HumCore Review

The Reluctant Dragon film

  • Baby Weems → a celebration of Western culture and male genius

    • Fantasy of the genius who knows everything

      • Particularly through a Western perspective (Baby Weems is white)

      • Labeled as someone with all the answers (goes on to solve world problems, governance problems, etc.)

      • Absurdity: baby genius can just solve all of these problems without having experienced the world

    • English → deemed as a universal language

      • Baby Weems is born knowing English → English becomes the dominant/most valued language

    • Paradigmatically American

      • Blonde with blue eyes

      • Elevated English (given an accent that seems to elevate him)

      • Seemingly trailblazer and a star → belongs to the country

        • Parents don’t get access to him

        • Shows exploitation of minors (irony of this being a Disney show → Disney exploits minors)

      • Consumerist aspect → the public owns Baby Weems

        • Products become centered around him

  • Dragon is queer-coded → doesn’t fall under stereotypes

    • Doesn’t want to be violent and destruction, affinity for tea, poetry, etc.

    • Features of the dragon are made to make the dragon tolerable and adorable → acceptable within society

      • More effeminate character and characteristics represent the dragon as different yet accepted

    • Simultaneously:

      • Docile, cute dragon → which goes against the norms and traditional conceptions of masculinity.

      • Coded as queer → made to be different

      • The dragon’s voice sounds like a mélange of a masculine and feminine tone.

    • Disney characters are queer coded by not acknowledged as queer

    • Representation of the dragon → indicative of an image of queerness as monstrous

      • Undermines the autonomy and uniqueness of queerness

        • The queerness is dangerous but exceptions can be made to “accept” queer people if they fall under certain social norms (ex: starting “normal” families)

        • Maps queer eccentricities map onto social and cultural values → respectability politics

  • Patriarchal trope → wife nags husband

    • At the end of the film, Mrs. Benchley gets mad that husband was dilly dallying

    • Misogynistic perspective playing into patriarchy:

      • Poor husband stuck with a nagging wife

      • Normalizes flirting and “cute secretary culture”

    • Women play into supporting roles → not exactly creators

      • Acting, playing voices, etc.

        • Double entendre → old hen voiceover (actress is an older lady and also voicing a hen/clucking sounds)

      • Act as nude models (animals and babies too)

  • All seeing eye of Disney

    • Husband becomes instantaneously accepted and welcomed into Disney

      • Disney “smile” and environment

    • Represents Disney environment as inclusive and being immersed in the world

      • You are meant to be there

      • Welcomed into the community → shown all the inner workings

      • Everyone called him by names → you matter, we know you, we care about you

    • Panopticon – all seeing eye; Disney environment is heavily surveilled/omnipresent/omniscient

  • Celebration of Western societal norms

    • Racial messages → paint white people as superior

      • Makes fun of a Chinese animator → Chinese elephants

      • Sexualized statue of a black women (with zebra legs)

  • Appropriation and accessibility → immerse and appease the audience

    • Animal voiceover to opera makes Disney seem accessible/similar to life

      • European appropriation but with Disney characters

    • Disney-ification of the real world

      • A fake version of the surrounding real world but in Disney form

      • Simulacra of the most common cultural/social norms

Concepts

  • Simulacrum

  • Disneyland

  • Utopia

  • Orientalism

Week 6 – Queerness

  • Lines and orientations

Orientation is about the ways we use to find our paths in a given space, whether we have our ways of inhabiting it. Lines represent various forms of alignment, which are usually set by society. Being “in line” reflects our adherence to the majority. In the specific context of sexual orientation, being heterosexual is a way to abide by the “lines”/norms in society, which makes LGBTQs queer constituents in the world.

  • Paths and deviation

Being “straight” refers to the adherence to a “heteronormative” path. Here, queer individuals are viewed as deviant since they turned away from objects that can help them stick to the “lines”. In other words, queer people are in a direction that is incomprehensible in society.

  • Walking simulator games - meandering

Case Study: Gone Home (a queer video game)

  • Derides games that “entail nothing more than walking”.

    • Association between meandering and femininity.

    • Walking itself as queer: Access of scattering objects that represent digressions from normative paths (i.e. heteronormative path)

    • Walking simulators challenge video game’s chrononormativity.

    • The pre-determined (“linear”) walking process in the seemingly “twisted” house offers limitations in the “freedom” of queer movement→ implicit denunciation of queerness.

    • Connections/analogies to “dark rides” in amusement parks like Disneyland.

    • Speed-running as the rhetoric of straight lines.

