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…
What’s your take on Roman Zolanski? Misogynist? Genius?
Or “Stupid Hoe” is not just stupid I’m still thinking through all that’s going on in Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoe” single/video. It’s complicated. It’s REALLY complicated. I don’t think anyone can rigorously analyze the piece and give a uniformly, one-sidedly…
The Role of Music in Rousseau’s Non-Ideal Domination Contract–Or, why you should read my book
I’ve been reading Carole Pateman’s and Charles Mills’s Contract & Domination, prepping it to teach later this term in my graduate Feminist Theory class. Here, I want to talk about Mills’s discussion of the early, Discourses-era Rousseau, because I think…
Mainstream Feminism’s Demand for Realism: On “Fotoshop by Adobé,” aesthetics, and posthuman feminism
This video has been making its rounds on feminist social media: Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo. The video critiques, via parody, the standard practice of ‘shopping female images, both in the mainstream media, and in individuals’ own…
The Traffic In Men?
This week, my graduate feminist theory class read Gayle Rubin’s classic article “The Traffic In Women.” We considered whether and how men could be trafficked—i.e., how men might be used as the medium for relations among other men. Rubin argues…
“The Protestor” Is No “Basic Bitch”: The Politics and Aesthetics of Stereotypical Blackness in 2011
I want to take a minute to reflect on the representations of race, specifically, the representations of African-American blackness, in US pop culture in 2011. In several blog posts, and a few of my published works, I’ve argued that stereotypical…
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…
Artistic Know-How, Aesthetics, and (Anti-)Humanism: Some Thoughts on Alexis Shotwell’s Knowing Otherwise
I’m making my way through Alexis Shotwell’s really well-written Knowing Otherwise, and I must say I generally agree with the project: in addition to being extremely well-written (it easily passes my “Can I read it on an airplane?” test), I…
Thoughts on “Xenomania” (or, Orientialism 2.0)
Earlier this week, Simon Reyonlds published a great little essay on what he calls “xenomania”—i.e., Western hipsters’ internet-enabled digi-crate digging for increasingly exotic-sounding “ethnic” pop and/or dance music. Now, I realize that its publication venue—one of the MTV sites—probably limits…
“Countdown”: Beyoncé’s Feminist Reversal of the “Catalog Song”
In this post I argue that Beyonce’s “Countdown”—both as a song and as a video—critiques a canonical, but quite misogynist, style of song. The “catalog song” is a centuries-old format: a dude ticks off a list of all the women…
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