A political rant about media that focus on social issues that I posted over on tumblr, after watching Barbie and They Cloned Tyrone over the last couple days:
"Part of recuperating social justice within media is that the media is almost never intersectional, instead opting to deal with one of the intersecting systems of oppression. Race, gender, class, etc.
By choosing to deal with an individual system, the protagonist/antagonist duality means that there are always heroes and villains. Blacks vs whites. Women vs men. Gays vs straights. Poor vs rich. The issue with this is that it kills solidarity, separating the intersectional struggles into individual ones with individual perpetrators (the whites, the men, the straights) rather than the actual perpetrators (the ruling class who made their family wealth through colonialism and exploitation of everyone outside of the ruling class).
These single issue depictions perpetuate infighting within the ranks of the non-ruling class. A film that celebrates women against patriarchy gets read as misandry by indoctrinated men. A film that celebrates black and brown lives againsts white supremacy gets read as reverse racism by indoctrinated whites. A film that celebrates queer liberation against heteronormative gets read as the gay agenda by indoctrinated cishets. A film that celebrates the working class against the wealthy gets read as Socialism (derogatory) by indoctrinated middle class. And I say "indoctrinated" in the sense that they have been socialized not to question why they have gifted privilege within the social hierarchies they have been placed in, and how that hierachical placement, in the middle between the ruling class and the most exploited at the bottom, means that they are an enforcing buffer that keeps the systems working and the ruling class safe from retribution.
All this isn't to say that films that tackle social issues are some kind of cointelpro psyop, controlled by Big Media (with all the anti-semetic connotations that kind of conspiracy thinking brings), but the point is that by not addressing the intersectional nature of the true struggle, these single issue stories are always going to alienate potential allies by seperating all victims of the underclass into warring tribes. The way we can use this media as a tool in our own favour is to use them collectively as a curriculum, and provide the intersectional context to hopefully break the indoctrination that is keeping solidarity from growing."
Subject: Politics 
Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:42 pm
