It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day, but I refuse to celebrate (while it is fun, I feel somewhat uneasy about the whole concept, for reasons I can’t quite explain yet). Here’s some interesting stuff I want to catalogue/share:
• Sometime I need to read Craig Bellamy’s new Fast Capitalism article he discusses here
• Is affect becoming a commonplace term in the humanities, to the point that it’s various definitions are being conflated? Jenny Edbauer Rice speculates on this.
• From Viz.: Discussion of fashion as visual rhetoric. Excerpt:
Yet fashion is a form of self-(re)presentation in which everyone engages–even when they think they are rejecting it, or at least “not thinking about it.” (Nudist colonists are maybe an exception, but even they have to get dressed sometimes.) The best expression of this point I know of is Meryl Streep’s monologue about the blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada. Fashion implicates everyone in its complex social, cultural, even political networks: of capital, class, gender, race, sexuality, globalization…the list could go on.
• Nels links to a couple recent posts on academic masculinity. They’ve certainly got me thinking more about embodiedness, masculinity, and dress. And I think I have a new blog I have to follow.
I plan to write more about how the experience being male differs for gay men, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Maybe something for our workshop to think about in April, too.
Yes, I think this is definitely something to think about for our workshop. I’ve had a lot of conversations with colleagues here at OSU about dress and gender (and the unfortunate demand on women that they dress a certain way or loose all credibility and the ability of men to dress without worrying about it affecting their credibility too much — or, to echo Deborah Tannen, go unmarked).
I had a colleague a few years ago remark about how well dressed (or fashionable) I always was, and I immediately started wondering about how much that had to do with my presentation as a feminine man with somewhat “hipster” clothes and being visibly queer.
A lot to think about…