New Videocast: Tip of the Hat to Eve!

In this short videocast I give a 'tip of the hat' to the wonderfully influential gender theorist, Eve Sedgwick.
The question I pursue is: what is a gendered identity?

Thank you for the truly inspiring literary analyses, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

You can watch the short videocast here.

You can also watch these episodes on iTunes as they get uploaded every Friday. The sound and video quality might also be better there.

The podcast series titles are:

Gendering the Media with Brikena Ribaj
and
On Love: De Amore with Brikena Ribaj

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New Videocast: The Third Gender Model in the Middle Ages

Well, no amount of the cold or flu could be great enough to keep one from recording an episode on the Middle Ages. In this episode, which is now also available on iTunes under the series: De Amore: On Love, I talk about my research on Hildegard von Bingen and her new gender model.

You can see this episode here.

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The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs

If you are a fan of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, they're baaaack.
I don't just enjoy their music, for the most part, but also their overall look. I also enjoy their clothing choices which I find very 'now' and well-informed.
And, Karen's androgyny is quite a text to observe, I find.

'Face to face, Karen is far prettier and less androgyne than photo spreads, or seeing her spit beer live, would lead you to believe. At dinner, she's wearing black suit trousers and an oatmeal cable-knit sweater with fake-fur shoulders, chic and professional, the way an editor for French Vogue might dress for the office. With her wide-set cheekbones, long brunette bangs, comedienne's nose, and slender build, she brings to mind a foxier Shelley Duvall. When I ask if turning 30 was a big deal, she cocks her head in amazement, incredulous at how dumb guys can be. "Of course it was! I'm 30! I'm ancient! But," she promises, "I'm gonna be even weirder this year than I ever was before."
Read more here.

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Happy Birthday, Gloria!

This blog is a grateful tip of the hat to the brave, smart, and always stylish wonder of a woman: Gloria Steinem. Today she turns 75.

She told the NY Daily News the following yesterday:

“Women and girls no longer feel crazy, alone or flying in the face of nature if they have the outrageous idea that they should be treated as full human beings,” the feminist leader and social activist told The News Tuesday. “Knowing that the system is crazy, not you, is a huge leap forward.”

Thank you, Gloria.

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New Podcast: My Published Article

Listen here to the new podcast of the new series On Love: De Amore.

This article is a Gender Theory-informed analysis of a thirteenth-century German text entitled der borte (The Belt). Der borte (1270-1290) was written by the little known, Dietrich von der Glezze and it deals with familial transgressions, perversions of knightly virtues, as well as same-sex physical encounters. This article has been accepted for publication by the journal Neophilologus and will be available online as well as on paper very soon. Here is an audio version of it I recorded a few days ago.

This thirteenth century text, a Middle High German-English translation of which I also intend to publish, is fantastically gripping.

Here is a summary of the plot. In a little nutshell.

A married lady is gazed upon by a stranger knight. He wants her. He has a lot of great things of value. She wants the things. She negotiates with him. She allows him one act of physicality in exchange for four great things of value. They get caught. The lady's husband leaves in shame. She waits for him for two years. He does not return. She goes in search of him disguised as a man.
Her husband sees him/her and his/her things and decides he wants to have some of his/her stuff. The wife says she will only let him have the stuff, provided the two 'knights' lie together as a married couple. The husband agrees to it. It's after all only ONE TIME. And it will be done in secret.

As the husband is about to acquiesce, the wife reveals her true identity and scolds her husband for agreeing to a heretical act of sodomy.

The husband apologizes and they return to their court together.

Courtesy of the little known author Dietrich von der Glezze circa 1270-1290.

A note on music: The music for this podcast comes from my friend's Matt's band Swiss Army Mouth. They're an instrumental rock band from Ohio.