  • Queer art of failure

    • Certain games you need to succeed, and some failure is an integral part of the game. Failure is needed for growth

    • Our normative time frames are all about succeeding, but these games offer a benefit from failure and learning from it

  • Normative path: creates a sense of failure; straight line that we “MUST” follow → presents an absolute path that seemingly designates happiness

    • Birth, education (preschool/K-12), higher education (university/grad school), job + marriage and kids, retirement + grandchildren

    • Makes it difficult for people who don’t follow the path (particularly queer community)

      • Homonormativity – way in which homosexual relationships follow this path

      • Children's desires are polymorphous, not completely driven by the endpoint of children and marriage; no mandatory heterosexuality yet.

      • In the context provided, "polymorphous" refers to the idea that children's desires are diverse and multifaceted, not solely focused on conventional or predetermined goals such as having children or getting married. Instead, children's desires are varied and can encompass a wide range of possibilities and experiences beyond traditional societal expectations.

      • They are anarchic

  • Queer – as identity (sexuality and/or gender), umbrella term for anyone in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum who does not fit heteronormativity or cisnormativity (dominant social norms of heterosexuality and cisgender)

  • Queer – as a conceptual term, used in queer theory to describe something that does not fit dominant cultural norms, especially but not exclusively related to desire, intimacy, and power

    • Can be a verb → to overturn, reimagine, recast in queer light, reclaim for queer people

    • Theory based on lived queer politics

  • Theory definitions:

    • Queerness is “the exceptions to the conventional ordering of sex, reproduction, and intimacy.” - Mel Chen

    • Queerness is “a rejection of a here and now and an insistence on the... possibility for another world.” - José Esteban Muñoz

    • Queerness is “a basic desire to live life otherwise.” - Jack Halberstam

    • Idea that the “normal” world is not for queer people → queer people must make their own worlds/deviate (spaces to live, love, relate, and create)

  • New worlds are built not just by creators but by how we navigate the world

    • Sexuality as orientation in the meaning of space

      • The ways in which we orient ourselves in space/inhabit space affect our life and orientation

    • Straight movement → follows a heteronormative path

      • Following the expectations of society

      • Queer culture deviates from this “linear” path

    • Takeaways:

      • Following the designated straightforward path is a “straight” way of moving through the world

      • Deviating from the established path/not moving in a straight line is a queer way of moving through/remaking the world

  • END OF THE WORLD/QUEER APOCALYPSE: queerness seen as a threat to society as people view it as the end of children and thus the end of the world

Week 7 – The Archive

ARCHIVE - collection of primary sources

Why we learn certain stories and who is telling them (is political about power)

  • Not just mutual it has to do with the views of the powerful

  • Transatlantic slavery and the two Venuses as an archive. Could not exist because it was a documentation from the slave owners

Problems with the archive

  • The problem with the historian who tries to speak for other people/ forgotten souls

  • Creating stories without grappling with the fact these stories are destroyed

  • In Transatlantic slavery, enslaved people were only included in the archive if they were accused of or the subject of a crime, or as a recipient

  • Enslaved people couldn’t create their own archive because they were put together with other people that didn’t speak the same language

  • VENUS: goddess of love, beauty, sex and fertility, name given to slaves as seen as an ironic joke when the name was used on an enslaved woman.

  • Venus: two cycles of violence; impossible as an archive

    • Option 1: Reinforce the historical narrative told by enslavers

      • Archives treated as objective knowledge

      • Enslaved women like Venus are just a small speck in the archive → not given much voice/place to be seen as real victims → They could not speak for themselves.

      • Retelling of stories recirculate/reproduce violence

    • Option 2: create a fictional, historical narrative to represent what her life would have been like

      • Projection of our ideas on Venus → further victimizes her

      • Potential room for over romanticization

      • Ethics of rewriting the narrative

        • Is it ethically okay to represent and fill out the story

        • Is it actually for the victims or the author or society → to honor victims or assuage guilt

      • Desire to humanize such stories and reveal the human figures behind the violence

      • Problems:

        • May not be taken as accurate/historical → fantasy

        • Putting a bow on the horrors of history → projection of our own, fulfilled lives → whitewashing of history

        • Makes it seem that narratives were allowed to exist when in fact they were not

Committed to destroying or making impossible black archives

  • No white supremacist archives kept this information such as their names or stories just their sexual encounters

Week 7 – Transgender Monks

  • History in the archives

  • Trans-masculine monks are in archive to be celebrated for becoming men and therefore closer to God

  • Their stories are preserved not to honor their experience as trans people but to out them after they have died

  • Might not refer to them as transgender and it may shift, but nonetheless we can understand these gender identity ranges

  • Monks that born female and died as male monks - today we call transmonks

    • They are not talked about as the experience from trans-monks

Patriarchy

  • The relation to misogyny.

