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Sex, Gender, and Popular Culture, Essay Example

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Introduction

The American pop culture has changed the way people perceive sex especially in the last three decades. DeLashmutt considers these changes to be both paradoxical and intriguing (43). Many efforts are being made by different groups in society to campaign for abstinence as well as sexual norms that are more stringent. Young adults and teenagers are the ones who are most influenced by the reconstruction, provision of information and dismantling (and sometimes reinforcement) of existing sexual norms.

Changing Sexual Norms: Impact of Popular Culture on Sexuality in America

The greatest source of influence to young adults and teenagers comes from adult media. In the adult media, explicit sexual references are made and figures and images, who are then popularized on this account. This creates excitement among the target audience, whose understanding of sexuality takes shape under the influence of these popular culture themes.

The main effect of reconstruction of sexuality on the popular culture arena has been making human sexuality appear like a commodity that is separated from the human body. Many American movies and songs have been fuelling controversy for so long that nowadays, this issue no longer seems as important discussion theme in high-level platforms as it once used to. For this reason, an academic approach has not been introduced into analysis of American sexuality as portrayed through pop culture.

Commercialization of popular culture has had a great influence on how Americans are presented with the images of sexuality. In most cases, such images are distorted in order to serve the commercial interests of the day. The individuals who create popular works of art are interested in earning some more bucks in the heat of controversy. Sexual controversies become a hotspot for triggering controversy is in the mainstream media.

Young people tend to appreciate sexuality as depicted through popular culture since in most cases it reflects their predicaments and therefore brings out the reality that makes some people in the society feel uncomfortable. The greatest influence resulting from the emerging sexual norms affects teenagers. With time, these norms become entrenched into the social fabric such that considering wiping them out will be taken by majority as merely wishful thinking.

Has Popular Culture Redefined Sexuality in America?

Since pop culture texts are able to permeate the society in a way that academic texts cannot, the former medium always carries the day. Films are not merely forms of entertainment; they are also sources of insights into man’s challenges in everyday life. Lipsitz believes that by explored matters of sexuality at length, films have introduced new concepts and made Americans define their sexual interactions in a new, often liberal way (39).

Intersections between sexuality and race, education and class are not as straightforward as they are depicted in popular culture. It is one thing for a youthful pop singer to lament about racism in a song; it is a completely different thing for a black professor to express the same sentiments in a university journal. Although these two different people may draw from similar other’s experiences, they approach the same issue from completely different perspectives. When it comes to sexuality, the same thing applies in the comparison between how sexuality is perceived by young and old people. Older people are not ‘severely’ affected since they already have some established views about sexuality.

It is difficult to draw a conclusion on whether film, for example has been used by some sections of the American population as an escapist medium, as it is claimed in some quarters. If some people tend to associate major players in the film industry as uneducated people who have no regard for sexual morality, then, this contention requires a detailed research. The outcome of such research would be expected to shed some light on sentiments relating to social inequalities. The main areas of focus would undoubtedly be education, class and race. In the face of these inequalities, the affected young American population is left with no other way of making an impression than through expressing sexually explicit sentiments in order to attract attention and reinforce a macho self-image.

The most obvious way through which popular culture dismantles existing sexual and gender themes in the American society, according to Lancaster, is through taking a casual approach to serious matters that are at the heart of human sexuality (331). Since popular culture is not considered a serious discourse, it is never criticized by policymakers and for this reason, it continues to thrive and extend influence. The farthest that policymakers go towards asserting authority is censorship.

As long as federal administrators and scholars continue to turn a blind eye on progressive and interactive criticism of popular culture, people in this industry will continue to be perceived as rebels who have not cause owing to the sexually obscene themes that they perpetuate with utter disregard to their effects on the young population.

In the education system, it would not be surprising for a research to reveal the gravity of confusion that high school students are embroiled in when it comes to matters of popular culture. The same confusion extends to matters of sexuality in which case young people have to piece together bits of information gathered from wise counsel from parents, teachers and religious leaders, misleading advice gathered from peers and the profanity of popular culture.

Since the commercial pursuits of players in the popular industry pay off handsomely, the sexual norms that are perpetuated in pop culture become popular and seemingly acceptable to inexperienced youth. As the youths mature, their newly acquired social norms become part of the social fabric. This is what has taken place within the last three decades for sexual norms in the country to undergo drastic change.

