Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture

Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture
by Sut Jhally
Media Education Foundation

Written and directed by MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally, The Codes of Gender applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape, showing how one of American popular culture's most influential forms communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity.

In striking visual detail, The Codes of Gender explores Goffman's central claim that gender ideals are the result of ritualized cultural performance, uncovering a remarkable pattern of masculine and feminine displays and poses. It looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of objectification and beauty, to provide a clear-eyed view of the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations.

With its sustained focus on how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines.

To Watch the Trailer and/or Preview the Documentary

Urszula Clark: War Words -- Language, History and the Disciplining of English

Clark, Urszula. War Words: Language, History and the Disciplining of English. NY: Elsevier, 2001.

Foucault does not deny that tradition and continuity act as forces of influence upon an idea, but rather that they are not enough in themselves to act as significant forces in creating change. The expression and site of ideas he calls discourse, is for him an active and dialogic, rather than a passive and monologic, process. Any discourse at any given moment in time is structured as much by the assumptions about what constitutes it as a discourse as by the boundaries of language itself. Discourse in a Foucaudian sense, then, combines linguistic utterance, whether spoken or written, with the underlying non-linguistic structures—such as the cultural, social and economic—through which utterances are realized and suppressed. Within education, for example, institutional practices control the access of individuals to various kinds of pedagogic discourse. (Clark, 4) {MB—see Foucault, 1972: 46, which she references; also Bakhtin; Irving/Moffett}

The historical process of cultural institutions, of which the education system is a part, has also been investigated by Raymond Williams. In Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams divides into three the elements which are responsible for what Inglis (1995) calls the value-loadings of discourse: residual, dominant, and emergent. These elements co-exist in varying degrees at any cultural moment. By the ‘residual’ Williams does not imply archaic elements of past culture which survive. Rather, they are experiences, meanings and values which have been formed in the past but cannot be expressed in the terms of the dominant culture. Even when in opposition to it, they are still present and potentially active within it. ‘Emergent’ culture involves the making of new forms and discourses, in the process of which there occurs pre-emergence, where expression is active but not yet fully articulated. Furthermore, the very existence of subordinate and repressed cultures point to the fact that culture is not a unitary phenomenon. Non-dominant, discursive elements interact with dominant ones at various times, co-existing with, being absorbed or destroyed by them, as well as challenging, modifying or even displacing them. Consequently Williams views historical time as dialogic and multi-dimensional. According to Williams, then, any analysis of cultural formations is an attempt to explain how cultural value is ascribed, and has to take into account the interaction between legislation in the form of the state ascription of value and historio-cultural processes. (Clark: 5)

Because of its association with value, feeling, and experience as expressed through language, and particularly as literature and the national language, English as a school subject quickly came to be more than the transference of a particular body of factual knowledge. It also came to be concerned with contemporary beliefs about the nature of human individuals and societies: that is, with cultural knowledge and how to live. (Clark: 5)

Consequently, issues about English, particularly when it comes to constructing policies about language, are at one and the same time an outcome of power struggles and an arena within which they take place. Therefore, any attempt to outline the formation of an idea such as that of English as a school subject and its relationship with language has to take account of both the struggles ‘outside’ as well as ‘within’ the subject. (Clark: 6)

For Bernstein, ‘text’ can refer to the dominant curriculum, dominant pedagogic practices as well as any pedagogic representation, be it written, visual, postural, sartorial, spatial. … {MB—Likewise} the term ‘text’ is used to refer to anything that occurs or exists in a classroom, from the slightest movement of an individual, materials and books, to the spatial and visual settings of that classroom. … Thus, the importance of Bernstein’s theory … is that it provides a framework within which the formation of English as a curriculum subject in general, and issues of language in particular, can be considered. As such, it considers not only the subject’s discursive practices and the texts privileged within it, but also how they came to be constituted and constructed in the way they have. (Clark: 10)

In other words, for a theory of cultural reproduction to be complete, it has to explain how a text came to be constituted as it is and accorded a privileged status as well as what is transmitted. (Clark: 11)

