Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Congratulations Strange Little Man!



You're a young man and today you're going to explain to us, in great detail, through an article published in an online magazine, why Orange is the New Black is problematic.

You'll do so with full disclosure of your position as a young white man who has been afforded a number of educational, professional and financial opportunities.  You'll do so with candor and love of the things the show does right.  But you won't gloss over Genji Kohan's problematic relationship with notions of privilege, her oftentimes cartoonish capacity for character development, and the arbitrary formative realities that occupy the narrative framework of the program.  You'll skillfully deconstruct the manner in which women of color are stereotyped and, even as they're constructed as a existent threat within the framework of a system that they are, in society, by and large victimized by, infantilized and drawn with broad, stereotypical strokes.  You'll even dedicate a nice paragraph to the reduced prominence of the superlative Laverne Cox, both in terms of her plot significance, and her visibility on the show.  You'll issue a love-letter to a flawed creation that presents something worthwhile while receiving a bevy of problematic, counterproductive abject praise, a thoughtful, thoroughly considered piece of writing that you'll have written alone, in your apartment, largely through the windows of your own perception, mitigated by the frameworks of the internet.

Within minutes of posting it to the internet, you will be uncovered by the capital I Internet.  You will be roundly declared a faggot, a racist, a bigot, a homo, a queerfuck, an ableist, and a trans-phobe.  You'll be told to kill yourself.

We'd recommend you not do so.

Congratulations Strange Little Man!

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