#critical cultural studies

[detroit-become-moomin]

Howdy y’all, my essay on the abject is finally out! It discusses a number of issues, including purity legislation, self-advocacy in media consumption, and how we interface with dark/ugly topics in art and literature. It also delves into the issues surrounding HB900, Greg Abbott’s (failed) censorship law. It’s free to peruse, no paywall, so consider giving it a read if interested.

READ HERE

RT HERE (really helps!)

[justanapparatus]

there's something to be said about the way that we both use facts about taylors life to interpret her music and how we use interpretations of her music to make assumptions about her life and how those are almost the same thing but not quite and what are the ethical and artistic and academic merits of these behaviors .

[secretsofthewilde]

There's something particularly frustrating about how academic fandom studies tend to talk about fandom spaces as being a place for inclusiveness and queer representation when there's still a very prominent misogyny problem throughout them. Even when these studies address issues of racism within fandom shipping dynamics, they still tend to perpetuate the idea that fandom is the rare place where queer ships tend to be more popular than straight ones, without really addressing the fact that this tends to only true when it comes to cis, white, m/m ships. If you want some kind of numerical evidence of this, you just need to look at the statistics on ao3 to see that f/f ships are the least popular kind of pairing on that site. And when you think of the stereotypical big name fandoms, most of them are well known for their m/m ships, with the f/f ships often being dismissed or treated as a joke.

I'm not of the opinion, nor trying to make an argument in support of the idea, that this is due to the stereotype of fangirls fetishising queer men. Instead, I think it's largely due to misogyny* - shocker, I know. I really do think that the stereotypical fangirl gravitates towards slash pairings due to both internalised misogyny and the general prominence of male oriented media over female oriented media (which will therefore have more male characters that are fleshed out with more engaging writing as opposed to their female supporting cast).

However, it's one thing for the abundance of male driven stories to generate more fan works exploring said characters, and another entirely for those same fans to then ignore when we do have media that gives us well written and enjoyable female characters. I think it's in part due to our internalised misogyny that fangirls have a tendency to gravitate towards their familiar male orientated shows and then fixate on the same familiar character types, rather than exploring and celebrating the breadth of female-centric media we have finally been getting produced in recent years. And this inability to allow ourselves to enjoy female characters the same way we do with male ones is what leads to an abundance of slash pairings being celebrated in fandom spaces, while femslash ones struggle to get recognition**. The fact that there's a common joke in fandom spaces about popular pairings developing between two characters who never interacted (or for only a brief scene) is all very well and good fun, but this is almost always referring to a m/m pairing.

As fans we should really reflect on why we might celebrate a male character for doing morally grey things, but then hate a female character for exhibiting those exact same traits. It's fine to genuinely not enjoy the writing of a female character (especially when sexist writing is often to blame), but we should consider how much more willing we seem to be to forgive poor writing when it comes to male characters than we are with female characters. If we can make a million headcanons and claim to love a poorly written male character, who is now viewed as something so far removed from the canon of the media he appears in its practically a different character entirely, why do so many of us seem unwilling to do the same for female characters?

We should be doing the same with our female characters - we should be putting more female characters into our favourite dynamics and tropes. I want to see more enemies to lovers headcanons with femslash pairings; I want nbc hannibal levels of art and meta posts about toxic femslash couples; I want johnlock levels of delusion posts about a femslash couple the story writers are claiming they didn't write the subtext for. I would just really love to log into tumblr and see a femslash pairings tag is trending more than once in a blue moon.

*note: obviously misogny is not the only contributing factor, and this initial argument I'm raising doesn't address the issues surrounding racial, gender-queer identities, and other inequalities within fandom. Please do not think I'm ignoring or downplaying them.

**Theres also an argument to be made here about fangirls projecting themselves onto male characters in order to explore queer relationships, without having to challenge their own internalised misogyny/homophobia, but I'll come back to that later (and this in general) and expand on it some other time I think.

