|
SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Ashley Dawson
Oh Bondage Up Yours!
Nov 5, 2008
For a brief period during the mid-1970s heyday of punk, icons of British youth culture such as Siouxsie Sioux flirted with Nazi iconography. Of course, Siouxsie and other punks also appropriated other accouterments of the S/M subculture such as fishnet stockings, chains, and dog collars. Contemporary commentators tended to perceive such accessories as part of punk’s attempt to demolish dominant gender paradigms, a making visible of the forms of submission to which ideologies of feminine propriety relegated young British women at the time.
|
|
SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Patricia Mathews-Salazar
Ways of Seeing and Being Seen
Nov 6, 2008
The Last of the Nuba reminded me of the colonial fascination with primitive others so common among anthropologists contemporary to Reifenstahl. Although Sontag’s critique focused on the continuity of Reifenstahl’s ‘nazi work’ and on the purification of her reputation [p84], I was wondering about the similarities shared by all of the ethnographers and travellers equally fascinated with ‘primitives’ devoid not just of clothes but of voice and agency. Neither Reifenstahl nor Sontag are concerned about the individuality of Nuba people or for this matter on the possible hardships of their lifestyle, or on what they might be thinking when they are posing for the camera. A lot of the work that follows the publication of "Fascinating Fascism" would focus on this critique of representation and colonialism. Elizabeth Edwards’ jacket in Photography and Anthropology [1993, see below] comes to mind. Anthropologists have taken different roads since then and although the myth of the noble savage has all but disappeared, today we cannot speak of one but many anthropologies and anthropologists working in their own societies, studying ‘up’, indigenous, ‘halfies’-- to borrow Lila Abu-Lughod’s term-- or devoted to an anthropology that serves the public, even when the search for an authentic native culture has all but disappeared, and sometimes it is used by people over studied by anthropologists or ovewhelmed by tourism, as Gary Larson reminded us in his well-known cartoon about anthropologists.
|
SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Andrew Bast
Stripping Down Sadomasochism
Nov 7, 2008
Reading Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” got me thinking about tops and bottoms. Hardly a coincidence that I got hung up on how she, like only the best can, actually wrote her essay upside down. Put another way, her thesis, her point, her big idea, contrary to convention, doesn’t come in the first or second paragraph. It comes at the end.
|
|
SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Michael Busch
On Sontag and Kaplan
Nov 7, 2008
Alice Kaplan boldly concludes her blog post by outlining Susan Sontag’s categories for understanding fascism and history as a guide for future discussion, and offering a challenge. She writes: “Finally—and here is a test of sorts—can we even tell the difference between the Riefenstahl photos and any number of spreads in the National Geographic? Her Nuba are young and glossy and muscular; some of them are gazing at her camera with the coy seductive look she may have taught them. This is repulsive, but it isn’t fascist.”
|
SEMINAR MEMBERS RESPOND
 Mehmet Kucukozer
On "Philo-racism" and "Soft Rehabilitation in Liberal Democracies"
Nov 10, 2008
I disagree with Professor Kaplan as to what makes Sontag’s essay important. For Prof. Kaplan the significance of Sontag’s essay lies in her “concepts for thinking about fascism and history.” The ultimate relevance of Sontag’s discussion, for me, is a larger question that Kaplan certainly alludes to and Patricia Matthews in her post points out: how different groups are represented, and the political ramifications of such representations.
Kaplan’s allusions to the larger question are found in “philo-racism”—“The idea that somebody could love and admire African culture for the wrong reason”—and in the idea of “soft rehabilitation in liberal democracies.”
|
|
|
|
|
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >>
|
|
Page 1 of 3 |
