mediastudies

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda | Noam Chomsky

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...to make it look as if when we attack and destroy somebody we're really protecting and defending ourselves against major aggressors and monsters and so on.

40 likes1 stack add

Jen2

Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate | Anna Bogutskaya

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Illuminating.

43 likes4 stack adds

The_Penniless_Author

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business | Neil Postman

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

1. Last year, Universal Studios in Osaka Japan!

2. No. There's barely time to get to all the stuff we want to see/do/ride, let alone read.

Tag @RaeLovesToRead @CBee @Yuki_Onna @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @dabbe @Ruthiella @IndoorDame

jewright I so want to go to Japan! Was it a good trip? 4mo

TheSpineView Japan sounds like a wonderful trip! Thanks for playing! 4mo

The_Penniless_Author @jewright Easily the best trip we've taken. If you're ever able to save up the money and time to do it, don't hesitate. It's an easy country to get around, not intimidating at all. Even the most mundane things are interesting to someone who's not from there, so you don't even need a lot of planning. We still visited a decent number of tourist sites, but often just wandering around, shopping and using public transportation was as much fun. 4mo

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Ruthiella Thanks for the tag! I‘ve not been to an amusement park in decades and I would never take a book for the same reasons you cite. 4mo

dabbe Will do; thanks for the tag! 😊 4mo

jewright @The_Penniless_Author—My grandfather was stationed there after WWII, so my dad was actually born in Japan. I grew up hearing lots of stories, so I‘ve always wanted to go. 4mo

29 likes6 comments

nonbinaryandbitter

And Don't F&%k It Up: An Oral History of RuPaul's Drag Race (The First Ten Years) | World of Wonder, Maria Elena Fernandez

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I REALLY loved this book. Not only was a great insight into the show, the narrator was ON POINT with the voices!!!

1 like

TheKidUpstairs

On Bowie | Rob Sheffield

#ThreeListThursday #TLT

I'm sure there's tons, but these are the first to spring to mind:
Just Like Heaven - The Cure
I Wanna Dance with Somebody - Whitney Houston
Modern Love/Let's Dance - David Bowie (I can't choose between them!)

@dabbe

dabbe Added to our new Spotify Playlist: LITSY SONGS OF THE 1980s! Thanks for sharing! 🤩🎶🤩

Click below for the playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5sZRAAKVORN1SRh7S6l60g 7mo

40 likes1 comment

Kimberlone

Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate | Anna Bogutskaya

so-so

I never felt like the author had anything really all that insightful to say about the female character archetypes she sought to examine in this book. There were some sections more interesting to me than others, but I did find myself skimming a lot in some parts. The author‘s inclination to dissect historical/period characters from an intersectional/2024 modern feminist lens was flimsy at best and disingenuous at worst.

46 likes

Robotswithpersonality

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film | Barry Keith Grant

Next up in quarterly review faves: non-fiction and lit fic. Biggest surprise: all the nature non-fiction I've done in the last three months, none of it ended up sticking with me, and the reading experience/writing quality was really hit and miss. Might have to rethink sampling in that subgenre (no more picking it up because it has a tree on the cover! Literary fiction is never my primary genre, at least I read ONE I loved! 🤷🏼‍♂️

6 likes

Robotswithpersonality

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film | Barry Keith Grant

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Fucking fascinating. Maybe a little too much Freud. Apologies for the dreadful cover showing in your feed.
Carol J. Clover's 'Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film' remains one of my faves of the collection, I realize that's my final girl bias showing through.
I think I honestly enjoyed Thomas Doherty's 'Genre, Gender and The Aliens Trilogy' (written back when it was just a trilogy) because those films made such an impression on me. 1/?

Robotswithpersonality 2/? The collection also expands several times on how the nuclear family (male patriarch) is threatened, essays individually containing stronger or weaker links back to gendered concerns via a mother who is somehow perverse; then stumbles into intersectional territory. There are a number of essays discussing queerness, seemingly more entries about gay men than lesbians, and some discussion of racism. Unfortunately, the inclusion of essays focusing on these topics felt more scattered than intentional and seemed to veer away from discussions of gender and, as the little ♀️symbol on the cover suggests, specifically depictions of women in horror. 9mo

Robotswithpersonality 3/4 I would love to see a third edition, (there was about ten years between the first and second edition, it's been nearly ten years since the second, so it's time!) with parts that expand upon the gender discussion beyond women as minority gender, into discussion of transgender, non-binary/agender spectrum, perhaps an interlude for new ways the masculine is treated or expanded upon as well, then a dedicated section that focuses more on how gender in family in horror works, with all the mother aspects situated there, and then a dedicated section for how intersecting queerness and bipoc rep into gender affects readings of certain films' texts. 9mo

Robotswithpersonality 4/4 In the meantime I'm definitely going to keep poking around for horror non-fiction with this kind of insight, especially centred on the final girl trope. Happy to take reccs if you got 'em!
⚠️ALL THE WARNINGS. If you're worried about it, there's probably at least a mention in this essay collection, and there are also black and white stills from the films in question. BEWARE. 9mo

5 likes3 comments

Robotswithpersonality

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film | Barry Keith Grant

The film being discussed is from Belgium in 1970.
It is 2024. WHY are there no feminist, lesbian vampire films I'm hearing about in present day North America?!
That would be so epic. 🙇🏼‍♂️

6 likes

Robotswithpersonality

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film | Barry Keith Grant