    • Trans male monks were celebrated for being closer to God and trans female monks were denigrated because they were moving down the cycle of perfectionism

  • Trans masculinity and patriarchal influence and misogyny

    • Trans masculinity celebrated (females → males)

      • Biological women are giving up bodily, female urges → become closer to men → become closer to God

      • Men = closest to angels → moving closer to God/more pure form

      • Trans masculinity → social/religious ascension

        • Virginity → taken as a masculine trait (rejection of bodily pleasures = masculine)

        • Story of Pelagius – sex worker, Pelagius, who eventually transcends to trans masculinity

      • Toleration for female masculinity → acceptable for a woman to pursue male characteristics

        • Only tolerable for so far; can’t go too far

      • Asceticism – masculine, monk-like behavior; associated with deprivation of body of desires and pleasures

        • Story of Anastasius – loses feminine features

    • Trans femininity denigrated (males → females)

      • Women = human and individual → moving away from God/less pure form

      • Trans femininity → social/religious decline

        • Sexuality and temptation → taken as a feminine trait (sexual behavior is the fault of a woman)

      • Intolerable for male femininity → hatred of femininity

        • Unacceptable for men to cross the boundary to more feminine characteristics

Byzantine Era

  • Gender-conforming care

  • Vasectomies

  • Top surgery for men who had large mammaries and women who had large clitorises - gender conforming surgery not gender affirming

  • Male and female were done through gender-affirming care

    • Men with bigger breasts would have surgery to make it smaller

    • Or a woman with a big clitoris would get it cut to be more feminine

Empress

  • Within a generation, we don’t know much about this empress

  • She wanted bottom surgery

  • She was not recorded positively & sufficient in records, where the only documents about her were negative descriptions.

  • Her trans identity was not celebrated but it was used as a way to make fun of her

Weeks 8-10 – Simulacrum - Disneyland

  • Simulacrum - no original, a fake original, misrepresentation of original

  • Then what is an authentic original?

  • Hyperreality - a built world that feels real but isn't

  • Hyperreality - a world that feels real but is totally constructed (ex. Films, disneyland)

  • Hyper reality is a world filled with simulacrum

    • A world full of simulacrum

    • Hard to distinguish what is real

    • Inorganic / master planned

    • Ex. Disney, Irvine, LA

  • Disney is like a miniature United States maybe?

    • Connection between Disney/Irvine/LA

    • Disneyland is a built environment, Irvine is a built environment. Top-down culture and a lot of imagining.

      • Connection to how to live safely in a science fiction universe

        • Sci-fi zone is another hyperreality

  • Irvine is a built world

    • All planned - everything is intentional

    • Made by a corporation

    • Architect of irvine created disney

    • Nothing can be organically added

    • No room for changes

  • Hollywood is an integral part of LA, and LA is an integral part of Disney. Bringing in palm trees.

  • The Spectrum - orientalist imagery without mention of the countries it’s related to.

  • Galaxy’s edge - supposed to be mysterious and scary, a ride in disneyland that is islamophobic because the architecture is modeled after middle eastern architecture and it is supposed to represent something scary.

  • Storm troopers - nazis

    • Simulacrum

      • What is real and what is fake

    • Spectrum = orientalist imagery → manicured and curated exoticism

      • Inspired by the Alhambra in Spain → touristic and exotified representation

Disneyland space

  • Assimilated you to the Disney mindset of Disney World

  • Acculturation into Disneyland space - the geography

    • How it becomes a part of the experience

    • A Hyperreality

  • The experience of living in the simulacrum is hyperreality. Everything is mediated of simulacrum

  • Theme park ride is an assembly line and the theme park is the factory → the way in which technology turns us into products

    • YOU are the product being made

      • Moved along a sort of assembly line and put through a series of scenes stimulating the senses → produced and manipulated to fall under idealisms of park

    • Factory workings become masked → produces elaborate theme park

    • Automation → robots/structures personified

      • Ex: Fred of space mountain in Disneyland

    • Subject formation shapes the suburbs, amusement parks, etc.

      • People become the subject to be influenced and shaped through parks, malls, etc.

  • Humanization of animatronics (amazon warehouses) - anthropomorphisation, makes us to connect with non-sentient objects

Simulacrum: fake copy but intended to have a specific effect on you.

  • flexible positional superiority

Idealism

  • Foster a really safe and comfortable environment to be open to new ideas and share

  • Model minority