Black English or Ebonics, because of its categorization as a variety of English, is excluded from recognition as a minority language. Consequently, it ranks below all others in terms of linguistic hierarchy to such an extent that it does not feature in issues of linguistic democracy at all. Learning to be literate in American society, therefore, also carries with it the dual aspect of learning a specific cultural literacy (Hirsch, 1978; 1987) and what it means to be an American, based upon a Eurocentric language and culture, a ‘white’ way of being. Thus, any challenge or change to the norms associated with learning to be literate, such as that posed by the Oakland Resolution, represents nothing less than a challenge or change to what it means to be American. (Clark: 229)

As one of the subjects most closely associated with the reproduction of culture and cultural values as these are generated through language, and with concepts of language themselves constructed around the central notion of standard English, battles over language are always and inevitably to do with battles over culture, identity and Williams’ notion of ‘ways of being’. Ultimately, they are also struggles for control of the pedagogic device itself. Williams makes the point that “A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world. The received categories—‘word,’ ‘reality,’ ‘nature,’ ‘human’—may be counterpoised or related to the category ‘language,’ but it is now commonplace to observe that all categories, including the category of ‘language,’ are themselves constructions in language…” ({MB-Raymond} Williams, 1977: 21). Education is thus never neutral, but a site of cultural reproduction as much as any other. Nevertheless, systems of education also contain within them the seeds of their own transformations. Just as reproduction is historically configured at any given moment in time, today’s acquirers become, in turn, tomorrow’s reproducers and producers of knowledge. Schools then, and the curriculum they teach, are at one and the same time sites of cultural reproduction and of potential future transformations. (Clark: 257-258)

JoAnn Wypijewski: Sexual Healing

Sexual Healing: Carnal Knowledge
By JoAnn Wypijewski
The Nation



...

As Rachel Maines demonstrates in her delightfully illuminating history The Technology of Orgasm, making patients out of sexually unsatisfied women was good business. The afflicted would neither die nor be cured but required regular massage treatments, weekly, sometimes daily, for an hour or even three. By one 1863 estimate, such therapies accounted for three-quarters of physicians' business, but doctors seem to have got no pleasure out of diddling women. It was, Maines says, "the job nobody wanted." And bringing women off was work, abstracted from sex (i.e., the robust progression from male hard-on to vaginal penetration to male orgasm) and requiring time and skill. With the vibrator, doctors' productivity exploded, as sixty-minute visits shrank to ten, raising more revenue from more patients per day, until the device became so popular and multipurpose (Sears marketed a home vibrator with attachments for beating eggs, churning butter, operating a fan) that the medical profession had worked itself out of a job. Miraculously, the sick were healed as soon as the first vibrator popped up in porno in the 1920s.

Leap across the decades, and this quaint history appears positively progressive in that, willy-nilly, medicalization marched toward putting sexuality into women's hands, into their heads in terms of body knowledge, and into the mix of culture, personal relations and a polymorphous physicality more true to life than biological function alone. The white coats came out again with Masters and Johnson but bumped into a counterculture and an emancipation movement that pushed against their categorizations of normal or not. Every 1970s woman might not have gone to one of Betty Dodson's masturbation workshops; every man certainly was not reborn as an attentive, exploring lover. But nor was everyone straight, in all senses of the word, and the fluidity of sexuality as part of the great mishmash of human experience was in the air-conditioning system of the culture. It was sexual but political, too. Today the cultural air is thick with sex, but the rhetoric of freedom and rights largely serves a commodified notion of sexual satisfaction. The politics has dropped out, and without politics we're all just patients, or potential patients.

How else to explain that a reality as old as god--that the vast majority of women do not climax simply through intercourse--has re-emerged as dysfunction? Or that another grab bag of indicators of dissatisfaction and low desire are renamed as symptoms of hypoactive sexual desire disorder, for which a female Viagra or a testosterone patch or cream or nasal spray must be developed? How to explain that middle-aged women go under the knife for vaginal rejuvenation, basically pussy tightening, and that young women go under the knife for laser labiaplasty, basically genital mutilation, saying they only want to feel pretty, normal, and raise their chances of orgasm through intercourse? How to explain that a doctor like Stuart Meloy of North Carolina, a throwback to charlatans who tried to shock hysterics into health with electric charges, has even one patient to test his Orgasmatron, an electrode threaded up a woman's spinal cord and controlled by a hand-held button that the patient can push (assuming the procedure doesn't paralyze her) to make her clit throb with excitement during intercourse and reach the grail of mutually assured orgasm?

