let me hear your voice tonight (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai) wrote2013-06-23 10:35 am
alexseanchai) wrote2013-06-23 10:35 am
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100 college things 21: Disney: Gender, Race, Empire week one discussion: readings
From Mouse to Mermaid introduction:
The films and their concomitant "properties" made in this "happy" place are (self-)righteously protected by Disney within the US legal system [...]
Four words. Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
A few more words: I write. Walt Disney doesn't; Walt Disney's dead. I don't know if everyone who worked on "Steamboat Willie" is dead, but given its 1928 date, I think it's possible, maybe likely. So how are any of these people benefiting from "Steamboat Willie" still being in copyright? In what possible way can a dead author benefit from maintaining sole control over the use of her work?
It benefits Disneycorp to keep "Steamboat Willie" in copyright, though. Or at least Disneycorp thinks it does. Which is why Disney has lobbied for and gotten copyright term extensions for it four times. Anyone wanna place a bet on whether there'll be a fifth when 2023 (the current date at which "Steamboat Willie" will become public domain) starts to loom?
I write. I do a lot of writing that's reworking public domain material. Nothing has entered the public domain in the US in years. Nothing will till 2019. This hurts me. But Disneycorp doesn't care about me.
These students consistently cite four easy pardons for their pleasurable participation in Disney film and its apolitical agendas: [...] it's only fantasy, it's only a cartoon [...]
Somebody has not engaged very much with either fantasy as a genre or anime as a medium. I haven't engaged much with anime either, so I can't talk about it beyond saying that like all media, the medium can carry any message the artist pleases, and often the artist pleases to be political. But fantasy? Guess which genre I write in most? Wanna know one of the reasons why? Because it's political.
Disney not only "cleans up" [...] sex/uality [...]
Youtube "Cinderfella" by Todrick Hall sometime.
The Mouse That Roared introduction:
[...] we are losing the ability to recognize, let alone resist, the corporate control of time, space, bodies, and minds. Pixie-dust magic may appeal to the world of fantasy, but it offers no language for defining vital social institutions as a public good, even as it links all dreams to the logic of the market and harnesses the imagination to forces of unfettered consumerism.
That? That sounds like a challenge. All I need now is a couple characters and some plot.
It also sounds like another novel...don't I have enough of those to be going on with?
[...] it is fair to argue that for the first time in human history, centralized, commercially driven conglomerates hold sway over the stories and narratives that shape children's lives.
"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." —Henry Jenkins
The bit about how much of the culture is owned by a handful of companies? Terrifying.
New favorite word: polysemic.
Feminist Film Theory:
Multi-columned PDF that doesn't fit the whole page on my screen and doesn't appear to have a function to copy the text to a document where I can read in single-columned format (or where I can copy-paste quotes, instead of having to flip between tabs to retype quotes). Ugh.
I am automatically leery of anyone who takes Freud seriously. It does not always come down to sex! Really it doesn't!
Know what, I'm just not going to retype quotes from this one. But the bit about it being easier for women to identify with male characters than the reverse? I'm certain that's because men have so many male characters to identify with that they don't need to learn how to identify with characters from another gender, and women have so few female characters to identify with that they DO need to learn that.
Tonight or tomorrow, I need to watch Mickey Mouse Monopoly and Snow White and Feminist Frequency's vlog on the Bechdel test and comment on them. At some point this week I need to decide on a research topic and sign up for a week to present it.
The films and their concomitant "properties" made in this "happy" place are (self-)righteously protected by Disney within the US legal system [...]
Four words. Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
A few more words: I write. Walt Disney doesn't; Walt Disney's dead. I don't know if everyone who worked on "Steamboat Willie" is dead, but given its 1928 date, I think it's possible, maybe likely. So how are any of these people benefiting from "Steamboat Willie" still being in copyright? In what possible way can a dead author benefit from maintaining sole control over the use of her work?