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New Podcast: Finale of Fiction Narrative

This is Part Three of the three-part podcast we started a few weeks ago. In this project, I am using fiction as a way of making sense of and decoding literary theory. The text of fiction you are about to hear is heavily laced with gender theory references. The gender ambiguity of the characters was informed by Dante's "Canto V" of the Inferno (Divine Comedy) and its two most important characters: Paolo and Francesca.
Click here to listen to the podcast. Also, the new podcast is available on iTunes under Gendering the Media with Brikena Ribaj.

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graph per black book

Are You Homosocial?

Here is the audio piece entitled: Are You Homosocial?
Click here to listen to it.

This is a piece I created for the purpose of expounding the concepts of homosociality, homoeroticism, and identity.

As always, there are many literary references, much music, and many more pop culture things.

I re-discovered Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh just the other day. Let me quote from it. It goes well with my premise.

"I did not consider myself, as a rule."


Graph via previous post on female DJ's. Find here.

The Psychology of the Coffeeshop

Click here to listen to the piece.

I and mine regardless of our immediate backgrounds and upbringing understand, in a similar fashion, the concept and function of the coffeeshop.
To us, the coffeeshop is a work space away from the work space.
While to many the coffeeshop might be a place of socialization over a cup of cappu, to me and many like me, the coffeeshop is a place of work, a place of creation.
Most of my work is written in such spaces and while the place is indeed public, the immediate space one's occupies is personal, not to be accessed sans the right passport.
I have often referred to the coffeeshop as a heterotopic space. I do so on purpose. The coffeeshop is a symbol of heterotopia, a place where many choose to pursue the kind of activity they choose not to pursue in every other space.
In this audio piece I do a Theory-informed reading of the concept of the coffeeshop. I single out Starbucks since it seems to be a sign readily recognized by most.
As always, I look forward to your feedback.
Tip of the hat to Liam for the photograph and story. Per Delta.

Teen Pregnancy among Evangelicals

In case you have been wondering about pregnancy rates among evangelicals, The New Yorker has a gripping piece on it. A bit says:
"The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge."


Read more here.

Radio Bit: Inversions, Freud, and Ellis

I created this piece for public radio a while back. The premise of it is to explain what "sexual inversions" are and who actually developed the term in the first place. Sigmund Freud has been credited with much, no doubt, but the initial discussion of "sexual inversions" would have to go to the British theorist Havelock Ellis and his wife Edith.

The audio file can be played here.
Happy listening!

Gendering the iPod: Theory and the Media

As a result of Ike's aftermath, we found ourselves without power here in Columbus, OH. We are still, as a matter of fact, sans electricity. Starbucks, however, is open and all the outlets were occupied today.
Slogan of the day: 'In Starbucks We Trust'....?
So, my hat goes off to modernity this week, more specifically, electricity.
Now.
Some of you have asked questions about certain Gender Theory jargon items. Ergo, I'm posting this as an example of literary theory applications to various Pop Culture notions.
I contributed this piece a while back for public radio. As I've already intimated in previous posts, I happen to fully agree with Nietzsche's music-loving, dying Socrates in that music precedes other forms of speech/language. And this piece is premised on the power of expression that music engenders.

In this piece I gender the iPod.
Click here to hear a gendered reading of the iPod.

graphs per apple, google images

Mad Men and Careers

If you are interested in experiencing what gender differences in the work places were like in the 50's and 60's, give the new AMC show Mad Men a shot. This is the only show that's fully grabbed my attention and to which I'm giving a 9/10. Mad Men is now on its second season.
The show portrays rather dexterously familial tension, intrigue, professional and personal inadequacies, gender differences, body perceptions, clothing as text, homosociality and much more. Plus, the main character, Mr. Draper, is played by the uber-talented Jon Hamm. Watch it. It won't disappoint.
Here is a snippet:

graph per amc

Swimming Literati

Whereas this, I enjoyed very well. Go for a swim when done. This literary experience will undoubtedly better your time in the water.
A most eloquent essay by Willard Spiegelman.

