According to Politico.com, Obama’s campaign released a statement condemning New Yorker magazine’s recent cover featuring Obama in a caricature of Islamic dress and his wife adorned in a racist caricature of black femininity. The cover depicts Obama and his wife giving each other the now famous “fist bump”. In the image, Michelle Obama is lampooned […]

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Last year I read Judith Stone’s book titled, When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race. This text is a true story about Sandra Laing, a light brown skinned woman who visibly appears to be “mixed-race” or “colored” according to South Africa’s former apartheid caste system was born in Piet […]

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After hearing the sad news last Friday that Tim Russert collapsed and died in the NBC D.C. bureau, I became fascinated with his life. While interning at Hardball with Chris Matthews during the fall of my senior year, I had the opportunity to briefly meet Tim. I always remember him smiling, because any other time […]

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Week Two of Lisa Marie Basile’s guest blogging! Hereeeeee’s Lisa:
Quiz-oh-nos
For those of you who think AXE ads are particularly disheartening (because smelling good –as though it’s some special power- equals multiple women crawling and pawing at you), then Quiznos’ recent commercial is gag-worthy. In the commercial, we’ve got an “average” or “overweight” woman (I […]

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Naomi Wolf author of The Beauty Myth argues that social constructions of beauty are political in nature as a way of maintaining the primacy of patriarchy. Wolf claims that in the West, public interest in the maintanance of women’s virginity and chastity has been replaced by a public obsession with a very specific and often […]

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American culture fascinates me. When my friend sent me this hilarious blog entry today sparked by CNN coverage of Michelle and Senator Obama’s “fist jab” starting a trend among politicians I couldn’t stop laughing. Is anything sacred?
I was amused when James Brown’s “Living in America” was the theme for the RNC last cycle and […]

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Through GHQ, I had the opportunity to review a young adult novel by one of my favorite authors. Meg Cabot’s How to be Popular was overall, a cute story that made me nostalgic for my teen years.
The novel stars Steph Landry, a 16-year-old girl whose number one desire, like most teenagers, is to be popular. […]

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I’m at work right now, reading through Newsweek.com and I came across this interesting article: “The Backlash Against Magazine Airbrushing.” The author sounds a lot like myself at first, talking about reading Seventeen and YM as a preteen, and calling them her Bibles. Anyway, the story is about airbrushing and whether or not magazines […]

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In light of the new developments in California, I feel compelled to invite us to think critically about the institution of marriage and what it means… It is important for us to consider the implications of certain rights.
Beyondmarriage.org is an amazing statement signed by some of the greatest contemporary thinkers and other community members about […]

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I am writing a paper about identity politics and digital culture right now, focusing on the advent of blogs like stuffwhitepeoplelike.com and exploring their meaning in relationship to the political economy. As a result, I am noticing everything on the internet and attempting to deconstruct what is behind specific forms of visual representation… When I […]

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