[devilsskettle]

i think some of the popularity that meta horror has garnered is a little bit disingenuous tbqh even though i do like some of the movies that have come out of the subgenre, people don’t realize that the foundation of the slasher genre was established in the 60s/70s and a lot of the 80s movies that have become so classic were already riffing off of the tropes established by those movies before full fledged meta took off. the idea to make friday the 13th was sparked by the commercial success of halloween. the original script for slumber party massacre was a parody of the genre and the movie retains much of that humor which is referential to past slashers by nature. + it intentionally uses typical slasher tropes around gender and sexuality to bring forward the concerns of teenage girls. is that not something that meta horror is frequently touted as doing? child’s play is like a slasher, “except —” which is what a lot of meta horror comedies do now (“slasher except it’s a possessed doll” is not that far off from “slasher except it’s freaky friday” and whatnot). this isn’t to say that scream isn’t foundational to what the slasher genre evolved into or that contemporary meta slashers aren’t doing something interesting but i also think they tend to lean towards cynicism towards the movies they’re deriving their themes from + they’re not even as different as they think they are from “classic” 80s movies that already are borrowing from classic slashers which in turn borrowed from even older horror (for example, in halloween, laurie is watching the thing from another world from the 50s which was adapted into the now classic john carpenter’s the thing in the 80s). and of course many of these older horror movies were adapted from literature which also inspired more literature. like the shelley/byron/polidori scary story writing contest is now legendary but also you don’t get the shining without the haunting of hill house (and you don’t get the haunting of hill house without turn of the screw, for example) and the shining is probably one of the most referenced movies by other media of all time. horror has always been an intertextual genre let’s stop pretending it didn’t become “self aware” until 1996

[msmargaretmurry]

[coffee cup] romance novels: when do they work for becs and when do they not!!!

oooh okay! so i often call myself a romance novel enjoyer but not a romance novel lover, because romance as a genre often involves things that are at odds with what i love most in fiction. which is fine! many people love those things, there is a reason the genre is like that! it just means that it's rarer for me personally to find a romance novel that works for me on every level. (the things i'm talking about are, i don't usually like alternating POVs between romantic leads, i usually prefer my romantic storylines to be involved with the plot but not the MAIN plot, and my favorite romantic relationships in fiction are ones where i don't know going in that they're going to get together. i LOVE catching a detail or an interaction or sensing some chemistry and going "oh?? are they--?? and then greedily gathering more details as i read to try and figure out what feelings are happening. obviously this cannot happen in a romance novel because you know the endgame from the start!)

so what DOES work for a romance novel for me? i'm sorry this got so fucking long and it's mostly complaining so we're putting it under a cut.

firstly it has to be well-written and well-edited. i'm sorry but a lot of romance is not well-edited and it's so distracting to me. i'll often let a little bit of sloppy writing slide if it's a story i feel feral about, but because romance as a genre isn't built to make me feral, i need the writing to be tight or i'll get so distracted by nit-picking. like, i really wanted to love a caribbean heiress in paris but the female lead "muttered under her breath" TWICE on the FIRST HALF-PAGE. this is a whole different conversation but i do place the blame for this on publishing houses who do not care if these books are well-edited because they think their audience has low standards.

secondly, i need things to happen for real reasons. i listen to the "fated mates" podcast a lot because i find the craft side of it all super interesting. the hosts, who really love romance novels (as opposed to me, a romance enjoyer but not lover), often talk about things in romance novels happening or existing for "romance reasons," which are reasons that aren't really justified by the story/plot but that the reader goes with anyway for the sake of the story. romance reasons are almost never enough for me. i need there to be real worldbuilding. if it's contemporary romance, i need it to jive with how things work in the real world. if it's historical romance, there are different rules, because historical romance can run the gamut from trying to actually be historically accurate to totally made-up societal rules in a historical setting. i will meet the book where it's at, but i need the internal world to make sense. no romance reasons.

thirdly, relatedly, i need the author to know their shit. if a character is an athlete, i need the details of that sport to be accurate. if your character works as a nonprofit, i need it to be clear that the author understands the basics of how a nonprofit works. if your character is involved in politics, do not make up how politics work to serve your story, because i will be too annoyed to enjoy it. i read a het hockey romance the other day where there was a rumor about a popular player retiring an the author had a reporter from the ASSOCIATED PRESS show up at the LOVE INTEREST'S HOUSE to try to get details about it and then MORE MEDIA OUTLETS SHOWED UP TO CAMP ON HER LAWN about it. none of that is how any of that works. i don't need every detail to be perfect. i just need things to feel real.

