Just a quick note. It appears as though Twisty Faster has returned. Don’t miss the insights.
Category Archives: learning
Onion tweet and visibility of hatred of women
Thanks to the potent Feministing column “Your daily feminist cheat sheet,” who recommended film critic Maryann Johansen who coordinates Flick Filosopher. The title of her article is: “a feminist film critic defends the Onion’s Quvenzhane Wallis tweet.” Her title is inflammatory, but I’m a little intrigued by the notion of some idiot was going to parade their shadow representation of feminism to justify calling a nine-year old kid a misogynistic insult.
I could not have gotten it more wrong. Turns out that Maryann Johansen is not only on-point, but seems to be the kind of really smart feminist critic who can help make oppressive discourse visible, able to be mocked and defeated. Thinking about it, the denigration of Quvenzhané Wallis is only visible because the insult doesn’t work against regular celebrity women — they are often called terrible names. Johansen explains that the Onion tweet is visible precisely because the message (hate women) has suffused mainstream culture.
That gets attention in a way that calling a famous adult woman the same thing never does. Because it’s clearly outrageous in a way that, apparently, isn’t quite so clear-cut when it comes to an adult woman. But she asked for it by wearing that dress. She’s an attention whore. She likes being in the spotlight. She can stop being famous any time if she can’t take it. We should see such rationales as ridiculous. We can see it when they’re applied to a nine-year-old. But we don’t see it in general.
What a smart argument. I still don’t see any need to defend the tweet. I’m not going to cheer on hatred of women in order to make hatred of women more visible. We work with the tools available to us. We read the signs available to us. We dismantle systems of oppression as they are described and spoken into being.
Filed under art, communication, feminism, learning, media, representation, resistance
Ella Baker!
Pascal Robert reviews a new biography of Ella Baker (Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby) and I’m convinced to go pick up the book. It seems fascinating to think about the inquiry into Baker’s challenges to the dominant communication and organizing styles of the civil rights leaders of her day. It seems valuable to explore and educate about the model of charismatic masculine oratory — the singular male leader inspiring the crowds.
What made Baker’s method of organizing both effective and revolutionary is that it completely dismissed the traditional paradigm of leadership that had plagued the black community from its earliest history in North America, stemming mostly from the black church: Charismatic masculine leadership based on oratory and exhibitionism. Baker believed in empowering the most common person, whether a sharecropper, teenager, or illiterate vagrant with skills to make demands on the political establishment. Baker believed that people did not need fancy leaders with degrees and pedigree to tell them what was best for them. She believed in giving people the power to choose their direction and make demands, and put pressure on institutions without depending on big shots with fancy suits. In her book, Professor Ransby notes:
“At every opportunity [Ella] Baker reiterated the radical idea that educated elites were not the natural leaders of Black people. Critically reflecting on her work with the NAACP, she observed, “The Leadership was all from the professional class, basically. I think these are the factors that have kept it [the NAACP] from moving to a more militant position.”
via NewBlackMan (in Exile): Ella Baker and the Limits of Charismatic Masculinity.
Thanks to Mark Anthony Neal’s New Black Man (in Exile) for the story and link.
Filed under communication, cultural appropriation, feminism, human rights, learning, propaganda, protest, race, representation, resistance
Harlem responds to the ‘Harlem’ Shake
Dang!
I had been thinking about posting about the Harlem shake meme videos — I was going to talk about the Waka Flocka Flame effect of enjoying music that makes you dance and have fun — considering the bodily invitation of Baauer’s nice tune. I was thinking about mapping how many ways we are constrained in movement and how nice that these videos offered a chance to have fun and simply go dumb (Rest In Power Mac Dre).
But of course, the reason why people feel so seemingly liberated is that there is a script to follow — the dances are mapped quite carefully. Check a couple of the internet meme videos and you’ll see the similarity in the costumes, poses, the points in the song where people are ‘allowed to dance,’ the invitation to unique foolishness is certainly there — but it is a copy of a copy of a copy. . . .
And in that copying is the insult for people who live in Harlem. The mockery and lack of respect for an actual dance form is central for many of the folks interviewed. I bet most of the people who are in Harlem shake videos would respond by saying: ‘I didn’t know about the history and the ties to the location.”
Which is precisely the difficulty with internet meme videos — the absolute disconnection from context at precisely the time that we are inundated with thousands of replications of the image, each one loving re-embraced by the local players who perhaps (put new text around a much loved image) or (prepare to do the Harlem shake with their buddies arguing over ‘who get’s to wear the mask?’). In most cases, the internet teaches us that what was once singularly owned or identified can be swept into the internet-o-sphere and assimilated, free of context or culture to become a clever short-term joke.
Thanks to Okayplayer who had the best coverage on this subject including a how-to on a slightly more authentic Harlem Shake.
Filed under art, communication, cultural appropriation, funk & soul, hip hop, learning, media, music, representation
Reading Yu the turtle (re)productively
1. The act of saving an individual turtle maimed by a shark is deeply symbolic. The choice to save this turtle, Yu, must be contrasted against the ‘Japanese fishing net” which has probably maimed a thousand times as many turtles as the offending “brutal” shark.
KOBE, Japan — Life looked grim for Yu, a loggerhead turtle, when she washed up in a Japanese fishing net five years ago, her front flippers shredded after a brutal encounter with a shark.
via Keepers give loggerhead turtle prosthetic fins to swim again.
