Category: Watching
Nightcrawler: Not the Satire You Think It Is
On its most basic level, Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014) is a heavy-handed satire that indicts the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality and the normalization of violent and gruesome images on television news. Since images of the Vietnam War made their way into people’s homes via television screens, there have been debates about how much
Feminism doesn’t (t)werk that way: “Booty Culture,” race, and pop feminism
As Pippa Middleton recently remarked, “What is it with this American booty culture? It seems to me to be a form of obsession.” Who doesn’t love the booty?** Whether we’re talking about Miley Cyrus’s twerking, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea’s “Booty,” Kim Kardashian’s “break the internet”
Feeling Testy: Assessing our Assessments
Tests and assessment make people angry. Yes, this is a terrible film. No really — tests, and the entire idea of assessment, can produce positively splenetic displays. The comments section of Christopher B. Nelson’s recent essay critiquing assessment provides an apt example. As the federal government pushes to hold colleges responsible for providing students with
Regeneration, Rebranding, Republicans; or, Reince Priebus is not your boyfriend
In case you were camping over the last three days, the Republican Party took control of Congress on Tuesday night. To paraphrase an oft-heard line on the Capitol floor, I’m not a social scientist—so I’m not interested in the actual, complex causes of the victory. I am, however, interested in the rhetoric around the victory, particularly
Queering LGBT History: The Case of Sherlock Holmes Fanfic
This summer, I fell for BBC’s “Sherlock” hard1 — hard enough to drive me back to fanfic. Fanfic has grown up in the past decade: it now has activists, “aca-fans” (academic fans), and copyright lawyers, and a nonprofit defending artists’ rights to disseminate transformative works, including fiction. My casual intention to fill the wait till
Teaching Irony and The Office: A Reception Studies Approach
Last academic year, serving as a 2013-2014 HASTAC scholar, I began work on The Pedagogy Project (forthcoming). The HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) community asked fellow scholars to submit sample lesson plans or pedagogical strategies. I submitted a lesson that I use when I teach Twin Peaks, and I helped compile and
The House Wife and The Good Wife
In a compelling and rich analysis of serial melodrama, Jason Mittell offers up a reading of the series in his new book on complex television. He claims that the series “complicates its gendered appeals through innovative genre mixing and storytelling strategies” (¶ 41). By this, he means that the show offers up stereotypically masculine and
#WhyINeedFeminism
#WhyINeedFeminism – Staci Stutsman (5 September 2014) Recently, the anti-feminist movement has gained increased visibility thanks to the popularity of the tumblr #WomenAgainstFeminism. Women have submitted photographs of themselves holding up signs that list all of the reasons that they don’t need feminism. These reasons range from “because no one should be shamed for being