A terrific new documentary, Orgasm Inc., by Liz Canner, addresses those questions in terms of corporate medicine and the creation of need via pseudofeminist incitements to full sexual mastery by Dr. Laura Berman and other shills for the drug industry. Female sexual dysfunction, it turns out, was wholly created by drug companies hoping to make even bigger money off women than they have off men with the comparatively smaller market for erectile dysfunction drugs. That's capitalism; that's its nature. The more obstinate question is why so many people are willing to be its slaves, and whether a resistant politics can grow up to say not just "We want in" to healthcare but "We want out" of the profit system and, on the sex front, out of a medical model that elevates a doctor over "playing doctor" or a more sensual ease with oneself and others.

"So many times I don't think sex is a matter of health," Dr. Leonore Tiefer, a sex therapist and founder of the New View Campaign to challenge the medicalization of sex, told me the other day. "I think it's more like dancing or cooking. Yes, you do it with your body. You dance with your body, too. That doesn't mean there's a department of dance in the medical school. You don't go to the doctor to learn to dance. And in dancing school the waltz class is no more normal than the samba class." You might not be a good dancer by some scale of values. You might not get the steps right, or do steps at all, but even in wheelchairs people learn to move to the music.

To Read the Rest of the Editorial

Media Matters: Chris Hedges -- Empire of Illusion

Christopher Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion
Media Matters with Bob McChesney



Pulitzer Prize winner, Christopher Hedges, whose weekly Truthdig column is published every Monday, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than 50 countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times. His book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle is his latest publication.

To Listen to the Interview

Diana Nyad, Jennifer Ring and Donna Lopiano: Stolen Bases -- Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball

Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball
Host: Diana Nyad
Politics of Culture (KCRW: Los Angeles)



Hall of fame swimmer and KCRW commentator Diana Nyad speaks to author Jennifer Ring about her new book, Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball, along with former softball pitcher and longtime Women's Sports Foundation chief executive Donna Lopiano. They discuss the hidden history of women in baseball, and the upcoming push to get women's baseball into the Olympics.

* Jennifer Ring: author, 'Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball'
* Donna Lopiano: former CEO, Women's Sports Foundation

To Listen to the Conversation

Michael Berube: Discipline and Theory

Berube, Michael. “Discipline and Theory.” Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. NY: Verso, 1994: 43-58.

In Bakhtin’s model {“Discourse in the Novel” from The Dialogic Imagination}, narrative isn’t a question of how much a narrator ‘knows’ or who sees what from what ‘point of view’. Bakhtin starts, instead, from the position that language is a profoundly social phenomenon, that our social lives are composed of myriad, competing dialects and idiolects, and that a language’s or a word’s meaning is radically dependent on its social context and social use—not on a presumably straightforward relation between ‘words’ and ‘reality’.

... he defined the novel—a genre notoriously resistant to ‘definition’—not in terms of the elements all novels have in common (for there are no such common elements), but in terms of the novel’s linguistic voraciousness, its very willingness to ‘raid’ other, more stable genres in the process of composing new and complex multigeneric molecules. (48)

... Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations ... position that genera of objects—novels, games, nations, races, genders, classes, tables, chairs—are constituted by ‘family resemblances’ rather than their common ‘essences’. Wittgenstein’s analogy is this: think of a cord of many overlapping fibers in which no one fiber runs the whole length of the cord. Now think of objects many of which have a number of significant features in common, but not all of which possess all the ‘significant features’ under discussion. That’s more or less what ‘family resemblances’ look like in Wittgenstein’s family. (48)