Works Cited

DeLashmutt, Michael “The sexualisation of popular culture: towards a Christian sexual aesthetic” Crucible p. 42-56, 2006.

Lancaster, Lodger. The trouble with nature sex in science and popular fiction . Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003.

Lipsitz, George. Time passages: collective memory and American popular culture . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2001.

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Gender and Popular Culture: Identity Constructions and Representations

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• Contributors

This collection of essays explores contemporary reflections on interactions between gender and culture. The 11 contributions focus on varied dimensions of popular culture that define, interpret, validate, interrogate and rupture gender conventions. There are discussions on how children react to gender expectations and how this reaction is reflected in their activities like drawing and games. There are also investigations of films, female bodybuilding in the USA, transgender identity in Greek and Indian mythology, and women breaking glass ceilings and pioneering social movements in developing countries like India. Specific chapters are devoted to British TV series and Hindi films that address issues related to masculinity. Essays on challenges that women face in the corporate world and the real world of social inequalities, especially in developing countries, give this volume rich thematic diversity. The collection will be of interest to literary critics, film critics, gender studies scholars, and poets.

Kusha Tiwari is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Shyam Lal College of the University of Delhi, India. She received her PhD from Jamia Millia Islamia, India. Her publications include the books Narrative of Liberation: Reading Nadine Gordimer’s Post-apartheid Fiction (2015), Critical Perspectives on Toni Morrison (2018), and Towards a Sustainable Future: Cross-cultural Strategies, Practices and Advancements (2019). Her academic specialties and research interests are postcolonial studies, South African literature, gender and transgender studies, and cross-cultural communication.

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Gender and Popular Culture (GWST 3030)

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This month's poll.

Depictions of Gender and Sexuality in Popular/Public Culture

Due date: 10-07-2022.

Proposals for essays are sought for a volume that critically examines depictions of gender and sexuality in popular culture, specifically in the last decade or so (2010–present ­ ). The editors are interested in essays that examine a growing diversity and evolution of expression of sexuality and gender in movies, television series, popular fiction, and the political stage. A wide range of voices and perspectives would be of particular value and would be welcomed.

• Some possible questions to consider in the proposals and chapters include: In what ways do these depictions redefine or broaden the public’s perception of gender and sexuality?
• Are these depictions groundbreaking, or do they recontextualize previous iterations of the public’s understanding of gender and sexuality?
• In what ways have these depictions had a negative or positive impact on society in general or the political stage in particular?
• What still needs to be said, portrayed, or represented in popular culture? When is representation alone not enough?

Submissions: Submit your proposal and short biography no later than 7 October 2022, to both [email protected]  and  [email protected] . For more information, visit https://samla.memberclicks.net/ext-cfps .

Notification of acceptance: Ongoing, no later than 30 October 2022 Provisional deadline for essay draft submission (approximately 10,000–15,000 words): 5 May 2023

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9 Gender and Culture

• Published: July 2019
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Culture and gender are closely intertwined with biological factors creating predispositions for sex and gender development. However, sociocultural factors are critical determinants leading to gender differences in roles and behaviors that may be modest but culturally important. Culture has profound effects on gender-related behavior, values, identity, roles, and how these are regarded in various social contexts. Culture governs the socialization of children, the tasks children are taught, the roles adult men and women adopt, and the expectations that govern women’s and men’s attitudes and behaviors. Culture provides the context in which gender roles, identity, and stereotypes unfold as well as parameters regarding sexual behavior. Culture affects variation in gender-related behaviors between individuals within a cultural group as well as variation between cultures. Culture can maximize, minimize, or even eliminate gender differences in social behaviors and cognitions. Indeed, it is impossible to separate gender and culture.

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Pop Culture and Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Morality, and Gender Essay

From a normative perspective, hooks’ thesis is that feminism is open to all willing to struggle against a system of intersecting oppressions, including men. On the other hand, there is a historically, politically, and economically determined point of intersection between parts of the feminist movement and the conservative media. This point is precisely the question of men’s participation in the feminist movement. I agree with hooks’ position that the feminist movement could not have been discredited as anti-male if it had paid more attention to finding more emancipatory perspectives on masculinity analysis. She argues that sexism, racism, and homophobia are linked and that all forms of oppression must be addressed in order to defeat them (hooks, 2021). It is also impossible to disagree with this position of the writer.