fourthly, relatedly, i need real stakes and believable conflict and deeply drawn characters. i won't love a book just because it contains a trope i like. i need the trope to work with the characters and within the emotional stakes of the story. i need my romantic leads to have something inside them then genuinely needs healing, and i need to believe that they are people who make each other better. (note that this is for romance novels. in other genres i love weird little freaks who make each other worse.) i know some people like very fluffy low-stakes romances and i support them but those are not for me. the stakes need to not just be about the romance; there needs to be other stuff doing on, both internally for the characters and externally in the world around them.

lastly, if it's het romance, it needs to not be fucking weird about gender in a getting off on traditional gender roles kind of way. i WILL be turned off if you keep telling me about your tiny dainty fragile heroine getting claimed by your big strong serious man hero. like i have enjoyed plenty of historical romances set in very gendered societies where gender roles play a huge part in characters' lives, but you can have gender in grand and delicious ways without making patriarchy the kink. if you are making patriarchy the kink then your book is not for me.

oh sorry two more things. i love it when a romance author tries something off-beat for the genre. very little romance feels truly fresh and new to me, so it's exciting when an author pulls that off. also: when a romance novel has sex scenes that are also character-driven, not always 100% perfect sex, and don't feel skippable. that's the good stuff.

sorry this mostly just turned into complaining about things that i don't like 😂 but it really is for me less about "these things work for me" and more about "these are the things that DON'T work for me and i kEEP RUNNING INTO THEM." here are some of my favorite romance novels: evvie drake starts over by linda holmes. the countess conspiracy by courtney milan. think of england by kj charles.

[ethicopoliticolit]

Almost all the media coverage of AIDS has been aimed at the heterosexual groups now minimally at risk, as if the high-risk groups were not part of the audience. And in a sense, as Watney suggests, they’re not. The media targets “an imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual” (p. 43). This doesn’t mean that most TV viewers in Europe and America are *not* white and heterosexual and part of a family. It does, however, mean, as Stuart Hall argues, that representation is very different from reflection: “It implies the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not merely the transmitting of already-existing meaning, but the more active labour of *making things mean*” (quoted p. 124). TV doesn't make the family, but it makes the family *mean* in a certain way. That is, it makes an exceptionally sharp distinction between the family as a biological unit and as a cultural identity, and it does this by teaching us the attributes and attitudes by which people who thought they were already in a family actually only *begin to qualify* as belonging to a family. The great power of the media, and especially of television, is, as Watney writes, “its capacity to manufacture subjectivity itself” (p. 125), and in so doing to dictate the shape of an identity. The “general public” is at once an ideological construct and a moral prescription. Furthermore, the definition of the family *as an identity* is, inherently, an exclusionary process, and the cultural product has no obligation whatsoever to coincide exactly with its natural referent. Thus the family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister.

—Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bret Stephens

Published: Jun 25, 2024

The notable fact about the anti-Israel campus demonstrations is that they are predominantly an elite phenomenon. Yes, there have been protests at big state schools like the University of Nebraska, but they have generally been small, tame and — thanks to administrators prepared to enforce the rules — short-lived. It’s Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Harvard, Columbia and many of their peers that have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.

Two questions: Why the top universities? And what should those on the other side of the demonstrations — Jewish students and alumni most of all — do about it?

Regarding the first question, some argue that the furor over the campus protests is much ado about not much. The demonstrators, they say, represent only a small fraction of students. The ugliest antisemitic expressions occasionally seen at these events are mainly the work of outside provocateurs. And the student protesters (some of whom are Jewish) are acting out of youthful idealism, not age-old antisemitism. As they see it, they aim only to save Palestinian lives and oppose the involvement of their universities in the abuses of a racist Israeli state.

There’s something to these points. With notable exceptions, campus life at these schools is somewhat less roiled by protest than the media makes it seem. Outside groups, as more than one university president has told me, have played an outsize role in setting up encampments and radicalizing students. And few student demonstrators, I’d wager, consciously think they harbor an anti-Jewish prejudice.

But this lets the kids off the hook too easily.

Students who police words like “blacklist” or “whitewash” and see “microaggressions” in everyday life ignore the entreaties of their Jewish peers to avoid chants like “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea.” Students who claim they’re horribly pained by scenes of Palestinian suffering were largely silent on Oct. 7 — when they weren’t openly cheering the attacks. And students who team up with outside groups that are in overt sympathy with Islamist terrorists aren’t innocents. They’re collaborators.

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.

