I don’t have memories of my mom telling me to act ladylike, but I do have such memories of my grandmother (my abuela). I often went to visit my abuela during Summer breaks in Puerto Rico when I was too young to be on my own the whole Summer. She is a traditional 1950s housewife. She only lets Estée Lauder products touch her body. She lived on an island near the beach her whole life and doesn’t know how to swim. All three of her daughters had curly hair and she forced them to get it chemically straightened, which ruined their curl pattern. She’s practically bald now from having this done to herself. Once when I lamented, after seeing a photo of Continue reading “Gender & Communication: My Model Behavior”
Can Misogynists and Feminists Ever Be Friends?
I wasn’t familiar with the concept of “incels” and incels as a political body until a recent piece (Lanchester, 2018) in The New Yorker mentioned the term in explaining why a particular economist was positing an irresponsible economic theory in describing a terrorist attack by a self-described incel in Toronto.
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#Fitspo: Health, Privacy, and Instagram
Fitness as a publicly discussed facet of identity is a relatively new phenomenon in pop culture. I attempt to explore the disruption of health and fitness privacy norms by the social media technology Instagram and its role in promoting negative social comparison. I will explain why we should be mindful of the impact of this technology on social comparison, define what social comparison is and the context-relative information norms for this practice, and then show how those norms are affected by Instagram use. I will conclude by exploring the normative value of those effects, and how the technology could be used to motivate better health outcomes for users. Continue reading “#Fitspo: Health, Privacy, and Instagram”
Internet Killed The TV Star: The Mutual Shaping of Tech & Culture
A cursory reading of the history of streaming television will paint its inception and effect as techno-deterministic. However, this is not the whole picture. I will argue that not only technological but also cultural conditions of the post-network era (2004 – present) gave rise to streaming technology, empowering some previously underserved television viewers by making their interests more difficult to ignore. This complicates an understanding of social change through a purely techno-deterministic framework by presenting industry and market (expressions of culture) as equally powerful as technology (Lessig, 2006) in determining the state of society. I will begin by briefly tracing how the technological evolution of TV affects content. I Continue reading “Internet Killed The TV Star: The Mutual Shaping of Tech & Culture”
The Dark Dandy: Aesthetic Subversion in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal
There is a certain satisfaction from seeing the good guy catch the bad guy. The tropes of genre allow one to anticipate a certain pattern and find joy when those anticipated elements come to pass (Smith, 2010). But what happens when this logic is subverted? In the current programming-dense “peak” of television, the avid postmodern viewer exhausts genre power, asking TV to be more, do more. In this way, not satisfying audience expectations actually produces more satisfaction. In Hannibal (2013-2015), a genre-defying television show developed and produced by Bryan Fuller, this is accomplished by complicating what is good and evil through careful aesthetic subversion that supports, in formal elements, a plot that with a consumerist morality deifies the bad guy, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). In doing so, such a show
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On the Air Tonight: Music in The Americans
Music is the first thing one experiences in the pilot episode of The Americans. Quarterflash’s 1981 hit, “Harden My Heart,” plays as we get the show’s setting: Washington D.C. No year is announced, but the song, with it’s era-specific “sexy” saxophone, tells us we are in the ‘80s. We aren’t sure that the music isn’t diegetic as we see Keri Russell sitting at a bar leaning into the conversation she is having with a middle-aged man who has deluded himself into believing that a woman that beautiful is incredibly interested in him.
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Visualizing Hindsight: The Semiotics of Halt and Catch Fire’s Intro Sequence
Image courtesy of Art of the Title
Halt and Catch Fire is a show more about time and technological progress than characters, and the intro sequence reflects that. Currently airing its fourth and final season on AMC, the show charts the evolution of digital technology from the personal computer boom through to the creation of our current portal to the web, algorithmic search engines. The main “stars” of Halt and Catch Fire’s opening title sequence are the racing Tron-like blips of light that shoot from right to left as if they are racing towards an invisible finish line. The five or so lights cut through glitchy silhouette’s of our three main protagonists, underlining the show’s priority of documenting tech’s evolution over character development. You don’t see the characters clearly at any point in the opening, which suggests they don’t matter. After watching the show, one realizes this is largely true. The characters exist mostly to drive the story forward, to play tech archetypes. They are as models are to clothes in a fashion show. The timeline tracking tech’s evolution is the main character.
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For A Healthier Health Class
I saw an excellent TEDx talk about the nature of feminity and its use as means to safety by Hari Nef, a model, actor, and trans activist. She is a lovely person whose insight is only matched by the grace of its delivery. It made me think about what can be done to evolve our society’s thinking on such subjects. Debates over restroom use by gender non-conforming people in our public schools are especially jarring because such rights are so basic, so essential. If the general public, especially teachers and students, were better informed on basic health education there would be more support for everyone’s rights to bodily autonomy and respect. Here is an exercise in putting my money where my mouth is: a curriculum outline for a healthier health class.
Sad Girls Club
In the age of Trump, an age of unabashed sexism and robust rape culture, doesn’t it behoove us all to try to view the world through a feminist lens? I’ve found that in doing so new light is brought to the disparities in health between men and women. From a view of gender as a social construction, it became clear to me that the discussion of mental illness prevalence among women in the “Report of the Task Force on Women and Depression in Wisconsin” (RTFWDW, 2006/2016) left out an important potential cause: the burden on women of living in a patriarchal society. While I love #sadgirl culture because it’s a kind of acknowledgment and to some extent protest over the continued subjugation of women even in elite, modern American society (one of my favorites is, Melissa Broder‘s writing and tweets @sosadtoday). However, it’s not enough to admit that a lot of women are sad: we must situate it within the patriarchy to legitimize the claim that women are oppressed. It’s obnoxious because the history of women’s health is Continue reading “Sad Girls Club”
Cristina Forever 