Not A Piece of Cake: Ethics, Aesthetics, & “Chris Brown & Rihanna” Problem

“It’s too close for comfort…So If you must falter be wise” (Disturbia; written by Brown, performed by Rihanna) The recent ink (or, more often, binary code) spilled over Chris Brown (sometimes in relation to Rihanna) raises a lot of interesting…

Come Hear My Talk at Ignite Charlotte

Come Hear My Talk at Ignite Charlotte

I’ve been selected as one of the speakers at Ignite Charlotte! You can find the full schedule and details here. My 5-minute talk is titled “If You Hate Justin Bieber, Patriarchy Wins.” I’ve blogged about this topic before, but this…

Rick Santorum, Keepin Patriarchy Real (aka, It’s All About Teh Menz)

While some Republican presidential candidates are skillfully using coded racial language (“food stamps”), I’ve gotta hand it to Rick Santorum for being super, extra explicit about how patriarchy actually works. As he tells ABC News here, patriarchy oppresses women not…

Jasbir Puar, Non-Metric Time, Steve Reich, and Kelis

This is an excerpt from the introduction to the manuscript I’m working on. Here, I’m discussing Jasbir Puar’s reworking of Foucaultian biopower into her notion of “superpanopticism.” She argues that superpanopticism operates not just in space (i.e., in 3D) but…

Race and Queer Time

This week in my feminist theory class we’re reading Jack Halberstam’s new book The Queer Art of Failure. This book builds on Halberstam’s earlier work, In A Queer Time and Place. Both texts argue that discourses and models of “maturity”…

Madonna, “Give Me All Your Luvin,” and Postmillennial Hipness: Or, 18 years later and bell hooks is still right

You’ve gotta give Madonna credit: she always keeps up with the trends, and has her finger on the hot new thing. As her new song and video, “Give Me All Your Luvin,” shows, Madge knows the new, postmillennial language of…