Neoliberalism & Transnational Black Masculinities in Taio Cruz’s “Hangover”

Here I rework my earlier reading of Taio Cruz’s “Hangover” to show how neoliberalism actively cultivates transgression, producing what I call a “faux-gression” that gets fed back into neoliberal means of production, augmenting privilege, hegemony, etc. I cut this from…

Taking MIDIjunkies Into the Death

Here’s a sample of something that I’ve been scrambling to complete before a rapidly-approaching deadline. This is still definitely in progress, so your feedback is most welcome!             In this post, I discuss a pair of songs on Atari Teenage…

Two Meditations on Beyonce, Race, & Queerness

These are two polished-up versions of analyses that have already appeared here. I needed a 1k word writing sample, and nothing from my recently-in-print work could be cut to stand on its own. I’m using this material in manuscripts I’m…

Is It Ethical To Eat Chick-Fil-A?

Chick-Fil-A has always worn its spiritual and social commitments on its sleeve (or wing). As a recent press-release explains,  From the day Truett Cathy started the company, he began applying biblically-based principles to managing his business. For example, we believe…

Intensification vs Intersection: “Metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln”

Intensification vs Intersection: “Metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln” In this post I both unpack the slur in the title, and use it to explain how discourses of “difference” (race, sexuality) function in neoliberal Western democracies.   So some on the American…

From “No Future” to “Delete Yourself (You Have No Chance To Win)”: Hearing the difference between classical and neo- liberalism

This is all rather rough, and because I’m thinking of reworking this to submit here, I really appreciate any constructive feedback you may have. The Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen,” with its refrain, “no future,” has been central to…

Beyoncé, Gaga, Race, and Sexuality, or, 1+1 Doesn’t Always Equal 2

[This week I’m going to attempt a few “year-end” type posts. Being on semester break, now’s a god time for me to collect some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head all term, but I haven’t had time…

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…

“The joy of repetition really is in you”: Lee Edelman and Hot Chip’s “Over and Over”

I’m going to argue that Hot Chip’s “Over and Over” (mainly the song, but also somewhat the video) evinces/endorses what Lee Edelman calls “sinthmosexuality.” Queer theorist Lee Edelman argues that, in the West, “queerness” has come to represent the “death…

Clones & She Wolves: Irigaray & the DISCOntinuum of female sexuality

Initially, while trying to make sense of Shakira’s “She Wolf” video, I hypothesized that this Shakira video was suggesting that straight white women’s sexuality is “closeted” – or, in more Irigarayan terms, what we understand to be “female sexuality” is…