The anti-male stance of some feminists coincides with the interest of conservatives in portraying feminism as a misogynist movement. On the other hand, male socialization may indeed present a problem from a feminist perspective. However, in traditional society, not only women’s but also men’s status is framed by a set of clichés. If gender equality were to become a reality, men, too, would gain freedom of choice and self-expression.

A key challenge for today’s media is to promote gender sensitivity in journalists, which means being able to see any social problem from a gendered perspective. As long as journalists do not see a social problem, they do not talk about it; therefore, they do not raise it in their stories. Journalists’ knowledge of a problem is the first step toward making it relevant because what the media report on is socially significant. This focus on excluding and exaggerating differences does not lead to reinforcing gender stereotypes. Rather, it can be considered as a new way of looking at the pressing issues of ethnicity, identity, and sexuality.

Indeed, all media not only reflect but also construct reality. Here, it should be noted that modern journalists cannot do without a clear methodology for creating texts that take gender into account. Language is first and foremost a reproduction of power relations, and discursive practices have their footing in intersubjective communication. Consequently, it can be said that changes in language through feminist literary criticism have served as a means of shaping a feminist paradigm of profound societal change. certainly, men and women still perceive and interpret the world differently, which is due to differences in their life experiences. The latter, in turn, is caused by biological factors and the historically established division of labor, but there is no need to absolutize this fact. There are similarities between women and men because they are representatives of the same species; they are, first of all, human beings who tend to think similarly.

bell hooks says that the representation of African-Americans in pop culture takes place in the context of white supremacy and the normalization, the acceptance of that supremacy. The images of movie characters are closely tied to the context, the place and time in which people live, and the values specific to a particular culture. Moreover, the way in which characters are portrayed in cinema is influenced by socially established norms of human interaction. Most often, there are fixed gender roles that enshrine certain behavior, as well as ways of representation of men and women. In this regard, cinema, as a massively popular form of media, can both question stereotypes and affirm them.

Today, there is little scientific research on how gender specifics manifest themselves in journalistic materials’ form and content. For the most part, scholars study gender stereotypes in media coverage of women. There is even less information on the influence of natural male and female characteristics on journalism. In particular, little has been written about how a woman’s need to describe reality manifests itself in her work. However, I think it is safe to judge at this point that the male perspective remains dominant. Unfortunately, there is still little space for actualizing issues of racial, ethnic, and sexual identity.

For example, feminists have not yet succeeded in creating political solidarity with women of different nationalities or socioeconomic classes. hooks believes that a more transformative politics is needed, one that is not so rooted in Western ideology (Bohrer, 2019). The idea of male-female solidarity in continuing sexism deserves special attention (Subašić et al., 2018). Together, it can be possible to overcome the dominance of a single point of view on media events, such as the way women are shown in movies.

hooks talks about the need to develop an oppositional gaze, that is, to deconstruct rather than accept the point of view of the male gaze, not to identify with female objects but to analyze cinema. This is indeed true since it is unacceptable to be content with the way the oppressor demystifies the history of the oppressed. It is important to invent ways to express identity authentically without any distortion. It is widely recognized that the media are transmitters of culture and drivers of globalizing cultures. Consequently, for the media to accurately reflect the state of society in a full and diverse way, the news must be deeper and not just utilize a male-centered, stereotypical view.

Bohrer, A. J. (2019). Marxism and intersectionality: race, gender, class and sexuality under contemporary capitalism. Transcript Publushing.

hooks, b. (2021). Communion: the female search for love. HarperCollins.

Subašić, E., Hardacre, S., Elton, B., Branscombe, N. R., Ryan, M. K., & Reynolds, K. J. (2018). “We for she”: Mobilising men and women to act in solidarity for gender equality. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 21 (5), 707–724. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, December 29). Pop Culture and Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Morality, and Gender. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pop-culture-and-race-ethnicity-sexual-morality-and-gender/

"Pop Culture and Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Morality, and Gender." IvyPanda , 29 Dec. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/pop-culture-and-race-ethnicity-sexual-morality-and-gender/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Pop Culture and Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Morality, and Gender'. 29 December.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Pop Culture and Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Morality, and Gender." December 29, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pop-culture-and-race-ethnicity-sexual-morality-and-gender/.

