#the current political moment in the US is shaping whether or not we get LGBT rep and to what degree

[mswyrr]

the Sept scene was fully in character for Rhaenyra & Alicent

I've seen fans--even Rhaenicent fans!--saying it was ooc or "fanfic." It wasn't. The original scene was much shorter: Emma and Olivia, two very talented actors who know their characters well, expanded it. They weren't just wasting time or suddenly lacking in talent and insight. They knew what they were doing and it connects all the way back.

So let's go all the way back! Where do we begin? Episode 1x01, King Viserys wants a son and male heir; he has wanted a son for so long that Rhaenyra, his 14-year-old daughter says (ep 1x01) "For as long as I can recall, it’s all he’s wanted." What has this done to her? Well, for one thing, it has made her mother, who has difficult pregnancies, in ill health for most of her life. This ill health means that Aemma did a lot of lecturing (and trying to keep Rhaenyra from flying and doing other risky things while she was sick) and not a lot of getting to spend quality time with her daughter. A distracted father, ruling the realm, and a mother sick with trying to give him the male heir he prioritizes above his wife and daughter.

Who has been there for Rhaenyra? Alicent. Alicent was hers. When Rhaenyra flies on her dragon, experiencing freedom from all her worries and power and joy, she wants ALICENT to be there with her, high above the sea, looking out over the city:

[source: 1x01 script]

When Rhaenyra had to have a difficult conversation with her mother, it was Alicent she looked to for comfort and emotional support -- in an act a cut scene from the script *explicitly calls "flirting"*. Rhaenyra relies on and longs for that "disarming kindness" she says Alicent has.

And it was Alicent's lap that Rhaenyra flirts about loving to lie upon. Alicent is so much to Rhaenyra that she dreams of running away together, just the two of them and Rhaenyra's bonded dragon Syrax.

Alicent was her cherished girl, her comfort and her chief supporter and advisor. She was Rhaenyra's heart's rest. And, yes - it was a friendship blossoming into flirtation and desire as the two matured. They were on the cusp of something. They were the world to each other.

[source]

Emma and Olivia get it and have always gotten it. Rhaenyra has this gorgeous yang or solar energy that finds balance with Alicent's yin or lunar energy. They're a sun and moon couple, balancing each other's strengths and weaknesses. With Alicent, the sword of Rhaenyra's intense energy has a sheath. A resting place. Her fire has a hearth. And Alicent isn't drained by people (like Viserys would later do...) who just take and take and take -- hurting her and draining that "disarming kindness" of hers until she's broken and ruined inside. Rhaenyra gives and cherishes in a way that made Alicent feel whole and appreciated.

Rhaenyra goes from being angry (angry the way a jilted lover would be - calling Alicent a "whore" for what she felt emotionally imo as Alicent cheating on Rhaenyra with her father) to instantly deeply protective and possessive once she learns more. See the cut scene after Viserys reveals his engagement to Alicent:

[script pages source] [photo source]

Rhaenyra is ready to take on the whole Seven Kingdoms to protect her girl!

Rhaenyra liked being the focus of Alicent playing the "lady beloved" role - reading soothingly to her, supporting and encouraging and admiring her, teasing her for being naughty, advising her about her political situation. She found rest and comfort there - and then Viserys took her mother, cutting her open to get his precious son out. And then, in his remorse and grief, he took comfort in Rhaenyra's girl (who was forced to give him that precious kindness of hers by her father) and her father *stole her girl too*. Not only did he steal her girl, he put her own status as heir into question by having a firstborn son with her - after wounding Rhaenyra deeply by chasing a son as far back as she could remember!

All the "she should be over it" stuff about Alicent... if Rhaenyra were a male character people would recognize the wound of having his crush stolen out from under him by his old man at the same time his old man refuses to fully back his status as heir - it's archetypal! It's gd Greek. Your old man trying to keep you from the girl you want, from your desires and destiny as an adult.

Rhaenyra makes total sense in the Sept scene - she has the primal wound of a girl who is an HEIR - who wanted to have things and act and possess and stand tall and be the lover to a girl's beloved in a way only boys are allowed in this society... and whose father took her girl away from her as well as making her feel uncertain of her status in a deeply wounding way. Rhaenyra correctly locates, emotionally, her rupture from Alicent as where it all went wrong. The Sept scene is about all of that emotionally and it makes total sense. It is also about Rhaenyra's sheer desperation and comprehension of the horror coming... and the most heartbreaking longing to return to a time when Alicent's heart was her home.

Alicent's heart was Rhaenyra's home. And her father stole the girl she loved. He took her and savaged and used and broke her and made her give birth to children she didn't want (at least not with him) from decades of sex she did. not. want. because even men who think they're nice in this society are allowed that - to cut a wife open for a son, to use a girl young enough to be his daughter. He vacillated between wounding and affirming Rhaenyra, never fully able to honor her as his heir because she was not a boy. And he couldn't even conceive of her feelings for Alicent because this is a deeply homophobic society - but he was also, even seeing it in a platonic light, selfish and inconsiderate of her feelings for her best friend.

He kept putting his feelings and needs first, over his wife, over his daughter, over her best friend.

I don't care if nobody else gets it - the way Emma plays it? They get it. They're an extremely talented actor who wasn't going "ooc" in the Sept - they were playing *that*. My father inflicted these primal wounds on me because my coming of age was more like a boy's--like things that should be allowed girls but are denied them-- and he thwarted me and yet I love him. And I love Alicent and I long for her heart, though it's full of poison and broken things now. Why does it all have to be like this? Why does it have to hurt so much?

The Sept scene is entirely in character for both of them. It is not "fanfic." It is not OOC. It is the broken heart of this tragedy bleeding before our eyes.

[janiedean]

Bro the Queen thing was just for a laugh lol let gay people make jokes

bro, if you had said ‘let gay people make jokes that make them sound like four year olds that just found out kindergarten exists’ I could have taken you seriously, but since you still can’t get into your thick performative activist heads that it’s not funny for anyone except maybe the three of you, I’ll explain you a few brief facts:

one: ¾ths of queen are straight so assuming they wouldn’t understand song they wrote and played (beyond somebody to love) already shows that you haven’t thought this joke through;

two: freddie mercury made a goddamned point to not make his sexuality a selling point or the only part of him people would be interested in when listening to his *music*, so your dumb jokes are something he would most likely fucking hate;

three: sorry to break it to you, but with all the sales queen had, going statistically, I can assure you more than half of their fanbase is straight, so congrats on assuming millions of people don’t get the bands they like;

four: music is an extremely subjective thing that tells different things to different people regardless of the original target of the song. I’ve seen articles titled ‘how I, a lesbian person, realized springsteen’s music wasn’t just for male cishet middle-aged guys’ in which people said that to them, a song that’s blatantly about a guy who killed someone and hightails it out of town and hopes that the border patrol doesn’t stop him, felt like it was about wanting to leave somewhere you had to stay in the closet and felt suffocated because you couldn’t come out. now, that’s nowhere near the original meaning of the song, but if for the lesbian author that related on that level… who the hell am I to make posts like ‘lesbians don’t understand springsteen songs’? spoilers: no one;

five: one reasons queen actually made it big was that their songs are actually very much relatable on a bunch of different levels and as I explained some ass who made jokes about how *straights* wouldn’t get I want to break free (written by a straight man btw but I see that now at least y’all are having the decency to pick songs that freddie wrote to throw shade at the straights TM, huh?), just that ONE song can be relatable for, FOR EXAMPLE, people with depression, people stuck in a phase of their life they hate, someone getting over a bad relationship and lgbt people who want to come out. and the lyrics to I want to break free are hardly extra complicated or difficult or obscure. of course then you have borap which no one still understands and freddie refused to explain but like… it’s IT CAN BE WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT regardless of whether their lyrics are obscure or the entire contrary. that was what made queen sell the number of records they did - because they make songs people can relate to, genius;

