Yesterday, I was prepping both a talk on Janelle Monae, and a class on Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended, when I realized that Monae’s “Cold War” single is more or less a condensed, poetic version of Foucaut’s concept of politics…
It’s more like a negative proof, or an argument ad absurdam…This “All the Christian Ladies (Put a Purity Ring On It)” sort of demonstrates all that “Single Ladies” could have been (patriarchial, misogynistic, etc.) but actually isn’t.
Or: If she ate, then let her ate and watch the money pile up… So, white feminists are all upset about “princess culture”: “ONOES, what is it doing to our girls, encouraging them to succumb to outdated stereotypes about femininity,…
UMG is being quite strict about policing copies of the video, so your best bet is to google for the most recent and reliable stream. I finished up a few things over winter break, so I’ve had some time to…
This is just a quick round-up of some trends I noted in the past year’s mainstream commercial pop. I’ll say a bit about them below, but these analyses are definitely in beta. It will be interesting to see if they…
I’ve posted briefly about work from Kelis’s “Flesh Tone” before, but here I want to follow through several quick but interesting observations/questions about her recent singles. 1. Afrofuturist feminism in “Acapella,” this time with some theory: I’ve posted about this…
In the interview posted here on Idolator, Lady Gaga admits that her forthcoming album is going to be, in all but name, a latter-day Wax Trax industrial-dance work: Gaga said, “I think that lyrically it’s more poetic. It’s, in a…
In a previous post I examined Halberstam’s use of the Sex Pistols to critique Edelman’s anti-relational negativity, and to argue for a “political” (or relational) negativity. Looking beyond Halberstam’s own somewhat narrow punk archive, I turned to The Clash and…
I’m excited to be contributing to a collection on Lady Gaga, curated/edited by the people who run the fab Gaga Stigmata blog. My essay, “Dance In the Dark, Little Monsters: On Gaga’s Post-Goth Posthumanism” will sound somewhat familiar to readers…
A great–and true!–story, via Feminist Law Professors’ Bridget Crawford: When Maya Angelou and James Baldwin Walked into a Bar… Maya Angelou recently donated 343 boxes of her papers to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black…
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