Tag Archives: Identity

Written on the Body: Difference and Transgression

My paper for the Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders conference was accepted today. The abstract is below.
Our bodies define a border between ourselves and the world around us. However we might feel about our body, it is what we present to the world. Victoria L. Blum in her book Flesh Wounds discusses how bodies […]

Posted in Culture | Also tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Subject and Ideology

Louis Althusser, in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (which is available online here), argues for an interconnection between the subject and ideology. It is also here that he develops his basic argument for interpellation. The following is a brief discussion of this, but I’m not trying to be particularly innovative or say anything […]

Posted in Theory | Also tagged , , , | 2 Comments

John Updike, Terrorist

Updike’s new novel comes five years after 9/11 and takes those events as the starting points for a discussion of what fanaticism and terrorism mean. Rather than looking at terrorists as coming from outside the US, he investigates how domestic terrorists might think and why they would hate US culture and society. It is an […]

Posted in Books | Also tagged , | Leave a comment

Patchwork Identity

The situation is quite different in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl, which does not partake in the device of the alien but instead casts identity differently. Identity is explicitly regarded as being constructed, hence the invocation of patchwork. Furthermore, the text itself is regarded as a patchwork constructed from a number of texts, all of […]

Posted in PhD: The Dissemination of Science Fiction | Also tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Bruce Campbell, Man with the Screaming Brain

Bruce Campbell’s directorial debut is a very entertaining film, but it also says a lot about the concept of cult films. Campbell’s film is aimed squarely at the fans of silly B-movies, more in the vein of Bubba-Hotep than Evil Dead though there is a clear over-lap. It is also completely dependent upon Campbell’s star […]

Posted in Films | Also tagged , , , | Leave a comment