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Eva Hemmings Wirtén, Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons: Using the jungle as a structuring idea/artifact that consistently represents a site for “mining” valuable resources—literary, pharmaceutical, or animal--Wirtén critiques the expansion of intellectual property rights globally. I learned the most from her discussion of customary use of commons land in England (enclosure is more complicated than the standard IP summary makes it out to be—I ended up reading a couple really interesting articles about female gleaners that she cited) and of how taxidermy supported visions of Empire in England. She ends on a cautionary note: the low-restrictionists have “put a face, a male face, on the opposition to intellectual property expansionism…. [T]he kind of creativity hailed by critics as being sacrificed on the altar of the second enclosure movement is highly gender-biased, and relies to a substantial degree on recycling the ideology of genius and originality, but now it the innovator/hacker/activist-hero.” I think this is a real issue, but one we’re actively fighting.
Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film: Really interesting look at the uses of music to construct female and male characters. I don’t read music, so many of the details escaped me, but I still learned a lot.
Rob Walker, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are: Walker does the “Consumed” column for the NYT, and he’s a good if not particularly deep observer of modern American consumer culture. He points out that most of our buying energy goes to convincing ourselves that a purchase will reflect who we are (or who we want to be); much signalling performed by buying is a performance for an audience of one. Interesting anecdotes about things like “murketing”—marketing that is hard to distinguish from non-marketing—and the uneasy commercialization of the crafting movement, whose proponents (see, e.g., Etsy) argue that commerce is the only way that crafts can survive, making market participation a sort of anticapitalist movement.
Kate Torgovnick, Cheer! Three Teams on a Quest for College Cheerleading’s Ultimate Prize: I love cheerleading: the teamwork, the synchronicity, the dedication to something that doesn’t get nearly enough respect for the effort required. Torgovnick’s book is a mostly fond look at cheerleaders at three schools, but the title is somewhat misleading: there’s a coed team at Stephen F. Austin, an all-girl team at Memphis, and a coed team at historically black Southern, and they don’t compete against each other. Though in theory Southern could go against SFA, it simply lacks the resources to send its cheerleaders to the main national competitions (though it went to one the year before Torgovnick followed the team). The all-girl teams are underfunded compared to coed teams. This disparity in resources and respect pervasively structures their cheering experiences. At Southern, economic uncertainty and the need to work or a surprise pregnancy can deprive the team of its fighting strength at any moment; they don’t even have a full complement, let alone standbys. On the other teams, there’s a little more breathing room, but not a lot—and academic success doesn’t seem to be high on anyone’s agenda. The cheerleaders are dedicated and disillusioned, committed and uncertain, on all three teams. The teams’ stories play out less like a docudrama and more like a confirmation. Ultimately, I enjoyed the book; Torgovnick was caught up in the excitement of competition, at least with Memphis and SFA, but she spent time on the risks of injury and eating disorders as well as the excitement of doing a big thing right with other people.
Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film: Really interesting look at the uses of music to construct female and male characters. I don’t read music, so many of the details escaped me, but I still learned a lot.
Rob Walker, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are: Walker does the “Consumed” column for the NYT, and he’s a good if not particularly deep observer of modern American consumer culture. He points out that most of our buying energy goes to convincing ourselves that a purchase will reflect who we are (or who we want to be); much signalling performed by buying is a performance for an audience of one. Interesting anecdotes about things like “murketing”—marketing that is hard to distinguish from non-marketing—and the uneasy commercialization of the crafting movement, whose proponents (see, e.g., Etsy) argue that commerce is the only way that crafts can survive, making market participation a sort of anticapitalist movement.
Kate Torgovnick, Cheer! Three Teams on a Quest for College Cheerleading’s Ultimate Prize: I love cheerleading: the teamwork, the synchronicity, the dedication to something that doesn’t get nearly enough respect for the effort required. Torgovnick’s book is a mostly fond look at cheerleaders at three schools, but the title is somewhat misleading: there’s a coed team at Stephen F. Austin, an all-girl team at Memphis, and a coed team at historically black Southern, and they don’t compete against each other. Though in theory Southern could go against SFA, it simply lacks the resources to send its cheerleaders to the main national competitions (though it went to one the year before Torgovnick followed the team). The all-girl teams are underfunded compared to coed teams. This disparity in resources and respect pervasively structures their cheering experiences. At Southern, economic uncertainty and the need to work or a surprise pregnancy can deprive the team of its fighting strength at any moment; they don’t even have a full complement, let alone standbys. On the other teams, there’s a little more breathing room, but not a lot—and academic success doesn’t seem to be high on anyone’s agenda. The cheerleaders are dedicated and disillusioned, committed and uncertain, on all three teams. The teams’ stories play out less like a docudrama and more like a confirmation. Ultimately, I enjoyed the book; Torgovnick was caught up in the excitement of competition, at least with Memphis and SFA, but she spent time on the risks of injury and eating disorders as well as the excitement of doing a big thing right with other people.
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