Author Archives: zhi wen teh

In the second segment, Hasan Minhaj references the common experience of Asian immigrant children having to live up to their parents’ expectations of high achievement, and going into certain stable and respectable careers such as medicine, engineering, finance and business. This is also plays into the model minority myth that Asians are the minority group that can achieve the American dream and are exemplary minorities. Minhaj responds to those commonly held ideas by bringing up examples of “shitty Indians” which includes Indian-American politicians who work for the Trump administration, John Kapoor who was charged with felonies and Dinesh D’souza a far-right political commentator who is known to espouse far-right talking points and propaganda. Throughout his response, Minhaj brings up these examples and commenting on how they’re going against the expectations of Indians being good, well-behaving, hard-working immigrants. Towards the end of his response, Minhaj gives us the punchline with looking at the ‘bad Indians’ from a different perspective. He suggests that the ‘bad Indians’ actually breaks stereotypes and releases Indian-Americans from the expectations that’s been placed upon them. His response seems to deconstruct how we stereotype Indians, that even ‘good’ stereotypes are still limiting and does not allow for Indians to be perceived as just people who are equally capable of doing good or bad things. The response also has the effect of revealing the relationship between the model minority myth and Asians that perpetuate white supremacy. On the racial hierarchy, Asians are lower than white but above other racial minorities. This means that Asians are capable of buying into white supremacy as they can come from places of privilege which could incentivise them to perpetuate white supremacy.

The effect of putting this segment after the Khashoggi case is to reinforce the criticism against non-Muslim Americans perceiving the Saudi Crown Prince to be progressive, instead of actually just perpetuating the status quo not unlike the ‘bad Indians’ who perpetuate the status quo of white supremacy. The conversation between the two segments is that of Minhaj taking advantage of his in-group knowledge of both being Muslim, Indian and American, to be able to explain issues concerning how Indians and Muslims are perceived in America.

There are two large photographic prints displayed near the exit/entrance of the Multiversity Gallery. They are encased within a glass case. Dionne Paul’s “Her First Day of School (2013)” is displayed at the top, with “His First Day of School (2013)” displayed below. Both pieces feature a colour photograph of a child, a girl and a boy respectively in uniform. In the middle of the photographs are different photographs placed on top of the colour photographs. They are black and white photographs that are the torsos and thighs of other children, placed on top of the colour photographs aligned with the respective body parts of the children in the colour photograph.

It is one of the few photography pieces in the space. It is surrounded by glass cases full of various indigenous artifacts. I think the artist meets Robert Houle’s definition of an “artist-warrior”. Dionne Paul is an Emily Carr University graduate, having been trained in a Western formal art school. Her pieces comment on the atrocities of residential schools and how they only occurred one generation ago. Paul makes use of photography to execute this piece, which is a fairly contemporary Western medium in contrast with the surrounding artifacts. This juxtaposition brings to mind Western technology’s impact on indigenous lives. Photography being a Western invention, Paul appropriates the medium to manifest the realities of residential schools. Photography as a medium historically has qualities of realness and a documentary-like nature that can’t be achieved by other mediums. By appropriating this quality, Paul provides a sense of immediacy to the impact and presence of residential schools. This part of indigenous history permeates all indigenous lives. Non-indigenous people and Canada needs to reckon with this part of history and they must be made aware that it still continues to affect the indigenous peoples now. The choice of medium also contests the idea of authentic indigenous art.

The work presumes that the viewer has knowledge of residential schools and the collective trauma that surrounds the institutions. Having grown up in Malaysia, I was not aware of this information until I was educated in an international high school that taught the Ontario syllabus. In some ways, colonial schooling has also impacted my life. Malaysia’s colonial schools were run by the British, who also ran the residential schools. Because of that history, English remains a lingua franca in Malaysia. My mother was educated in a convent school, a product of colonialism. My parents understood that English was far more important than other languages. So I grew up speaking English at the expense of the other languages of my culture. I’ve lost a significant part of my culture because I only understood English. My experience wasn’t as brutal as the residential schools, but it still was a product of colonialism.

Before the debate, I found the article accurately outlines the problems of American politics and the media surrounding it. I found Dean’s argument pretty compelling, but my experience as an international person outside of American politics meant I already had a different perspective, especially considering social media played a huge role in the 2018 Malaysian General Elections and it’s because of social media that we were able to vote out the incumbent government and vote in the opposition for the very first time since the formation of Malaysia. So already I viewed Dean’s argument as reflective of the state of affairs in the US, but it is not necessarily applicable internationally, especially since we have widely different political situations and priorities. Whilst preparing for the debate as an assessor, I read the article with the intention of analyzing both sides of the resolution. It’s a continuation of my prior perspective on the article in my initial reading.