1. IvyPanda . "Pop Culture and Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Morality, and Gender." December 29, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pop-culture-and-race-ethnicity-sexual-morality-and-gender/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Pop Culture and Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Morality, and Gender." December 29, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pop-culture-and-race-ethnicity-sexual-morality-and-gender/.

• Hooks' “Inspired Eccentricity”: Relations With Mother
• The Bell Hooks Theory of Getting Free
• Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
• Feminism in Lorber's, Thompson's, Hooks's Views
• Visual Culture. Gender and the Gaze
• Feminist Theoretical Schools in Various Cultures
• Race, Class and Gender: Feminism - A Transformational Politic
• Lessons of Wisdom From Seniors to Youth
• Preschools Pty Ltd.'s Payroll Department Issues
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• The Absolute Human Right Not to Be Tortured
• Becoming an Ally of the Queer (LGBT) Population
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Rejecting the Binary

The greatest gift judith butler ever gave me was teaching me never to allow your opponent to define the terms of the debate..

When Judith Butler was serving as my dissertation adviser at the University of California in the late 1990s, they did not yet go by “they.” No one in my circle did, and at the time that circle included one of the most forward-thinking spaces in the world when it came to matters of gender: Butler’s dissertation seminar, which met every two weeks so that each of their advisees could present work in progress to the group.

I had never taken an actual class with Judith, who arrived at Berkeley just as I was finishing up my coursework. A few years before, just after my Ph.D.-qualifying oral exam, I had been, in academic terms, deserted at the altar: The professor I had considered my chief ally in the department abruptly, and without explanation, made it clear she would neither advise my dissertation nor recommend me to any of her colleagues. She was one of those professors (the unethical ones, I now realize) who divide their students into an in-group and an out-group, and whatever the cause, I was now on the outs.

I dropped out for a few years, working an office job in San Francisco to save up money for a self-funded year of study abroad. When I came back to Berkeley to finish my degree, the corridors of Dwinelle Hall, where both my department (comparative literature) and Judith’s (rhetoric) were housed, suddenly felt impenetrably unwelcoming. What professor who had never even taught me would be willing to take on my weird interdisciplinary thesis topic? I began awkwardly introducing myself to faculty members I hadn’t interacted with before, flailingly outlining my half-formed idea.

Whether out of interest in the project or just as an act of mercy, Judith agreed to be my adviser. As I would learn over the next few years, they were not only a committed educator but a savvy academic ally, the exact opposite of that professor who had hung me out to dry after my exams. Butler understood the adviser’s role as a crucial cog in the bureaucracy, helping their advisees land fellowships, degrees, and eventually jobs. To that end, they offered me the kindness of welcoming me into their dissertation group, a room full of scarily brilliant (and a few just plain scary) people. Butler’s work by then extended well beyond the subject matter that had made Gender Trouble so influential and controversial when it came out in 1990. That book, Butler’s second, introduced the then-radical notion that gender could be better understood as a socially constructed performance than as a stable biological fact. It was a star-making book, one of those rare academic-press publications that cross over into the mainstream conversation: Whether you read it or not, if you were interested in feminism and queerness in the 1990s, it’s certain you encountered its argument out in the wild.

Because Judith Butler had become a star, even those who never seriously engaged with their work often had an opinion about them. For a few years, the conservative-leaning journal Philosophy and Literature ran an annual “Bad Writing Contest” to mock the alleged obscurantism of contemporary humanities scholars (though every “awardee” just so happened to work on questions related to leftist politics). When Judith won the award in 1999, they published a response in the New York Times that to this day remains a model for how to casually shred someone else’s specious argument using steel-trap logic and a sense of humor. (“I’m still waiting for my check!” Butler observed in acknowledging their recent “prize.”) The editor of Philosophy and Literature, Denis Dutton, never gave out the Bad Writing prize again, demonstrating the efficacy of a bit of advice I recall Judith giving advisees: Always refuse to frame the debate in the terms your opponent has set. It was not only Butler’s writing on gender that offered an alternative to the zero-sum logic of the binary; that insistence on reframing the question was at the heart of their pedagogical method, and maybe the greatest gift they gave me as a teacher.

