industry. In conjunction with this project I also edited the collection Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks (Digital Formations series, Peter Lang, 2015). This collection investigates the diversity of publics that hashtags address, with politics and positionalities ranging from subcultural and community maintenance; to speaking back to state, corporate and societal power and privilege.
I maintain a blog at http://complexsingularities.net.
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Books by Nathan Rambukkana
Hashtags are deictic, indexical – yet what they point to is themselves, their own dual role in ongoing discourse. Focusing on hashtags used for topics from Ferguson, Missouri, to Australian politics, from online quilting communities to labour protests, from feminist outrage to drag pop culture, this collection follows hashtag publics as they trend beyond Twitter into other spaces of social networking such as Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr as well as other media spaces such as television, print, and graffiti.
In Fraught Intimacies, Nathan Rambukkana delves into North American society’s fixation with monogamy and its attendant fascination with non-monogamy. Drawing on media coverage, popular culture, and recent court cases, he examines how polygamy, adultery, and polyamory are represented in the public sphere and the effect this in having on intimate relationships and aspects of contemporary Western society.
As this book demonstrates, although monogamy is considered and presented as the norm in Western society, many kinds of sexual and romantic relationships exist within its borders. Rambukkana’s intricate analysis reveals how some forms of non-monogamy are tacitly accepted, even glamourized, while others are vilified and reviled. By questioning what this says how about intimacy, power and privilege, this book offers an innovative framework for understanding the place of non-monogamy in Western society, particularly in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship status.
Timely and controversial, this book makes a stimulating and sophisticated argument for why we need to reconsider how we talk – and think – about non-monogamy.
Journal Issue by Nathan Rambukkana
Journal Articles by Nathan Rambukkana
Book Chapters by Nathan Rambukkana
According to Massumi, Simondon's writing on form and matter can be usefully mobilized to think through how discourse forms and circulates. Rather than a simplistic reading that would see discourse as a mimetic reflection of human culture, or a deterministic one that would see it as a top-down shaper of culture, Massumi's mobilization posits discourse as technosocial event, shaping and shaped, forme et matière. It is the complex singularity that gains substance through its ongoing becoming, it is both medium and message.
This paper explores the hashtag as a similar technosocial event; both text and metatext, tag and subject matter, hashtag-mediated discursive assemblages are neither simply the reflection of pre-existing discourse formations nor do they create them out of digital thin air. Rather, they are nodes in the becoming of distributed discussions in which their very materiality as performative utterances (Bruns) is deeply implicated. Hashtags are mobilized in discourse that recognizes itself as such, a crossroads between form and matter, medium and message entangled.
This growing field comprises work on polyamory (discursively “ethical” or consensual non-monogamy); on polygamy (plural marriage, usually—but not exclusively—polygynous: Muslim, Christian and other); on swinging (sometimes known as “The Lifestyle”, a subculture devoted to casual open sex); and on non-monogamies outside of these three major formulations. This last category includes open marriages and relationships; alternative marital arrangements, sometimes referred to as “swapping” or co-marital sex; “friends with benefits”; group sex (e.g., threesomes, orgies); open-sex commune experiments (e.g., the Oneida intentional community); and otherwise-unnamed non-monogamous intimate practices such as those that can occur in some lesbian, gay, bisexual and kink subcultures. Finally, it also includes work that considers non-monogamies broadly across these categories. These practices have different histories, etymologies, facets and politics. Some of these practices are thousands of years old, some are merely decades old and some are just being fleshed out; some have their origins in religion or spirituality, others in a staunch and iconoclastic secularism. Taken together, however, they form a present and undeniable facet of contemporary intimacy that has been growing in prominence and significance in the public sphere and public culture since at least the early 1990s (Rambukkana, in press). Engaging with open non-monogamies is no longer something relegated to societal margins in the life of western societies; it has shifted to be a part of the centre—albeit a part that sits somewhat uneasily with current normative frameworks. With definite parallels to the more-firmly-established shift that brought LGBT* and queer lifestyles into the mainstream and that have made same-sex marriage a reality (or present struggle) in a growing number of countries, this cultural movement creates tensions and new problematics in psychology and cognate fields.
