“Cruising Utopia” with the radio on ???: Jose Munoz’s utopian queerness and !!!

Approaching Acid Jose Munoz’s Crusing Utopia focuses mainly on visual, performance, and literary artworks. However, there are a few musical references in the text; for example, the last chapter is titled “Take Ecstasy With Me,” after the Magnetic Fields’ song…

Plastic Bag: Xray Spex as critique of Katy Perry’s liberal individualism

I was listening to Katy Perry’s most recent single “Firework,” and I noticed that this song used a “plastic bag” metaphor to connote the supposedly alienated, mass-produced subject of post-industrial consumer society. This then reminded me of one of my…

The Slits — Peel Sessions

Does anyone else hear Sonic Youth avant la lettre in this Slits performance of “Love and Romance”? Listen to the timbre, the general noisiness of the guitars, the pitchiness and otherwise generally unmasterful vocals, etc.

3AM Eternal: the role of music in the queer futurity/anti-futurity debates

I’m currently working on some projects that focus on the role of music in the recent and ongoing futurity/anti-futurity or relationality/anti-relationality debates in queer theory. While these debates are wide-ranging, I’m focusing mainly on the work of Lee Edelman, Jose…

The Cyborg Emancipates Us from Liberal Humanism

Over at The Atlantic, Tim Malay does a quick genealogy of the term “cyborg.” It’s quite interesting: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/the-emancipated-cyborg/63995/ He focuses on the “emancipatory” potential of the cyborg. However, I do think he misses the critical function of the term–that is…

Trash/Pop Culture as more subversive than “art”

From io9: http://io9.com/5662383/richard-kadrey-trash-culture-is-more-subversive-than-art-could-ever-be I am a very big believer in the power of trash: trash pop culture, trash literature. I really have a lot of affection and belief in that stuff, because art scares people. Trash, pop culture doesn’t. You…

Race as technology, or, on the racialization of non-human bodies

Ever since I adopted a pit bull, I have had suspicions and half-grounded intuitions that there was some sort of connection between the vilification of pit bulls and anti-black racism. I just lacked a coherent way of making that connection…

Queering Taylor Swift

So, Taylor Swift is generally pretty uninteresting to me because her music, her image, and her lyrics all shore up normative white heteropatriarchal gender roles. And, her songs may be OK, musically, they’re more meh than not. Although I would…