"To a bookish, intellectual youth, a transformative revelation occurred when, at the age of 23, I decided that I had a body that required tending to. Does one have a body? Does one inhabit the body, a soul within a carapace? Are you your body? The philosophical dimensions of the questions interested me at the time. In graduate school I lived next door to the university swimming pool. Swimming seemed the easiest and the most expedient exercise, and one that depended on no one else’s schedule. For sheer convenience, running or walking is always the easiest thing to do: neither weather nor location should ever inhibit you. Swimming demands both a place and scheduling, but since I was free at 10 in the morning when the pool opened, and since it was never crowded at that hour, I had no excuse other than laziness for not doing it."

and

"Although we know that the ancient Greeks enjoyed swimming, the activity underwent changes in popularity. Under Christianity it declined but was revived with spectacular energy at the start of the 19th century. In Britain, the homoerotic, or at least the homosocial, angle was strong, as it was in Germany. Cyril Connolly summed up the old Etonian tradition in a prewar journal: “a fusion of my old trinity, grace, greenness, and security” came from his sense of the tradition of “two friends going down to bathe.” Hellenic worship of the body and pastoral sinlessness merged, at least in the imagination. Bloomsbury swam. Rose Macaulay as well as Virginia Woolf swam naked with Rupert Brooke before the Great War. Iris Murdoch was one of the last great English river swimmers."

...

"Ludwig Wittgenstein articulated the connection best: “Just as one’s body has a natural tendency towards the surface and one has to make an exertion to get to the bottom—so it is with thinking.” The opposite might also be said: the body unaccustomed to the water has a tendency to sink; only buoyancy, innate or learned, can keep it up. And with thought, the same is true: we divide our focus between what remains on the surface and what seems to lie below it, seldom realizing that the very metaphor we are using to describe the mind’s realm has an analogy in water and our experience of it."

Also, "an enlarged version of this essay will be included in his forthcoming book Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness."

text and info per the american scholar

Settling Down?

Tyler Cowen over at MR had this to say re: a new article on the Atlantic Monthly about settling down.

'So the "strong bidding women" can always cave and settle for a "lesser man" after an optimal amount of waiting, yet many don't. The distinction between period-by-period happiness and overall lifetime happiness also shapes the market. As smart single women mature, their lives get better and better. "Settling" becomes psychologically harder, even if it would make some of the "settlers" happy in the longer run. So settling doesn't happen; decisiveness become harder to conjure up at the same time that its long-run value is increasing, or in other words behavioral economics is very much at work here.'

As I just noted to a friend the other day immediate happiness doesn't always lead to happiness over time. Quite an article. It will, definitely, make some of my readers react a certain way...
Read it here.
graph per atlantic

Crossing Humor: An Eddie Izzard Portrait

The NY Times has a most enjoyable feature today on the British entertainer Eddie Izzard. Here is a snippet.

“Some people would heckle me and say ‘Where’s the dress?’ and I’d say ‘Don’t oppress me, you Nazi’ — tends to shut them up. Because I have fought for the right to be able to wear a dress, not that I have to wear a dress. I didn’t jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.”

I recommend the full feature.

Hotel Theory: Where Fiction and Nonfiction Meet

Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory is a book that marries two narratives in one. The first is a semantic discussion of hotels and the second a fictional account entitled Hotel Women in which some of the characters are Lana Turner and Liberace. What makes this book unique is the way it manages to marry the fiction and nonfiction. Koestenbaum genders the hotel space and the characters he features in a contextually entertaining way.
Definitely a good read. And those of you interested in literary theory and depictions of urban concepts in literature, Hotel Theory will be most enjoyable.

graph per amazon

I'm Not There: Deconstructing Dylan

A film I am looking forward to seeing is Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There: Deconstructing Dylan"

I think Bob Dylan is a true institution and I would watch any film that had anything to do with him. However, another reason why I cannot wait to watch this new film is the fact that Cate Blanchett is one of the six actors who portrays Dylan.

Even though Richard Schickel gave Haynes' film a stingy review on the NY Times, I will still see it.

After all, it's not every day that the very talented Cate Blanchett plays a man on the silver screen.

I'm sure she will be more convincing than Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria.

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
is Schickel's review:

graph per nytimes