A humorous and reflective journey of self-discovery via pop culture.
Essays that incorporate elements of 2000s pop culture to examine broader themes of queer identity and sexuality.
Longtime Onion and Reductress contributor Perry revisits the songs, movies, and TV shows she was drawn to as a closeted, Catholic adolescent in the Midwest. She examines them in order to explain her coming-out process, interspersing personal anecdotes with recaps of the plotlines and characters involved in the media that informed them. Her knowledge is extensive, running from The Real World to Harry Potter, Dawson’s Creek, The O.C., the Disney Channel, The L Word, Taylor Swift, and Glee—and beyond. Perry isn’t interested in dissecting 2000s pop culture or passing judgment. Rather, she analyzes how it shaped a generation of queer people despite the scarcity of actual LGBTQ+ representation. Perry deploys specific pop-culture phenomena to open up larger conversations about a variety of relevant topics—e.g., MTV’s programming and gender essentialism, Dumbledore’s sexuality and the problem of disingenuous representation, singer King Princess and the etymology of “coming out of the closet” and whether it is still a relevant framework. The author also turns her critical eye toward the ways in which queer viewers were drawn to queer-coded characters because of what they saw in themselves but also modeled themselves after those characters, in a long game of chicken or the egg. As sexuality and gender became better understood and celebrated in the late 2000s, pop culture reacted to the trend, but millennials straddle the divide. “We grew up without queer characters in our cartoons or Nickelodeon or Disney or TGIF sitcoms. We were raised in homophobia, came of age as the world changed around us, and are raising children in an age where it’s never been easier to be same-sex parents. We’re both lucky and jealous,” Perry writes, hopeful for the future in this post-Glee world.
A humorous and reflective journey of self-discovery via pop culture.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-76014-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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