Pop culture.

I have a problem with pop culture. I dissociate from it. I don’t remember any of it. I can’t. My view of pop culture is entirely one-dimensional. I admit. Christian suggested to me that mass media is a powerful form of cultural communication, a potential avenue for social change. bell hooks has a third view: Pop culture is an important space for cultural critique. Pop culture both generates and reinforces cultural meaning. It’s important for us to look to pop culture to understand the how, why, and what of power in our society. These videos are good:

What about Love!?

Of course, Love. I always come back to you.

Thanks for your comments, Sean. You are awesome. What do ya’ll think of this idea:

A Radical/Subversive history of love. I’m thinking a mosaic. I could trace the larger arch of how the mainstream discourses on love have changed over time, but underneath that show how different subcultures have taken the dominant meaning of love and subverted it in some way toward social justice. Here are some examples i’ve thought of so far:

interracial (black/white) relationships in slave-holding or reconstruction south

free lovers of late 19th/early 20th centuries

1920’s and harlem rennaisance “new woman”/ “new negro”

… (huge time gap)…

Lesbian feminist back to the land movement in Oregon

Development of womanism, audre lorde “Uses of the Erotic”

Eco-radical discourses on love, maybe anarcha feminist

Polyamory radical queer culture

Current scholarship on love: bell hooks and some others

Look!

Look! My friend who writes the Revolutionary Environmentalism blog has a great post on why the police are not your friends. Person is in the process of dispelling four myths about police:

–that not all cops are bad

–that they have a dangerous job.

–that the cops are there to protect you

–that the cops deter crime.

From Microcosm Publishing

A poster from INCITE! that a woman gave to me for free when i only had three dollars.

Click on the revolutionary environmentalism link in my blogroll!

INCITE!

I just noticed that INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence has a wonderful video clip from the US Social Forum that happened last June in Atlanta. On the video they included my most favorite, and my least favorite quotes from the plenaries. Andrea Smith critiqued the slogan of the US Social Forum, “Another US is Possible.” Andrea Smith said that “a sense of nationalist social hierarchy impacts what kind of revolutionary imagination we can even come up with. First of all let’s just look at the slogan of the US Social Forum: ‘Another world is possible, but another US is Necessary.’ The question to put on the table is, if another world is possible, is the US itself necessary? If we put all our… imaginations together, is the best we can come up with a kinder gentler…colonial state that’s based on slavery and genocide?” Mia Mingus gave a powerful speech on queerness and disability, a radical critique of able-bodied heteronormativity. I wish they took a larger clip of her speech, because the part they clipped did not quite catch the power/empowerment i felt listening to her speech at the time. I absolutely did not like the following speech by Loretta Ross, who said spoke about the colonization of the mind. Ross said that “nobody can make a slave out of you without your permission.” I absolutely feel that this kind of stance comes from a position of agency and some degree of privilege, neither of which enslaved or similarly exploited people can take for granted. I think her larger argument is right on, that we need to decolonize our minds as well as our bodies, and part of this process may include embracing a certain vocabulary of political language–she talks about women who wont use the word feminism–but why pretend that everyone in the world has the same amount of agency and privilege? Why assume that everybody wants to use the same language? Why assume that slavery is a choice? It seems to me these assumptions come from a general attitude that large structural/systemic social problems will change simply because we understand them, that just talking about problems will be enough to solve them. Shouldn’t it be obvious that slavery is a non-consensual arrangement? Who does it serve to say otherwise?

Lifting As We Climb: Racial Uplift and Gender in Historical Accounts of Black Women in America

Here’s a paper I wrote earlier this term for Sisters in Struggle: 20th Century Women’s Activism.  Click below or above to read!