Department of English Professor Shannon McRae
NEoN, a charitable arts organization based in Dundee, Scotland, commissioned Department of English Professor Shannon McRae to write an exhibition piece for their digital reading room addressing the year's Digital Arts Festival theme of “Wired Women.”
The festival's focus is to "address the digital gender divide and highlight the contribution of female and nonbinary artists in shaping the digital and technology-driven arts sector."
The name "Wired Women" is taken from the title of a pioneering anthology of writing about women on the Internet where Dr. McRae's early work on fluid sexual identities in virtual spaces, "Coming Apart at the Seams: Sex, Text, and the Virtual Body," was first published in 1996.
The commissioned multimedia piece, "ReWired: The Internet of Us," updates that original work as an investigation of how genderqueer women and nonbinary persons create community and find modes of self-expression on today's Internet.
McCrea will also be the featured speaker/conversant for an affiliated event sponsored and organized by the School of Cyborg, an international consortium of graduate students working together at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. The topic of that conversation will be the figure of the cyborg as an icon for nonbinary identity and empowerment.
