beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I am a science fiction geek, and I am a cultural studies student, and when these things get together this usually involves words like 'discourses' and being very academic about science fiction. But sometimes it involves being very SF about culture. So, I have a theory:

isms suck, like gravity
therefore orbital mechanics is a good way to conceptualise the interaction of texts and isms

For the purpose of this theory an 'ism' is a big accumulation of ideas.
The ones that tend to bring things to grief are racism, sexism, ablism, classism, and heterosexism.
And probably some other things that don't end with ism, because language isn't convenient like that. But.

There are some signifiers that accumulate other ideas around them in complicated structures. ( Read more... )
Isms might look like these small compact things far away, but they suck so hard they probably pull everything you're saying around even from there. And there's lots of them, so they pull in lots of directions at once. And, because a metaphor is not physics, you can in fact crash into several of them at once.

So, I am studying up on this symbol system I find myself living in, and trying to find the sucky bits, so I can steer around them.

Going 'lalala I shall make a straight line! ...oops' is pretty much how those isms just keep on getting bigger.