six: the fact that your ***joke*** assumes straight people can’t in any way shape or form conceive a life where they feel like they’ll be forever alone and no one will love them or they will never find a relationship says all about how **funny** it is because it implies dehumanizing an entire category of people and assuming they don’t have feelings or can’t conceive what y’all go through, which then turns into People On This Hellsite sending straight people TM the worst kind of bullshit and vile anons just because since we have no feelings and we’re supposed to take all your dumb unfunny jokes then it’s fine. idk, since I’ve been here according to you I should have laughed at:a) people telling me at thirty I was too old for anything and I should look for a husband and get married already;b) people telling me I was a homophobe/half of this dumbass website blocking me on sight for informing y’all that straight women find men sexually attractive as a general rule - no, really;c) someone telling me once that they hoped I’d find someone I would trust implicitly and give all of myself to in bed just to have them tell me the moment after we’re done that I was ugly and unlovable and I deserved to die alone;e) being called a bitch/homophobe an insane amount of times for pointing out that straight women who don’t look standard attractive have issues;f) people questioning why I went to therapy because I happen to relate to a character in a straight ship that they hated and the reasons why I went are Issues That Character Has.that was just the first six instances I could think of because they were personal but I assure you, your rhetoric about straight people TM being dehumanized aliens who hate y’all isn’t helping literally anyone;

seven: as someone who has fucking struggled with years with the issues the somebody to love narrator has (I did look at the mirror and felt horrible/almost cried when I was a teenager, I did wake up each morning feeling like shit for half of my time in uni, I’ve been struggling with managing initiating contact with other people since high school fucked me up in that sense, I’ve been told that I could never be attractive enough to find someone who’d love me and that I was too brainy or ugly or extra or threatening for men to even look at me and so on) and who has always found that song immediately relatable which is why, surprise surprise, out of all the songs freddie mercury wrote on his own for this band - not counting the march of the black queen but that’s another story - somebody to love is absolutely my single favorite and has always been since the second I heard it, because to me it was relatable at seventeen and it’s relatable now, the moment I read that fucking ****joke**** I literally felt a bout of vomit rise up in my throat, my stomach closed up and for a second I felt like crying as your joke was implying that my straightness disqualified me from understanding/liking a song I’ve loved and felt deeply for half of my life, but I suppose that doesn’t mean anything in comparison to the fact that you **gays of tumblr** need to have a laugh at the expense of 85% of the planet and not, idk, homophobes? no, you never say HOMOPHOBES COULDN’T UNDERSTAND QUEEN or whatever the fuck it is, you say straight people can’t. if you don’t see where the fuck is your problem I’d advise you to really go back to kindergarten because usually you realize that other people have feelings at about that age and I have a feeling that if this is your reasoning for saying I should shut up and have a laugh at my own expanse, well, you’re just an asshole;

eight: newsflash, bro, some people use music to cope with just about anything. I’m not the only person I know who has a fairly damned visceral personal relationship with the music she listens to, to the point where I can do the art is not the artist thing np with just about any media except music - I can watch a movie made by a person I despise or whose political views I despise, if I think it’s a good movie, I can’t physically listen to music from people I despise or whose political views I despise. heck, every time my local rock music station airs current lynyrd skynyrd’s music I mute it because their lyrics make me want to hurl and I actually do like the melody half of the time, but I can’t listen to them. and I know people who are way worse than me about this. if you show up basically telling me (or whoever else) that bands we like and helped us through whatever fucking shit life threw at us are now Not A Thing We Can Like Or Understand Anymore you’re being an asshole and for a thing that makes no sense because the beautiful thing about MUSIC in general is that everyone finds the music they like relatable for different fucking reasons even if it’s the same artist and your dumbass attempts at **gatekeeping** bands that existed since before you were born and straight people listened to since before you were born and whose records they bought before you were born is honestly just so fucking ridiculous and really kindergarten-level that if that is what you need to have a laugh I advise you to develop some sense of humor, because you sure as hell ain’t got one.

good enough for you? your joke wasn’t funny. deal with it e stacce.

also: I’m fucking done giving a shit about what kind of dumbass jokes at the expense of **straight people** y’all think is cool to make on here. are we oppressed for being straight? sure af not. but since most straight people on here are actually allies and support your rights and uh, are also human beings that aren’t just useful when you need someone to reblog your info posts informing us that ***straight people can reblog!!! :)))*** underneath after having reblogged your fucking jokes ten minutes earlier, I really don’t give a fuck about your need to have a laugh at the expanse of other people’s feelings and I’m going to reblog all the people telling you that y’all ain’t funny until my fingers fall off.

ps: did you send this message also to the pansexual user who called that dumbass OP on their bullshit before I did? just for science.

pps: grow the fuck up, it’s been time since years and y’all have about played all of your ‘it was just a joke’ cards a hell of a long time ago.

[sameoldart]

White Painting: Dana Schutz at the ICA Boston

“Obviously race is the elephant in the room and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it is not going to get better. ‘Oh, they’re talking about that again. They pulled the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that.’ Well, because it’s uncomfortable. There has to be an uncomfortable element in the discourse for anything to change, whether it’s the LGBT movement, or women’s suffrage, race, it doesn’t matter. People have to be made to feel uncomfortable, and especially white people, because we’re comfortable. We still have no clue what being born white means.”

Gregg Popovich, head coach of the San Antonio Spurs (September 25th, 2017)

Walking into Dana Schutz’s current exhibition at the ICA in Boston, the elephant in the room is a painting that is not part of the show. When a friend speculated if Schutz would have received this show without the controversy surrounding her Whitney Biennial painting of lynching victim Emmett Till, I realized that it would be important to highlight the various issues and tropes that Dana Schutz has addressed through painting over the last two decades.

Dana Schutz, Poisoned Man, oil on canvas, 2005

It is also important to note that Dana Schutz has always displayed a range of techniques, differing modes of representation and an interest in art history as well as the world around her. This is rare among emerging and mid-career white painters of the current moment. Schutz is a painter who does not aim at uniformity in style and subject; she does not shy away from uncomfortable subject matter or subject matter that is not exclusively rooted in her experience.

In the early 2000s, she invented the character Frank, who appeared as the last human on Earth in a series of paintings. From the generally more resolved and descriptive Frank paintings, Schutz moved to the gestural, yet explicit depictions of human activities - either imagined or observed. This included paintings like the 2004 Face Eater and Sneeze. One remarkable portrait from 2005 (that is not included in the ICA’s show), simply titled Poisoned Man, depicts former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, who was poisoned in 2004. The toxin was so potent that it disfigured his face for several years. It took until 2009 before a study identified the poison as a type of dioxin commonly used in Agent Orange and so pure that it had to be produced in a lab. It is now believed that the Kremlin was responsible for the poisoning due to Yushchenko’s pro-Western stance and his attempts to curb Russian influence on its former satellite state Ukraine.  When white painters reference the work of Dana Schutz or Nicole Eisenman, they often overlook such political aspects in favor of its more attractive and easily digested formal elements.  

Dana Schutz, Flasher, oil on canvas, 2012

White painters today appear less versed in how to pair subject matter with technique, less inclined to look beyond their own experience, less likely to work their way through a range of painterly styles than their 20th century predecessors. The (white) ghosts of Bonnard and Cezanne, Mondrian and Matisse too often squeeze the life out of the paintings on display in artist studios and galleries across New York and beyond.

This does not mean that you have to give up humor, irony, the imaginary or even the vast painterly repertoire at your hands; just be aware of it and what it means to you. Schutz’s work Flasher is a hilariously cunning example of how an assortment of painterly gestures - from Kandinsky’s geometric shapes, to Frank Stella’s patterns and Gerhard Richter’s squeegee marks - is offered by a wide-eyed character to the viewer. The character’s coat can also be seen as a canvas and thereby a painting rather than a piece of clothing. In addition to the Best-Of collection of painterly marks & tricks, some watches and tools are included in the selection. If we take the character’s desperation at face value, his perversion comes across as a last-ditch effort to rid himself of masculine traditions too embarrassing to be sold in a gallery or on the street.