Before working on this debate, I had a fairly simplified understanding of the relationship between social media and sociopolitical change. After seeing the debates, I had a slightly more nuanced understanding of this relationship. Listening to Castells’ debate seemed to confirm some of my own perspectives on the relationship, especially in regards to my personal experience witnessing the recent Malaysian General Elections. A lot of the connections and unity in Castells’ article I did witness on a milder scale back in Malaysia, especially with a lot of the voting efforts being coordinated over social media. We were updated in real time what was happening at the polls around the country, and people coordinating as well to keep elections fair. Particularly Dean’s perspective introduced a different side to social media, as it was really helpful in detailing the fragmentation and stalemate in American politics on social media, the concept of “technological fetishism” was fairly illuminating in how social media could be used to pacify the political energy of the public. A significant difference of both articles is the immense unity in Castells’ perspective contrasted with the fragmentation and dispersion in Dean’s perspective.

#GamerGate was a harassment campaign organized on Twitter, 4chan, IRC and Reddit. It was an attack on women, feminism and diversity in video games under the guise of ethics in game journalism. #GamerGate initially started as an attack on game developer Zoë Quinn, who was trying to publish Depression Quest, a text-based game based on her struggles with depression. Many male gamers in the community discredited her work saying it was not “a real game”, but much of the subtext of the criticisms surrounding Quinn’s game was more to do with her being a woman. #GamerGate really exploded when Quinn’s ex-boyfriend published a blog post accusing her of cheating on him with men working in games journalism. Much of the gaming community accused her of having “unethical” relations with games journalists. The harassment also included other targets like game developer Brianna Wu and feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian. These women were doxxed (had their personal information, including home address, phone number, personal email, etc, hunted down and published publicly on the internet) and received rape & death threats.

With the role social media played in this controversy, it revealed already existing social dynamics in the gaming community. The gaming community is a subsection of the geek/nerd community which includes computer programming nerds, comic geeks, etc. These communities are rife with misogyny and prejudice. They were historically male-dominated spaces. Any women gamer had to face men discrediting their interest in games, with many accusing them of being “fake gamer girls”, which was something I saw a lot personally as a young girl gamer. Female gamers also had to deal with harassment from male gamers on multiplayer games. The role social media played was publishing these misogynist behaviours. It allowed for people to organize themselves to conduct harassment campaigns, that’s not really all that different from witch hunts of the past. Social media essentially provided new tools for misogynists of the world to harass women and commit violence against them. It was only natural that misogynists find each other on social media, as social media was only a means of communication and publication, what people do with it is up to them.

Sherlock is a TV miniseries that first aired on the BBC back in 2010. Created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson respectively, the show amassed a huge fan following. The Sherlock fandom was a force to be reckoned with and is the perfect case study for fan culture studies.

Throughout the show’s run, the creators have frequently denied the possibility that Sherlock Holmes is gay, and that he and John Watson will get together as a couple. But the fandom doesn’t take them at their word, citing the fact that the creators have a history of lying in interviews to protect plot points of the shows they run. Queer fans in particular draw from their experience and view the show in a different light from what was originally intended. The Johnlock Conspiracy, or TJLC for short, was the culmination of the work of many fans who analyzed the show for evidence to support the subtext they saw.

This discrepancy can be illustrated by the three different readings an audience may take when decoding media as theorized by Stuart Hall. First is the dominant/hegemonic position, which is the audience taking the text at face value. In the context of Sherlock, casual fans which comprises majority of the show’s viewership views John and Sherlock’s relationship as platonic, which was the intention of the creators. Second is the negotiated reading, which is when the audience partly agrees with the text. In Sherlock’s case, this would be the people who accuse the show of queerbaiting, which is when a show employs queer subtext in order to attract a queer audience, but with no intention of following through on that subtext. In line with the negotiated reading, this section of the audience generally agree that the text for John and Sherlock’s relationship is purely platonic, but they also can’t ignore the queer subtext evident in the show. So they take the view that the show employs queerbaiting to explain the discrepancy between the show’s text and subtext. Last is the oppositional reading, which is when the audience is in complete disagreement with the text. This is illustrated by the TJLC sub-fandom, who believe that the queer subtext will become text, going against the creators’ intentions that the text will never become queer. These fans reject the platonic nature of the show’s main relationship, citing the mountains of subtextual evidence in the show as reason to do so.

In the end, fandom has a way of remixing existing media to take on more fresh and radical stories. Participatory culture has largely been a space for minorities such as women, LGBTQ+, people of colour, etc. It is important that we not dismiss the alternative readings, for they reveal the representation that is sorely missing in the current media landscape.