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By Rachel Goldberg • 11 years ago

The King of Pop: on transcending signifiers of race and gender

A SYTYCB entry

Next week marks what would have been Michael Jackson’s 52nd birthday. (Please note: I don’t keep a little iCal of celebrity birthdays. I know this because of Spike Lee, and because a close friend feels about MJ the way I feel about “Titanic.”) Jackson, deemed the most successful entertainer of all time, remains an incredibly relevant source for analysis even posthumously. Both his physical body and music itself provide a rich platform for exploring the social terrain of race and gender.

On the one hand, the man made Thriller, an album universally accepted as “the most fucking amazing thing ever” out of 5 stars. Yet he was problematic, as this article posits,

…he was sexless as he interpreted the roles of both man and women; his sexuality was represented as either non-existant or hyper-active,  between the media sensationalism of his not possessing a sexuality whatsoever to his preying upon children;  and likewise Jackson defied race as he was neither black nor white paradoxically because he was both black and white.

Throughout his life and even after his death, the media has been unable to reconcile the undeniable artistic genius with bizarre personal anomaly. In Michael’s case, the private and public spheres do not amalgamate in a way that’s culturally digestible.
By Rachel Goldberg • 11 years ago

Why we can’t write off Todd “Misspoke” Akin as a lunatic exception

A SYTYCB Entry

By know, we’ve all cried/become devout existentialists/had our eyeballs pop out of our sockets a la Tex Avery cartoon heard about Todd Akin and his much deserved politico-rebuke storm. So, there’s a real candidate out there who believes “science” equates with unicorn-like feminine wiles, and that “legitimate rape” contains two words conceivably arranged next to each other. Politicians on both sides have been swift to castigate. Which makes it tempting to believe that regardless of politics, we’re all human beings on the same side here, and we can write this off to “Another Ridiculous GOP Thing said by Ridiculous GOP White Guy.” (A file that’s blossomed quite robustly this year!)

Unfortunately, we can’t.

Don’t let semantics fool you, for the underbelly of ...

A SYTYCB Entry

By know, we’ve all cried/become devout existentialists/had our eyeballs pop out of our sockets a la Tex Avery cartoon heard about Todd Akin and his much deserved politico-rebuke storm. So, there’s a real candidate out there who ...