Shaking + Quaking + Breaking the Boughs: Deconstructing Family with Digital Visual Culture Media

Abstract

Master narratives of family tangle inseparably with dominant sociocultural discourses of sexual identity, gender, race, class, and others to organize and enforce cultural norms (Gee, 1992; Geertz, 1973; Gergen, 1995). In today’s “technomediated culture” (Carpenter & Taylor, 2003, p. 48), digital media can perpetuate oppressive dominant discourses or promote social justice. Hypertext, as a digital process and product, can be used to deconstruct dominant oppressive identity discourses, creating potential for increasing sociocultural equity. Glenn Ligon’s online work, Annotations, a digital family album, demonstrates hyper-text’s deconstructive potential to envision alternatives to patriarchy, encourage an awareness of multiple narratives and knowledges, and provide options that envision multiple, divergent discourses and subjectivities outside culturally-defined norms. I deconstruct family relationships and interactions from my own family photo albums, and provide examples of how artists have used hypermedia as subjective platforms to reflectively re-negotiate their concepts of self, and, in turn, re-imagine concepts of family.