Groupthinkers
A review of Divining Desire (OR Books) by Liza Featherstone
Philosophers of Babel
...funding to match: Eurothink at its academic best. Why else would the culture czars of Paris and Brussels who’ve brought you the yearly European Culture Capitals (Umeå, anyone?) and Quaero...
The Party's Girls and Party Girls: Negotiating Beauty in the Soviet Union
...features particular to Eastern European women are especially valuable in the post-Soviet era in beauty and fashion. In a beauty culture that simultaneously celebrates the exotic but still defaults to...
The Job of Consent
The Joy of Consent: a Philosophy of Good Sex (October 2023) tests the limits of consent as a heuristic for "good sex," exposing the wide berth between pleasure and what is legible to the law.
New Transcendentalist
...No physicist would dispute this.” “When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience,...
An Attempt at Exhausting a Movement
...rather than from the comfortable center of official culture. If an Oulipian leaves the workbench and settles into a comfortable armchair, his worldview narrows, and his work’s potential diminishes. A...
Seconds of Pleasure
...distracting us. A culture of distraction doesn’t stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production. Distractions only...
Wrong Ways to Eat
...sporadic self-indulgences and self-denials, the diseases that Western culture has recently made of them. In fact, in 2011, a study conducted by doctors in Utah found that Mormons who routinely...
The Principle of Our Negative Solidarity
...undermined by an economics of competition. As Gilbert argues: Neoliberal culture works specifically to enhance our creative capacities while inhibiting any attempt to put them to work in a collective,...
Bad Mothers
...a neo-imperialist military project. Despite arguing for the American Pietà as an understudied U.S. visual culture, Tapia deals only briefly with other so-called American Pietàs, such as the 1995 image...
A Black Jack
...culture we’ve gone from mainstream sitcoms in the 70s like The Jeffersons, which featured an unapologetically acerbic and defiantly successful George Jefferson, and Benson, whose titular character advanced from butler...
Tim Burton's "Big Eyes"
...secret (an open secret, apparently) — "from her own daughter!" even. He capitalizes on a sexist culture to take credit for Margaret's ability, and then uses the specter of that...
A Deluxe Apartment in the Sky
...family, whose upper class suburban environment has, he explains in voiceover, caused them “drop a little of [their] culture.” His eldest son favors field hockey over basketball and has adapted...
Beauty Blogosphere 5.9.13
...big deal. Y not?: The Grand Narrative, as always, manages to elucidate aspects of American culture while examining contemporary Korean culture. This time: How the "Y-line" branding trend in South...
Secondary Modern
...art to turn in on itself, away from common experience, and to make itself its own subject. Art, thus separated from culture, requires a social elite to support it and...
7 Days of Queer Theory
...With Normal," can kick us off: "The received wisdom in straight culture, is that all of its different norms line up, that one is synonymous with the others. If you...