Jamie Hood
Anti-Anti-Rape | On the #MeToo Backlash
Jamie Hood
After sexual assault allegations against author Neil Gaiman resurfaced in January, “Red Scare” host Anna Khachiyan wrote: “Are we really still doing this? #MeToo was rejected at the ballot box!” In the wake of almost a decade of anti-anti-rape sentiment — much of which calcified in the hyper-discursive, ideologically slippery podcast and social media sectors — Khachiyan’s refried Paglia-isms hardly shock. What alarmed me was an accelerating sense that I...
Publicists, Manifesto Pushers, Propagandists | What Happened to the Avant-Garde?
Alphonse Pierre, Becca Rothfeld, Dean Kissick, Eugene Lim, Frank Guan, Gabriel Kuri, hannah baer, Jamie Hood, Liza Batkin, Lucy Sante, Marta Figlerowicz, Melissa Anderson, Timo Andres
It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even...
Bland Bloodsuckers
Jamie Hood
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est mort” (“to be avant-garde is to know that which has died”). And death, too, is...
The Girlboss and the Anti-Woke Cool Girl
Jamie Hood
It seemed, for a brief moment — perhaps by virtue of the intensity of energy driving the 2017 #MeToo movement — that the bloated corpse of feminism might be reanimated, given a path forward. That #MeToo was rapidly recalibrated to advocate in the interests of the most privileged and protected within its subordinated class (broadly, victim-survivors of sexual harassment and assault) — not to mention implicit and plainfaced unions with...
“Steered by the Reactionary” | What To Do About Feminism
Alexandra Brodsky, Andrea Long Chu, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Becca Rothfeld, Elisa Gonzalez, Jamie Hood, Jess Bergman, Rosemarie Ho
For a long time now, we’ve had the sense that feminism is in trouble. In the years before the pandemic, its most prominent battles — the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Women’s March, #MeToo, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, “Nevertheless, she persisted” — were about figureheads. These days, symbols no longer seem adequate, or even all that meaningful. The professions (teaching, nursing, eldercare) that have been most overtaxed and underprotected during the...