2. Yu the mauled turtle is kept as an amusement (and testament to the generosity of humans) in a Kobe Aquarium. She has been fitted with “27 models of prosthetic fins.”
Now keepers at an aquarium in the western Japanese city of Kobe are looking for a high-tech solution that will allow the 25-year-old turtle to swim normally again after years of labor and 27 models of prosthetic fins behind them without achieving their goal.
via Keepers give loggerhead turtle prosthetic fins to swim again.
3. Her keepers enlisted the help of many experts who tried again and again to create prosthetic fins for this one turtle. They often caused Yu pain while they tried to get her capable of swimming. I suspect the experts received professional prestige for their work. The executive director of the Aquarium (Kamezaki) seems to know that the alternative for Yu the turtle would be a quick death. The playing-God impulse isn’t in the arrogance to choose what happens to Yu (they certainly could set her on the beach and see which ways she chooses to go). The arrogance is in the commitment to hold this living animal as an experimental subject and believing that it is in her best interests.
After nursing the loggerhead – an endangered species – back to health, keepers enlisted the help of researchers and a local prosthetics-maker to get her swimming again.
Early versions of prosthetic flippers caused her pain or fell off quickly, and with money short, Kamezaki said he sometimes felt like packing it in.
“There have been times I wanted to give up and just fix her up the best we can and throw her back in,” he told Reuters. “Then if luck’s on her side she’ll be fine, if not, she’ll get eaten and that’s just life. The way of nature, I suppose.”
via Keepers give loggerhead turtle prosthetic fins to swim again.
4. Why would you torture a living creature like this? To ensure that she makes babies. To inscribe the reproductive responsibility– the survival of the species into this single tortured being. And of course Aquarium director Kamezaki knows that if she did have babies it “would make all the trauma in her life worthwhile.”
Though Kamezaki admits that it’s unlikely Yu will ever live a normal turtle life, he still has hopes.
“My dream for her is that one day she can use her prosthetic fins to swim to the surface, walk about, and dig a proper hole to lay her eggs in,” Kamezaki said.
“When her children hatch, well, I just feel that would make all the trauma in her life worthwhile.”
via Keepers give loggerhead turtle prosthetic fins to swim again.
5. I am in favor of doing what we can to save endangered species. And I like turtles, quite a bit. But I’m offended at this techno-science band-aid fantasy public relations memo masquerading as science news. For those slow to notice, the 28th version of Yu’s prosthetic flippers fell off less than a day after being attached. That’s right, these wretched researcher/prosthetic makers/aquarium directors didn’t actually help this turtle yet again, and they’d like the world to know that they screwed up again.
But along the way the aquarium makes money, the scientists get fame, newspapers have a quaint human interest story, and humans world wide get to imagine that all the brutality of commercial fishing is being neatly fixed by magical experts who are attaching fake-flippers back on mauled turtles. The desire to imagine the ecological harm done by human beings can be so easily fixed is at the heart of the problem.
The distraction of a single cute critter coupled with the affirmation of human-beings all-mighty capabilities (despite not actually turning out to have been that capable) makes this a most poisonous read. Stop making yourself less guilty by using desperate measures to save individual cute animals — make structural changes in society to stop harming animals.
Filed under Animals, capitalism, communication, learning, media, propaganda, representation
Away from the keyboard: pirate bay documentary
So much interesting stuff in this documentary. Thanks to Pigeons and Planes for the link.
Filed under capitalism, communication, documentary, hacking, human rights, learning, police, propaganda
Reading disasters through museums:They’re burning the stuff we haven’t stolen yet!
The new crisis in Mali reminds me of the Taliban destroying priceless Buddhist statues. In case you didn’t see it, extremists in Mali burned an archive of historical records and old manuscripts.
Seydou Traoré, who has worked at the Ahmed Baba Institute since 2003, and fled shortly before the rebels arrived, said only a fraction of the manuscripts had been digitised. “They cover geography, history and religion. We had one in Turkish. We don’t know what it said.”
He said the manuscripts were important because they exploded the myth that “black Africa” had only an oral history. “You just need to look at the manuscripts to realise how wrong this is.”
Some of the most fascinating scrolls included an ancient history of west Africa, the Tarikh al-Soudan, letters of recommendation for the intrepid 19th-century German explorer Heinrich Barth, and a text dealing with erectile dysfunction.
via Timbuktu mayor: Mali rebels torched library of historic manuscripts | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Of course the loss of history is tragic. And we shouldn’t burn books. But beyond this is the preference to simplify another culture and place through colonial loss — in essence we should be enraged that human history is being destroyed. In my opinion this hinges on a universal humanist version of history — one where all the stories of the world are foundations for the great story of the west.
Although destructive and thoughtless, it seems as though the west is more concerned about the ideas of people of the region that were recorded four hundred years ago than those expressions of anger in 2013. This temporary colonial perspective would probably elicit awkward old school colonialist answers to global problems.
Filed under colonialism, disaster, learning, protest, representation
Donna Haraway reads National Geographic part 2
Astounding.
Filed under academics, Animals, colonialism, communication, feminism, learning, media, nature, representation
Donna Haraway: from cyborgs to companion species
I watched this just before going to bed the other night. Ridiculously thoughtful posthumanist insights.
You see, that’s my dog.
Filed under Animals, communication, feminism, juxtaposition, learning, nature, representation
Life of refinement 