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Today we have Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles on to discuss their 2012 article "Postmodern Geekdom as Simulated Ethnicity". This article is very dense and has a lot of different ideas making up its thesis, so we didn't feel we could contain the discussion within a single episode. Therefore it's a two-part episode, with this being the first part. Both parts are free and not bonus premium episodes. Subscribers to Patreon will have access to a combined version of this episode with the full two hour interview as one file however.

Dr. Kom Kunyosying completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Oregon where he studied the overlap between iconic and ethnic representation in U.S. comics in relation to other visual and prose media. He has published essays on the rise of geek culture for Jump Cut (with Carter Soles) and on metonymy and ecology in Charles Burns’s Black Hole for Interdisciplinary Studies Literature Environment. His essay with Carter Soles, “The Walking Dead’s Hyperreal Hillbilly: Horror, Melodrama, and Backwoods White Protagonists,” is in the forthcoming anthology, "There's Us and the Dead": Identity Politics in The Walking Dead (McFarland). He teaches Writing and Literature at Nashua Community College. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Dr. Carter Soles completed a Ph.D. at University of Oregon. Carter Soles is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at The College at Brockport (SUNY). His research interests include geek studies, gender and identity studies, film authorship, and the comedy and horror genres. He has published articles on the queerness of the independent film Chuck&Buck (2000) for Jump Cut and on the figure of the hillbilly in 1970's horror cinema for The Eco-Cinema Reader(Routledge, 2012). His profile can be found here: https://www.brockport.edu/academics/english/directory/soles_carter.html. He can be contacted on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cartersoles

Discussed in this Part 1 episode:

* "Postmodern Geekdom as Simulated Ethnicity" by Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc54.2012/SolesKunyoGeedom/

* Elliot Rodger's identity issues as being both a White geek and an Asian geek: "Elliot Rodger's Manifesto Shows Self-hate Fueled Anti-Asian Violence that Kicked off Isla Vista Rampage" http://aaldef.org/blog/elliot-rodgers-manifesto-shows-self-hate-fueled-anti-asian-violence-that-kicked-off-isla-vista-rampa.html.

* Elliot Rodger's racist antiblack motivations, "Elliot Rodger, Isla Vista Shooting Suspect, Posted Racist Messages on Misogynistic Website": https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/05/24/elliot-rodger-isla-vista-shooting-suspect-posted-racist-messages-misogynistic-website.

* Elliot Rodger's sexist motivations, "Elliot Rodger Left Behind Tons of Sexist, Racist YouTube Comments From Second Account" https://splinternews.