Awesome review of white privilege in Avatar and other recent scifi
http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar” This review, by Annalee Newitz of i09, is spot-on. I wish *I* wrote it. Some of the highlights: — “Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people,…
“This is a song about faking orgasms!”
The title of this post comes from the introduction to the Au Pairs song “Come Again”. So, I’ve been thinking recently about Gaga’s relationship to post-punk — With all her homage to “The New York Scene,” the connection isn’t too…
UNC Charlotte Ethics Bowl Team
Here’s a video of UNC Charlotte vs. Univ. of Miami Team B in the Mid-Atlantic Ethics Bowl semifinals. Kathleen’s presentation about research ethics and Javan’s response to UM’s Kantian environmental ethics are *excellent*!! Students: Kathleen Lowenstein, Javan Lapp, Megan Norton,…
Beyonce/Gaga: Dear Dr. Mulvey, Video Is Not Narrative Cinema
Beyonce and Lady Gaga have a newish video out for their collaboration “Video Phone”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtIdxk2zqXs The men in the video all have cameras for heads: This might be seen as a literalization of Laura Mulvey’s (in)famous article “Visual Pleasure and…
“Do you realize, that people are still having sex?”: Teaching the History of Sexuality v. 1 with 90s House
So, whenever I teach Foucault’s History of Sexuality, v. 1 to undergraduates, they usually have difficulty “getting” the book’s two main claims: (1) that sex is not repressed, and (2) that power is relational and productive, not a substance that…
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…
“Neckties” vs. “Warlords”: Yeezy and HOVA’s contesting masculinities
So, in my earlier post about Jay-Z’s DOA, I argued that he was defending a more traditional ghetto-hetero-black masculinity against Kanye’s Autotuned insurgency into hip-hop and its canon of “proper” masculinities. Kanye’s LMFAO “Paranoid” remix (Youtube below) makes it clear…
Pop and the New Millenium Music Critic
In his P2K essay, Tom Ewing argues that, in the last decade, pop finally became something that serious people (music critics, academics) took seriously. This is not so much attributable to some change or set of changes in “pop” itself,…
Does a mid-sized city like Charlotte even NEED a professional Symphony Orchestra?
No. As this Observer article explains, the Charlotte Symphony is in serious financial trouble:http://www.charlotteobserver.com/breaking/story/909093.html Clearly the community cannot financially sustain a professional symphony orchestra. Does it need to? Ought it? Nope. Certainly we need to save the great institutions –…
Pathological Sublime = the Abject
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/04/a-young-persons-guid.html#more Mark Derry details his new project about the “Pathological Sublime.” Now, I
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