Category Archives: representation

April 27, 2013 · 10:37 pm

Not everyone has access to the same technology

Jen Schradie on the digital divide.  Thanks to Cyborgology via the Society Pages.

6. But aren’t people from marginalized communities “leapfrogging” over desktops, laptops and even tablets by using their mobile phones?

As Sociologist Sheila Cotton put it, “Could you type a 10 page paper on your phone?” However smart it might be, newer, smaller, sleeker gadgets, such as the iPad mini, are designed more for consumption, rather than producing and engaging with online content. Certainly, many people are tweeting and posting status updates with their smart phones, but class divisions are stark both domestically and worldwide for smart phone, rather than mobile phone access. And mobile devices are not always “smart.” As I have argued, having online access at a variety of locations (i.e. home and work) and owning a lot of gadgets allows people to control the means of digital production and have the autonomy for high levels of Internet use. One cell phone doesn’t cut it.

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April 26, 2013 · 4:45 am

Flex! University articulation of labor as duty

The Feminist Wire comes through with a nice write up about academic labor.  Here Paul Seltzer, a GW Women’s Studies major, articulates the painful implications of the academic culture which insists on students and faculty suffering in order to retain connection to the school.

Flexible instructors and flexible students, dependent upon the corporate university for a wage and a future, are those whose labors and bodies stretch to satisfy the requirements that would make them valued members of the university’s community, less at-risk to a budget cut here or a rise in tuition there.  Flexibility means that when the corporate university applies such pressures, instructors and students will bend as much as they can so that they will not snap.  Sure, I can teach another class for minimal pay.  Sure, I will work freshman orientation in return for free housing.  Sure, I will go into debt.

I observe in my own academic life that the credibility of the institution is used to help justify these kinds of decisions.

 

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April 17, 2013 · 12:55 am

Dean Spade on the expansion of criminal justice system in the name of civil rights

Dean Spade has great succinct answers in this four-question profile. One answer is about trans and hate crimes and becomes a lesson in pro-active intersectional feminism. As quoted in the McGill Reporter:

Hate crime laws that provide more resources to law enforcement and/or enhance criminal penalties have been critiqued by many trans organizations and activists because they do nothing to prevent attacks against trans people but they expand the criminal punishment system which is the most significant source of violence against trans people in the U.S. They build that system in our names, and that system has been growing rapidly for several decades, such that now the US is the most imprisoning country in the world, with five per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners. A trans movement that is really about reducing harm and violence to trans people has to be an anti-criminalization movement, and a movement that doesn’t just try to get the law to say something our lives are meaningful, but instead seeks to dismantle legal systems that are killing us.

Thanks to Feministing’s Daily Feminist Cheat Sheet for the link!

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April 15, 2013 · 1:47 am

Bikers against child abuse

Nice profile of Bikers Against Child Abuse in AZCentral.com.  The author, Karina Bland, spent a few months traveling with a chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse.  Potent, emotional prose.

The girl chewing on her lip was abused by a relative, according to police reports – someone she should have been able to trust. He’s not in the state any longer, but the criminal case is progressing slowly, so he’s not in jail, either.

He still terrorizes her at night, even though he’s nowhere near. She wakes, heart pounding. The nightmare feels real again. She never feels safe, even with her parents just downstairs.

The unruly-looking mob in her driveway is there to help her feel safe again. They are members of the Arizona chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International, and they wear their motto on their black leather vests and T-shirts: “No child deserves to live in fear.”

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April 5, 2013 · 12:21 am

Kid President and Obama

Power of the internets x 1,000,000,000.

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March 1, 2013 · 1:21 am

Wrestling commentary is fake? Glen Beck vs. WWE

I enjoyed the story of a conservative (fictional) storyline in professional wrestling taken for reality by right wing schmuck Glen Beck.  We get an amazing opportunity for the actors who play wrestling characters to explain some of the differences between acting and reality.

Thanks to David Shoemaker who ran the whole scenario down for us at Grantland.

The most impactful response to Beck, however, came not from the WWE front office but from Swagger and Colter, who recorded a new wooden-fence oratory. But, this time, after the promo ended, the camera angle changed, and Colter and Swagger were revealed to be standing on a soundstage in front of a green screen. They introduced themselves by their real names and explained in plain, straightforward terms how the pro wrestling enterprise works. Those anti-immigration speeches? Those were just promos, said Zeb — “a scene we record to elicit a positive or negative reaction from our fans.” The substance was irrelevant. “We aren’t in the political business or the immigration business,” he continued, “we are in the entertainment business.” After shaming Beck with a litany of audience demographics, Zeb and Swagger launched back into their rant as if nothing had happened. And Monday on Raw, even when Zeb mentioned Beck, he didn’t have to break character to do it. That was probably the most revealing thing about the broadcast — of course WWE was going to keep talking about Beck if it meant more mainstream attention, but they didn’t need to address his wrestling illiteracy on the air. They didn’t need to explain why Zeb and Swagger act the way they do, because everybody knows wrestling is staged. Beck should understand this, too, because as much as anyone, Beck knows what it is to be a performer.

via Dissecting WWE’s feud with the tea party and Glenn Beck – Grantland.

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February 28, 2013 · 5:12 am

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.

via a feminist film critic defends the Onion’s Quvenzhané Wallis tweet | MaryAnn Johanson’s FlickFilosopher.com.

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.

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February 22, 2013 · 11:18 pm

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.

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February 20, 2013 · 1:59 am

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.

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February 18, 2013 · 12:25 am

Listening to kids: scared is scared

E. shared this nice short film with me.  The premise is good, but the implementation is superb.

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