Kontextmaschine

18th December 2013

Post with 4 notes

It’s no coincidence that Macklemore and the Penny Arcade guys are both products of the Pacific Northwest.

The settler tradition here comes from a “free labor” school that held that slavery was repugnant and could best be warded through the conscious exclusion of blacks. Remaining a resource extractive economy to the 1990s if not present, it avoided the Great Migration and thus the black civil rights movement, which was then unavailable as an idiom for later identity struggles. Minorities - racial, sexual, social, were integrated through sufferance and assimilation rather than challenge.

Do you know how disorienting it is to move to a city where you hear women telling more rape jokes than men?

Riot grrl yes but what that challenged was women, to be more assertive. There’s a beloved nonprofit summer camp here that teaches girls to play rock, one of their PR appeals was a riot grrl veteran talking about girl power and a guy rocker talking about how hot he found chick rockers. Riot grrl’s most famous veteran does a PNW-themed show with America’s most famous blackface performer recurring skits of which are “hey aren’t second-wave feminists silly” and “isn’t it ridiculous that we’re both in drag and negotiating sexual boundaries”