Unicorn Ethics: A Fragment on My Little Pony

June 27, 2011 By 20 Comments
Twilight Sparkle expressing pony values.

It is the job of fusty, addlebrained academic sorts to take things we all enjoy and take for granted, and then dissect it with the ponderous seriousness of a graying doyen of our particular art. Especially in the social sciences. Teasing out social messages, identifying wider imbricating discourses, and seeing patterns with relation to the media is usually a sombre affair filled with sad news. This is how this movie reinforces patriarchy, this is how this television show transmits transphobic messages, this is how our media is coarsening social attitudes, this is how this commercial is making us hate our bodies, and so on and so on. It is a rare, rare joy indeed when I get to turn my critical eye towards explaining how something in the media is positive in its influence on our society. When a good friend of mine nudged me into watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic I internally scoffed. It sounded cute, and nothing was wrong with cute, but I’m a woman in her 20s, jet setting … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism Tagged With: , , ,

A Social Symphony: The Four Movements of Transphobia in Theory

October 29, 2010 By 2 Comments
the_waltz

In analysing the place of transgender and transsexual people in the theorising of various disciplines one finds several common threads that link together the entire enterprise. Society can often be quite messy and yet paradoxically can also be found to have identifiable mechanisms of operation that grind certain social forces inexorably forward. So what am I getting at with this? What are the common threads? Well, with the invaluable assistance of an expert social theorist who happens to be a trans woman, I believe I have found four. Trans people are not the only group of people hard done by social and political theory; there is a lot to be learned from analysing how theoretical paradigms have utterly excluded other marginalised peoples. In her 2007 book Southern Theory, sociologist Raewyn Connell articulates an excellent exegesis of Western social theory that lays bare its deeply Eurocentric assumptions as well as the colonial enterprise that underlay it. The colonised world, she … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism Tagged With: , , , ,

The Ministry of Footnotes

February 20, 2010 By 1 Comment

My previous article was, in a word, a doozy. It is, if I may be immodest, ambitious and expansive in its arguments. This leaves it especially prone to puncturing from any number of people with ready examples of individuals and institutions or events that fall outside the parameters I laid out in The Ministry of Strength. So, tonight, I’ll address some of the weaknesses of my argument and anticipate some responses thereto. I certainly don’t deny that exceptions to the theories exist. I’d be a little scared if they didn’t. No modern society contains 100% socialised individuals. Indeed, no society ever has. The very proposition of individuality requires that one not be ‘fully socialised.’ By fully socialised I mean simply that the individual has fully internalised the mores, folkways, and ideas of their society and never challenges or personally interprets any one of them. Such people do not exist, of course. To construe any totalising argument from the thesis of … [Read more...]

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The Ministry of Strength

February 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Anyone involved in any sort of emancipatory activism, from flame wars in forums to robust street protesting, is bound to be familiar with the phenomenon I’m about to describe: “What’s the big deal!?” This is most often asked when you broach a subject of media criticism or a critique of seemingly innocuous language. You’re told that it’s ‘not a big deal’ if someone says, say, ‘fag’ persistently in the most derogating way possible. It’s ‘not a big deal’ if a commercial is in any way commodifying or objectifying women. It’s ‘not a big deal’ if, say, a late night talk show host predicates a gag on trans panic. Et cetera. Et cetera. Such is the power of privilege that the obvious, and in any just universe the only needed, answer never occurs to the offender for even a moment. “It’s disrespectful” ought to be enough, yet somehow it never is; so we are left justifying our anger at a seemingly small bit of errata that must appear like a speck of … [Read more...]

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