Objectify This

France  has long been aligned with romance in the American imagination, but recent events have got me going all Public Enemy on that ish: Don’t Believe the Hype.

It all centers on the discussions of the behavior of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the chief of the International Monetary Fund currently sitting in Riker’s Island without bail awaiting trial for sexual assault and attempted rape.

At The Australian, Chris Bremner reports that “When Mr Strauss-Kahn’s conduct has crossed the boundary even by French standards, he has been protected by a team of powerful image-minders who have been grooming his candidature for his planned presidential run against Mr Sarkozy.”

Meanwhile, over at ABC, Marc Perelman stated, “It is certainly something that is very serious even by French standards which tend to be more liberal when it comes to politicians womanising.”

The Independent’s George Garvey concurs: “While the French public generally takes a more tolerant view of such peccadilloes Read more »

Today’s post is brought to you by the word bricolage, which  Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define as

the practice of working with whatever materials are at hand, and making do with what one has. As a cultural practice, bricolage refers to the activity of taking consumer products and commodities and making them one’s own by giving them new meaning . . .  to create resistant meanings out of commodities. For instance . . . wearing sneakers unlaced or baseball caps on backwards can  . . . change the intended meaning of those products. The punk practice of wearing safety pins as body ornamentation is one of the Read more »

Ana Tijoux was born Anamaría Merino in 1977 in Paris, because her Chilean father and French mother were in exile from Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. When her mother’s job as a social worker put her in touch with hip-hop as an 8-year old, it was love. At 14, Ana and her family returned to Chile and found the country reeling from years of violent suppression of dissent. She helped jump-start the conscious hip-hop movement as part of a group called Makiza at age 20.

Recently, Ana’s gone solo, and the homegirl has done her homework, incorporating elements of 90′s-style hip-hop from the U.S. into a fresh, personal art form. She’s comparable to artists like M.I.A who also incoporate geopolitics into their tracks, and to Lauryn Hill in her relentlessly personal, intelligent rhymes. Her hit single “1977,” from the eponymous album, may be the first music video to invoke Hannah Arendt and LL Cool J. Read more »

The new year is here, and with it, new questions.  The New York Times wondered what it would mean if we aren’t calculating horoscopes correctly; Information is Beautiful explored what it would mean if we were; McSweeney’s Internet Tendency asked why comic sans can’t get any respect.

I wonder what it would be like to have video game skillz. It’s not Barcade that’s got me wondering; it’s Who’s That Brooown!, Das Racist’s hilariously low-fi html video game, with six levels of getting Kool A.D. and Hima from Queens to Williamsburg on their hunt for Heems, the group’s hypeman. On the way, the intrepid duo must dodge obstacles absurd and mundane, battling racism from the whites and pinks and dodging traditional tokens of interest with casual aplomb: nah though, nucca. Sarah Palin makes an Read more »

Hello lovelies!

I’m still hard at work on applications. But here are some links for you in the meantime!

Over at Sociological Images, Marissa explores the implications of representing sex on bathroom signs for our understanding of sex and gender.

At AmplifyYourVoice, actual abstinence-only curricula meets animated bears.

The New York Times reports on the variety of financial penalties of maternity leave across professions.

Also at the NYT, Paul Krugman reports on the classism behind Social Security cuts.

My friend Ilusha Tsinadze’s first bluegrass/Republic of Georgia folk music video: Read more »

Dearest Interested Parties and Thinking People,

Here at ObjectifyThis, you may have noticed that we’re in the midst of a haitus. Suffice it to say that with the demands of applying to graduate school, the radical notion that people are people is not getting the attention it deserves.

And so, it is my pleasure to announce that while we will be taking an Official Haitus until January 1st, 2011, at that point you may expect that once again friendly and curious explorations of gender, race, society, biology, literature, the media, your mom, and your jams will join the jangling internets. For now, keep it real and/or imaginary!

Love,
Marina

We’ve long celebrated reinventions of billboards that advocate everything from pinching bottoms to sexual entitlement, so initially ObjectifyThis was thrilled to learn about the Be Yourself Movement.

Flavorwire describes the Be Yourself Movement as “an Italian art collective with an agenda,” by which it means a political movement. The BYM, as they call themselves, is a group of youngish people who reorganize billboards to say things like “Be stupid as these ads.” Their logo, which consists of the letters BYM with a slingshot for the ‘Y’, seems to reject the monotony of both advertising and the consumerism and conformity it inspires. You can check out a video of their antics after the jump.

Flavorwire tiptoes around the politics involved, calling their article “Be Yourself Movement: Corporate Collaborations or Pure Vandalism?” But unless the defacement and public derision of these companies and their property  is considered collaboration, there’s little chance of that.

The Be Yourself Movement began as a wonderful idea, but it has since taken a strange turn. At the risk of publicly inciting vandalism, I’ll publicly incite this kind of vandalism, this kind of diy, up-the-punks political aesthetic. In general, I support the expression of individual opinions in cultural commons and public space as much as the next member of the Church of Just Stop Shopping, but the Be Yourself Movement Read more »