Red Light Politics
Welcome to my short form Tumblr blog. My name is Flavia Tamara Dzodan, I am a business developer, writer, public speaker, ideas instigator, content creator, media facilitator and trend watcher living in Amsterdam.
This Tumblr is about the spaces and intersections between politics, culture, race and gender matters with some humor and pop culture thrown in the mix.
My long reads blog is Red Light Politics.
I also blog at Tiger Beatdown.
If you would like to know more about me, visit this page .
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Noted Elsewhere
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What did I miss?
I’ve decided that I am not even going to try to catch up on Tumblr since Friday. Nope. Not gonna do it.
So, did anything important...
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Interesting
Just got a job offer? I know the company, it has a good reputation. And awesome downtown offices.But it’s not quite my style - their...
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“The new rules, which were given the force of an executive order, are a clear improvement over a draft version. If monitored and enforced, they could...”
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Heroism in the Supermarket:
Vitamin Water wants me to believe that drinking their sugary concoction will help to make me a superhero rather than...
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…and The Onion for the win, forever.
Tl;dr: All 10 ways are “Revolutionary Terror.”
(via TheNoobYorker)
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Last night got the pleasure to met and chat with the German Tumblr team.
These women were totally awesome. Total girl crush!
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“The institution of marriage is not under attack as a result of the President’s words. Marriage was under attack years ago by men who viewed women as...”
Tag Results
73 posts tagged media
Non Western economies as wild animals
I just got an email advertising the conference “Africa Works”. The first sentence in their website illustrates the premise behind the event:
Africa in the 21th century has already proven to be the source of endless possibilities and trends. In the first decade of the 21st century, the perception of Africa has changed dramatically from being the ‘hopeless continent’ to being a continent of ‘lion economies’, analogous to the Asian tigers.
“African lions”! “Asian Tigers!”. And of course, because I love to look for context, I checked who’s in the board of the Netherlands-African Business Council organizing this. And then I shook my head to the point of dislocation.
“Too radical for Dutch media”
And “unpublishable”. Those were the words of two editors from two separate major media outlets in The Netherlands in response to something I co-wrote about racism in this country, as a social ecosystem (leaving out incriminating details to protect the innocent). And to think we had even tried to simplify our ideas to make them more accessible for a general audience.
Maybe this should now be my byline?
Deliberate choice of images
There is this site, Role/ Reboot, where both Clarisse Thorn and Hugo Schwyzer write regularly. The site is supposedly devoted to issues of gender and sexuality. I don’t check it often but every now and then I see a link to it and click. This was the main page today when I checked it out.
I was all oh, finally they have brought some diversity to the site? Is this a young Black woman exploring her issues with dating? Considering the title of the post is “I’m single and they are never going to like me”, I was hoping for a personal story of singledom. So I clicked. And this is what the post looks like:
I read the post and throughout the text, I kept wondering why the author would never mention her issues with interracial relationships or “dating while non White” or, you know, what you’d expect to find if you are led to believe this is about a young Black woman. Except that the author, Hilary Sherratt? She looks like this:
And then I let out a screech because really, the only photo in the entire main page that features a WoC illustrates how this woman feels “ugly and unwanted”. Nothing in the way we choose media or look at media depictions is random. Our lens is informed by the culture in which we are immersed and the way we have been influenced by decades (or centuries as the case might be) of depicting “the Other”. That the editors of Role/ Reboot would pick this one image to associate with the title of this post says a lot about the care and attention they put when considering their choices. Because when it is about media? Nothing is innocent.
The latest reality TV FAIL out of Dutch TV: Real Girls in Search of their true self.
For the purpose of “searching for their true self”, these “real girls” dress up in faux “Oriental” garb and travel to Nepal where they face challenges, described in the website as “facing the loud and physically coercive Nepalese bus drivers”, “washing a bikini in a public square next to a Holy Temple” or being part of “a confrontational road movie in which emotions run high but hilarity prevails”.
The website, in full Orientalist aesthetic, includes “hilarious” items like a “zen-o-meter”, to measure how “zen” the audiences perceive these girls.
My friend Egbert pointed me to this trainwreck, but I don’t have it in me to thank him for it.
