Progressive culture since 1954
What a turn to conversation and confession as solutions to men’s mental health overlooks is that men’s unhappiness is depoliticised when it is individualised. That men might then turn to each other with this framing in mind robs this situation of its potential to suggest the political reform of the society that almost certainly played a part in the creation of that unhappiness.
Popular culture and dialogue doesn’t often touch on dissociative identity disorder, but when it does, it’s often in the same vein as the way mainstream media tends to treat mental illnesses in general – incorrectly and with a tendency to both glamourise and to indulge in stereotypes.
If the conceit of post-history was that we have achieved a liberal capitalist paradise, the definitive burial of the future has been heralded in recent culture by an obsession with the afterlife.
Here, at the edge of dystopia, time has finally caught up to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Critiques of Scott’s accuracy in near-future prophecy usually focus on the lack of hovercars and the fact that android sophistication isn’t much more advanced than the ice-cream scooping robot team in Federation Square. The other possibility, of course, is that we can’t see the future clearly because we are looking at it from the other side.
Within this nuclear reality whose lives are seen as disposable? Whose bodies are rendered collateral? We do not yet have fully functioning artificial intelligence, nor replicants built to carry out the domination and appropriation of invasion. However, colonialism and capitalism have seen to it that androids have been made of humans: dehumanised, worked, hunted and killed. The survivors of apocalypses and nuclear disaster exist and continue to resist.
As the fifth anniversary of the disappearance of forty-three students from rural Mexico passes, questions remain about the culpability of the Mexican government in the crime and its subsequent cover-up. Now, with a new President and a special government commission, there’s hope the truth might be revealed.
Announcing the final results for the ten categories of the 2019 Fair Australia Prize. Hearty congratulations to all!
Is utopian thinking a distraction from meaningful politics?
I remember mistakes over the years – the errors that made it into print, despite the concerted effort (sorry Fredric Jameson et al) – disagreements about whether a work is finished (who even really knows when a work is finished!) … Mostly, I remember the thrill of collaborating with writers and editors and our volunteer readers on thousands of ideas and essays and arguments and editions and special issues.
Chile’s protests, ongoing since mid-October, are the culmination of thirty years of frustration and disillusionment with Chile’s neoliberal economic model and rising inequality.
Considered alongside Robert Harris’ selected works, this collection lays bare the enormous gulf we’ve crossed in the years between them apropos of the birth and rapid proliferation of the internet (‘Apropos of nothing I … / just got woke from an internet coma’) and all the everything that comes with it: data clouds, screaming memes, twenty-four-hour mainline newsfeeds, data profiles that outlive their hosts and so on.
On another World AIDS Day, I wish I could believe a cure was in sight but unfortunately I cannot. My experience living with HIV and working in the HIV/AIDS sector has shown me what we’re up against – a monolithic pharmaceutical industry that thrives on us swallowing pills for the rest of our lives.
Where self-care began as the radical notion of self-love, it has since been reappropriated to function as a marketing tool, advertising individualistic acts of respite from the pressures of late capitalism.
Right now, Australia is besieged by disparate disasters which nonetheless are linked: one involves the devastating results of a climate change-induced fire catastrophe, the other is marked by the disappearance of our literary and cultural eco-systems.
Absolutely, 1999 was a significant year in Hollywood film history (so often interchangeable with ‘film history’ more generally), but let’s get a grip before we start hurling around the term ‘the greatest’. In the light of the carnival of rose-tinted glasses that covers much of positive discourse supporting this claim, it’s perhaps no small coincidence that The Blair Witch Project (one of my personal all-time favourite horror films, as an aside) is effectively the story of a woman filmmaker being punished by supernatural forces for daring to make a movie.
I only started actively thinking of how and to what extent queer characters are represented in futuristic African literature earlier this year, after reading TJ Benson’s We Won’t Fade Into Darkness – a collection of exquisitely written futuristic short stories.
This is the second time I’ve been part of a climate emergency. The first was in 2017 when the town of Lismore in Widjabul country in northern New South Wales was hit by catastrophic floods. It was a flood that couldn’t happen.
Out of the Y2K countdown at the crossroads of baby boomer, gen X or Y and millennial subcultural cross-dressing, 3PBS FM (in tandem with big sis RRR) ran a dazzling promo for a lustrous new rock-press glossy fanzine, Polymer.
Compared to multimillion-dollar blockbusters, comics are fast, cheap, and disposable. This means comic books can flit like hummingbirds. Hollywood movies, meanwhile, steer like battleships. Superhero comics can try things the movies would never dare, knowing that they can always wave their failures away and start over next month.