media

Work, play, art, science, literature, sex, education … digitization leaves nothing untouched. Social relations are being transformed by the development of telecommuting, hypermedia systems, and the new world of on-line information. In particular,

Where the political terrain can neither resolve nor suppress inequality, it erupts in culture. Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of

[1]Just in case you’ve been living without cable, like an animal, for the past few years, I’ll begin this essay by explaining that Queer Eye For the Straight Guy is a successful show on Bravo where, every week, five gay men make over a

[1]The public rehearsal of making over goes back to 1979, the moment when post-war housing began to fall apart and when This Old House, the WGBH home restoration program, was first aired.  Making over was never simply the humble process of

[1] Steven Soderbergh, director of both experimental films and big-budget genre films, has been unusually candid about racism in Hollywood.  In a June 2003 New York Times profile of African American actor Don Cheadle, Soderbergh

[1] The cultural articulation of sexuality to political violence has enjoyed no shortage of scholarly analysis in recent years. Drawing upon libidinal models familiar to readers of renowned German Freudo-Marxists Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and

“Each week their mission is to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming and culture.”—Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,

[1] In a 2003 episode of Extreme Makeover, ABC’s makeover show offering transformation through style advice and multiple plastic surgeries, Amy, a “painfully shy 29-year-old cake decorator from Indiana,” exclaims in her post-makeover interview

The Rise of the Heterosexual Male Adolescent[1] Prior to the twentieth century, male adolescents were often presumed children in affect and interests, and thus excused from heterosexual potential or desire (Maynes, 1992; Stovkis, 1993; Cohen, 1999;

“As we Latinos redefine ourselves in America, making ourselves up and making ourselves over, we have to be careful, in taking up the promises of America, not to adopt its limiting racial paradigms.”Julia Alvarez, “A White Woman of Color”Will Ferrell