Detail of Flasher

And then there are many wonderfully strange and gigantic paintings that feature bugs  - of varying sizes - crawling over figures in undefined, clustered spaces that leave little room to breathe. These are intriguing because they are hard to place and because they testify to the strength of the imaginary in painting.

Dana Schutz, Conflict, oil on canvas, 2017  

But then there is Conflict from 2017, which stands apart from the remaining work for several reasons. Unlike the others, this painting is not filled to the point where we do not distinguish between the foreground and background. Here the horizon is reduced to a thin sliver at the bottom of the canvas while the rest is occupied by an atmospheric sky. The space between the two struggling characters allows for a sense of air. We can identify two heads leaning into each other and two pairs of feet - one barefoot while the remaining three are dressed in mismatched shoes. The characters’ midsection is more difficult to distinguish. There is pushing, pulling and punching that occurs, but the resting heads indicate an exhausted state. Even though we do not see any sharp objects or weapons used, the right head exposes a gaping, secreting wound that might as well be a bloodied eye. Its vaginal shape makes it even more haunting by evoking an analogy between pleasure, pain, abuse, mutilation - ultimately a struggle for life and death.

Detail of Conflict

We do not know who is at conflict here and it does not matter. Looking back all the way to the second half of 2001, the world seems to have turned into a zone of many conflicts since then - most of which are related to each other, with no end in sight.  

In a recent interview, Chicago artist Cauleen Smith stated: ”I’m not an activist, but I don’t understand how people can make art that isn’t about the world around them.” Unlike video, film, photography, or performance, painting has the freedom to fall back onto itself, to reference its history of marks, styles and conventions without having to acknowledge the conditions of the outside world. At the end of the day, a painter’s decision does not have to be either in favor of politics or against it. As Dana Schutz has demonstrated over two decades, both can be pursued simultaneously without ‘betraying’ painting or giving up on the pleasures of making paintings.

To return to Popovich’s opening quote: there are white people who refuse to see racism when confronted with it. They do not want to be bothered by it, they do not wish to be implied, they do not want to be made to feel uncomfortable, and they refuse to understand the realities of white privilege. But there is no way out of racism without becoming uncomfortable. Dana Schutz is no racist, but her Emmett Till painting caused discomfort to the same community that has and continues to experience the effects of centuries-old, institutional racism. This speaks to her painting’s partially failed intention: instead of exposing the deadly consequences of racial hatred, it reenacts them. And maybe the resulting controversy has helped Dana Schutz to realize that Emmett Till’s mutilated face is not the same as Viktor Yushchenko’s disfigured likeness.   

So what should white painters do then? We need to embrace discomfort as part of our national discourse and our artistic practice. If athletes manage to stir a national debate, so must artists and especially painters. Keep painting what you have been painting, but also create opportunities in your work to engage the outside world and its potentially uncomfortable issues. Evoking the current president’s face or name is not enough. Now is not the time to feel comfortable.

[ethan1220world-blog]

Audience Studies (3P18) Blog Post #2 - Ethan Limsana

Although I spoke a lot about how mass media power and advertising has made rap music an important part of my life, it is one of hundreds of different medias I use to gratify my individual wants and needs for a variety of constantly evolving reasons. After all, modern advertising relies on understanding what I want before I ask for it. Through self-examination, I use movies, tv shows, video games, multiple social medias, and books for all different reasons depending on genre, length of time, level of engagement, etc. This week, for example, I bought a new phone online that I’m very excited for. To deal with my higher than usual amounts of hyperactivity and lack of attention span, I’ve watched countless amounts of YouTube videos about the products in comparison videos, unboxing videos, and reviews. Also, to deal with my energy, I’ve stopped playing slower role-playing video games, and I’ve spent more time playing fighting games where all my thoughts are in the moment and fast paced, where most other times these games are too intense for me to feel comfortable. This also effects my music listening to be faster paced EDM, or rap music as an interesting side-effect. In this way, I’ve used media to gratify my individual, particular needs as an active user. Deeper, is looking at what specific needs each of the medias I used gratified. The comparison and review YouTube videos gratified my cognitive needs by giving me more knowledge about the phone before and after purchasing the product; how to use it and how it performs in comparison to other popular phones people are buying. My affective needs are met by listening to music that accompanies my emotions, making my overall experience more pleasurable. Advertisements of the product make it look extremely clean, and expensive which meets my integrative needs that give me the feeling of higher status for owning this new piece of technology. My social needs are not particularly met by any of these actions, but the phone itself represents the media platforms I will use to become even more social which is at the height of my excitement. Also, my escape needs are met by video games, being able to put off the thoughts of homework, chores, and other responsibilities to allow my mind stay at its’ preferred state.

In these instances, I often have with the media as a tech enthusiast, I act as both a ritualized audience member and an instrumental audience member depending on the context. In this scenario, I am seeking for these specific types of content to fit my needs, but overall, accessing each of these mediums for media is performed most days anyway. The cycle of consumption of media for myself is highly ritualized while the specific motive for interest changes daily. If it were not the excitement of buying a new phone, it may have been the excitement of a new video game, album, movie. The best way to understand why I act in a cycle like this would be to understand the “expectancy value approach”. This looks closely at what my gratifications sought in relation to my gratifications obtained; the higher success of my gratifications obtained over time will increase my dependency on the place (media) that I sought for gratification. Going back as far as I can remember, my gratifications for media were first met with video games by my family. My uncle was extremely influential in my childhood as I grew up without a father and no other siblings, his interests were passed onto me as I spent time with him. He valued video games at that time, and they quickly became a source of family bonding for us and served as a learning space for me when I started playing at around 3 years old. Since then, they were rooted into my childhood, meeting my emotional needs and my proficiency over time has met my own personal fulfillment. Since technology for us today has been evolving and improving at such a rapid pace, video games have always obtained my gratifications and my dependency on them today is very high. As video games have improved, viewing them on online sources like YouTube have become incredibly popular while the medium of television has not aged like this. Most of the online influencers on YouTube who are interested in video games are also interested in tech, and through the grapevine of gratifications obtained, my tech interests have shaped my job choice to Best Buy and opening the opportunity for working in mobility and smartphone enthusiasm. This observation of my life with video games and technology also show me that my individual needs are not static, but constantly shifting and developing over the course of my life. It also shows me that my uses of media are reflected by my society, being influenced and shaped by the people around me who I grew up with and who I currently interact with.

         Needless to say, my life has had many times of instability and struggle whether it be for financial issues in my family, or personal emotions during high school, my integration with media has always been stable. Even to the point of having important impacts on my life like determining my interest in tech which is now a vital part to my personality. By examining the uses and dependency approach, it is understandable why I am dependent on these cycles of using multiple outlets of media based on emotion and interest. If I were to look to other sources for gratification like going out to parties, travelling, or working out; although I don’t feel I cannot do these things, I am not guaranteed the same satisfaction, so they are not as addicting as my use of media. In this way, I am acted upon by advertisers in the media, but I also act as an agent of free will. The issue is that the factors that guide my freewill may not be healthy. Even though my interests were originally guided by my family at a young age, the way it has shifted has been a product of addiction and less time spent outside of technology.

 Now that I’ve established myself as an agent over someone who is purely acted upon by advertisers, it is important to know how I decode and make meaning of these messages I’m exposed to. Interpretations of semiotics is what determines my understanding of any text I encounter. To best describe how this affects me, for this week’s blog I will closely relate my understanding to media in relation to my parents due to generational gaps changing our understandings of media texts. Since I’ve been using a personal computer daily since getting one for myself in grade 8, I’ve engaged in many different online communities including reddit, 4chan, and video game communities like Minecraft servers. These have been sites of social intertextuality which has cultured me during my developing years, my mother, in her developing years would have been restricted to physical social gatherings and more patriarchal types of media like daytime television and big budget films. To connect with her I sometimes show her funny memes I find online to hopefully make her laugh, but I’ve learned that much of my humor is not understood by her and I choose to share with her. I’ve shown her the popular icon “pepe the frog” in humorous portrayals and she has no clue what it is outside of an amateur drawing of a frog with human-like features. I see the frog as a template that anonymous users add to and alter to share their emotions, or what’s called “reaction pictures”. On the other hand, some political points of view may see the icon as in sighting terrorism or right-wing ideology which may be because of the influence of 4chan’s anonymity and history. Screen theory suggests that films include embedded ideologies from the filmmakers, and that films work to deny their existence as merely text and therefore become normalized to us. Despite each of us interpreting this one picture in different ways, the meanings we create are abstract due to our history with film and media so none of our interpretations are wrong, so each of us are right.

