I’d also add there that it’s also about the nature of trauma and how that can be passed down, too.
7 Likes
Imagine a painting of a couple sharing a thanksgiving meal with their extended family.
If the couple is gay some people would say it is political because it normalizes gay couples.
If the couple are of mixed ethnicity some people would say it is political because it normalizes mixed couples.
if the turkey was replaced with a vegetarian dish some people would say it was political because it normalizes non-meat diets.
But if everyone is white, straight, and meat-eating, those people would insist this isn’t political because it normalizes what they define as normal all ready.
So to them it is neutral since for them it suggests zero change from their current state. Where as they see the first 3 examples as political since it suggests there are other ways of living that are valid and to accept that would require these people to expand their view of the world and what is normal.
18 Likes
Not a comic, but worth reading along with Maus:
8 Likes
So you want us to imagine something that is so very unlikely, when the reality is that this tends to happen to people of color or women. For years in science fiction, women had to use pseudonyms (and are still encouraged to use initials instead of their full first name) to get published, regardless of their talent, people of color, too. Still today, writers of color and women are marginalized away from the mainstream literary category into women’s lit or ethnic lit. Instead of filing a book such as the Color Purple into the literature category, it’s labeled “black literature” so that it can be safe tucked away in the corner of the store.
White men still dominate what we think of as mainstream literature and other kinds of writing. White men do not have a problem finding a platform, getting heard, and writing works that are considered mandatory reading for understanding human nature. Women and people of color, not so much.
14 Likes
class is an identity.
15 Likes
I don’t see that, sorry.
Even Superman was created in the context of the Great Depression and resulting domestic ills, and
is a clear allegory for a foreign immigrant being a patriotic asset for his new country.
5 Likes
Well that is obviously what the bourgeoisie want you to think, when actually identity politics divide and pit the working class against each other. Or so a haunting specter told me. You can search for Marxist critique of identity politics to find out more.
No. Identity is a class. Go back and read some marxist historians, whose work makes that clear. It’s an identity that is built up over time among people with a shared set of experiences. There was a time when a working class identity did not exist, and other types of class based identities existed.
The ones I read tend to be willfully ignoring the actual experiences of people of color and women. And plenty of marxists are smart enough to understand that racism and sexism have real world effects that need to be addressed specifically. Alexandra Kollontai, for example, was a marxist (part of the Menshevik party) and argued that women, across economic classes had a shared identity outside of their class identity. She argued for (in addition to a full on economic transformation) an end to the institution of marriage and the shared responsibility of rearing children collectively. WEB DuBois was a unapologetic socialist as well as an advocate for people of color the world over, because he understood that the capitalist economy was built just as much upon the backs of slaves in the new world as it was on the backs of the proletariat in the old.
14 Likes
I’m pretty sure that was sarcasm; maybe check to see if your detector is working properly?
Those who argue against ‘identity politics’ often do so from a place of extreme privilege;
Women, Gay folks, POC, Trans folks, the Disabled, non-Christians, and anyone who could ever be checked off as “Other” don’t get any choice about being identified by any of those labels. We’re not the ones who make the distinctions, and we’re not the ones who have established a hierarchical society that places straight, cisgender, White males who claim to be Xtian at the very top; as the epitome of what is “normal.”
12 Likes
9 Likes
Works of swords & socrcery were mentioned above as being apolitical, but it really isn’t, otherwise any deviation from heterosexual (and often white) characters entering the hero space would have provoked no negative reactions.
If a work induces controversy over seeing gays or non Christian players as being people, often good people, with struggles to overcome, then the previous works alluded to were also political. QED.
So “I don’t see politics” is a shorthand for blindness, not that there are no politics to be seen. If you can’t see a political default being catered to, then you are a part of a default inherent in the work, which seldom had to examine its own politics before. (This is often a component of privilege.)
Being shown where the lines were drawn therefore isn’t an injection of political appeal.
16 Likes
That situation has never existed in my lifetime.
So as long as I’m fantasizing anyway, I’d like to live in a world where people didn’t have to be cowed by fear of social repercussions in order to act decently.
3 Likes
Fine. I liked it when being a Nazi carried such a social stigma that people were less emboldened to spread Nazi ideology in public than they are in 2018.
16 Likes
So you’re asking for people to just “be decent”.
Wow, that is some far fetched fantasy you got there.
2 Likes
This doesn’t seem like politics in the work, that is politics of the idiots on the internet. People projecting their own biases into a work. We are back to calling everything political because some random person reads politics into it.
1 Like
That makes no sense. If the work was apolitical, then there wouldn’t be a political group (regardless of validity) to oppose the work’s presentation.
8 Likes
The issue there is that standards of decency have changed dramatically over time. Not so long ago “decent” people didn’t allow interracial marriage or talk about homosexuality in public or approve of women wearing trousers.
9 Likes
There’s some religious contingent that lurks the more populous Bart stations by the entrances; they always smile and hold their tracts quietly next to their sandwich boards, but regardless they still creep me the fuck out…
Because their smiles seem creepily vacant, and every woman I’ve ever seen with them is always wearing a long skirt or dress; it’s like something straight out of Stepford.
8 Likes
No creation is neutral.
Anyone who creates art is projecting their own biases and narrative into their creations.
13 Likes
