Conspiracy care work: gender, labor, and the paranoid style in American podcasting (2012-2020)

There is a dominant conception, both in academic literature and most media, that conspiracy theorists are mostly men—think “toxic masculinity” in internet culture. By analyzing fictional podcasts in the 2010s, my dissertation illustrates that this conception does not hold true. Apple’s built-in podcast app and the success of true crime podcast Serial (2014) heralded an era of prestige audio with conspiracy as a central theme and women as their paranoid protagonists. This research’s central question is: “What changes when the conspiracy theorist is not a (straight, cis, white, American) man, but instead female and/or queer?” The answer is in my title: conspiracy care work. When women and/or queer people engage in conspiracy theory, their motivation is not an individual quest for knowledge, but rather because of someone they care for, either personally or professionally, is in their perception endangered by a conspiracy. This dissertation explores what happens when conspiracy theorizing becomes (in fiction) a form of care work—a necessary way to care for those around them. Through media analysis, history, and interviews with listeners, I show how fictional podcasts comment on historical changes in conspiracy thinking, labor, and the role of the US in the world. They interrogate the role of intimacy and emotion in an era of social media, the underlying motives of the War on Terror, or the precarity of work under the contemporary neoliberal economic policy.