The “genderless” young hipster types in Tokyo and Osaka who’ve been getting press coverage lately are by no means a new phenomenon there. Anthropologist Jennifer Robertson, who has spent much of her life in Japan, gives the history, from cross-dressing eighth-century women to bisexual aristocrats in classical literature to foppish 19th-century “high-collar” men to the very popular Takarazuka Revue, considered avant-garde when it opened in 1914.
Category: issues
Even Viola Davis’s Oscar Acceptance Speech Has Become Fodder For The Culture Wars
Gee, it seemed like most of us loved her speech because it transcended politics. But one sentence – one word, really – gave the right-wing internet the target it wanted. Spencer Kornhaber reads the attacks so we don’t have to.
Three Reasons To Abolish the NEA – And Why They’re Wrong
“The NEA has been a perennial target for fiscal conservatives ever since it was launched in 1965. (Which, in perversely good news, means we already know how to put up a good fight.) But why is the NEA so often on the chopping block?” Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Jennifer Stahl recaps the choppers’ top three arguments and answers each one.
Decline Of French Towns Has French Worried About The Meaning Of “Frenchness”
“France is losing the core of its historic provincial towns — dense hubs of urbanity deep in the countryside where judges judged, Balzac set his novels, prefects issued edicts and citizens shopped for 50 cheeses.”
What’s A Cultural Critic To Do? (Plenty, Actually)
“The radical potential of aesthetic negotiation relies, I think, on total freedom. Decoupled from government politics, cultural politics knows no bounds. But tweeting about an issue can encourage the critic (and her reader) to pick a stance, thereby helping to shore up the big pile of social-media meaning. Our space for aesthetic negotiation ends up laden with binaristic thought after all.”
Defending The NEA Unites Lincoln Center’s Arts Organizations
The groups — which generally get only very tiny fractions of their funding from the endowment — argued that the NEA serves an important function that goes beyond the dollars it distributes: attracting private philanthropy and “providing early funding to get projects off the ground or helping to create or expand promising initiatives to achieve greater reach and impact.”
Arts Groups Turn To Their GOP Congresspeople To Save NEA And NEH
“While Democrats have long supported the endowments, the coming budget proposals from President Trump will test the sort of Republicans who have been the rescuers and defenders of arts spending during the decades-long efforts by conservatives to cut and even eliminate them.”
One Oxford Degree Program Provides A Stream Of UK And World Leaders (And Maybe That’s A Problem)
“In the new age of populism, of revolts against elites and “professional politicians”, Oxford’s courses in Philosophy Politics and Economics no longer fits into public life as smoothly as it once did. With corporate capitalism misfiring, mainstream politicians blundering, and much of the traditional media seemingly bewildered by the upheavals, PPE, the supplier of supposedly highly trained talent to all three fields, has lost its unquestioned authority. More than that, it has become easier to doubt whether a single university course, and its graduates, should have such influence in the first place. To its proliferating critics, PPE is not a solution to Britain’s problems; it is a cause of them.”
Report: Defining Canadian Culture And Wondering How To Promote It
For decades Canada has promoted Canadian culture with “Canadian content rules” meant to foster creation of Canadian art working in the shadow of the great American industrial entertainment complex. But what constitutes promoting Canadian culture in the era of content everywhere? This IPSOS study went across the country to find out. The issues aren’t surprising.
In Defense Of Cultural Criticism Even During The Trump Presidency
“It’s hard to defend doing anything except being in the streets” right now, but the space where the arts lie “is not an apolitical place, it is just not owned by government. In this aesthetic space, the arts explore a less confined politics than the one that controls the state. The state is not the beginning, end, or the reason for this space.”