It benefits Disneycorp to keep "Steamboat Willie" in copyright, though. Or at least Disneycorp thinks it does. Which is why Disney has lobbied for and gotten copyright term extensions for it four times. Anyone wanna place a bet on whether there'll be a fifth when 2023 (the current date at which "Steamboat Willie" will become public domain) starts to loom?
I write. I do a lot of writing that's reworking public domain material. Nothing has entered the public domain in the US in years. Nothing will till 2019. This hurts me. But Disneycorp doesn't care about me.
These students consistently cite four easy pardons for their pleasurable participation in Disney film and its apolitical agendas: [...] it's only fantasy, it's only a cartoon [...]
Somebody has not engaged very much with either fantasy as a genre or anime as a medium. I haven't engaged much with anime either, so I can't talk about it beyond saying that like all media, the medium can carry any message the artist pleases, and often the artist pleases to be political. But fantasy? Guess which genre I write in most? Wanna know one of the reasons why? Because it's political.
Disney not only "cleans up" [...] sex/uality [...]
Youtube "Cinderfella" by Todrick Hall sometime.
The Mouse That Roared introduction:
[...] we are losing the ability to recognize, let alone resist, the corporate control of time, space, bodies, and minds. Pixie-dust magic may appeal to the world of fantasy, but it offers no language for defining vital social institutions as a public good, even as it links all dreams to the logic of the market and harnesses the imagination to forces of unfettered consumerism.
That? That sounds like a challenge. All I need now is a couple characters and some plot.
It also sounds like another novel...don't I have enough of those to be going on with?
[...] it is fair to argue that for the first time in human history, centralized, commercially driven conglomerates hold sway over the stories and narratives that shape children's lives.
"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk." —Henry Jenkins
The bit about how much of the culture is owned by a handful of companies? Terrifying.
New favorite word: polysemic.
Feminist Film Theory:
Multi-columned PDF that doesn't fit the whole page on my screen and doesn't appear to have a function to copy the text to a document where I can read in single-columned format (or where I can copy-paste quotes, instead of having to flip between tabs to retype quotes). Ugh.
I am automatically leery of anyone who takes Freud seriously. It does not always come down to sex! Really it doesn't!
Know what, I'm just not going to retype quotes from this one. But the bit about it being easier for women to identify with male characters than the reverse? I'm certain that's because men have so many male characters to identify with that they don't need to learn how to identify with characters from another gender, and women have so few female characters to identify with that they DO need to learn that.
Tonight or tomorrow, I need to watch Mickey Mouse Monopoly and Snow White and Feminist Frequency's vlog on the Bechdel test and comment on them. At some point this week I need to decide on a research topic and sign up for a week to present it.
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(Possibly you have inspired me to go fill some prompts on Disney_kink...)
And on the Jenkins quote, yeah, baby. So's (much of the use of) youtube and similar sites. So is crowdfunding (in some cases). Information wants to be free. So do stories. So do dreams.
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nodnodnod I mean, I'm okay with people owning the stories they create, so they can profit off creating the stories? Within reason, and current copyright law is not reasonable. And bullshit any corporation owning any story. The shareholders had no creative input. The company itself, not being an actual person even if legally it is, had no creative input. But the law says they can, and therefore they do.
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From the introductions, both books sound entirely critical. The article doesn't engage Disney.
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Copyright and patent law as it is right now just sucks. Especially in how corporations are able to leverage everything to their own benefit without having to actually share anything.
And those clauses that let corporations demand that anything developed by an employee is property of the company automatically, without any additional compensation.
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nodnodnod
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Him: I would say it's enjoyable, as long as you're willing to put up with the fact there there is One Girl and her primary role is Love Interest.
Me: I think I'm not, anymore. It's not that there aren't awesome Love Interests and Damsels in Distress. It's just...that's all you're going to give me to identify with? Really? ...I think I'll pass.
Him: I think the comeback is supposed to be "White Straight Male is the cultural default character, and we offered you several of those, so really, you get lots of options to identify with!"
Me: Yeah. And that used be enough a lot more often. Like if I could imagine them kissing, or one of them was William H. Macy...