In the encoding/decoding structure, the creator of the version of the picture is encoding a message by his alteration of the picture, the time and place of the post, and the message via text that may accompany it. Due to my prior knowledge of the frog being used as a comedic representation, whether the frog has a birthday hat, is crying, or id holding a gun, I’m heavily influenced to decode the message as a comedic gesture. For a left-wing figure, they most likely have been the receiver pro-gun activism, or anti LGBT communities who use the frog in posts from time to time. As my mother the understanding of having little context to the figure causes her to have a neutral position.

         Here, I can see the asymmetry of meanings from the encoder to the decoder. Due to the abstract nature of memes today in our society, I can’t always be too sure of the creator’s true intention, but the fact that decoding is polysemic, means most of us have different outcomes of meaning than what was intended. For this scenario, I’m probably right due to my position in relation to the broadcaster. People posting memes online should be assumed to be within my generation because of the surrounding medias that attract my age demographic to websites like reddit and 4chan. My connotations should therefore include most of the intertextualities of the creator themselves which include video games, older posts on the website, and social media. My mother doesn’t know these same intertextualities, so her reaction is more on the denotative level, taking the message for its literal meaning which holds little value. The left-wing figure brings connotations of real-world issues the online platform, taking an oppositional position to the post.

There are three different positions audience can decode messages; these are described as dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. If the left-wing person is repurposing the encoded message to fit their preferred view that the text exists as a political message, they’re taking an oppositional view to the message. I am younger and have been influenced by this type of media in the way the creator intended with little difference, I am a dominant reader. My mother, taking the information for what it is in reality as a post that has little significance in her life, she has negotiated the meaning of the text.

         Intertextuality is what drives my interest for most of the entertainment I consume but I don’t have a strong background in music which separates my understandings of music from my friends. Take Drake’s song “mob ties” for instance. When this song came out, I thought it was enjoyable because it was repetitive and catchy, but my friend Eric liked it for an entirely different reason; the meaning behind the lyrics. Through keeping up with Drake’s social media pages and recent news, he knew that there was drama within the community and that Kanye West had been producing music for other rappers that were making fun of him in their newest music. Avid fans were waiting for Drake to acknowledge this, and to fit their preferred narrative that Drake would come back and release a great song that would solidify his position as a stronger, more influential rapper. Recently I’ve gotten a new coworker who used to be in a rock band, and now does music a hobby. When I’ve asked what he thinks about my music tastes, he usually turns his nose up; not because it is a different genre, but he cares more about the history and culture of the music which is expressed through sampling and remixing of sounds. He finds that they don’t feature enough creativity in sampling, but result to choosing an interesting sound, and repeating it which he thinks is an insult to other artists who put in more effort. Intertextuality has caused us to understand and react to music in very different ways depending on our context. I can see how simple differences of gender, race, and age these same effects with all sorts of media can have, but I have little first-hand knowledge.

Media reception theories give me some more context about uses and gratifications by taking a look at the contexts of my media consumption. In order to understand the contexts of my media viewing, I will examine the rituals of an average school or workday for myself. Studying film, I feel it is my duty to fill as much of my free time with viewing online content in order to be efficient in learning about film while enjoying my leisure activity in the domestic sphere. In the beginning of my day at 7:00am, I spend an hour of my time on YouTube to procrastinate getting up, while keeping myself from falling back asleep; watching esports highlights or tech enthusiasts. This is the least important content as I don’t want to wake up to anything intense. While I am getting ready, my visual attention strays, so I turn on podcasts until my drive to either work or school is done. These podcasts give me the experience of socializing without being present. Once I’ve arrived, I switch to music and space out, attempting to change my mood to either excited or relaxed, until I’ve stepped into my kiosk or my class. Once there, if I have free time, I know I won’t be able to devote much attention, so I either glance through online shopping to ease my mind while doing something productive by planning how to save money. After I’ve made my way back home, I do my homework and play video games simultaneously. Often, I lose my attention because I feel too energetic, so I resort to using fighting video games to temporarily put my brain through intense excitement to calm myself down and work. This process also works as a reward system that for every hour I work, I play half an hour of games. Finally, at the end of my day I try to watch either a TV show or movie depending on how tired I am.

In this examination, just about all of the types of entertainment I consume have been chosen to best fit my social and situational contexts and the amount of attention I have free to give. I am naturally introverted despite being very outgoing and talkative in sales, so my preferred leisure is done with full attention to detail and in isolation. I would way my use of video games as a reward system for homework completion is a gendered dynamic when comparing the ways my girlfriend procrastinates. She is less concerned with violence and gore, but traditional female roles, so she likes to procrastinate by watching cooking videos online. I also prefer to avoid spending time with my parents because my mother has married into very rude male which has extremely changed gender dynamics in the household. In the living room, I have lost the ability to watch my preferred content and, in my room, I’ve lost the ability to have volume on mt TV at night. Fully utilizing my smartphone as a medium for entertainment and communication is the best way for me to deal with these social contexts within the home, which affects my physical context as a result. In order to watch my daily entertainment, it is most beneficial for me to stay in my room for long periods of time, or while I’m on the go. They often get into loud verbal fights which put me out of the mood for longer content like movies, so I will instead view shorter YouTube videos that take less attention. In this examination, the media has dominated my free time by the active choices I make to fit entertainment around the structure of my day.

My generation and younger ones either have more introverts, or introverts are better enabled than ever before with the use of new smartphones and on-demand video platforms with fast internet speed. The text uses the term “time-space distanciation” which is used to explain the phenomenon that individuals are becoming increasingly able to experience social interactions without ever being physically present by the use of social media. Smartphones provide me instant links to speak directly to the most famous people in Hollywood as well as my family members who may just be in the next room. This instant feedback is even faster than walking to that next room, resulting in the technology changing the situational geography of my life; I no longer need to make appointments with people to speak with them, so I no longer need to structure my days with those restrictions in mind. I do not need to attend a seminar to receive guidance from real directors. I do not need to even walk to the Livingroom to speak with my parents.

We do still have positive rituals and interactions in the home during few occasions, one being dinner. We all use our smartphones in similar ways, meaning most of our knowledge and topics are influenced by what we have done on our phones. Often, I bring up a topic of technology, my mother talks about what her friends are doing, and my stepfather talks about prices for things he’s seen online. In this way, smartphones as a transactional system have shaped the conversations, we have with each other. We have each bought our phones from our carriers. The important part of integration has been their objectification; they fit on our persons at all times of the day which makes their incorporation into our lives easily manageable. Once they have been personalized, they serve as the conversion that brings us new information we wouldn’t otherwise have, resulting in giving us topics to speak of that avoid conflict. In the same way they can cause conflict, but we have learned to filter out topics which start conflicts.

