Michaela Wünsch

Vita

Michaela Wünsch studied Cultural Studies (Kulturwissenschaft) and Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has written her dissertation 'In the Inner Outside. The Serial Killer as a Medium of Unconscious White Masculinity' supported by a DFG-fellowship affiliated to the Graduate School 'Codification of Violence in Medial Transformation' from 2004-08. While her dissertation is still unpublished, she co-edited an anthology on Gender and HipHop (with Anjela Schschmanjan) and another on the Politics of Queer Space (with Matthias Haase and Marc Siegel). Soon a book on Politics and Media, the Political and Mediality (co-edited with H. Blumentrath, K. Rothe, S. Werkmeister and B. Wurm) will be published. Recently she has written several articles and essays on horrorfilms and queer and gender topics and taught in Berlin, Riverside, C.A., Bochum, Vienna and Graz. M. Wünsch also works as a lector and publisher at b_books and organized several lectures, exhibitions and festivals within this and other contexts. Her research interests includes psychoanalysis, film and television. Since May 2010 she teaches at the Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft at Universität Wien.

ICI-Project

Death Drive, Repetition Automatism and Seriality in the Intersections between Psychoanalysis, Cybernetics and Popular Culture
My research project is concerned with the interrelations of the repetition compulsion of the subject and the phenomena of repetition and seriality in the audiovisual media, especially in television. It proposes to examine the structural similarities and differences between the mechanisms of the psychic apparatus and the automated processes and standardized patterns in the media. The objects of study are psychic automatisms, their explanatory approaches, and the television series as a media phenomenon. These planes, however, should not be treated as entirely separate from one another. One of the main points of the project is therefore the influence of cybernetics on the psychoanalytic formation of theory and of the repetition automatism inherent in the death drive. A further area of research is the media constitution of discourse in the humanities and the formation of the subject, which will be treated through the example of television. Since television series are also characterized by automatisms of repetition, this will be brought into relation with psychic processes.