Since the spring my ideas for this chapter have solidified, and I am beginning to see what the argument may look like. In the past few days the fragments are coming together as a whole, to my surprise, as I've become increasingly desperate, beating my head against a wall to make two things talk to each other which don't speak the same language -- media archaeology and black feminist studies. In looking for some way to talk about race and technology from a material standpoint, I landed on the concept of the flesh, and have been struggling to theorize from black feminist notions of flesh (beginning with Spillers through Snorton and Musser) to get at this kind of radical potential contained within the flesh, which operates through opacity and surface. In my reading of Black Femininist thinking on the flesh, particularly Snorton, what I found was a capacious way of thinking about the intersection of two registers, of the material (flesh) and cultural/symbolic (race/gender), which I can apply back to my thinking about technology, and the intersecting registers of the digital and analog.

But more on this later. For now, I want to highlight two things: first, how relieved I am and ridiculous I feel to realize that one of the texts that I analyze in this chapter, Dawn by Octavia Butler, is in fact queer, because of the alien sex which uses a nonbinary intermediary (duh!). I wanted to write about the alien sex (which is why I chose this text) but had always approached it as a straight kind of sex in my head, because of the male and female "terminals", so to speak. However, now I do feel compelled to address the whole question of what "counts" as queer, and whether it should be independent of sex/gender, especially considering race and the conversations occuring in black feminist studies around this question, which I think is really the future of queer studies. Something else to think about.

The second thing will require more time and space to think about. How do I talk about the flesh, mobilize ideas of the flesh, without feeling like I'm instrumentalizing it? I'm trying to think with the flesh, in looking at what it opens up, but cannot help feeling that my work continues some kind of exploitation, which I don't want to be a part of. I think the solution is to continually consider my positionality as I do the project, and to be explicit about it in my writing and teaching.

Below is a summary of the chapter as I am envisioning it now:

This chapter looks at the materiality of digital media by harnessing
concepts of the flesh as developed in black feminsist studies. First I
consider how the flesh has been theorized in black feminist studies,
particularly C. Riley Snorton's theorization of the "transcapable,"
which offers an analytic for understanding the kind of capacious
thinking required when two registers combine---the physical/analog and
the immaterial/digital. Throughout this converstation, I incorporate a
discussion of Octavia Butler's novel, *Dawn* (1987), as a way of
reading the intersection between the digital and analog, particularly
in the way that sexual relations occur through direct neural
stimulation between alien/human "triples," facilitated through the
third partner, non-binary intermediary being with the ability to
connect directly to the brain's pleasure centers. Then, I examine a
hypertext fiction work, a digital series by Entropy8Zuper! entitled
/skinonskinonskin/ (1999), and efforts at its preservation amid the
obsolescence of one of its major components, Flash technology. I trace
the complicated stack of hardware and software that facilitate the
display and preservation of this work, examining various technologies
that work in tandem such as internet networks, hypertext, and
Flash. These technologies together enable me to explore how
/skinonskinonskin/'s interface engages the intersection between the
digital and analog registers undergirding its components.