1920s gay hollywood actors, transphobic bathroom scares, editorial staff at journal quits because Elsevier is evil, and speaking of evil, why Return of the Jedi is actually an awful movie!
1. The story of the silent film star who left MGM for his husband (Slate)
This short essay (or you can listen to the longer podcast, an episode of You Must Remember This, embedded on the same page) explores William Haines, a Hollywood star in the 1920s and known gay actor who lived with his partner from the 1920s until his death in 1973. I found the story most interesting for how it complicates notions of the closet (mirroring Sedgwick’s argument that the closet is an open secret, or Chuck Morris’s work showing how the closet is a matter of collusion and collaboration). The podcast is also a delight to listen to.
2. Why are Houstonians so confused about HERO? (Slate)
Yesterday Houston voters rejected the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) by “a wide margin.” Passed by the city council and forced to a vote by the courts, the ordinance would have extended anti-discrimination protection to a variety of classes, including military status, genetics, pregnancy status, and more. However, arguments against the bill focused mostly on gender identity, resorting to scare tactics about predatory men choosing whatever bathroom they want (coverage at Buzzfeed). J. Bryan Lowder’s column at Slate is circulating in my Facebook feet a lot this morning, and he notes that to queers, this bathroom scare rhetoric is just so damn stupid that it’s hard to take it seriously. And he attributes a lack of response to this rhetoric as the reason for the proposition’s defeat. This passage particularly resonated with me:
Many queer folks live in a world where gender-neutral bathrooms are common, or, as in many gay bars, gender designations on the facilities are more or less suggestions. While distinctive gender identities and expressions are obviously important, we tend to move through spaces that are more relaxed about (or even dismissive of) the binarized division between “the sexes” and be less weird about different sorts of bodies sharing the same space. Speaking for myself, it’s been a long time since the thought of peeing in the same room as a woman even registered as strange, and experience suggests that many queer folks feel the same way. Additionally, the complexity of queer desire tends to undermine the assumption of sexual tension between men and women in all situations. There’s something about the category-stretching thinking one must do when coming out as queer that erodes the power of these kinds of straight cultural anxieties, so much so that it can be hard to understand how other people can still hold onto them.
3. Written Communication in the classroom: Resources for Teaching Methods
Abigail Bakke and Kira Dreher have created a great resource for Written Communication that provides overviews and resources for teaching methods in writing studies. Looks very useful!
4. Entire editorial staff of Elsevier journal Lingua resigns over high price, lack of open access (ars technica)
The title of this article kind of says it all.
5. What if the new Star Wars sucks too? (Deadspin)
A few weeks ago the newest trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out. It was probably the most exciting moment in all of October for many of us. I’m linking to Albert Burneko’s column about how much Star Wars has actually sucked historically because first, it’s an entertaining read, and second, he’s pretty persuasive that Return of the Jedi was an awful movie and so really, we’re talking about a franchise that made only two good movies (A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back). Out of six, that’s not a great record. While Burneko has a number of complaints about Return, the best analysis is of how Vader’s character has changed from Empire, where he is a badass who cuts of his son’s hand and then reveals he’s his father to a sniveling tool of the emperor. The Vader of Jedi, he explains
is neither the absolute cruelty nor the equally frightening true-believer zeal of the Darth Vader we knew. This is the angsty, vapid, self-pitying emo shit-for-brains we’d later come to know in the prequels—the pathetic, un-frightening goomba henchman who for all intents and purposes gets pranked into becoming a villain in the first place. This is not the bad motherfucker who gleefully slices his own kid’s extremities off and then owns him all the way to attempted suicide; whose flair for cruel showmanship led to the memorable scene of him having Han and Leia delivered to him at a dinner table. This is a defeated, excuse-making heap of garbage.
His analysis leads Burneko to conclude, “The prequels are not a betrayal, but a coherent expression of where the original trilogy was headed in 1983.”
