In his piece “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak discusses the inauthentic representation of marginalized people within mainstream media because the marginalized individuals lack a platform for their own voice. Time and time again films and media, often with noble intentions, depict the struggles of marginalized people, but do so from a privileged vantage point […]
Love is often understood as a transformative political practice, subconsciously or not. This is through the ambiguity with the term “love.” The issues with relying on an abstract concept like love as a reference point or call to action is that the way each person defines love is often relative to how others have defined […]
In Sandoval essays on love, titled “Love as a Hermeneutics of Social Change, a Decolonizing Movida,” much of the piece is spent talking about the ways in which love can be and has been politically charged. The way that love can revolutionize and the way the love and redefine the way social movements function and […]
Nicole Arbour is a Youtube personality that has found herself in headlines on more than one occasion. Famously, her video titled “Dear Fat People,” garnished viral media attention, responses from fellow Youtubers who were angered and disgusted, and from millions of views, comments, and shares on the video. Upon looking it up, I learned that […]
The Call of Duty games that have been some of the most popular video games released in the past 10 years are extremely problematic because of their portrayal of Muslim people. In her piece “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft”, Lisa Nakamura’s notion of racialization in […]
After reading Sandoval’s chapter on semiotics, I searched for a commercial to put it into conversation with. One of the first companies that came to mind for me was AXE body spray. They’ve certainly had some interesting commercials, but the one that I stumbled upon actually surprised me in terms of the messages it seems […]
In Rodriguez’s Intro to Queer Futures, the opening sentences are about a move towards “another kind of sexual future.” They say, “It is sexual in the queerest of ways, meant to inspire intense feeling rather than reproduction; it is multisensory, asynchronic, polysemous, perverse, and full of promise.” This reminded me of the film Married to […]
The film (A)Sexual focused on the formation of the group “AVEN,” which aims to promote the visibility and education of asexuality in the mainstream. What was apparent in the film was the desire to categorize or quantify the group in order to promote solidarity. Categorization of a group, however, can be destructive to the goals […]
The Superbowl’s commercials are almost as highly anticipated as the game itself. This year, Budweiser ran an ad focussed around the journey of a one of its founders from Ireland to the United States. One of the greatest myths provided in the advertisement is when the immigrant’s visa is stamped, as the clerk states “Welcome […]
From what I gathered about Spivak’s arguments regarding the subaltern, she is investigating the ways in which Western, dominant identities observe and then reach (often prejudice, racist) conclusions about groups that are deemed “other.” She seemed most interested in the fact that the dominant group finds a way to speak over the subaltern about their […]
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