AliceFraser
patreon
New Podcast Ep and Experts in The Middle East
🕑 Added 2016-10-04 04:53:43 +0000 UTC Hey all, I've edited and popped a New Teacast up! In it, you'll hear me talking with the excellent photographer and inventor of Improv/Comedy formats Troy Conrad at the LA Podcast Festival.We blithered about how insults are contextual (no really?) why everyone should be able to use hate terms (irony!???), how to create the environment to cultivate creative brain sparks & which insults are cross cultural and why.
It was a fun chat. Lemme know if you like it.
---
Today's thoughts:
It's sort of stressful wondering how hard you should plug yourself online, and in what contexts, or if you should just relax and see if the audience comes to you (secret marketing tip, they don't). Also, applications are due for next year's festivals already, so I'm thinking about the new show while still working on the old show. The circle of life, maybe.
I was talking over breakfast today about a friend of a friend who is an expert in a particular form of religious financing in the Middle East, specifically in [specific area]. (keeping details out of this for the sake of anonymity) I use the word expert advisedly. He has lived for long periods in the place he's studying, and has just finished his PHD from [very very top university] in the particular nuances of that particular thing in that particular place. So he knows a lot and has thought a lot about it. He's suffering a severe attack of the cynicism at the moment, because he's regularly having his opinion on this very particular issue dismissed in conversations, within academia and in his social life, because he is characterised by his interlocutors as a straight white elitist man who can't possibly understand the reality of the situation.
Which is fair enough. He is an elite, but the thing he's elite in is understanding this particular issue. The privilege he has afforded him the time to think about one single tiny thing more than almost anyone else in the world. But the nature of that privilege has almost disqualified him from swinging the weight of his opinions in the colloquial wrestle against establishment tyranny.
It's an interesting dilemma, and an almost insoluble one.
Makes me ask myself:
I mean, I'm very pleased with the movement towards equality that has started to redress a lot of the power imbalances that were established throughout a world history shaped by physical dominance and technological violence.
But do we think that straight white men are in charge of the world because of an accident of fate that put them on the top of the heap, and they've just been defending their turf with privilege since? Or is it that we think straight white man-ness imbues its possessors with special qualities that make it impossible for them to be anything other than blind tyrants, incapable of looking past the privileges they have to understand the reality of the world? Do we think straight white men have special characteristics (racial/gendered traits) or not?
I don't know what I think about this - because one day I'm on one side of the argument, and on the next day I'm on the other side of the argument, which is a big sign to me that I need to do a bit more thinking about the whoooole thing!
Chiz!
Alice
Comments
Dean has put it more eloquently than I can. I don't think "white men" have any especial qualities apart from being (the majority) on top of the heap. And the confidence that goes with that I suppose. Get more diverse people and you'll get the "That can be me too" factor.
Dean
I'm a straight, white male and I find myself increasingly being told that I'm a straight, white male in much the same way that dog shit smells awful. I can forsee that it won't be too long before I'm told to shut up in much the same way that women have been told to shut up. In fact, it's already happening...
