autoblography

Jiwani and Young, looking at representations of the Vancouver missing and murdered women in news media representations, identified frames which “entrenched stereotypes about women, Aboriginality, and sex-trade work” (1). Chester Brown’s Paying For It, a memoir of the author’s longstanding status as a john, does something quite different: Brown actually removes these problematic frames of race, class and drug addiction. In fact, he removes almost any frame at all. In an effort to protect the anonymity of the sex trade workers he’s engaged with, Brown works to refrain from “putting…read more

When the Haitian earthquake of 2010 first hits, Dany Laferrière describes how he initially “thought of those disaster movies and wondered if the earth would gape open and swallow us up” (15). Once the tremors are over, he notes how “We slowly got to our feet like zombies in a B-movie” (16). Laferrière’s ability to articulate the experience is directly gleaned from the popular imagination, and this opens up avenues to view Laferrière’s account as informed by popular culture. For my part, I’m interested in how The World is Moving…read more

Art Spiegelman’s Maus does exceptional work in recovering James Young’s “post-memory,” the experience that reflects “back on memory, revealing it as equally constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination” (Young 669). Art follows his “media-conscious generation” in instead “of attempting to portray the events of the Holocaust” he draws “about the event of its transmission” (670). If I have any critique of Young’s point, it is that he does not fully express how the cartoon nature of Maus so heavily contributes to this new historiography that “integrates…read more

For today’s blog, I’d like to revisit the discussion my group began regarding the portrait of Tiffany Drew (45-6) from Forsaken. I’d like to give it a closer reading to illustrate how its organization reinforces marginalizing discourse like those identified by Jiwani and Young in “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Specifically, I’d like to point out the compartmentalization of the three paragraphs. Paragraph one details how Tiffany “grew up in Port Alberni and Nanaimo” and contains the imagery of an innocent childhood: she “loved to swim…read more

In his TED talk, Eli Pariser is concerned with how content filter algorithms, used by sites like Facebook and Google, insulate the individual from ideas outside their usual sphere of experience, creating so-called “filter bubbles.” This problem is of particular interest if we apply it to the process of identity construction. Katja de Vries, in her paper “Identity, profiling algorithms and a world of ambient intelligence,” refers to these algorithms as a part of emerging ambient technologies, technologies that envision a world “in which computing is brought into the world by…read more