They also got them from university administrators whose private sympathies often lie with the demonstrators, who imagine the anti-Israel protests as the moral heirs to the anti-apartheid protests and who struggle to grasp (if they even care) why so many Jewish students feel betrayed and besieged by the campus culture.

That’s the significance of the leaked images of four Columbia University deans exchanging dismissive and sophomoric text messages during a panel discussion in May on Jewish life on campus, including the suggestion that a panelist was “taking full advantage of this moment” for the sake of the “fundraising potential.”

Columbia placed three of the deans on leave. Other universities, like Penn, have belatedly moved to ban encampments. But those steps have a grudging and reactive feel — more a response to Title VI investigations of discrimination and congressional hearings than a genuine acknowledgment that something is deeply amiss with the values of a university. At Harvard, two successive members of the task force on antisemitism resigned in frustration. “We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see,” wrote Rabbi David Wolpe in his resignation announcement.

That’s the key point. More dismaying than the fact that student protesters are fellow traveling with Hamas is that with their rhyming chants and identical talking points, they sound more like Maoist cadres than critical thinkers. As the sociologist Ilana Redstone, author of the smart and timely book “The Certainty Trap,” told me on Monday, “higher education traded humility and curiosity for conviction and advocacy — all in the name of being inclusive. Certainty yields students who are contemptuous of disagreement.”

And so the second question: What are Jewish students and alumni to do?

It’s telling that the Columbia deans were caught chortling during exactly the kind of earnest panel discussion that the university convened presumably to show alumni they are tackling campus antisemitism. They were paying more lip service than attention. My guess is that they, along with many of their colleagues, struggle to see the problem because they think it lies with a handful of extremist professors and obnoxious students.

But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive. If, as critical theorists argue, the world’s injustices stem from the shadowy agendas of the powerful and manipulative few against the virtuous masses, just which group is most likely to find itself villainized?

Not even the most determined university president is going to clean out the rot — at least not without getting rid of the entrenched academic departments and tenured faculty members who support it. That could take decades. In the meantime, Jews have a history of parting company with institutions that mistreated them, like white-shoe law firms and commercial banks. In so many cases, they went on to create better institutions that operated on principles of intellectual merit and fair play — including many of the universities that have since stumbled.

If you are an Ivy League megadonor wondering how to better spend the money you no longer want to give a Penn or a Columbia — or just a rising high school senior wondering where to apply — maybe it’s time to forgo the fading prestige of the old elite for the sake of something else, something new. That’s a subject for a future column.

==

Intersectionality is a "luxury belief"; that is, it signals a form of elite status. It's a form of academic masturbation which has no alignment with reality.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. – Rob Henderson

[belle-keys]

what do you think about all those who whine about how they miss the old fandom culture of interacting with fanfic writers and fanfic artists as members of the fandom community who enjoyed engagement and discussion and feedback because now content creators are on a pedestal and don't need positive feedback but do need to churn out constant content to feed the a03 machine? like 8 years ago i was in harry potter fandom and people weren't so sensitive when dealing with constructive criticism. now every message that isn't praise to the sky is hate message lol sorry but now content creators are like anti democratic leaders. they want only approval, want readers to be brainwashed into total devotion to the point of obsession and act mad that their egos aren't petted with constant praise? if they need to be cuddled better do it irl peple no longer worship writers like gods lol or go to therapy, maybe it's not too late

I’m gonna selectively disagree based on what we’re talking about… Writers of original written content should man up and respect criticism, and moreover, stay out of reader spaces. People, even hardcore fans, are allowed to read works critically amd have negative opinions. That’s the whole point of literary criticism and media literacy. I don’t believe in unwarranted praise just because someone is a writer.

However, this should not apply to fanfiction writers from my point-of-view. No fanfiction is not worthy of overwhelming negative criticism – the characters do not even belong to the fic writers and were not created by them. Fanfiction is an exercise in indulgence, in comfort, in imaginativeness. But it’s not original content. No single person is truly qualified to tell a fanfiction writer how to write their fanfiction i.e. their borrowed creative property that exists purely for giggles and creative exercises at the end of the day. That’s as hilarious as “homeless man calls other homeless man a brokeass”. How the hell can “you characterized Draco as too much of a bully in this fic when he wasn’t even that mean in the canon and his relationship with Harry is abusive and toxic here” remotely qualify as constructive criticism? The whole point of fics is that there are no rules. Like, fanfiction is an exercise in emotional fantasy, not skill. I don’t believe in providing “constructive criticism” on unoriginal written content that exists for neither literary study not commercialization purposes. Keep your negative fanfiction opinions to yourself – fanfiction, unlike literature, doesn’t exist for the purpose of critique.

