original image, illustrated by frank uppwall, for dorine b. clark’s gutter star (1954)
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[ID: a tweet by @CallToActivism reading "Breaking: Bill Clinton has been hospitalized with sepsis. He is currently in the ICU, but antibiotics are working. RT to wish former president @BillClinton well!]
Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry, 83.
i have no recollection of ever reading adorno, and i think i only understand like half of it. i’m trying to get rid of the feeling that i can only quote from something if i fully understand it, because the passage above is close to the argument i want to make about the selling of lesbian knowledge.
what i’m trying to do is to see past the most prevalent arguments about representations of lesbianism in mass media, namely: lesbianism is represented in culture in order to destroy it; and lesbianism is represented in culture in order for the sexual pleasure of straight men. i think both of things are often true, but i also don’t think they tell the whole story. part of the problem, i think, is a kind of siloing of analysis: lesbianism is an issue of gender+sexuality, so its appearance in culture is treated as an issue of gender+sexuality. this isn’t an incorrect approach, but what i want to talk about is how lesbianism (more specifically lesbian knowledge) can be understood as a commodity not unlike any other in the sense that it sells you your place in society. i want to think of it more abstractly, which is difficult because i don’t want to let go of the part of it that is, no matter what, an issue of gender+sexuality. thinking more abstractly makes it easier for me to understand how, for instance, liberals can argue that objects stolen as an extension of colonial violence should be displayed in western museums, because knowledge is inherently good. maybe what i mean is basically ethnography and the presentation of knowledge as a consumer product, which should be as freely available to you as any other product. freedom is the freedom to consume and to at least have the illusion of the freedom to consume anything. nothing should be removed from the system of consumption. so when a pulp sexology book advertises itself as revealing the hidden world of lesbians, it is about gender+sexuality, but it’s also about the logics of consumption and freedom. you should get to learn about this hidden world in the same way that you should get to see pictures of navajo sandpaintings.
[while i was working on the roughead story i came across a discussion of roughead’s use of the phrase “the dark continent of crime,” which brought me to a discussion of freud’s use of the phrase “the dark continent” to refer to white women’s sexuality as unknowable by comparing it with africa. i was really frustrated because i wanted to get into it but i couldn’t figure it out within the structure i’d set up. i think it belongs in a discussion like this one though.]
i’m not sure if i agree with myself here. honestly, thinking through the entanglement of capital and other forms of oppression/marginalization is really difficult! i can understand why some people just set it aside and insist on the primacy of capital or whatever else. it’s way easier to just assign a single origin/explanation and move on.
i’m not writing a dissertation, i’m writing a series of call-out posts for people who lie about the past
“elvira has a butch wife who is her personal trainer” cresting the stormy hellscape of 2021 like jesus calmly walking across the sea
the impulse to hide what I'm doing at my computer still sits so deep even tho I'm literally never looking at anything objectionable , the door will open and I'll hurry to close the page like oh fuck no one can know I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for the Balkans
i’m trying to access the DAM FAQ website but it uses flash, which is - as i just learned lol - no longer supported. i tried using ruffle to make it work, but all i’m getting is the audio, rather than a clickable set of questions. does anyone know how to fix this?
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), n.p. [1982 preface to the fourth edition]
this is hot tbh
help!
there is a word/phrase/theory/theorist that refers to the idea that advertising creates desires that can’t be fulfilled by the acquisition of the commodity being sold, with the end result that people are always buying the new thing that promises to satisfy the desire, even when the attempt has always failed in the past. i can’t remember who talks about this idea (or, more specifically, where the usual suspects talk about it), which is really annoying given that i’ve lectured on this topic before.
if you know where to direct me, please do. i try to not get frustrated about my brain being the way that it is, but this is like ….forgetting my own name frustrating.
i’m at a stage of writing this chapter where i’m seriously doubting myself. if i was in a different place, i would be reworking everything. instead, i am going to do my best to ignore my doubts and just commit. i’ve already spent too much time on this, and it doesn’t matter. it truly doesn’t! i’m not citing books you would find at a scholastic book fair, and that’s enough.