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...
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,...
The Principle of Our Negative Solidarity
...culture predicated less on collective projects and more on developing a name for oneself. In the years since then, as our projects progressed (his made it to print first), we...
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.
Dating in the Expanded Field
...the very thing it is supposed to capture. Boomer parents bewail the hookup culture that they say has replaced dating, while their adult children stare into the abyss of Craigslist...
Groupthinkers
A review of Divining Desire (OR Books) by Liza Featherstone
Africa39: We Have New Names
...have lost, whether it is language and culture, or land and nation. And their writing is an attempt to recover a lost known object. But the Africa39 writers do not...
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...
Sunday Reading
...deep book Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity. Taibbi on that Goldman executive I liked this movie. Had a half blog post about the way the movie has...
The Accidental Audience
...describe themselves as viewers and/or creators of culture in general? Prosumer seems the most accurate. For artists using social media like Tumblr, the question is not whether their involvement constitutes...
The Shanzhai Lyric
...China has long been known for its vibrant counterfeit culture. The “World’s Factory” produces iPhones, Uniqlo and Gucci, but also Pardo, Muimui and Diro. “Copycat” or shanzhai brands are at...
City of Brotherly Love
...consumer gay culture satisfied with glossy representations as a sign of progress. But I wondered what Looking would show me about the image of a gentrified San Francisco, framed for...
"It Continues Not To End": Time, Poetry, and the ICC Witness Project
...of Kenyan and African literature more broadly. Second, the historical. This text is very much of a particular moment in Kenyan literary culture, what I would characterize as the disillusionment...
“Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric”: Trans Assimilation and Cringe
When the right deploys cringe to control trans assimilation, trans people cringe at each other.
Dear Marooned Alien Princess
...are small versions of the big things. We could look at interpersonal relations, rape culture, modern wars, colonialism, capitalism, globalization, white imperialism as a continuum rather than separate things. Think...
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...