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…
I encourage you to read crunkista’s post on Crunk Feminist Collective. It raises some important considerations/issues/questions in discussions about different generations–and competition among different generations–of female rappers. http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/lil-kim-vs-nicki-minaj/ Most interesting–and important, IMHO–is crunkista’s claim that the underlying issue here is…
It’s World AIDS Day. Since nobody seems to talk about AIDS anymore (b/c it’s not so much a problem for privileged men anymore, and more of a subaltern women’s problem), I thought I’d post some of my favorite songs more…
So, I need to spend some more time with Kanye West’s new album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” You can count on some more developed posts about it; those are on the slate for winter break. However, I thought I’d…
This is the first in my “London’s Burning” sub-series of posts on punk music and queer futurity/anti-futurity debates.* Here, I want to cover Judith Halberstam’s particularly illuminating critique of Edelman. Halberstam argues that Edelman calls on a supposedly critical “negativity”…
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