You can critique the genre of fanfiction on a holistic meta-level, absolutely, there are dissertations dedicated to that. But to go on an author’s fic and be like “your worldbuilding in this ABO Destiel fic is so bad here” is ridiculous. I’d lose respect for people doing that in online fanspaces. Ignore and move on and go read something else if you have nothing good to say.

[vespasien]

Pour mes haters :

La critique est celui qui sait traduire d'une autre façon ou avec un autre matériau l'impression que lui font des choses de beauté.

aka Oscar Wilde

[auntiefragile]

i’m deaaaad i was expecting to have a long day on campus and tell me why my 3 hr long class ended within 20 minutes. goodbye

[dykrophone]

FINE I'll rewatch k3g I GUESS 🙄

[justanotherliteraturestudent]

"Let's learn (it won't take long) -

That "difference" isn't always "wrong"..."

— "Culture Clash" by Sally Odgers

[pumpacti0n]

"...Robinson turned to Thompson’s English working class. He argues that, even in the “racially pure” circumstances of the emergence of the English workers, race was ever-present because of the social impact of the Irish. In the United Kingdom, the Irish became the cheapest and most exploitable workforce in part as a result of the history of colonialism. English attitudes toward the Irish as colonial subjects were akin to racism.

For both groups, Irish and English, awareness of the other helped shape their class position and their consciousness of that position. The process of class formation in the English working class was simultaneously a process of racial formation in which some workers—even those facing similar conditions and with similar skin tone—were constructed as racialized “others,” a group apart.

This process of racialization was happening between peoples that modern readers would view as “white,” demonstrating both that the process of racialization is ever-present with capitalism and the historical construction of race and its mutability."

Intersectional Class Struggle Theory And Practice - Michael Beyea Reagan

[britneyshakespeare]

This is just a map of New England (minus Connecticut the fake New England state)

[unhonestlymirror]

- Mirror, please don't misunderstand me: Lithuania is a beautiful country with lots of possibilities. It's just that I've chosen Latvia because... Lithuanian languge is cute - Latvian language is Goddamn Hot, yk

- Yeah...

[golmac]

Time for a New Pinned Post

Hi, I'm Drew Cook. I'm probably best known for my long-form criticism of 1980s text adventure games by a company called Infocom. They made thirty-five games in total, and are probably best-known for the Zork trilogy of games. My interests as a critic are mostly cultural and historical. For instance, I choose to look at Zork through a post-colonial lens.

My work has been featured at Critical Distance many times, including their "2022 Year in Videogame Blogging" roundup.

When I stick to my posting schedule (every two weeks), I get around five hundred unique visitors a month. That's pretty large for such a niche topic. Reactions to the site have made me very happy. It's called Gold Machine. Come pay me a visit!

I have also collaborated with Callie Smith on a few podcast episodes about Infocom games. It's called Gold Microphone. Unfortunately, we haven't had time to update it in a long, long while. We still want to get back to it. Last time I checked, it was on all major podcasting platforms.

I also write parser interactive fiction. My first game, Repeat the Ending, is a work of speculative metafiction about grief, mental illness, and the second law of thermodynamics. I tried to resist the tendency of parser games to be about things, focusing instead on narrative, psychological portraiture, and lots and lots of paratext. In fact, one of its themes is concerned with the limitations of parser-based narratives. It's been well-received so far, and earned ribbons for Best in Show, Best Art, and Best Writing in Spring Thing 2023. You can check it out here (linked below) and read some nifty extras, including the source code. Note the "play online" button at top right, and don't forget to save your game!

Feel free to ask me anything about game criticism, RTE, or even my work in progress. Or something else, it's cool.

I'm considered disabled due to the severity and prognosis of my mental illness. I'm not going anywhere with that; I'm just saying.

If you enjoy any of my projects, including my recently started posts about Inform 7 for beginners, consider telling your friends about it/them, or even rating Repeat the Ending at IFDB if you felt it was worthwhile. I do all of this for free, and always will, so knowing people find value in my work is what motivates me.