My second Bakhtinian liberation was this: Bakhtin’s emphasis on narrative discourse (as distinct from narrative epistemology) manages to combine narratology’s emphasis on narrative minutiae with a sophisticated account of the social contexts in which different forms of language operate. According to Bakhtin, then, the same word—oh, let’s take a good big one, like ‘liberty’—gets rearticulated, refashioned and redefined by diverse social groups, and these groups' struggles over the meaning of words (think of ‘peace through strength’) constitutes the social life of narrative forms. This position, too, I wound up glossing with the help of Wittgenstein, who maintains that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’. Sounds commonsensical enough—until you realize how thoroughly anti-Platonic a position it is, how much it goes against our sense that words refer to something. But what do words like ‘however’ and ‘actually’ refer to? And why do we think that we can look up words’ meanings on a reference-table, absent the social context in which they are used? As for words like ‘table’, which are, as we know, less subject to social contestation than words like ‘terrorist’, their meaning, too, resides in their use in the language, not in any linguistic essence; it’s just that most people tend not to see any need to argue about their use. (48-49) {This leads to Berube’s anti-essentialist philosophy. It is a well-reasoned and supported stance that I am sympathetic to in regards to its fight against labeling and blanket-grouping—and thus its contestation of common sense. This is also a focus of Zygmunt Bauman’s Freedom and Richard Harvey Brown’s Society as Text. Also refer to Holloway/Kneale (1999).}

In my next close encounter of the 1980s, I came up against Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and ... Richard Rorty. From that point on I’ve been an ‘anti-foundationalist’ as well. Thanks to Kuhn’s refusal to believe that science ‘progresses’ in some linear, incremental way, and Rorty’s refusal to believe that philosophy is the ‘foundation’ of human knowledge, I’ve come to believe and argue that our social practices and identities are ‘contingent’ rather than ‘grounded’—that there are no final, universal, transhistorical standards for the production or value of human knowledge and understanding. (49)

It’s been a mild shock to me to discover how disturbing this position is to many traditionalists in the humanities. Scientists, by contrast, seem largely untroubled by it. Kuhn himself draws most of his examples from the ‘foundational’ sciences of chemistry and physics, both of which have taken stock of Kuhn’s account of ‘normal science’ and have kept right on conducting normal science as Kuhn understands it. In the fall of 1991, I presented the case for anti-foundationalism at an interdisciplinary conference at which I was asked to speak about ‘new directions in knowledge’ in my field. I talked mostly about the effects of ‘theory’ on the way we do literary history, and along the way I invoked the names of Kuhn and Wittgenstein, and Michel Foucault, too. To my surprise, I was met with questions from physicists and psychologist who demanded to know what was so ‘new’ about the propositions that humans perceive things through interpretive paradigms and that human knowledge, like all things human, is historically conditioned and socially constructed. ... physicists and mathematicians are unthreatened by ideas like ‘indeterminacy’, but that some of us in the humanities cannot contemplate the notion that meaning is indeterminate without declaring that the sky is falling; and many cognitive psychologists work well with the assumption that all perception is a form of interpretation, whereas in some ‘traditionalist’ circles, you still can’t say such a thing about literary texts without being accused of some horrid thing like moral relativism. (49-50)

{If presented correctly and bridged towards student everyday realities} deconstruction {can open up a space in which} students {will recognize} that meanings always have to be made and remade. (51)

I always thought that it was OK for universities to encourage skepticism—that is, to teach students to think critically and to interrogate received ideas, particularly the ideas they’ve received without knowing they’d accepted a delivery. (52)

The Children of Woody Guthrie: Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio

The Children of Woody Guthrie: Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio
by Alexander Billet
Socialist Worker



Never underestimate the ability for pop culture to water down its most firebrand figures--especially after they're dead. Luckily, there are people like Antonino D'Ambrosio. His book Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer, released in 2003, is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn who the Clash front man really was. D'Ambrosio's new book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears is a passionate examination of Cash's album protesting the conditions for Native peoples in the early 1960s.

Here, D'Ambrosio takes to Alexander Billet about the new book, his influences, and his thoughts on music and politics.

To Read the Interview

Mikhail Bakhtin: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

(Notes)

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. V.W. McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.

{MB—from Introduction by Vern W. McGee ix-xxiii}
In Bakhtin’s thought the place from which we speak plays an important role in determining what we say (x).