 The text often relates to the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft when making points about the heights of audience member’s engagement with a online text, building a community and participating in a virtual society. This game was extremely dominant in a time where I would have thought the stereotypical geek would be male, socially awkward, low income, and ugly. Although these stereotypes are still around just like any other, popular opinion has shifted to appreciate fandom and subcultures and to embrace the forming of new communities through meetups, conventions, and media involvement. The most engaged I’ve ever been as a fan was during the 6 years, I played League of Legends, a game that changed the way I saw online games forever, with a peak of 27 million active players at the same time. At first, I was peer pressured to play the game when I didn’t want to, but I eventually started and was exposed to the largest, exciting online community I’d ever seen. What got me hooked initially as a consumer was the prosumers of the game. YouTubers who played were uploading comedy shorts, highlight reels, lowlight reels, professional games, and everything in between. Since these online influencers were using YouTube, the site offered me a comment section to talk with other fans. These Youtubers’ popularity was so high, communities formed around the game and each of these individual personalities which brought in a maximum number of consumers to be part of the community. In this time there were so many active members that nearly every new type of interpretation and reinterpretation of texts within the game were poached and played with: community drawings, fan fiction, sexual repurposing, music that used samples from in-game sounds, etc. The game itself seemed much smaller than the community around it as everyone was distributing their unique works, supporting each other either socially or financially, and playing with imagination gained. Within one year, I became so engaged that I became a prosumer myself, working to make good plays and post them on my own channel for people to comment and post on Reddit. I mainly played a character named ‘Wukong’, which I made guides on how to play, made my username, and criticized other players who didn’t play him the ‘right’ way. This was an act of textual poaching because I inhabited the character and learned everything about him and gained a sense of ownership of this character, I spent countless hours with, resulting in creating a prescribed way for others to play the character. This sense of accomplishment and mastery even made me feel different about my personal life; I felt I was belonging to somewhere better than others after the school bell rang.

Within two years, I enjoyed one of the social aspects by attending my first Fan Expo at the Metro Convention Centre which had huge fan meetups where many fans dressed up as ‘their favorite characters and most booths sold only League of Legends artwork and apparel.  Here, I saw the hierarchy of the subculture in person. Popular Youtubers and cosplayers sold their autographs and photos and were chased down and treated like celebrities by fans. Lesser known cosplayers, especially sexualized females, were treated second to the online influencers as many gave them tips and asked for photos. At the bottom was whoever wasn’t visually noticeable like me, not dressed up. Although I was at the bottom of the hierarchy, the culture was socially safe; I could dress like a female character and people would probably be excited about it and I would have a great time away from reality for the day.

As a huge fan by my third year, I played many more characters within the game and was challenging the institutional producers of the game. As I was highly ranked and well experienced, I decided to offer my concerns and wants on a weekly basis on the developer’s forum pages. In many occasions I would directly email them and receive feedback within a day or two. The game was updated every couple weeks and my notes would be about what items and characters I felt needed to be stronger or weaker and provided reasons why. As an activist, it was really rewarding to see how my contribution as a community member had the effect on a multibillion dollar video game company which is a crucial reason of why I was engaged for so long. Though many times I was reminded that as merely a community member, I was powerless when others decided against me. As the game matured, many of the YouTube influencers felt they were entitled to special treatment in the game for the work of creating large fanbases that played the game but again, they were a powerless elite, and one by one, most of the biggest celebrities in the community left for other games, leaving the professional esports as the last of the community and micro-celebrities.

With these big changes in the community, during my final days playing the game the community was still large because of the number of players addicted to the gameplay, but the variety of fans had diminished, leaving only the esports fans left. This showed the dark side of fan identity and group cohesion that made me leave the community. Identity shifted from a hierarchy that valued overall participation, to competitive ranking. If you weren’t in the top 1% of ranking, you didn’t have an opinion. The best players in the world were praised while community members who had been active for years weren’t valued because they weren’t good at winning. The game also became much more about money too; in order to fit these new standards of the community you needed a fast internet connection, expensive computer, and enough wealth to not have a job in order to perform at the top level and become a celebrity. As the second wave fan scholar would find, although I escaped into a virtual world for multiple years, I was not able to escape the systems of hierarchy as they were recreated by the community.

An interesting view of my experience with League of Legends is the profit of productions by the community. The reason for such a large audience, as I mentioned, is because of the online content creators, bloggers, and vloggers. While I gave my thoughts about the game to the company, I was acting as a part of crowdsourcing; an integral part to the way the game is made and its updates. I and countless others avid gamers would specifically tell Riot Games what was too strong and too weak, and they would fix the game on their terms. The community was working every day, putting in collective hours to create a cycle of media entertainment around the game for others to see and join, while the company itself did not sponsor or pay for these activities. Looking back at it, Rot Games for a long time worked to coexist with prosumers; accepting free advertising, in fact, expecting free work from people like me as the audience members became an important part to the structure of maintaining the game’s popularity. When big community members expected special treatment from the company for their free labor, they were not rewarded because they didn’t own any of the product they were remaking and mass distributing. For myself, the same is true and the time I spent contributing to the community was just free labor, giving away my intellectual property.

To examine how these online influencers brought hundreds of millions of fans to play the game, a modern look at the way we’re using technology to our advantages will explain these possibilities. There are many games made from big producers who invest much more into the creation of their games: EA, Activision, and Ubisoft. The reason League of Legends is able to have so much more success is because its style isn’t hardware intensive, allowing for nearly anyone with a computer the access of playing. It is also free to play with online currency structures; removing the only financial barrier from not playing the game. Our society is heavily digitized since tech is becoming cheaper and cheaper to the point, I could have a smartphone and a computer to play games for around $350; less money than a couple weeks of groceries for some. These two technologies allow access to all types of entertainment which transforms us into an engaged community for the game who act across a multitude of online communication mediums, create, remake, and distribute our own work. This is a form of fragmentation; although the video game only exists as one type of entertainment, fan span far and wide across the internet on YouTube, Twitter, Wikis, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, 4chan and others while I have access to each of these within any convenient context, always seconds away from either my phone, iPad, laptop, desktop, and smart TV. These technologies allow for audience autonomy where I can interact by posting a video by using my webcam, or comment on another’s user generated content. These enabling social media platforms include the means to watch the video, give feedback through likes and dislikes, and offer comment sections where the audience can interact with the producer. Early content creators were rewarded for their creativity in a new subculture and placed them higher than developers in the perceived hierarchy of the game. One of my favorite creators, ‘Videogamedunkey’ is an example of a creator who saw early success and even after his departure, is realized by the community as it’s king by many. He was a potentially dangerous figure for the publishers at the time because his content often including remixing of other online content where the game is being compared to any number of copyrighted medias, and his words engaged more fans than the official game’s accounts on social media. When he was filming a new video of him trying to win games and gain a higher rank as opposed to his usual comedy content, his internet fame stopped him. Many times, when he would play, others would recognize him and stop trying to play competitively, starstruck by seeing the youtuber in their game. Videogamedunkey became the target of trolling and in one of his games, verbally abused another player for their actions. The game has strict rules on friendly communication, and certain words and phrases result in automatic bans from playing the game. Videogamedunkey felt entitled to special treatment because of his status and free labor for the company and requested he be unbanned to finish the video. He was denied this treatment and slandered the entire company in a single update video and his departure from the community. This instance showed a crack in the participatory culture around the game; it was a visual-audio representation that community members are nothing more than consumers for the large billion-dollar company. Many who followed the YouTuber across his social medias and creators similar left the community as a sign of protest. This movement showed a new folk culture; players reflected on their efforts and revalued their time spent in order to make the cultural move of finding new games to replace League of Legends. In the “read-write” culture, gamers followed a single person who through interaction with fans, was able to change and influence and small portion of the culture within the community. In the broader context of the success of League of Legends, this instance lost them only a small percentage of fans but was soon replaced as the most popular game in North America by Overwatch, and soon, Fortnite. Videogamedunkey has also kept most of his fans at around 6 million YouTube subscribers, although has not risen in popularity since. League of Legends is still an extremely popular game and that success should be thanked by the participatory culture that is rooted in its beginnings and what still continues today through content creation of professional players across a network of fragmented audience members viewing all mediums of social media.