Thirty-four years and at least a dozen books after Gender Trouble (on their own and co-written with other scholars, covering subjects from hate speech to post-9/11 global politics to Zionist nationalism to the COVID-19 pandemic), Butler is publishing their first book with a nonacademic press. Who’s Afraid of Gender? , out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is not the simplified, popularized reworking of their early writings on the topic you might expect. Nor is it a polemic in the tradition of Gender Trouble . Instead, it’s an analysis of contemporary political and cultural battles over the very topics that Butler’s early work brought into wider public discussion: the mutability and potential for radical social change that are contained in the category of gender, along with the right of women and all queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people to live freely and safely in the world.

Who’s Afraid of Gender?

By Judith Butler. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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So who is afraid of gender? Many, many institutional and governmental entities, not to mention activist groups both online and off, are now staging a mass moral panic about a “phantasmatic cluster” of anxieties related to gender and sexuality: queer and trans rights, feminism, abortion, contraception, reproductive technology, book banning. These issues, Butler demonstrates, can all be seen as parts of one very large and urgent problem: the global rise of authoritarianism. Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro—right-wing leaders and religious organizations from around the world are all busy stoking the same fearful rhetoric around the same handful of reliably incendiary issues. Any consumer of right-wing media is dosed many times per hour with “news” about their children being groomed by secret networks of left-wing pedophiles, or the imminent threat posed by imaginary gender pirates whose demand for basic bodily autonomy somehow imperils the sexual self-definition and even the continued existence of heteronormative cis people.

As statistics persistently show, the reverse is true: It’s women and LGBTQ+ people, especially those of color, who are far more likely to be the targets of workplace discrimination, online and street harassment, sexual violence, and murder. The projection of one’s own desire to oppress onto the target of that persecution is the kind of psychosocial phenomenon Butler excels at spotting in the wild, and at dismantling with the swiftness of a hunter field-dressing their prey. “They want to quash critical thought in the name of doctrine,” Butler writes after a discussion of Ron DeSantis’ attempt to institute a “Don’t Say Gay” policy in public schools, “and, by way of an inadvertently confessional projection, assume that their adversaries want the same.”

Gender is taking over, conservatives tell us. It is endangering the purity of the body politic. Butler notes how the right wing employs the language of migration to characterize gender as a force invading from below, transgressing its proper boundaries. Yet conservatives are also happy to replace that language with the image of gender activists as colonizing elites, bent on imposing their corrupt urban values on traditional rural cultures. The cognitive fog induced by letting these side-by-side contradictions stand unremarked upon is part of the point of such rhetoric. In the right-wing imagination, “gender” is nowhere and everywhere at once, an all-purpose wedge issue that Butler describes as a “diabolical” category. It can be spun so as to encompass every horror from Orwellian totalitarianism to lawless anarchy and also, somehow, both at the same time. The same kind of free-floating demonization has been used against Butler in their personal life, as they note in a rare autobiographical passage in the book’s acknowledgments. As their work has been translated and published around the globe, they and their longtime partner, the political theorist Wendy Brown, have been accused by fundamentalist groups of “a chaotic and lurid cluster of sexual crimes”; during a 2017 visit to a conference in Brazil, Butler was burned in effigy and denounced as a witch.

The intersection of psychic and political territory is nowhere better explored—or Butler’s refusal to cede the terms of the debate to the oppressors better displayed—than in Butler’s chapter on TERFs and the British. You might argue that this author’s rhetorical firepower is squandered on opponents with as weak a case to make for themselves as the anti-trans “feminist” movement that claims several high-profile proponents in the U.K. But Butler’s methodical examination of this group’s self-contradicting claims sheds welcome light on the way fantasy, paranoia, and scapegoating can supplant rational argument when it comes to the particular issue of trans rights. The chapter’s highlight is a section on the June 2020 post to J.K. Rowling’s website in which the Harry Potter author revealed for the first time the personal history of domestic abuse that, Rowling wrote, provided the origin story for her ongoing support of anti-trans bathroom legislation.

Butler’s response to Rowling’s autobiographical revelation is a case study in the value of close reading. They start off by conceding two important points: The online bullying and threats to which Rowling was subjected to were unseemly (“I will not condone that kind of behavior, no matter who does it,” Butler writes) and the abuse she suffered at her first husband’s hands was horrific. But Butler’s empathy toward the transphobic billionaire ends there, as they go on to coolly point out that “the motivation one has for entering into a public debate may be worth knowing, but it rarely suffices as the reason everyone should agree with one’s point of view.” Butler zooms in on the language of that 2020 post, a curious document that careens between the confessional and the delusional, with abrupt 180-degree shifts in logic. Immediately after a passage proclaiming her “solidarity and kinship” with trans women, and after stating that her empathy for them includes a desire to keep them safe, Rowling observes that

at the same time, I do not want to make natal women and girls less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to every man who believes or feels he’s a woman—and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones—then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.