Working as always with a specular subject (a self derived from the other), he makes it clear that speakers always shape an utterance not only according to the object of discourse (what they are talking about) and their immediate addressee (whom they are speaking to), but also according to the particular image in which they model the belief they will be understood {MB—Bakhtin understands this image to be a higher power, an abstract concept, a discipline or body of knowledge, a political institution, humanity in general, etc…}, , a belief that is the a priori of all speech. (xviii)
A common theme running throughout is the need to exceed boundaries, while still recognizing that only through awareness of the very real restraints at work in mental and social life can we do so. (xix)

A note of caution is in order here: Bakhtin’s call to liberation is everywhere informed by a stern awareness of necessity’s central place in the biological limits of our perception, the structure of language, and the laws of society. Our very status as the subjects of our own lives depends on the necessary presence of other subjects. Thus, when Bakhtin says “we are suffocating in the captivity of narrow and homogeneous interpretations,” he is not suggesting there is some freedom beyond interpretation. All understanding is constrained by borders: freedom consists in knowing insofar as possible—for our ability to know is controlled by contextual factors larger then mere individual intention—what those borders are, so that they may be substituted by, translated into different borders. Speech genres provide a good example of this relative degree of freedom: the better we know possible variants of the genres that are appropriate to a given situation, the more choice we have among them. Up to a point we may play with speech genres, but we cannot avoid being generic. There is no pure spontaneity, for breaking frames depends on the existence of frames. (xix)

Bakhtin is arguing here that art is only one (if a fundamentally important) sphere of the larger activity of aesthetics, which encompasses as well most other aspects of life as lived by men and women who manifest their humanity by authoring utterances. Just as in the logosphere that is our home there are genres at work in all our speech, not just in art speech, so is there “everyday ritual,” ritual not confined merely to political or religious life (xx). {MB—end of introductory comments}

There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one’s own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture. This idea, as I said, is one-sided. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture, the possibility of seeing through its eyes, is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this were the only aspect of this understanding, it would merely be duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others. (Bakhtin: 6-7)

In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly (but not maximally fully), because there will be cultures that see and understand even more). A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sideness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths. Without one’s own questions one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign (but, of course, the questions must be serious and sincere). Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched. (Bakhtin: 7)

{MB--Dialogical speakers} do not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth. (69)
Each rejoinder, regardless of how brief and abrupt, has a specific quality of completion that expresses a particular position of the speaker, to which one may respond or may assume, with respect to it, a responsive position. (72) {MB says—Bakhtin reminding us that all “utterances” are socially situated; see Holloway/Kneale 1999, 77}

Understanding is always dialogic to some degree. (Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text”: 111)

No natural phenomenon has “meaning,” only signs (including words) have meaning. (Bakhtin, 113) {MB—Thus, if Nature has meaning, it is as a sign/symbol we have constructed/recognized, not as nature itself.)

Can languages and dialects (territorial, social jargons), language (functional) styles (say, familiar daily speech and scientific language and so forth), enter into these relationships, that is, can they speak with one another and so forth? Only if a nonlinguistic approach is taken toward them, that is, if they are transformed into a “world view” (or some language or speech sense of the world), into a “viewpoint,” into “social voices,” and so forth. (Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text”: 119)

With such transformations the language acquires a unique “author,” a speaking subject, a collective bearer of speech (people, nation, occupation, social group, and so forth). (Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text”: 119)

Ted Striphas: The Late Age of Print - Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia UP, 2009)

In the midst of hysterical rants about the end of print culture it was a pleasure to read Striphas' book. Essential sections include the strange history of ISBNs and their transformation (especially as "control" devices), the development and effect of big-box bookstores, the Oprah-effect on book sales, the global Harry Potter lawsuits, and corporate attempts at controlling culture.



