Bernadette Bowen (she/they), Published Poet and PhD ABD
School of Media & Communication, Bowling Green State University
Abstract:
To comprehensively understand philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. context, this second chapter of my dissertation explores the racist, Eurocentric, and sexist United States context, tracing out the background story of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Informed and structurally based upon colonialism, over the course of a few centuries capitalism, and its benefactors’ pursued development of the planet through means of industrialization and globalization, which bore increasingly more mechanized practices.Throughout this chapter I briefly discuss rhetorics of colonialism, industrialization, globalization, Keynesianism, and most recently, neoliberalism, to illuminate how it went about orchestrating this grand development plan. I demonstrate how each preceding ideological platform builds upon the previous, becoming the dehumanizing and demoralizing logics and practices of late-stage present-COVID capitalism. Theoretically and practically, I conduct and link critical feminist histographic recovery work of the erased non-men founders in the field of communication with canonical media ecological insights to contextualize late-stage present-COVID U.S. sexual technological usage and sociosexual relations, existing on the most micro, individual, level. I conclude with discussions of the Internet Age, the reported “sexocalypse”, the #metoo era, and the present-COVID U.S. sociosexual landscape.