Major issues relating to psychology involve the following: a) The status of open non-monogamies in relation to normative social psychology (with implications within applied psychology for individual, “couples” and family practitioners; b) The theoretical questioning of the notion of healthy romantic love between more than two people; c) The effects of non-monogamy (and polygamy particularly) on women; d) The effects of multiple partner parenting on children, communities and society; and e) The psychological exploration of the minutia of non-monogamous living (e.g., the psychology of overcoming jealousy, and of non-normative relationship dynamics/structures such as “compersion,” “sister wives,” “triads” and “New Relationship Energy” ).
Debates within this literature are linked to divides such as those between mononormative and anti-mononormative perspectives ; on all of swinging, polygamy and polyamory; between activist and critical approaches to polyamory; between pro-legalizing and pro-criminalization approaches to polygamy, and between and among multiple forms of open non-monogamy (for example, privileging polyamory over polygamy and swinging, or the identification of “non-monogamous” over “polyamorous”).
Implications are discussed for such wider fields as counselling and therapy, law, media and representation, urban and social planning, and politics; and for academic fields such as Sociology, LGBT* and queer Studies, Kink studies, Critical Race Studies, Women’s Studies, History, Religious Studies, Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Politics and Medicine.
The future of work on open non-monogamies is also briefly touched on including new categories of analysis and emergent forms such as “the new monogamy”, polygamy legalization, “non-monogamous” as identification, poly children growing up, further impacts of new marriage legislation in different countries, more cross-cultural and cross-categorical work, and the impact of changing demographics.
(This is a pre-typesetting and final copyedit draft of this paper, originally published in Understanding Non-Monogamies (2010).)
Conference Presentations by Nathan Rambukkana
Take the hashtag. The non-descript number symbol, long-resident of qwerty keyboards and neighbour to the once-innocent @, has been thrust into service by innovative Twitter users to signal unified discussions over time and space. When used politically, the hashtag can tag and link continuous discussions over non-continuous media. Searching a hashtag can link mobilizations of a singular discussion over Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, reblogging sites, mainstream and alternative news sites, webpages, photodumps, video hosting sites and beyond. They are promoted and censored, used by activists and politicians alike: a powerful transmedia code.
I will explore the potential of hashtag political discourse through its mobilization in the discourse of #RaceFail, a political debate that started in 2009 in the science fiction blogosphere and expanded from there into a broader sustained critical race discussion over social media. In 2009, a blog post about the use of cultural appropriation in science fiction and fantasy texts kicked off what some call the “Writing the Other” debates and some simply refer to as #RaceFail—though what this means for differently invested parties differs wildly, from the failure to have respectful representation of others to a more reactionary view of “political correctness gotten out of hand,” the “Fail” being that the debate happened at all (Jemison 2011).
What is significant about this discussion is twofold: First, it marks a generational and stylistic change in how race is written in science fiction and fantasy texts. The weight and importance of this subcultural political debate is felt through how new texts are altered¬—both in anti-racist and reactionary ways—in relation to it. It created new experts, new voices and (due to its social media nature) a meta-textual archive of discussion on these matters that remains an important influence on how new work is crafted and an excellent example of digital democracy at work in the broader sense Fraser alerts us to. And second, it’s useful to attend to the way that the #RaceFail hashtag unites that discussion, tying together its many mobilizations and sustaining it so that with each new iteration the whole interlinked corpus is re-invoked, working the new thread into the ongoing open-weave of the discussion.
Theses by Nathan Rambukkana
In exploding the overly-simple notion that monogamous sexuality is societally privileged, while non-monogamies are marginalized, I show how while there is a societal meta-narrative that centres monogamy, it is really the intersectionality of non/monogamy with other forms of privilege/oppression that truly locates a subject practicing (or connected to) non-monogamous intimacy as having intimate privilege, defined as the emergent state in which one’s intimacies hold societal privilege.
