Popular culture has become segmented into a myriad of forms, genres, audiences, tones, styles and purposes, so much so that it cannot meaningfully be talked about as a monolith. While some so-called popular culture is produced en masse (and has… Read More ›
The term queer has often puzzled outsiders.Why call yourself that? This too has its story. For a long time queerwas, of course, a derogatory term for male homosexuals. That began to change when it began to be widely used in… Read More ›
Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical studies both indicate that, rooted in institutional practices, discourse evolves distinct configurations which oppose ruling class aims but still regulate the body, institutions, and even society. This contingent, historical view of discourse repudiates the Althusserian opposition… Read More ›
We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we really are. (Slavoj Zizek, in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema [dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2005]) Would you allow this guy to take your daughter to a movie? Of course not…. Read More ›
Fredric Jameson is among the most prominent theorists of postmodernism and one of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), film occupies a central place in his account of the… Read More ›
Unlike a number of his contemporaries, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) does not provide a single, systematic theory of cinema. Instead, his comments are scattered across a range of works, taking the variant forms of brief asides, longer analyses and remarks made… Read More ›
I What is life, and what makes human life unique? With the rise of the life sciences and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century, new answers to these questions were proposed that were deeply at… Read More ›