With the dry sense of humor that often characterizes their public speeches (and that used to leaven the mood of those long, sometimes dull dissertation workshops), Butler notes how quickly Rowling transforms these much-empathized-with trans women into a marauding band of poorly disguised men with violent intentions. The volley of questions Butler then poses to the absent specter of Rowling shows how broad a swath of social and political reality the novelist’s gaslighting brief on behalf of transphobia has left out. Rowling stresses her preoccupation with cis women endangered by cis men posing as trans, something that almost never happens, while making no mention of the frequently documented violence against real trans people in virtually all public and private spaces. “It would seem,” Butler writes, “that the violence she is concerned about is domestic violence perpetrated by men, but what about other forms of social violence inflicted against trans people more broadly? … What about incarceration, psychiatric pathologization, street violence, loss of employment?”

Having opened up the concept of “violence” to a broader set of possible meanings, Butler proceeds to do the same with “men”: “Are gay men even included in this category, or are they not thinkable inside the category? What about genderqueer men, or all those who categorize themselves as transmasculine? Transgender men?” True to their own advice, Butler refuses to engage Rowling’s argument on the novelist’s spurious terms. By interrogating her conveniently narrow framing of imagined cis-on-cis sexual aggression that is still, somehow, trans people’s fault, Butler exposes the blinkered paranoia of Rowling’s bathroom-invasion scenario.

As an opponent in a reasoned debate, J.K. Rowling is fairly easy to leave flopping on the deck. But there is nonetheless a lot to be learned from this confrontation between her brand of feelings-based anti-trans activism and Butler’s expansive view of gender, not as the possession of a privileged group that must circle the wagons to defend it, but as a feature of human life that transcends the concept of ownership. Trans-exclusionary feminists, Butler notes, “maintain that their rightful property, their sex, is being taken from them by ‘fake’ women.” But “gender categories are not property, and they cannot be owned. Gender categories precede and exceed our individual lives.” For Butler, gender is best understood not as something one is or has , but as something one does .

In the decades since Gender Trouble came out, though, Butler has acknowledged that their earlier view of the category now seems limited in ways they were unable to see at the time as a white Western feminist trained in traditional European philosophy. Citing the work of feminist and gender-studies scholars from Argentina, Nigeria, and South Africa, Butler observes that many non-Western languages have long had a vocabulary for forms of gendered existence outside the male/female binary.

It’s Butler’s embrace of the ultimate impossibility (even undesirability) of finding one final answer to the question “But what is gender?” that animates their long intellectual and ethical engagement with the subject. At one point in this new book, discussing the work of pioneering feminist scholar Joan W. Scott, Butler calls gender a “form of power”; on the next page, it’s a “structure that saturates the world,” which, while not a contradiction of the previous formulation, is far from a simple restatement of the same idea. Still elsewhere, Butler designates gender as “a site where biological and social realities interact with one another.” Near the end of Who’s Afraid of Gender? comes a burst of lyricism not typical of Butler’s usual rigorously pragmatic voice: “Gender has to remain relatively wild in relation to all those who claim to possess its correct definition.” Here I understand wild not as a synonym for “fierce” or “unruly,” but as the opposite of “domestic” or “tame.” Like a deer encountered on a walk in the woods, gender should be allowed to take off at a run to wherever it’s headed, to lead a free life without fear of unasked-for intrusion. No one, including Butler themself, should be allowed to capture that wild thing.

What about that Bad Writing award? In their first trade-press book, Butler makes a concerted effort to keep Who’s Afraid of Gender? accessible and jargon-free. It is, without question, a demanding read, but not because the author is obfuscating or showing off. Rather, the difficulty derives from the rigor of the thought itself, and the work of accompanying the movement of that thought brings its own kind of pleasure. More than anything, reading this book reminded me of attending one of Butler’s large lecture classes for Berkeley undergrads, which I used to drop into sometimes for the sheer joy of watching Professor Butler think on their feet as they boiled down big ideas into a form that students new to that way of thinking and writing could understand. A generation after I was lucky enough to study with them, Butler has gone from a star in the world of academia to that rare thing: a genuine public intellectual, one whose goal is not to restrict their ideas to an academic in-group, but to bring them to the world and, perhaps, to change it. If you’re not sure whether this book is for you, watch one of the many clips online of Butler talking about their work, like this 2023 lecture , which presents much of the material that makes up the book’s conclusion. What Judith Butler was for me 25 years ago, they now are to whoever cares to read them: a born teacher.

