from Tumblr (or, Frumblr)
about lady gaga, but it applies to this site as well:
"or to put it another way: white skinny bodies are allowed to be art. you see this all the fucking time in the twee/hipster zones of the world/internet, soft-focus photos in sepia tones with size 2 AT MOST people standing in for melancholy, or wistfulness, or love, or whatever. you dont see fat girls lying in a field of daisies wearing fishnets and reading haruki murakami next to a picnic spread under a parasol. because then the viewer, its assumed, would get distracted by their fatness. skinny bodies (& white bodies) are allowed to turn themselves into things because they are presumed to be blank slates. theyre neutral. fatness already symbolizes things in our culture - laziness, sloth, greed - so its not allowed to symbolize other things.
or another way: lady gaga is allowed to play at being grotesque because its understood that she is making a choice to be grotesque; fat, non-white, or otherwise atypical bodies already belong to the realm of the grotesque. the choice is made for them. whether its as unfuckable (fat women, women with visible disabilities) or inherently sexualized (black and Latina women) or some weird combination of fuckable but not sexual (asian women) or just grotesque and unworthy (trans women)."
which is to say that the participation in something counter-cultural (like SG) is just as much an exercise of white privilege as any mainstream/quotidian/square cultural expression, but it carries with it the additional insult of feigning critical engagement with the world around it.
about lady gaga, but it applies to this site as well:
"or to put it another way: white skinny bodies are allowed to be art. you see this all the fucking time in the twee/hipster zones of the world/internet, soft-focus photos in sepia tones with size 2 AT MOST people standing in for melancholy, or wistfulness, or love, or whatever. you dont see fat girls lying in a field of daisies wearing fishnets and reading haruki murakami next to a picnic spread under a parasol. because then the viewer, its assumed, would get distracted by their fatness. skinny bodies (& white bodies) are allowed to turn themselves into things because they are presumed to be blank slates. theyre neutral. fatness already symbolizes things in our culture - laziness, sloth, greed - so its not allowed to symbolize other things.
or another way: lady gaga is allowed to play at being grotesque because its understood that she is making a choice to be grotesque; fat, non-white, or otherwise atypical bodies already belong to the realm of the grotesque. the choice is made for them. whether its as unfuckable (fat women, women with visible disabilities) or inherently sexualized (black and Latina women) or some weird combination of fuckable but not sexual (asian women) or just grotesque and unworthy (trans women)."
which is to say that the participation in something counter-cultural (like SG) is just as much an exercise of white privilege as any mainstream/quotidian/square cultural expression, but it carries with it the additional insult of feigning critical engagement with the world around it.