It’s no secret that tumblr has a hyper-active social justice community that does a wonderful (but also incredibly problematic) job of raising social awareness for issues like transgender rights, disability activism, intersectional feminism, and much more. The issue, however, is that many of the people on these blogs are working with academic linguistics that they aren’t exactly well versed in. The result is a sort of super-flattened pseudo-academic landscape (in which important desconstructionist concepts are thrown around lackadaisically) that manages to take ridiculously complex theories and reduce them into sound-bytes about privilege and appropriation. Gawker has already covered the ways that this can actually harm sub-altern communities (like when otherkin, or people who believe that they have the souls of magical creatures trapped in their bodies, claim to be just as or more persecuted than transgender people). What this has resulted in (and it has trickled down from tumblr) is a digital culture in which all media products are scrutinized to a ridiculous degree, and everything comes under attack as racist, homophobic, culturally appropriative, misogynistic, and so forth. Absent, it seems, is the ability of these amateur cultural critics to ambiguously consume media: they appear to lack the ability to understand that any piece of media can contain things that are worthy of both celebration and critique. On top of this, there is to be a distinct allure of being the most critical of any and all cultural products, described by writer Tom Blunt (full disclosure: Tom is a friend of mine) as “a sort of cultural cache to being the first one to register offense and/or dismay, especially when it comes to touchy subjects like gender, sexuality, and violence.”
Enter Tyler Coates, a writer for flavorwire.com, and self-made enfant terrible of gay culture writers. In the past months Coates has published a flurry of articles, taking seemingly contrarian stances about a handful of gay (non-)issues in a distinctly curmudgeonly manner. These humorless tirades use the same kind of college-level short essay format to, supposedly, tear down certain homo-normative aspects of culture. What Coates thinks he is doing is reading deeply into a certain kind of simplicity and acceptance of offensive, infantilizing, and phobic cultural products. The amount of vitriol that he spills certainly makes me think that this may all be a calculated performance to garner page-views, but I’ve read enough Baudrillard to know that there isn’t anything un-simulated, so that point is pretty much moot.
For example, Coates’ article on the culturally appropriative qualities of RuPaul’sDrag Race (which he accuses of stealing Harlem Ball culture, while simultaneously ignoring the thousands of other queer referents from which Drag Race draws upon) employs a sort of bell hooks-ian cultural logic while simultaneously ignoring important concepts of post-modern media like camp sensibilities, Kristeva-ian intertextuality, concepts of homage, parody, pastiche, Lyotardian notions of the death of the meta-narrative, Hebdige’s critique of sub-culture, or Barthesian ideas of the image repertoire. While it would obviously be impossible to tackle the complexities of our late-capitalist media landscape in a short blog post about drag queens, the idea that the cross-cultural politics of a show as narratologically and culturally complex as Drag Race can be characterized by the ubiquitous tumblr ideology that “Rich White People Steal From Poor Black People” is absurd. (That is not to say that Rich White People don’t steal from Poor Black People, it happens all the time, but it’s usually very complicated and can’t be understood by this maxim alone.) This does both the show and the academic concepts with which Coates toys a severe disservice.
What is frustrating specifically about Coates is his willingness to speak simultaneously for, against, on the behalf of, and contrary to gay culture. While I certainly relate to a resistance to the tenacious acceptance of homo-normativity (I refuse to see pretty much anything on Broadway and I’ve never made it through an episode of Glee), the intention of many of these articles seems bordering on maliciously divisive and spiteful. Time after time, Coates’ condescending appraisals of cultural touchstones miss the mark. In a recent article about a New Yorker cover, which depicted Bert and Ernie snuggling on a couch while watching the news about DOMA, Coates uses the word “infantilizing,” as if proud of himself for using a word that is more than quadrisyllabic. In this particular article, Coates glosses over the complexity of queer identities and identifications to make, essentially, a personal claim on behalf of the gay community he thinks he speaks for. In a different article he attacks the Geeks OUT boycott campaign of Enders Game while surreptitiously making factually incorrect statements about the author of the novel and refusing to elaborate on a more effective activist strategy. In an even more recent article he attacks a viral video of Dustin Hoffman crying while talking about his experiences filming Tootsie. Coates claims that social media users are too-readily celebrating a cis-gendered male becoming aware of sexism, as if he comes from a place of sociological authority to condemn such celebrations.
At one point, Coates suggested on his Twitter account that people were criticizing him for reading too much into the trivialities of gay media. My criticism is that he isn’t reading deeply enough.
The problem with these kinds of social awareness types, who think that they can spot the subtle injustices of everyday social media banalities and the communities that support these evaluations, is that they give a voice to disingenuous and overly simplistic cultural criticism, and then allow us to rest once we feel superior to the cultural products that we consume. Without a more nuanced understanding of artistic and anthropological products to back them, these criticisms (Coates’ articles specifically are consistently re-tumbled enthusiastically by thousands of users) perpetuate a prevalent and juvenile negativity about our increasingly interesting media-saturated world.