#seeing the recent ‘is art inherently political’ discourse has been driving me crazy lol

[rivetgoth]

I am to this day so grateful for my intro to literary criticism professor for the way she taught the concept of critical theory and engaging with media when I was in my first year of college. She basically introduced some of the major forms of theory—feminist, queer/gender, race, historical, postcolonial, Marxist, etc—and made a big point of emphasizing that you can apply any form of criticism to any piece of media. Like, and this doesn’t sound novel to me now but at the time it was, she’d emphasize that a piece of work can have 0 women in it and still be engaged with through feminist theory (in fact to say such a thing sounds funny because OF COURSE a story with 0 women in it would warrant such interpretation!), a story with 0 queer/LGBT characters still warrants queer theory regarding how the norms of gender and sexuality are or aren’t upheld, ditto for race and how race and the powers and structures of white culture and supremacy do or don’t play out within a text that does not have any nonwhite characters, etc. And she’d give us these really free-form assignments where we’d read a text and then she’d just tell us to write like a page worth of any type of theory on it that we wanted. Not only did I love how autonomous this was and it inspired me to get creative and try to push more boundaries with how something could be engaged with (as like, a baby queer at the time I had a lot of fun mapping queer theory to whatever we read, and at a separate point I actually wrote an essay explicitly disagreeing with her interpretation on a reading and she loved that and gave me an A haha), but I think that introducing critical theory this way really helped me develop the mindset (and love) of engaging with any and all media beyond simply what’s being said on the page/screen/whatever—What isn’t being said, and what’s taken for granted, and the context in which it exists matters just as much.