With such a limited representation of disability on television, it can be even harder to drill into specific aspects of the disabled experience; when you’re only showing a tiny slice of disabled life, you’re cutting out a lot of varied experiences within the disability community. I sat down the other day to think about depictions …
Category Archives: pop culture
The Curious Case of YA Friendships
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friendships in young adult books, and how they tend, overall, to be relegated to the background, pushed to the margins to make way for romance. In a way, it’s a reflection of the tension some young adults experience as they pass through important, but sometimes very liminal, stages …
For Every Prejudiced Joke, A Validated Viewer
When people protest the use of prejudicial humour, they’re often told to lighten up. This is, after all, just a joke. Everyone knows it’s meant to be funny. In some cases, they’re told that the whole point of the joke is to make fun of people who think that way; no one really thinks Jewish …
Environmental Dystopians: An Underutilised Genre
In the plague of dystopians (particularly in the YA world) that’s currently upon us, there’s one thread within the genre that I’d really like to see more of: environmental dystopians. I can think of only a handful off the top of my head (which doesn’t mean there aren’t more), and of those, many had elements …
Is There A Grey’s Anatomy Effect?
Like the CSI franchise, Grey’s Anatomy has become an important cultural institution in the United States; the primetime soap may be yet another iteration of a long-established television category, but something about it is compelling audiences to tune in season after season. This even after the plots get more and more absurd and the characters …
Period Fantasies
We appear beset of late on television with an overload of nostalgia for bygone eras; perhaps I’m wrong and the numbers of nostalgic shows aren’t any higher than they used to be, but it feels like we have a lot more period dramas with ornate costuming and whiffs of longing for the past than we …
Reality Shows As Aspirational Bootstrapping Dramas
I have never been a fan of the reality show genre, I freely admit, but like many people living in this society, I’m still steeped in it. I understand references to reality shows, I often have a loose idea of the most popular ones currently airing, and I know that many of my friends eagerly …
On Integrated Casts and Minority Characters
Rewatching Regenesis, as I do now and then, I’m reminded of the diverse racial makeup of the cast; this is not a uniformly white show, which is especially appropriate given the setting. Toronto is not a uniformly white city, and it’s a hub for immigration and innovation, which explains why, for example, Carlos is from …
Separating Creators From Their Work
What a person creates can tell you a lot about that person; how that person thinks and believes, for example, how that person thinks about art and expression, how well that person works with others. It can provide you with glimpses into who that person is, even, as long as you operate in the awareness …
On Whitewashing and ‘Reverse Racism’
One of the more odd responses to complaints about whitewashing of media that I’ve encountered recently is this utterly bizarre and backwards argument: ‘But I don’t see people complaining when canonically white works/characters are played by people of colour and nonwhite people. Isn’t that the same thing?’ No, no it is not the same thing, …
