voxygen.net » Pop Culture

I’m back

~LS~ — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 10:28:49 +0000

I’m waiting for Typekit to populate/propagate my font. I’m using Cooper. It’s been some time since I’ve blogged. There’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just chalk it up to a lost and found year. The font makes the webdesign. I have to finish rebooting things here.

As always, the design reflects things about my life too numerous to go into. For instance, I tried to de-clutter and get things squared away into a single-file simple column. I failed. However, things did get shoved to the bottom, all linky and soldier-like, messy in an orderly fashion, but overwhelming from a big-picture perspective.

The Sells-Jaros household is now just the Sells household. The Jaros household will be a household with someone else. Quite surreal. The Sells household is also without the beloved Pach Du. That was a devastation too great to be accounted for – [...]

Another reason to like Hillary

~LS~ — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 15:27:17 +0000

Nonverbal communication expresses power and dominance. In public, professional settings, who gets to touch whom and the nature of that touch plays out and defines gender relations. Because it’s typically subtle, people are often unaware of this dynamic. When it’s more obvious, those who are in the “one down” position see it clearly and those in the position of power remain oblivious as part of their sense of entitlement. The stereotypical male boss/female secretary and male customer/female waitress interactions illustrate this over and over again. However, as gender roles change, the accompanying nonverbal behaviors change with them. Hillary is the perfect example.

This clip from Mad Men illustrates my point (see :40 – :50). Mad Men is a wonderful show to use for examples like this because it does such a good job of capturing the cultural milieu of the 50s and 60s [...]

Maslow’s Hierarchy

~LS~ — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:15:38 +0000

This cute take on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has been floating around on Facebook for a while. It’s been on my computer desktop for a couple of weeks. I’m definitely showing it in class when we talk about Maslow, but it’s just too cute not to post here as well.

Allie Beckstrom is my hero

~LS~ — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:27:08 +0000

Paranormal fiction and urban fantasy books are plentiful these days and a large portion of them are vapid. There are exceptions, of course, as with any genre, but on the whole, the works of Laurell K. Hamilton and Stephanie Meyers are representative of “teh stupid” that is paranormal fiction.

Shows such as Buffy, Charmed, and So Weird made common the kick-ass female main character in paranormal or urban fantasy and opened the door for this genre’s expanding popularity. The burgeoning teen fiction/young adult market, born with the huge demographic hump of Gen Y, cemented gothy vampy werewolfy witchy faery stories as a permanent fixture at Barnes and Nobles. So despite the stupidity of paranormal fiction’s lowest common denominator, its frequent strength is an empowerment of females. Well, except for Twilight, which reduces girls to 19th century passive, pining virgins awaiting their one true love. But let’s [...]

Wannabe feminism

~LS~ — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:18:10 +0000

It is no accident that Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas’s new book, opens with a discussion of the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls represent the negation of feminism by commercial cooptation. Girl Power, which the Spice Girls placed front and center in the public imaginary in the 90s, is what Douglas calls “bustier feminism,” a frosted cupcake of an ambiguous message about feminism at the turn of the century. According to Andi Zeisler’s Feminism and Pop Culture, the Spice Girls and the Girl Power they promoted was a “shorthand for a kind of a diet feminism that substituted consumer trappings for actual analysis.” Such vacuous feminism is easy to brush aside, easy to dismiss, particularly when it fades into a distant memory that occupies a small drop in the vast ocean of popular culture.

Fast forward to fourteen years later where the [...]

Pornification

~LS~ — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:24:29 +0000

Recently on WMST-L, the Women’s Studies discussion list, someone posted a call for papers about porn culture. The call was clearly anti-porn and the posting provoked a brief but rapid pro-/anti-porn debate before the moderator shut it down for being inappropriate to the mission of the list. Those old issues from the feminist sex wars still prickle at us feminists and I’m predictably on the fence about porn. I content myself to remember the title of the book, Pleasure and Danger, because porn is both those things, a crucial point about sex that we should always remember.

But one thing that does bother me is the pornification of consumer culture. I mean this in a different way than the typical use of the term as a comment on the how advertising borrows heavily from porn’s tropes and porn itself has infiltrated every aspect of popular culture. I’m [...]

Women in rock: some things never change

~LS~ — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:09:30 +0000

Baton Rouge has a new radio station: 103.3. Well, not a new radio station but an old station with a new format. The new format is “Music for Generation X.” That’s me, of course. The old format was “Divas” — not for me.

I listened to the station for several hours today and it’s quite a Frankenstein’s monster in terms of genre. They played everything from Nirvana and Guns-n-Roses to C+C Music Factory, with pit stops at Salt – n- Peppa, and REM, not to mention mid to late 80s disco, hip hop, rock, and the weird, bad music that I forgot existed. Funny, though, I recognized every song I heard, which demonstrates the way that our (my!) listening in the 80s and 90s was rather homogeneous despite the generic differences that existed.

Still, after about four hours of listening, guess what…no women in rock. Ok, [...]

Top 20 off the beaten path movies of the 2000s

~LS~ — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:18:50 +0000

These are not my top ten movies of the decade. I don’t think I could pick such a list. I’m glad it’s not a job requirement. The following list includes movies that I thought were different and interesting. Not all were critically acclaimed, either. Still, something about each one stuck with me over the decade. I’m an action
pic junkie and some of these are action pics, but they are not your standard shoot ‘em up style. They have something unique about them. Not all the films listed here were overlooked, but many were. I did not include major movies. The list is in no particular order.

1. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)

A strange man with an amazing sense of smell learns how to make perfume and then murders women in search of the elusive perfect scent. It’s a disturbing, dirty, compelling movie. Alan [...]

Mix tape obsolescence

~LS~ — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:28:38 +0000

As the decade draws to a close, many commentators are remarking on the demise of various technologies. I am sometimes rueful and sometimes relieved by the disappearance of the technologies, of their associated objects and habits.

Think of letter writing. Often, the only clues to women’s history or insights into the thoughts and emotions of previous generations lie in their letters. Writing letters was a habitus, a way of being and doing. Today, our digital documentation is excessive and often thin and shallow. A constant stream of 140 characters doesn’t seem to me to capture the nuances of a traditional letter. I suppose that 19th century upper-class women writing about their tea service (see Veblen on spoons; there is no spoon?) could be considered shallow too. Both Twitter and high tea are reflections in “taste” in its fullest sense of the [...]

More Suzuki Beane

~LS~ — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:00:27 +0000