Engaging in theoretical and discursive analyses of the contemporary public sphere presences of three major forms of non-monogamy (adultery, polygamy and polyamory) through texts such as journalistic articles, policy documents, self-help literature, television programs and Internet sites, I continue the academic discussion surrounding non-monogamies that is just beginning to come into its own in the fields of social science and humanities, as well as to complicate less-nuanced discourses on non/monogamy that are circulating more broadly in the public sphere.
Working Papers by Nathan Rambukkana
Hashtags are deictic, indexical – yet what they point to is themselves, their own dual role in ongoing discourse. Focusing on hashtags used for topics from Ferguson, Missouri, to Australian politics, from online quilting communities to labour protests, from feminist outrage to drag pop culture, this collection follows hashtag publics as they trend beyond Twitter into other spaces of social networking such as Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr as well as other media spaces such as television, print, and graffiti.
In Fraught Intimacies, Nathan Rambukkana delves into North American society’s fixation with monogamy and its attendant fascination with non-monogamy. Drawing on media coverage, popular culture, and recent court cases, he examines how polygamy, adultery, and polyamory are represented in the public sphere and the effect this in having on intimate relationships and aspects of contemporary Western society.
As this book demonstrates, although monogamy is considered and presented as the norm in Western society, many kinds of sexual and romantic relationships exist within its borders. Rambukkana’s intricate analysis reveals how some forms of non-monogamy are tacitly accepted, even glamourized, while others are vilified and reviled. By questioning what this says how about intimacy, power and privilege, this book offers an innovative framework for understanding the place of non-monogamy in Western society, particularly in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship status.
Timely and controversial, this book makes a stimulating and sophisticated argument for why we need to reconsider how we talk – and think – about non-monogamy.
According to Massumi, Simondon's writing on form and matter can be usefully mobilized to think through how discourse forms and circulates. Rather than a simplistic reading that would see discourse as a mimetic reflection of human culture, or a deterministic one that would see it as a top-down shaper of culture, Massumi's mobilization posits discourse as technosocial event, shaping and shaped, forme et matière. It is the complex singularity that gains substance through its ongoing becoming, it is both medium and message.
This paper explores the hashtag as a similar technosocial event; both text and metatext, tag and subject matter, hashtag-mediated discursive assemblages are neither simply the reflection of pre-existing discourse formations nor do they create them out of digital thin air. Rather, they are nodes in the becoming of distributed discussions in which their very materiality as performative utterances (Bruns) is deeply implicated. Hashtags are mobilized in discourse that recognizes itself as such, a crossroads between form and matter, medium and message entangled.
This growing field comprises work on polyamory (discursively “ethical” or consensual non-monogamy); on polygamy (plural marriage, usually—but not exclusively—polygynous: Muslim, Christian and other); on swinging (sometimes known as “The Lifestyle”, a subculture devoted to casual open sex); and on non-monogamies outside of these three major formulations. This last category includes open marriages and relationships; alternative marital arrangements, sometimes referred to as “swapping” or co-marital sex; “friends with benefits”; group sex (e.g., threesomes, orgies); open-sex commune experiments (e.g., the Oneida intentional community); and otherwise-unnamed non-monogamous intimate practices such as those that can occur in some lesbian, gay, bisexual and kink subcultures. Finally, it also includes work that considers non-monogamies broadly across these categories. These practices have different histories, etymologies, facets and politics. Some of these practices are thousands of years old, some are merely decades old and some are just being fleshed out; some have their origins in religion or spirituality, others in a staunch and iconoclastic secularism. Taken together, however, they form a present and undeniable facet of contemporary intimacy that has been growing in prominence and significance in the public sphere and public culture since at least the early 1990s (Rambukkana, in press). Engaging with open non-monogamies is no longer something relegated to societal margins in the life of western societies; it has shifted to be a part of the centre—albeit a part that sits somewhat uneasily with current normative frameworks. With definite parallels to the more-firmly-established shift that brought LGBT* and queer lifestyles into the mainstream and that have made same-sex marriage a reality (or present struggle) in a growing number of countries, this cultural movement creates tensions and new problematics in psychology and cognate fields.