Everywhere on the internet
Be it Jezebel, The Atlantic, The Atlantic Wire, etc, where the racist tweets from the writer of the HBO show “Girls” are discussed, without failure, the conversation derails into people saying “BUT I LOVE THE SHOW!”. How can people miss the point so, so much? It’s no longer about the show. Well, it is only tangentially about the show at this point. It’s more about the mentality that drives the show and the words, rhetoric and ideologies supported and disseminated by one of their main writers.
Is it me? Is it so difficult to analyze and critique a system of racism that perpetuates ideas and the people behind this perpetuation who also have the power to continue this never ending cycle? Is there no longer a way we can vehemently resist this without being told “BUT I LIKE THE SHOW!”? It seems that liking a pop culture manifestation like a TV show is now more important than people being treated with decency and not being subjected to insulting Tweets by the maker of the show in question. Priorities. Who knew, eh?
Lesley Arfin, one of the writers of HBO series Girls, on Twitter.
I suppose this is a joke? Is this how she deals with commentary about the lack of diversity in the show? I am baffled, someone throw me a rope!
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Recently on talk shows there has been a certain amount of upstanding feminist tsk-tsking about the retrograde soft-core exploitation of women in Fifty Shades of Grey, and there seem to be no shortage of liberal pundits asking, “Is this what they went to the barricades for?” …
It is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not submit to politics, or even changing demographic realities
”Katie Roiphe for Newsweek. Seriously though what the fuck is she even talking about? What “upstanding feminist” has been tsk-tsking Fifty Shades of Grey for it’s sexual content?
All I’ve read is people taking the book to task for its atrocious and funny bad writing. I don’t exactly live in a cave.
(via bricksandmortarandchewinggum)
Katie Roiphe is a living testament to the power of nepotism, because I assure you that had her mother not also been a published writer, Roiphe would be spewing her barely coherent nonsense on blogs and tumblrs like the rest of us.
(via whynotshesaid)
What amazed me about the article (well, amazed might not be the right word, more like “how I realized I was in the presence of the usual nonsense”) was how bland and ultimately ordinary her “analysis” was. I know I can mention intersectionality until the cows come to graze in my living room, but really, there wasn’t even a half hearted attempt at any of it in this piece. And to make matters even more hilariously misguided, the “analysis” of the fetish part itself was incredibly narrow and lacked the most basic nuance.
It’s like the least interesting writer was offered the topic she knew the least about and for which she had the least interest in researching a bare minimun. And bam, that’s the piece we got at Newsweek.
(via whynotshesaid)
Leadership and responsibility
I’ve been thinking a lot this morning about the “crazy and lame” remark from last night and mostly, trying to situate it within one of the topics I am fascinated with: feminist ethics. Because here is the thing: I get it that the tweet was probably meant to be snarky and edgy and oh so ironic. I am aware that some people actually believe these are legitimate jokes to be made. There is a reason hipster racism exists as a category and I see the “crazy and lame” remark in that context.
However, I keep bringing up the issue of ethics and how we have failed to create a certain model of ethical leadership within the movement. And I know people could easily say that Jezebel is not a feminist site which is true. However, Jessica Coen does present herself as a “new face of feminism” and accepts to be featured in a position of leadership within the movement in mainstream media. That alone carries a certain responsibility. Mainly, the responsibility not to be deliberately hurtful to others, that, at the very basic, base level. I get the “foot in mouth” nature of Twitter and the temptation to just say something witty or try to be funny. On Twitter, that is usually rewarded with more followers and more attention. However, there has to be a check and balance where if you are positioned as a visible face of a movement, a position you, yourself accept and actually promote by participating in these features, at the very least, you do not harm those you supposedly represent.
Someone relatively well known within feminism unfollowed me on Twitter last night, I suspect because of how I was barging about accountability and leadership. However, I insist on this because that is at the very root of our collective failures. We can choose to align ourselves with commercial goals that only seek to promote page clicks and media dissemination or we can remain within a certain ethical framework that deems this kind of snark hurtful and unacceptable. We cannot have it both ways. I certainly do not begrudge Ms. Coen for trying to make money and increase the popularity of the media outlet she manages. This is part of earning a living, everyone to varying degrees participates in this system. However, I do hold her accountable for her position of leadership within a movement that supposedly represents me and billions of other people and for failing to take on that responsibility in an ethical manner.
“My white guilt died on Good Friday, April 6, 2012. That was the day my bike got stolen.”
White Guilt | The end of my white guilt | The Daily Caller
Let’s review the facts in this piece: his bike gets stolen + on Good Friday = end of his white guilt.
