(re-) Claimed She-Mail / / Anita Stahl

In my “Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies” class at NYU, a professor told the story of her grandmother asking what she teaches: “Queer theory.” “Oh dear, I don’t think you’re supposed to use that word anymore.” In academic and liberal circles today, the word is used so casually, I am quick to forget there was a time before reappropriation, when it was an insult thrown upon the community by the outside.

 

For a few seasons now, I’ve been an avid watcher of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
For a few years now, I’ve been an ardent feminist and queer advocate.

When I watch Drag Race, I see satire and parody and it cracks me the fuck up. I’m not offended that the portrayals of women are big boobs, big hair, barrels of paint, and a skimpy dress, accessorized with high heels. It’s a parody of femininity and the expectations placed on women; every challenge shows the effort and time that go into becoming such a woman. (Unless you’re Courtney Act, in which case Chapstick and mascara are all you need.)

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Notions of Hegemony in Olympic Discourse / / Anita Stahl

    The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics closed just months ago, and already Russia is playing fast and loose with any global good will it built. That is, if they ever intended to generate good will… that is, whatever that even means… that is to say, it’s all a little hazy when it comes to Russia and Western relations. Global good will, power plays, displays of grandeur, there are no clear intentions. Sandwiched between despicable acts of homophobia partially endorsed by the Kremlin and the (para-) military annexation of Crimea, some Westerners still appear genuinely shocked by the dichotomous representations of a nation trying to show a different side in Sochi and in Ukraine. But corruption, abuses, elitism, and a deliberate whitewashing of disgusting realities are as old as the Games themselves, and are well documented in the Olympic revival of the 19th Century.

 

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VART # 2 / / Tingting Wei

Read first part of essay here.  

            VART follows two major lineages colluding into one.

            The first lineage follows the historical pop movement: pointing-as-art (championed by Duchamp), celebrity-as-art (championed by Andy Warhol), consumption-as-art (championed by Jeff Koons), and relations-as-art (championed by Nicolas Bourriaud).

            The second lineage follows the internet. Dialogue around how the internet has changed the way artists view themselves and make art is ongoing, summarized by Rhizome as: “Post internet, post media, post media aesthetics, radicant art, dispersion, formatting, meme art, circulationism—all recent terms to describe networked art that does not use the internet as its sole platform, but instead as a crucial nexus around which to research, transmit, assemble, and present data, online and offline,” and in which both art and artist are more ‘fluid, elastic, and dispersed.’”

            The first lineage is important because we see how conceptual twists set up by Duchamp, Warhol & co. recuperated anti-art as art. We see how art fell again and again from its pedestal and resuscitated so that it may, in the fashion of a phoenix, rebirth—each time a little different from last. Relational Aesthetics, which VART borrows heavily from, depends on “the virtual relationships of the Internet and globalization, which…have inspired artists to adopt a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach and model their own ‘possible universes’.”  VART loves virtual relationships gathered in virtual universes—in other words, VART loves microtopias.

            This leads us to the second lineage, the internet, which helps move image dissemination away from traditional rigid models and into arguably more democratic ones [3]. Generous with space and cost-effective, the internet is also responsible for meme culture, where ubiquity rather than scarcity is the reigning cultural value meter. And perhaps most importantly, the internet is responsible for the technological society that prizes novelty, one predicated by the progressivist notion that reality must be constantly updated.

 

 

[3] Some argue that b/c the early internet was heavily influenced by US politics that it is essentially a state tool.