This effective use of transmedia production has become an expectation of modern participatory audience members. Taking a broader look at the  

To conclude what I’ve learned about media audiences and how they operate today and, in the future, I will look at my current favorite content creator Marquez Brownlee and the advertising technology of Google. I’ve explained earlier that I enjoy watching videos based on new technologies and smartphones, and that I use my own smartphone as a tool to structure entertainment viewing and media participation throughout my entire day as a constant ritual. Marquez Brownlee has gained my subscriptions across many different media platforms because of his expertise in transmedia production. My gratifications as a fan are gained through intertextuality and interactivity, rewarding me as a fan for paying attention over the course of time, understanding references and being able to interact with the creators. Marquez does this by his use of different media platforms. On his main YouTube channel, he is a very cinematic smartphone reviewer who occasionally reviews other tech like headphones, smart home products, and tesla. For me, Marquez exists as a paratext; he is able to offer me meanings about new products and I trust his opinions. Based on his review on a phone, I’ve placed it on my shopping list, sold my old phone, and bought the new phone as a discounted black Friday price, effectively making money while getting a new expensive piece of tech which gratifies my needs including my social status and entertainment with a larger screen to body ratio, making movies more vivid on the go. Due to my understanding of buying and selling applications like Kijiji and my use of paratexts, I am able to use this information to become an informed consumer and profit from trade to gratify many of my needs as a consumer.

Marquez’s content is also becoming increasingly important to my daily rituals because he makes content which is able to fit my free time due to his understanding of fragmentation as a creator. He creates content that seamlessly travels with me during my daily activities. I watch his cinematic reviews when I can give visual-audio attention to learn about my new phone. When I’m driving to work, I turn on his podcast to listen where he gives a more in depth talk about the new technologies he’s reviewed over the week. Once I’m home and I want to scroll through some social media before going to sleep, he’s active on Twitter, excited to talk about what upcoming tech he’s going to try out in the near future, so I have something to look forward to in the coming days. The structure that is being used on me is one that fully embraces fragmentation in the new media landscape. I am always seconds away from viewing his work and it offers seamless transitions of entertainment based on my own special, social, and time contexts while offering me intertextuality between the texts by ‘continuing the conversation’ among all of these different media platforms. Even in the last 10 minutes of his podcasts, he dedicates time to mention questions his community has asked and give’s shout outs to other people’s content in the community. This fills my need for interactivity as a community member, which instills the feelings of fandom I previously found in League of Legends. This utilization of medias fits what audience members like me expect and big companies are realizing this and building similar structures; having multiple social media accounts, creating videos, blogs, and interacting with fans. As an agent of my own consumption, this structure works the best for now until my needs evolve again which if anyone can guess what that is, it is Google.

I’ve been selling Google products for a few years and I need to know how they work and their business model. I own a Google smartphone, use Google software in the form of search engine and YouTube. I also own smart thermostats, speakers, TV’s, and Light bulbs. Most importantly, I heavily rely on Google’s voice assistant to perform hands free tasks. Something interesting is that physical Google products, despite dominating software, don’t include great hardware, but this is on purpose. Google’s phones are known for having the best cameras, but they are also much lower in cost to produce. This is because Google has invested in machine learning technologies across all their platforms to fix our issues as consumers. If my photo doesn’t look good, machine learning has look at billions of photos and knows what feature should stand out and offers me a DSLR quality photo without any work or production value. In other words, since I have given Google access to look at my photos, I gain the benefit of better-looking selfies. Similarly, if I give Google consent to my viewing habits, I can watch unlimited on-demand YouTube videos that are catered to me, or if I give my location, I can find the cheapest gas near me while driving if I ask the assistant. Google is an advertising company and all this information that is taken is used to give to machine learning that advertises me things based on my history as an audience member. Since it is a software, this advertising is able to track me through my accounts across the fragmentation of using different devices on different websites. No type of advertisement other than Google’s can be as successful because they have no way of tracking audience members fragmentation like Google can. To explain the cycle of my latest smartphone purchase, Google advertised Marquez’s review of the Oneplus 7 Pro on YouTube, Google gained the information that I viewed the whole video, then went online to do further research on the product, and within a week, my Google news feed that is built into my phone advertised Oneplus 7 Pro black Friday deals as the top story curated for me. As a salesperson, the informed buyer is the hardest person to sell to. Google’s software is able to become a new type of salesperson that is consistently making the right offers and denial of services means the loss of being an active member of the modern media. 

                                                     References

Sullivan, J. L. (2020). Media audiences: effects, users, institutions, and power. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

[kidsviral-blog]

The 1970s Feminist Who Warned Against Leaning In

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-1970s-feminist-who-warned-against-leaning-in/

The 1970s Feminist Who Warned Against Leaning In

There is more to gender equality than making money. Four writers talk feminism, race, capitalism, and the appeal of some good, sexy class analysis.

View this image ›

Getty Images / BuzzFeed News

Forty years before Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, there was Sheila Rowbotham’s Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World.

Hailed by Simone de Beauvoir as one of the most interesting feminist thinkers of her era, Rowbotham didn’t always think of herself as a feminist. Growing up in 1950s England, she associated the word with “frightening people in tweed suits with stern buns,” but she was always countercultural, drawn first to the bohemia of the Beat movement, and later to the moral certainty of Marxism.

Within these movements, Rowbotham began to think critically about her experience as a woman. She reeled at the socialist men who “solemnly told everyone that drugs and drink and women were a capitalist plot to seduce the workers from Marxism,” and the passivity of the ideal Beatnik “chick,” who was “serene and spiritual … with a baby on her breast and her tarot cards on her knee.” But she also felt a sense of solidarity with the women she encountered, from girls “with no academic protections” who earned their financial independence by dancing in clubs, to Beat women who organized “co-operative sewing schemes” for artists. “They weren’t like me,” she writes in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World. “But they were enough like me in a different way for me to respect what they were doing.”

By the end of the 1960s, both the U.S. and British Left were in a state of fractious expansion, as the burgeoning black power and women’s liberation movements demanded a new politics that took into account identity and difference. Rowbotham was at the forefront, co-organizing the landmark National Women’s Liberation Conference, held at Oxford in 1970.

View this image ›

Courtesy Verso Books.

In Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, first published in 1973 and re-released by Verso books last month, Rowbotham brings her feminism and socialism together, arguing that capitalism shapes and upholds the gender divide: Men’s earning power depends on having someone, typically a woman, do a whole lot of unpaid work in the home. (In recent decades, that housework and child care is increasingly done by immigrant women and women of color for low wages.)

Rowbotham’s critique of capitalism is scathing, but she also acknowledges that capitalism provided the conditions for second wave feminism to emerge. Liberating technologies like the Pill — and the capitalist philosophy of the self-actualized individual — enabled women and children to be seen as people with their own rights and desires beyond the family unit.

In an age of #GirlBosses chasing a vision of success defined by men who relied on the support of stay-at-home wives, Rowbotham’s arguments feel both provocative and immediate, calling into question some of the sacred cows of 21st-century pop feminism. So I called three of my favorite young feminist writers, Laurie Penny, Reni Eddo-Lodge, and Jacob Tobia, to talk about what we might learn from Rowbotham’s work today — from the new wave of feminist consciousness raised (sometimes painfully) over social media, to the problem with measuring gender equality in the bank account balances of America’s richest women.

–Rachel Hills

View this image ›

Frederic Lewis / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Reni Eddo-Lodge (London journalist on race, gender, and social justice): One thing that Rowbotham talks about in the book is the development of a new feminist consciousness that was happening in the early 1970s. She says, “Now we are like babes thrashing around in darkness and unexplored space. The creation of an alternative world and an alternative culture cannot be the work of a day … theoretical consistency is difficult, often it comes out as dogmatism.” It reminded me of some of the battles going on in feminism as the moment. It feels like a lot of kinks and creases and sticking points are being painfully ironed out and tugged at, in a massive community of people who have different ideas about what it means to imagine a better future, even though they are all broadly left of center. Currently, some U.K. feminists are trying to have a debate on trans people’s right to exist, which is very disturbing.

