Unity of Thought

I have a problem . . . yes, I know, I have many problems, but only one that I feel like addressing today so let's just go with "I have a problem," okay?  I tend to assume that people agree with me, or have any idea what I'm talking about at all.  I know the proverb about assuming and donkeys, but I have trouble internalizing lessons learned from pithy sayings.  So I'm generally quite surprised when I stumble upon discussions like the comments thread at this wonderful blog post over on Bitch's website.  Tasha Fierce write a great piece on positive portrayals of fat women on TV.  She cited Sara Ramirez's Dr. Callie Torres from Grey's Anatomy at the top of her list (having suffered through seen about 7 episodes of that show I have this to say: I hate Grey's Anatomy but, man, I love Callie!  If only the rest of the show could be as awesome as she is.)  What followed was a thread of fat-shaming (e.g., Sara Ramirez isn't fat because she's not gross!  Sara Ramirez is healthy, not fat!), fat-policing (e.g., Sara Ramirez isn't fat enough to count as actually fat!), and various and sundry other forms of utterly offensive derailment.

Which, seeing as how this is Bitch, an awesome feminist media outlet, left me completely shocked and awed.  If you know me, then you know my stance on body acceptance (see my review of Body Drama) and I did not expect to see the conversation take such a negative turn.  Color me naive.

Luckily, Tasha up and wrote another post giving a little Fat Acceptance 101 to the Bitch audience.  Enjoy, it's awesome.

So have you noticed a trend lately?  The last few posts have all been me saying, essentially, "Hey, why isn't everyone on my page, here?  What the heck?"

On Media and Messages

A medium, by definition, is "an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished; one of the means or channels of general communication, information, or entertainment in society, as newspapers, radio, or television."  Since it is impossible to transmit our ideas and emotions directly from mind to mind, we are are forced to use a carrier substance - language.  Often that language is then floated along in a secondary carrier, paper and pen, radio waves, cathode ray tube, tweet, text . . . . so that in the end the essence of what was thought or felt or dreamt is squished and squeezed and folded and deconstructed and reconstructed to fit the confines and purposes of the conveyor.  Thank you, Mr. McLuhan.

I love language.  I love polysemous words, the nuance of context, the subtle shift between shiver and quiver that opens up a whole new world of understanding and interpretation.  I love that we are unable to directly convey our thoughts and must pour them messily into linguistic containers and carry them on media's shaky cafeteria trays from table to table.  I love the work of analysis and interpretation that comes with deeply reading a text and I work everyday to pass that love on to the students I work with.

This love translates directly into a love of graphic novels.  Talk about nuance!  There is so much to synthesize!  As McCloud discusses in Understanding Comics, comics require the very active participation of the reader.  The reader must buy-in and construct meaning from the myriad linguistic and artistic tools employed by the author/illustrator - from words to pictures, from blank space to camera angles.

Perhaps because I love a good double-entendre, I take no issue with the idea of media impregnating our messages with their own.  Two messages for the price of one!  It is when we stop recognizing this that problems arise.  When we take for granted that the containers and conveyances are passive and idle, then we fall into the trap of assuming (wrongly) that we can use tools without them using us.  Thank you, Mr. Postman.  Tricky stuff, indeed.