Rogueish
Middle Class Snack Kids | The Billfold→
04/04/12
My grandma and granddad got our family into the middle class by budgeting their money. Paychecks were separated out into envelopes for food, mortgage, gas, and fucking nothing else. These people paid for cars in cash, and here I am snacking my way out of the middle class because I feel like getting a latte at Starbucks twice a week? Because there’s a Pinkberry close to work? Because I want to eat an entire bag of chips by myself while I re-watch Deadwood? Ugh. This Middle Class Snack Kid business is nonsense.
Interested in the phrase “snacking my way out of the middle class” here. Obviously, it’s not unusual to try to conceptualize economic hardship in terms of personal choices as a way to hold on to some sense of agency in the face of economic forces we have no control over, but it’s interesting to see this tied up to the kind of bodily discipline involved in controlling what you ingest.
03/19/12
Pleased to see that Coronation Street continues to be on the front lines of the class war in its struggle against the reactionary moralism of Jamie Oliver.
Queering Taylor Swift→
10/01/10
Instead of men bonding via misogyny, we have men and women bonding—and desiring one another—via the rejection of femininity.
Interesting to see a critique of Swift which recognizes the ambivalences in her relationship to femininity.
Also maybe worth noting that Swift’s presentation of herself as “just butch enough” often has a kind of class component (e.g. her fairly frequent lyrical references to pickup trucks) - she may be a woman, but she’s not effete.