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Race & Ethnicity in Popular Culture

Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) 2024 Hybrid Conference

Call for Papers: Race and Ethnicity in Popular Culture Current Chair : Indya Jackson, Ramapo College of New Jersey, [email protected]

Dates : Thursday, October 3, 2024 - Saturday, October 5, 2024. 

Location : Nichols College in Dudley, MA and Online*

We invite submissions that critically examine the intersections of race and ethnicity within popular culture. From film and television to literature and social media, this CFP seeks to interrogate the ways in which racial identities are constructed, represented, and contested in contemporary media landscapes. We welcome diverse theoretical perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches that shed light on the myriad approaches to race and ethnicity within the realm of popular culture. 

Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):

• Constructions, depictions, and appropriations of race in various popular formats (ex: film, literature, comics, video games, social media etc.). 
• The intersections of race, ethnicity, popular culture and academia. 
• Race and ethnicity in popular discourses (ex: conversations around DEI, police reform and mass incarceration, critical race theory, antiracism, migration etc.). 
• The meaning(s) of race and ethnicity in constructions of nation/nationalism, “anti-woke” culture, neoliberalism, globalization and capitalism. 

Abstracts/Proposals

The call will be open until June 15, 2024. You can submit your proposal at this link , which will ask the following questions about your proposal:

• Proposal Type (Single Presentation or Panel)
• Subject Area
• Working Title
• Academic Affiliation (if any)
• Abstract (250 words)
• Short bio (50-200 words)

For more information, please visit our 2024 Conference Page: https://nepca.blog/2023-annual-conference/

*Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday morning via Zoom, and in-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning at Nichols College, Dudley, Massachusetts.

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'Playing Place — Board Games, Popular Culture, Space' released

By molly sheridan.

"I have to admit that the only board game I really played as a kid was Monopoly. I was always the banker, and I always cheated," confesses Architecture Professor Medina Lasansky with a conspiratorial laugh while sharing the inspiration behind Playing Place — Board Games, Popular Culture, Space , a new book out from MIT Press which she edited in partnership with Chad Randl (Ph.D. HAUD '14). The volume, printed in full color and rich with imagery, collects 38 essays by contributors spanning a wide range of experience and expertise that illuminate, as the editors' introduction explains, "what board games, past and present, tell us about larger place-based cultural attitudes, assumptions, and anxieties." 

The impetus for the book came out of Lasansky's Archi.Pop class, which draws connections between architecture and design and popular culture. One unit asks students to play a board game and think about how that relates to their understanding of space. 

"Students should know about pop culture when they go out in the world, and I encourage them to think about board games like everyday life," Lasansky says. "A lot of people play with games and toys, and it helps them think about ideas about space and place without them knowing it. I used to teach the Italian Renaissance, and it took me so long to get students up to speed and to be able to ask interesting questions, whereas in Archi.Pop, they know all this stuff, so they can begin right away being creative and thinking critically."

The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester also proved to be an invaluable resource in developing the project. Housing an archive of some 29,000 games and employing a very helpful archivist, trips there introduced Lasansky and Randl to the amazing range of options available — from the weird to the scandalous to the inspiring, and even the original blueprint to Scrabble, which as it turns out was designed by an unemployed architect.

In the midst of planning the book, COVID hit, which Lasansky suspects led them to a better, more accessible project in the end. Renewed interest in board games paired well with their decision to take a more relaxed approach to what was originally envisioned as a collection of long articles rather than the shorter essays covering a wider range of games that they eventually commissioned. They tapped contributors who they knew would have fun with the project while also bringing scholarly insights to the table. Some covered the usual suspects such as Life, Risk, and Monopoly, while others dove into more obscure childhood favorites such as Barbie Queen of the Prom and Uranium Rush.

Continue reading on the Architecture, Art, and Planning website.

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