Jacob Tobia (genderqueer media maker and LGBT business consultant): There are times when I think that the internet has made the sticking points of feminism (i.e., trans issues, racial justice, pro-sex vs. anti-sex, etc.) much stickier, as the controversy around Patricia Arquette’s comments at the Oscars demonstrates. Arquette used her Oscars speech to advocate on behalf of wage equality for women, later adding that “it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.” The feminist blogosphere erupted with voices telling Arquette where she got it wrong — that women of color and LGBT people have been fighting for women’s equality for generations.

Rachel Hills (feminist journalist, author of The Sex Myth): Yes. I’m still on the fence on whether fourth-wave feminism is a “thing,” but if it is, I think it is characterized mainly by a diversification of the types of stories and experiences we hear about when we talk about what it means to be a “woman.” White, middle-class cis women (like me) don’t get to hog the microphone anymore. That’s tremendously exciting in terms of the conversations we’re having with each other, but it also means that there are a lot of arguments happening about what it means to be a “good feminist.” If there are competing versions of reality, it is because we are all living different realities. Take the recent dust-up over Jessica Williams’ disinterest in taking Jon Stewart’s hosting job at The Daily Show. It is true that many women experience a lack of confidence that makes them less likely to put themselves forward for jobs they are perfectly qualified for. But while that might be true in the general, it was not true in the case of Jessica Williams, and the assumption that she didn’t know her own ambitions was misplaced.

Reni: We live with a lot of contradictions. Sometimes I think life would be easier if I were a status quo-loving Tory.

Laurie Penny (author, journalist, Nieman fellow at Harvard University): I think within feminism, as within nerd culture, a lot of the pain comes from the feeling that you are already part of a special circle of people who feel marginalized, and feel like they’re creating an alternative community. To have someone then come into that group and tell you that that you yourself are engaged in marginalization and exclusion, that creates existential crisis. It’s profoundly upsetting.

Reni: So, what does this mean for the “new consciousness,” as Sheila calls it? I would like to see the better future we’re all imagining to be open minded rather than falling into dogmatism.

Jacob: I think that in order to get there, we have to change the ways that we engage with one another online. We have to find ways to be more considerate and constructive in our feedback if we are to really build a new feminist consciousness of any sort. When feminists yell at each other IRL, sometimes that can be productive. But when we yell at each other online, I rarely find that it’s working toward a new collective consciousness.

View this image ›

FPG / Getty Images

Rachel: Laurie, I want to go back to a point that you made at the beginning of our conversation. You said, “I feel like the discussion of labor, what does and does not constitute labor and how it should be divided, are the great taboo in modern feminist thought.”

Laurie: So, right from the start Rowbotham challenges the notion that liberation means shoehorning more women into male modes of production.

Jacob: Yes! And that is so important!

Laurie: The idea that “equal pay” is where it starts and ends is kinda where mainstream feminism ended up in the 1990s. You’ve got the right to be equally exploited, now shut up and get to work. It’s no accident that this idea is just starting to be challenged again right now as a new generation is discovering that work does not equal liberation.

Jacob: I think that feminism has lost that sense, at least in a mainstream cultural capacity. Mainstream cultural feminism is epitomized in demands for equal pay, for the ability to “play like the boys.”

Laurie: I think the challenge to “work” itself is the most radical thing in this book.

Rachel: Yes, as a non-Marxist I found it very eye-opening. In particular, how she talks about labor under capitalism in terms of exchanging your LIFE for money. At one point she writes, “The money represents the measure of the time and possibility which has been subtracted from his life. Time is the measure of what he has lost, money represents the measure of what he is allowed.” It’s powerful stuff.

Jacob: I think what we’ve seen in recent years is a real constriction of the imagination of mainstream feminism. Mainstream feminism means becoming Oprah, Beyoncé, or Sheryl Sandberg — the accumulation of wealth is how you demonstrate your equality.

Reni: Don’t get me wrong. It costs money just to stand still these days. I can understand why those of us who don’t have much money dream of it setting us free.

Jacob: I love Beyoncé and Oprah as much as anyone else, but they only represent one vein of feminist thought and analysis, and that type of feminism has definitely been elevated in pop culture over other, more politically challenging forms of feminism.

Rachel: How do you think feminism could incorporate a better class analysis? And what is stopping us from doing that? Is it just that class isn’t sexy? Or perhaps more pertinently, not profitable?

Jacob: It doesn’t work with the “keeping up with the men” mentality of modern pop feminism.

Laurie: It’s partly about who gets to speak and define the conversation. Mainstream feminist discussion has been dominated by wealthy white Western women, mainly straight and cis, who are financially secure and who are able to employ less privileged women to do menial work on their behalf, talking about those parts of gender oppression which affect them. (And those issues are important too.) But class is actually part of the root gender oppression, so it affects everyone, including the 1%.

Reni: I wrote an article a few months back about the domestic labor gender divide. Women are still doing twice as much housework as men, shouldering the majority of a shared burden. The response I got reminded me that housework as a feminist issue doesn’t get much airtime.

Jacob: I think what is really interesting is that we are in some ways replacing what used to be a gendered divide between workers and homemakers with a class-race divide between business people and domestic workers. Like, modern women who are “equal” to men and are able to maintain families and such often do so at the expense of other low-wage workers of color raising their children and cleaning their homes.

Laurie: Yes. That’s the entire message of “having it all” feminism. Lean In is predicated on the notion that you’ll also be leaning ON immigrant women, women of color, and poor women.

View this image ›

H. Armstrong Roberts / Retrofile / Getty Images

Rachel: Does domestic work HAVE to be a shitty job, or is the problem just that it’s not valued in our society?

Reni: It’s just not valued. Cis men still aren’t taught that keeping the home they live in clean and livable is their responsibility.

Jacob: And not only are they taught that it’s not their responsibility. They’re also taught that it’s not VALUABLE. They’re taught that it is silly, unimportant work.

Reni: YES, Jacob. One good thing that Sheila says in the book is how husbands return home and see all the housework that hasn’t been done.

Rachel: What is the solution here? Is it to pay domestic workers more money? To get men to do more domestic work so that it doesn’t need to be bought and sold?

Laurie: I’d say universal basic income, socialized medicine and child care, and a complete re-evaluation of what constitutes labor. As a list of preliminary demands. I think it’s also going to involve talking about misery. About depression and exhaustion and how shitty it is to have to earn money. Talking about anger and depression is not sexy feminism, but it is important.

Reni: I often imagine what a world without compulsory work would look like. I still can’t conceptualise it.

Rachel: True, but non-sexy feminism has been put on the agenda before. Domestic violence is not at all sexy, but it is a big media issue in Australia at the moment, where I grew up, and that’s mostly down to one writer, Clementine Ford, writing about it again and again and again. Rape culture involves sex, technically, but it’s not sexy either — and it’s a massive part of the feminist agenda now.

Laurie: Hey, I happen to think total reorganization of the wage labor system is sexy as hell.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelhills/the-1970s-feminist-who-warned-against-leaning-in

[elizabethleslie7654]

How Jews Gave America Gay Marriage

all kinds of cool jewelry and no shipping or getting mobbed t the mall

Tweet

Since gay marriage was legalized in 2015 the American public has seen that the slippery slope from legal gay marriage to trannies in girls locker rooms to troubled children given hormone blockers is real. And Americans aren’t too happy about it: as Alyssa Rosenberg lamented in the Washington Post, the number of Americans who express discomfort around LGBT people has risen for the first time since 2014.

In light of this, it’s worth looking back at how this slippery slope began and how gay marriage was legalized in the first place.

An interesting perspective on this subject can be found in an article published in 2014 by Tikkun Magazine titled “How Jews Brought America to the Tipping Point on Marriage Equality” which details how “Jewish activists gathered enough force to help push the state-by-state dominoes over to legalizing same-sex marriage” and how “Jews can claim a fair share of the credit for bringing Americans to a tipping point of accepting marriage equality.”

This may sound like a shocking anti-Semitic accusation to some, especially to those Evangelical Christians who seem to think Jews are God’s Chosen People who can do no wrong, but this article was written by a Jewish activist in a Jewish magazine. Tikkun Magazine is named after the Jewish concept of “tikkun olam,” which means “repair the world” in Hebrew.