Late Age of Print--The Video

Copyright/Copyleft (Archive)

Ongoing project--any suggestions/comments/critique appreciated

Boynton, Robert S. "The Tyranny of Copyright?" The New York Times Magazine (January 25, 2004)

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. (Penguin Press, 2004)

Lethem, Jonathan. "The Ecstasy of Influence." Open Source with Christopher Lydon (February 2, 2007)

---. "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." Harper's Magazine (February 2007)

McLeod, Kembrew. Freedom of Expression (R): Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. (Doubleday, 2005)

Miller, Paul D., aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. "In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act." Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. ed. Paul D. Miller. (MIT Press, 2008: 5-20.)

RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor: 2008)

Seitz, Matt Zoller. Copy Rites: YouTube vs. Kevin B. Lee The House Next Door (Archive by Michael Benton: January 15, 2009)

---. "The Video Essay." Kunst der Vermittlung (April 18, 2009)

Striphas, Ted and Kembrew McLeod. "STRATEGIC IMPROPRIETIES: CULTURAL STUDIES, THE EVERYDAY, AND THE POLITICS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES." Cultural Studies 20.2/3 (2006)

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity."

Steven Shaviro: Doom Patrols

I owe Shaviro an intellectual debt. He took a lot of complex, mysterious concepts/theorists and filtered them through the lense of Grant Morrison's comic series Doom Patrol (and much, much more). It exploded my understanding of cultural/literary analysis as dry, dusty, lectures that instruct and opened me up to the idea of interdisciplinary, traveling, parisitic dialogues that bring subjects alive.



From the Preface:

Doom Patrols, then, is not a work of historical scholarship or objective description or ideology critique or in-depth interpretation. I have scrupulously followed Oscar Wilde's two fine maxims, that the critic should avoid "careless habits of accuracy," and that he should strive "to see the object as in itself it really is not." Each chapter of Doom Patrols is headed by a proper name. But these names are themselves fictional, even when they ostensibly refer to actual individuals. For they are not identities, but singularities, as I try to work out in the course of the book. Any resemblances to persons living or dead, to objects or commercial products, or to other works of fiction and the characters and situations therein, are precisely that: resemblances, which is to say simulacra, deceptive and superficial imitations, fraudulent impersonations. All accurate depictions and representational correspondences, on the other hand, are accidental and unintended, and should be taken as signs of failure on the part of the author; the aim of the book being precisely to pervert and undermine all such forms and canons of representation.

Read Doom Patrols

Cultural Studies: The Politics of Intellectual Production

(Courtesy of Ted Striphas, Kembrew McLeod, and Mahzood who blogged it in his reading list)

About the issue: This special issue of Cultural Studies aims to create a genuinely interdisciplinary scholarly discussion of the politics of intellectual properties. While many areas of study pay lip service to the idea of interdisciplinary work, one remarkable thing about recent intellectual property research is the way it has produced an actual cross-pollination of scholarship. Drawing together prominent scholars from multiple disciplines, this issue of Cultural Studies speaks to many significant topical intersections--from library science, computer science, and the biological sciences to popular music, film studies, and media studies, to name a few. In addition to presenting compelling, cutting-edge research, this issue explores what cultural studies can contribute to public conversations about the politics of intellectual properties.

Issue Table of Contents:
(1) Ted Striphas & Kembrew McLeod, “Introduction—Strategic Improprieties: Cultural Studies, the Everyday, and the Politics of Intellectual Properties”

(2) Adrian Johns, “Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science”

(3) McKenzie Wark, “Information Wants to be Free (But is Everywhere in Chains)”

(4) Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe, & Lewis Kaye, “Your Second Life? Goodwill and the Performativity of Intellectual Properties in On-Line Games”

(5) Steve Jones, “Reality© and Virtual Reality©: When Virtual and Real Worlds Collide”

(6) Jane Gaines, “Early Cinema, Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’arroseur arose”

(7) Gilbert B. Rodman & Cheyanne Vanderdonckt, “Music for Nothing or, I Want My MP3: The Regulation and Recirculation of Affect”

(8) David Sanjek, “Ridiculing the 'White Bread Original': The Politics of Parody and Preservation of Greatness in Luther Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.”

(9) Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, “Out of Sight and Out of Mind: On the Cultural Hegemony of Intellectual Property (Critique)”

(10) Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Afterword—Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto”

(11) Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Just Say No: Negativland's No Business”

To Download the Issue