Core Post #4 Alexandria

 In the Sarah Banet-Weiser piece, I think I was kind of confused about the connections between “hip,” “urban” and “post racial.” I guess part of the reason why this threw me off was because I study popular music and in the context of many major music institutions, “urban” is a racially coded way to identify and separate black artists and their music from the pop mainstream. It’s something that has finally been receiving pushback in recent years. But I guess within Banet-Weiser’s context that the urban is used in a different way and that in many of the postfeminist tv examples she’s looking at, an urban setting connotes coolness and flavor, a kind of diversity that is geared towards consumerism as opposed to engagement with race. I wonder how Dora the Explorer would fare if it were introduced into today’s consumer context because she was “pan-Latina,” not rooted in any particular Latin American country or context. Raya and the Last Dragon is currently facing backlash because while it was set in a Southeast Asian context, they cast East Asian voice actors in the main roles. At the same time, it’s getting criticized for flattening the Southeast Asian diversity and vaguely representing it through the five tribes in the film. I wish we had more readings about Latinidad within TV representation, because I know that Latinx audiences have differing relationships to media representations as well.

It’s interesting to consider this piece in relation to Banet-Weiser’s later work on popular feminism in which she argues that pop culture has begun to co-opt feminism, making it a highly circulable, capitalist product, hollowed out of its original meaning. These three essays were helpful in terms of helping me to understand the context of postfeminism that led up to it, and some of the arguments over the overt sexuality of female pop stars that were happening during the time Butler wrote her piece (2013) are still very much in play today. Consider the YouTube comment section beneath Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s recent performance of “WAP” at the Grammys. These arguments and contentions are still being played out in real time.