In the article, Amy Beam explains not only how Jewish activists and social organizations pushed the gay marriage issue, but also how their victories can serve as a blueprint for other “social justice” issues—which in the near future will probably include such things as taking “trans” children away from parents who refuse to allow them to transition genders and labeling anyone with a conservative view of sexual morality a mentally ill sexist, homophobe or bigot.

The first lesson from the Jewish fight for gay marriage, Amy Beam explains, is taking a clear moral stance:

“By coming out early with a clear moral position rooted in religious values and coordinating their message at the national and state levels, Jewish leaders helped reassure voters who may have been unsure about the religious implications of voting for marriage equality.

As early as 2007, Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post: “We have reached a point in American society where the obvious is clear: neither my marriage nor anyone else’s is threatened by two loving individuals of the same sex. And it is increasingly difficult for religious leaders to envision that the loving God of the Universe does not welcome such faithful relationships.”

The shift in attitudes is a deep one, according to a recent poll cited in a report in The Atlantic this past summer: “Even among the most conservative Christian group in America, 51 percent of white evangelicals aged 18 to 34 now support gay marriage.” And polls say Jews themselves now support marriage equality to the tune of over 80 percent. Susskind suggests it is no accident that Jews embraced same-sex marriage. “As the narrative on marriage equality in the country has moved,” he says, “Jews—as people who value equality, value civil rights, and have a long historical understanding of what it means to be discriminated against—are consistently at the front of that.”

First, note how Jews here utilize religion to their own political ends. They realize that many Christians in America, who erroneously and often unknowingly follow a dispensationalist theology, view Jews as a uniquely holy people, as a people who have their own covenant with God. So Jews use their own status to couch their left-wing political opinions in religious terminology, and then they sell those opinions as uniquely moral to American Christians. Most American Christians, unfortunately, are more than willing to gobble it up. After all, God’s Chosen People couldn’t be wrong, could they?

This is a view that we have to be willing to challenge on a fundamental level. The correct Christian worldview is that the Jews aren’t God’s Chosen People any longer, they lost their covenant with God the moment they rejected Christ and killed Him.

Second, note how Jews view their own influence in society and how they explain why they champion left-wing causes: “Jews – as people who value equality, value civil rights, and have a long historical understanding of what it means to be discriminated against.” In other words, their support for left-wing “social justice” issues like gay marriage, Black Lives Matter, open borders, and so on isn’t a mere political opinion—it is inherent to their ethnic and religious identity, an identity shaped by being a minority in every country that they lived in for well over 1,000 years.

In their own eyes, the Jews are on a crusade against all forms of discrimination, real or perceived. And it doesn’t matter how reasonable the discrimination they’re fighting is, e.g. discrimination against trannies in girl’s locker rooms or unvetted migrants from radical Muslim countries flooding into the West.

This mentality isn’t held by a small Jewish elite but by a majority of rank-and-file Jews, as the article mentions later:

“Noting the recent Pew poll that showed that 70 percent of Jews vote and 56 percent say that being Jewish means working for justice, Abby Levine, director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable wrote in a November 22 op-ed in Zeek magazine that she sees a rise in Jewish involvement in “projects dealing with economic justice, women’s rights and community organizing.” Jewish social justice organizations are primed to train and mobilize even more faith-based activists to take on this next wave of struggles.

“We [Jews] bring a different paradigm than the typical paradigm of the policy marketplace, which is a paradigm of morals,” says Susan Lubeck of Bend the Arc’s Bay Area office in California. “Of what’s fair and right and good, and not just what is politically appetizing.”

Unmentioned here is that the vast majority of Jews vote for liberal Democrats, regardless of whether or not they think that “being Jewish means working for justice.” Their support for left-wing “social justice” politics is rooted in their understanding of their own identity, which is why any attempt to win over Jews to the right will be doomed to fail.

But to get back to the meat of the article, Amy Beam explains the other “lesson” from the Jewish fight for gay marriage and other social justice issues in America, the necessity of a solid ground game:

“Jewish activists and leaders at both the national and local/regional levels spearheaded the recent wave of victories for marriage equality (such as state-by-state legalizing of same-sex marriage and the defeat of the Defense of Marriage Act). “We did it in a variety of smaller ways,” says Susskind. “[We had to] get rabbis signed on, get other community leaders signed on, do calling drives, get people engaged with their state legislators.” Susskind cites the work of regional Jewish groups as key to winning in several states; these include Jewish Community Action (JCA) in Minnesota, Jews United for Justice in Maryland, and Bend the Arc’s regional offices in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in California.

State Senator Scott Dibble of Minnesota said the work of JCA was “very important” in two major recent fights there: defeating a 2012 amendment to the state’s constitution that would have banned same-sex marriage, and the subsequent passage of a state law that legalized it. “They provided lots of organizational support.” Dibble said. “The support came in many forms, a lot of it very practical and tangible. JCA arranged for meeting space in several different synagogues as we were getting underway.” Beyond providing such material assistance, Dibble said JCA was “also just a real key force and driver in the aspect of the campaign that relied on bringing the faith voice to the forefront.”

Again, Jewish organizations played a “very important” role in pushing for gay marriage. So no, it’s not an anti-Semitic conspiracy.

The article goes on to mention several other ways that Jewish organizations lobbied their local and state governments for gay marriage as well as “economic justice” issues like higher minimum wages:

“In the Washington, DC, region, JUFJ worked alongside workers’ rights groups to pressure the city council into scheduling the December 17 vote to pass an $11.50 an hour minimum wage. DC councilmember Tommy Wells, who is currently running for mayor on a progressive platform, said, “Right off the bat, I was impressed” by JUFJ’s organizing on paid sick days and the minimum wage. “They held some events that I went to. And they met with me. I appreciated how clear they were on exactly what they wanted to happen.”

What they wanted to happen was for the city council to bring DC’s minimum wage into alignment with the surrounding Maryland region of Prince George’s and Montgomery counties. There, the county councils in November passed the same increase—to $11.50 by 2017—following intense organizing by JUFJ and other groups. “We organized a lot of ways for Jewish people to contact their representatives,” said Ennen. “Jews, like anybody else, don’t necessarily participate that much in local politics. Jews do tend to be pretty hooked into progressive politics nationally, or national issue campaigns, but lots of people who are involved in JUFJ had never called their actual county representative. It turns out,” she went on, “that county elected leaders aren’t used to the level of lobbying that Congress is. So it doesn’t take hundreds of phone calls and thousands of petition signatures. They’re receptive to hearing from their constituents. So we did a lot of work to mobilize people to have those meetings and make those calls. That was one of the ways that we were able to win in Montgomery County.”

This highlights an important lesson that the right-end of the political spectrum needs to learn from: politics doesn’t end at the ballot box.

Notice how in addition to voting a certain way, pushing out certain messages through the media and religious organizations, etc. these Jewish organizations actively engage in large-scale and well-organized grassroots lobbying campaigns. They encourage their members to call and write their representatives, participate in petition drives, etc.

This is something that the right-wing has to do more of. Too often we’re satisfied by donating some money to our favorite candidates, voting, and then sitting at home and occasionally sharing something on Facebook or Twitter. Worse still, on the rare occasion that a relatively good guy like Donald Trump wins, we satisfy ourselves by thinking that no follow up is needed, “he’s got it in the bag.” But that isn’t enough.

Just like these Jewish lobbies, we have to learn to start engaging more with our elected officials, local, state, and federal. When important votes for issues come up, call your Congressman, Senator, or county representative. Tell them how they have to vote if they want your support next election cycle. The thing is legislators actually listen because they do want to get re-elected at the end of the day. And the more feedback they get from their constituents, the more likely they are to vote with them.

If we do not start engaging more heavily with this kind of grassroots lobbying then we’re letting the groups that do win the game completely unopposed.

Tweet

MY FAVORITE ACCESSORIES

from LIZ FASHION FEED http://ift.tt/2tYpBS9 via IFTTT