User:MandyLynnHearne

I have practiced Cultural Studies for 10 years.

note: 'studies' includes at least culture, communication, and history; 'communication' implies any form of communication from media to literature to the nonverbal.

All of these in some way involve studying individual identity in larger social contexts. And this leads to a general need for specificity. Fragmentation is nothing new. What binds communities together and what suffocates the individual interest me immensely in the ways they intertwine with seemingly harmless or assertively 'empowering' notions/things. Consider this broadly (and perhaps blasphemously) Subaltern Studies.

I've done literary studies & theory, women's studies, gender studies, film studies, ethnic studies, african american studies, latin studies, a bit of middle eastern studies, images (paintings/photography/cartoons/milk bottles) of race & ethnicity, visual culture studies, subcultural studies, youth studies, world history, a bit of philosophy, textual analysis, rhetoric, history and New Historicism. I've been called a 'neo-pragmatist' and 'foucaultian'. In my spare time I study media & politics. I was heavily influenced by a class on 'Trans-Atlantic African American Identity'. "Cold War, Civil Rights" by Dudziak; "Race Against Empire" by Von Eschen; "The Black Atlantic" by Paul Gilroy. The papers that Dudziak and Von Eschen got through the FIOA present an amazing insight into the cold, intentional construction of nearly everything related to the image of African Americans to the world and ultimately back to themselves. It was the rise of token individualism in line with the 'Horatio Algiers' myth of Meritocracy and a denial of class and race that managed to seep into our collective subconsciouses to become 'naturalized'.

Of course these things are true. We know them to be true because we see them.

Cultural Studies always acknowledges the political aspect in everything and pays heavy attention to power-functions.

I am too pragmatic to place blame. People act and inasmuch as their actions reveal things, we may say: This person did this and maybe it means this/represents this/reflects this/reveals this. I don't not blame because I'm ideologically against it. I just don't see the point. If someone commits an illegal act, they should be punished. If someone hurts me, I should see to it that they don't hurt me again. I am against victimization and casting blame against authority figures and general 'rah-rah-rah'ing only because it does not personally suit me. In general, I have no opinion of people who do this. They have a function, their activities (protest, clamoring) are necessary, but I have no set measurement for engaging their activities, through which I can proclaim them either bad or good. I have no use for evaluating them. Should I have a use and my own intention, I will do so. And I won't disguise it.

But I won't stand by while people's actions threaten to color this world and perpetuate misunderstandings and misinformation and hatred and war, because I have no use for these things. Because I care. Because I don't like those things. I don't know the people who do them. I might like to understand them, to listen (reasonably, to reasonably listenable things), to learn. I respect differences, but I like my own home to be peaceful so I can't say that I'd invite them back after a beer. Keep the rowdiness at the bar.