News
Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews edited by Sarah Lightman won the Eisner for best scholarly book! I wrote a little blurb about Ariel Schrag for it, so I sort of not really just a little won an Eisner too. Below’s a pic of cartoonist Miriam Libicki (former HU writer!) and her daughter accepting the award.
On HU
Featured Archie Post: Cartoonist Jason Overby vs. Godard.
Robert Stanley Martin provides on sale dates for comics from early 1944.
Kate Polak on Hannibal, Laura Kipnis, and power.
RM Rhods explains to Grant Morrison that Heavy Metal Magazine isn’t punk.
Chris Gavaler on the swampy Heap and his thingy off-shoots.
I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates and the way of white critics.
I wrote about the first appearance of John Stewart and black superheroes saving white self-esteem.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Playboy I reviewed Go Set a Watchman, which is kind of a racist piece of crap.
At Splice I wrote about the establishment media’s embarrassing response to TNC’s “Between the World and Me.
At Quartz I wrote about:
—how POC don’t talk in films, and why Her and American Hustle are awful.
—the tradition of anti-country country music.
At the Guardian I wrote about Wesley Chu’s Time Salvagers, a sci-fi novel that cobbles together old tropes into an uncertain future.
At the Reader I wrote a short review of fuzak folk band Little Tybee.
Other Links
Arielle Bernstein on Rihanna, Taylor Swift, and female revenge narratives.
Julia Serano on how pseudoscience harms trans women.
Dianna E. Anderson on bisexuality and Christian ethics.
Michael Sonmore on feminism and his open marriage.
Lux Alptraum on funding research on sex and sex workers.
From that Quartz piece:
‘One way or another, a film with only white people in it is about being white.’
Are you hyperbolising a little, or do you really mean this?
I don’t think that’s hyperbole. Having only white people in your film is a really weird thing to do; the world just doesn’t look like that. So…yeah, it’s not just an accident. It has meaning. At the very least, it tells you about whiteness in the sense that it’s a sign of current power structures. But it almost always has broader meaning as well, as I try to show in the readings of Her and American Hustle.
I chose American Hustle at random, pretty much, incidentally. I’d seen Her, but none of the others he’d done, so I figured I’d watch that and see what I thought. And first thing in the film is Ellington music. That seems pretty meaningful to me in a film where virtually no people of color speak.
Presumably this isn’t unique to film, then. Does this mean that, say, the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman is also (inter alia) about whiteness?
…or, like, I’m not saying this to try to win a debate with you, but just because I think your argument seems much too strong, so…
Is Her also about being non-disabled? Is it about not having MS? Is it about not having a diagnosed mental illness? Is it about being non-monolingual? Is it about not being a stutterer? After all, the world contains people that are disabled, have MS, etc…(but maybe it’s that there aren’t as many of them?)
I totally get the criticism that those films don’t have POC. I get the criticism (not here, but elsewhere) that films don’t have enough women in major roles, minor roles and even (per that Geena Davis foundation thing) in crowd scenes. And certainly your weaker claim: ‘At the very least, it tells you about whiteness in the sense that it’s a sign of current power structures’ is right.
But it seems like an interpretation too far to say that thereby the films are about whiteness, or whatever the case may be depending on the films’ unrepresentativeness. You did backpedal to ‘almost always’ broader meaning, so I think you were hyperbolising a little, after all
I think Her is definitely about disability, or that you could do a reading about that pretty easily.
The Marston/Peter WW is about whiteness, too. I’ve talked about this in various places…but Marston was really racist, and his vision of ideal pure womanhood is not coincidentally linked to ideas about white womanhood specifically.
The thing about whiteness is that it’s a construct. It’s created through exclusion; certain people are white because certain people aren’t. So, the absence of poc isn’t coincidental; it’s part of how whiteness is constructed (I’d argue.)
I’d be interested to hear an example of a film that is overwhelmingly white where that doesn’t matter, or has nothing to say about whiteness. I can’t think of any.
If you mean the absence of poc (to stick to the matter at hand) “matters” and “has [something] to say” in an extra-diegetic sense, then totally, yeah — it reflects real-world inequalities etc. But to the extent you mean something stronger than that, okay, we may just have to disagree about what counts as an artwork being “about” xyz.
Man! Salon needs to clean up their web act – I tried to read Arielle Bernstein’s article, it locked up my machine for several minutes loading, and 45 minutes or so of doing things in other tabs while I waited for it to settle down so I could scroll and actually read wasn’t enough.