In “Haunted Data, Transmedial Storytelling, Affectivity,” Lisa Blackman explores what she calls a hauntological method. In this, she draws upon Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, highlighting how a “ghostly trail of haunted data” can emerge when the type of connectivity that Gordon discusses is brought to bear on digital narratives.¹ Through the creation of the video posted here, I decided to explore this hauntological method in a very literal way.

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Adult films aren’t generally known for their well-crafted scripts, but sometimes the dialogue is so over the top, it can’t possibly not go viral.

Private Lessons 3 opens with Jake (Jake Porter), a private chef, arriving at his client’s house. With his arms filled with groceries, Jake is welcomed at the door by Jaxton (Jaxton Wheeler), who has arranged for Jake to make a salad for his wife (Nikki V), but somehow Jaxton has missed the fact that Jake is marketed as a “naked chef.” Nevertheless, he decides to go along with it, and in the middle of the sexual acts that ensue, Jaxton’s wife returns home from work. Oblivious, she begins to eat the salad that Jake has prepared and makes small talk with the two men who are positioned on the other side of the kitchen counter. Suddenly her suspicions are stirred: “You don’t have a shirt on. […] Wait a minute. You don’t have pants. Are you guys fucking? Are you serious? Right in front of my salad? You guys are fucking gross!”¹ Jaxton’s wife leaves in disgust and the two men decide they might as well finish what they’ve started.

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In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles is quick to acknowledge the multiple ironies of her title.¹ One of these, she notes, is in her use of the past tense “became.” Hayles explains that this was intended to surprise the reader, but it’s also a wink at technophobes who fear a postbiological future. Yet, it also echoes Donna Haraway’s notion that we are already cyborgs. Although Hayles refers to “human” and “posthuman” as terms with “shifting configurations that vary with historically specific contexts”—in some ways foreshadowing the flickering signifiers referred to later in the text—she also provides a list of ways in which virtual reality has visibly altered our current and actual lived experiences.

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To examine these elements, I’m designating this post as an analysis of “San Junipero”—an episode from the third season of the sci-fi Netflix series Black Mirror. As with every installment to the series, “San Junipero” takes an element that concerns technology within contemporary society and projects it into a heightened future. Here, the story revolves around attempts to prolong life. The episode begins with an initial meet cute between Yorkie and Kelly. Soon after, a romance develops between the two twenty-somethings that is quickly complicated by a number of factors. One, Yorkie is hesitant about beginning a romance with another woman. Two, the women are only able to see each other once a week. Three, San Junipero—the town in which they meet—is actually an online platform that both women access from distant locations. Four, in the real world, Yorkie is in a coma and has been, residing in a hospital, for the last 40 years. Five, Kelly—who lives in a nursing home—is dying of cancer and has been told she has three months left to live. I’ll stop numbering the complications now, but as the story develops, a number of parallels between the narrative and Hayles’s writing emerge.

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In “Remediation,” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin identify two factors of media production that often seem to be at odds: immediacy describes the erasure of the tools and the interface that users interact with, while hypermediacy makes that same interface more obvious, more overt, due to the desire for more and more forms of media to be brought up to speed. These elements are then brought into play through remediation—the transfer of content from one form of media into another.¹

As I thought about interesting examples of remediation, I kept coming to ridiculous rabbit trails, and the examples I found most interesting were the most ridiculous. But I read Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure over break, and one of the most interesting takeaways from that text is his advice to choose materials for study that might not be taken seriously: “Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.”² Following Halberstam’s advice, I’ll proceed by introducing the star of my remediation study: Miranda Sings.

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I’m Jon Heggestad, a second-year PhD student in the English department at Stony Brook University. I came to Stony Brook after completing a program at King’s College, London called the MA in English: 1850 to the Present. There, I focused on Victorian literature, writing my MA thesis on the various ways George MacDonald pursued writing about faith and doubt in the many literary genres he engaged with throughout his life. Thanks to meeting Dr. Elyse Graham at Stony Brook, my interests have once more diverged into a dozen different topics that I’m happily (although, at times, chaotically) exploring. Now, I generally find myself focusing on a handful of camps, which fortunately overlap every now and then: 19th-century British and American literature, queer theory, and digital humanities.

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