Except… he doesn’t know who exactly stole his bike. It could have very well been a fellow white dude. But you know, then this guy wouldn’t be able to jump on the racist bandwagon and go for a rhetoric ride.
Also, if you’d like a little more meat as to whom is fueling this racist machine, here’s a nice tidbit from The Daily Caller’s About page:
Founded by Tucker Carlson, a 20-year veteran of print and broadcast media, and Neil Patel, former chief policy adviser to Vice President Cheney.
Also, this other tidbit from the OP is worth noting:
It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.
A whole family, including three babies/ toddlers die in a tornado. What do Jezebel commenters do? Why shame them for living in a trailer, being poor, not having built a basement and well… dying.
And these are the people with whom we supposedly share a similar political outlook? (Jezebel demographics tend to be on the more leftist side of the spectrum, they tend to identify as feminist, etc). You know when I wrote last week about feminist ethics? Some people (rightfully) inquired as to what I meant and if I had specific examples about the possible/ potential concerns of a feminist outlook towards ethics. Here, Jezebel is an excellent example: how can you milk the feminist media machine while at the same time you take zero responsibility for both your editorial actions and the moderation of commentary that is allowed within your site? All the profits, none of the feminist accountability.
Media, colonialism and “the islands”
After my last piece at The Guardian’s CiF about David Cameron, many media outlets (including the BBC and Sky News) have contacted me with the intention of generating a bit of “media polemic” over my views. Also, from people who have contacted me, it seems the piece has been widely quoted and referenced in Argentina’s media, especially as a counter part of another article that The Guardian’s Observer published yesterday on the topic.
The piece at The Observer is written by another fellow Argentinian, who seeks to prove that the islands should be granted independence because, according to him, “nobody in Argentina cares about them”. He goes on to cite two very divisive figures in South American media, Beatriz Sarlo and Jorge Lanata. It’d be too long and quite unnecessary, for me, to write extensively about my disagreements with these two (and with the writer of the piece). However, I do have something to say about my position regarding the islands, especially given the fact that people are now writing to me either to express agreement or fury over my words.
Here is the thing, the dispute over the Malvinas/ Falkands islands is, for me, part of a larger historical continuum and my very strong anti colonial stance that is a core of my overall ideological positions. I cannot, under any circumstance, isolate the struggles for the islands from previous acts of European and British colonialism and the severe consequences they carried for the peoples and territories of the Global South. Colonized subjects still carry the burden of these actions several centuries later (descendants of those who were part of the slave trade, genocide over First Nations in the American continent, social and political issues in contemporary India and African nations, to name just a few). Now David Cameron makes outlandish claims of “reverse colonialism”, but such claims would require an equal balance of power (which obviously is not such) and a swift erasure of this historical continuum and the weight of the aforementioned consequences.
It is not difficult to find people willing to engage in colonialist apologia within certain South American and Argentinian groups. The colonialists always relayed on such people to legitimize their power. That now I find myself in the unwitting place of opposing such people is not new. Actually, I’d be shocked if I ever found myself in agreement with them.
“When I was managing the Tumblr of Newsweek magazine, I had two goals,” told Mark Coatney , who has since been hired by Tumblr and became their “media evangelist.” “The first was to provide Newsweek, whose readers have an average of 57 years, to an audience who do not read.”
In which something is lost, but much is gained, through Google Translate. (via markcoatney)
Sage advice.
(via theamericanscholar)
Bit patronising for our taste, but interesting…
(via guardiancomment)
FINALLY! Now we understand the Social Media strategy that led Newsweek to post stuff like this to “celebrate” International Women’s Day! See? it was just a way to attract a “younger” demographic!
(via guardiancomment)
“The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided to place restrictions on documentaries up for the award. Any documentary must be reviewed in the New York Times or Los Angeles Times in order to be considered for the award.”
Documentaries, Oscar, and Michael Moore : Lawyers, Guns & Money
This will probably hurt so many independent and low budget documentaries. Also, it sounds like a media lobby to enforce the relevance of the LA Times and the New York Times. But then again, the Academy is also struggling for relevance in a world where “word of mouth” is a lot more meaningful than a mainstream endorsement.
Gawker’s new, unmoderated commenting system surely seems to be a success! These gems are currently the “featured” comment thread in a story about terrible, brutal violence at New York’s Rikers Island jail. I wonder if this was Denton’s goal all along, to turn the comments into something worse than Fox News.