Major issues relating to psychology involve the following: a) The status of open non-monogamies in relation to normative social psychology (with implications within applied psychology for individual, “couples” and family practitioners; b) The theoretical questioning of the notion of healthy romantic love between more than two people; c) The effects of non-monogamy (and polygamy particularly) on women; d) The effects of multiple partner parenting on children, communities and society; and e) The psychological exploration of the minutia of non-monogamous living (e.g., the psychology of overcoming jealousy, and of non-normative relationship dynamics/structures such as “compersion,” “sister wives,” “triads” and “New Relationship Energy” ).
Debates within this literature are linked to divides such as those between mononormative and anti-mononormative perspectives ; on all of swinging, polygamy and polyamory; between activist and critical approaches to polyamory; between pro-legalizing and pro-criminalization approaches to polygamy, and between and among multiple forms of open non-monogamy (for example, privileging polyamory over polygamy and swinging, or the identification of “non-monogamous” over “polyamorous”).
Implications are discussed for such wider fields as counselling and therapy, law, media and representation, urban and social planning, and politics; and for academic fields such as Sociology, LGBT* and queer Studies, Kink studies, Critical Race Studies, Women’s Studies, History, Religious Studies, Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Politics and Medicine.
The future of work on open non-monogamies is also briefly touched on including new categories of analysis and emergent forms such as “the new monogamy”, polygamy legalization, “non-monogamous” as identification, poly children growing up, further impacts of new marriage legislation in different countries, more cross-cultural and cross-categorical work, and the impact of changing demographics.
(This is a pre-typesetting and final copyedit draft of this paper, originally published in Understanding Non-Monogamies (2010).)
Take the hashtag. The non-descript number symbol, long-resident of qwerty keyboards and neighbour to the once-innocent @, has been thrust into service by innovative Twitter users to signal unified discussions over time and space. When used politically, the hashtag can tag and link continuous discussions over non-continuous media. Searching a hashtag can link mobilizations of a singular discussion over Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, reblogging sites, mainstream and alternative news sites, webpages, photodumps, video hosting sites and beyond. They are promoted and censored, used by activists and politicians alike: a powerful transmedia code.
I will explore the potential of hashtag political discourse through its mobilization in the discourse of #RaceFail, a political debate that started in 2009 in the science fiction blogosphere and expanded from there into a broader sustained critical race discussion over social media. In 2009, a blog post about the use of cultural appropriation in science fiction and fantasy texts kicked off what some call the “Writing the Other” debates and some simply refer to as #RaceFail—though what this means for differently invested parties differs wildly, from the failure to have respectful representation of others to a more reactionary view of “political correctness gotten out of hand,” the “Fail” being that the debate happened at all (Jemison 2011).
What is significant about this discussion is twofold: First, it marks a generational and stylistic change in how race is written in science fiction and fantasy texts. The weight and importance of this subcultural political debate is felt through how new texts are altered¬—both in anti-racist and reactionary ways—in relation to it. It created new experts, new voices and (due to its social media nature) a meta-textual archive of discussion on these matters that remains an important influence on how new work is crafted and an excellent example of digital democracy at work in the broader sense Fraser alerts us to. And second, it’s useful to attend to the way that the #RaceFail hashtag unites that discussion, tying together its many mobilizations and sustaining it so that with each new iteration the whole interlinked corpus is re-invoked, working the new thread into the ongoing open-weave of the discussion.
In exploding the overly-simple notion that monogamous sexuality is societally privileged, while non-monogamies are marginalized, I show how while there is a societal meta-narrative that centres monogamy, it is really the intersectionality of non/monogamy with other forms of privilege/oppression that truly locates a subject practicing (or connected to) non-monogamous intimacy as having intimate privilege, defined as the emergent state in which one’s intimacies hold societal privilege.
Engaging in theoretical and discursive analyses of the contemporary public sphere presences of three major forms of non-monogamy (adultery, polygamy and polyamory) through texts such as journalistic articles, policy documents, self-help literature, television programs and Internet sites, I continue the academic discussion surrounding non-monogamies that is just beginning to come into its own in the fields of social science and humanities, as well as to complicate less-nuanced discourses on non/monogamy that are circulating more broadly in the public sphere.