Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts

Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts
(link)

How did the written form of Jungle Book's all powerful snake Kaa become the Disney film's second tier villain and comedic relief, and how did natural black hair become a 9 billion dollar industry so profoundly contentious it led Chris Rock to make a documentary about the subject with a Rotten Tomatoes 95% approval rating after his daughter at three asked why her natural hair wasn't "good?" Disneyfication, conforming a subject to dominant culture's preexisting expectations of how that object should be, making for a lot of unnecessary and uncomfortable changes. In a book rife with assimilating contradictions, in which the Medusa fights an Odalisque from obscure Quebecois myth so beautiful anyone catching sight turns to gemstone against the gorgon's stone, an elaborate fight fought through mirrors, one of Infinite Jest's major characters who wears a veil is either hideously disfigured or fatally pulchritudinous behind it, forever ambiguous until looked upon which like the quantum cat's vitals inside a box, a physical attribute achieves a superposition in culture, a sort of walking contradiction as a symbol of power at the same time it leaves open the wound for the bitter slight, "Becky with the good hair."
They're contentious things and that's why they're hanging in a gallery.