something secret

It's time! I'm finally going to see Catching Fire tonight and I'm BEYOND EXCITED. I love the Hunger Gamer trilogy and I'm practically shaking with anticipation about seeing the newest installment in the franchise. *bounces off walls* I had never heard of the Hunger Games until my senior year of college when the promos for the first movie started running. The trailer looked so enticing to me that I knew I had to find a copy of the book and get reading. I ended up devouring the first novel in a day, and then reading the next two over Spring Break. I vividly remember my glee at understanding the references in the trailer after finishing the novel. I'm corny! But I really did love the world that Suzanne Collins had created and I loved that it dealt with so many complex themes and issues. Seriously, the series is just begging  for some cultural analysis. How could I resist? In preparation for tonight I'm rereading the entirety of Catching Fire (speed reader! *pops co...

I wasn't online for most of today, so when I got home an hour ago and saw the furor online about #feministselfies , I had a bit of catching up to do. Trust me when I tell you that I was not in any way surprised to discover that Jezebel had stepped in it  again with a pretty condescending piece about the inherent narcissism of selfies. Plus ça change! After reading the piece though, two quotes in particular stood out to me: "Stop this. Selfies aren't empowering; they're a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness." "Further, self-taken digital portraits are typically posted on social media, ostensibly with the intent of getting people to respon to them that's what social media is. In that respect, selfies aren't expressions of pride, but rather calls for affirmation." Here's the thing; my own relationship with selfies is fairly complicated. I'm a photo...

I've been thinking about writing this post for a while. It was originally conceived as an examination of the "Stripper Anthem" as presented by Nicki Minaj and Rihanna in Beez In The Trap and Pour It Up, as it related to the sexuality and sexualization of black women, but after last week's post on Lily Allen, and some of the... ill-informed responses it received, I realized that there is a different conversation that needs to be had first. That conversation is about the distinction between the exploitation of black women's sexuality for the (white) male consumerist gaze, and a black female celebrity's reclamation of her own sexuality on her own terms. For whatever reason, there seems to some difficulty in grasping the concept that the most significant difference between these two scenarios is agency , and the way in which the presence or lack of agency determines how a display of sexuality is to be perceived and received. To that end, I want to examine the ima...

Last week, I read a great article  by Nichole Perkins on Buzzfeed that talked about the way the character development of the leading ladies of both Scandal and Sleepy Hollow were working towards dismantling the harmful depictions of "strong black women" in media. It was a great read, and I loved that someone else shared my conclusions about Olivia Pope's characterization.  What stuck out to me however, was Perkins' characterization of Gabourey Sidibe's character Queenie  on American Horror Story Coven as a negative embodiment of the "strong black woman" stereotype. She says: "Then there is Gabourey Sidibe as Queenie on  American Horror Story: Coven , a “human voodoo doll” whose supernatural power is the inability to feel pain, even as she inflicts said pain onto someone else. [...]  These Strong Black Women feel no emotional pain, tolerate severe physical trauma with no reaction, and menace others with stone faces." I love American Horror Stor...