Revised Final Project Proposal

ALTERNATIVE FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION!

I'm still going to write the equivalent of an eight-page research paper, but it's going on my blog so that I can embed video. I'll compare feminists' hijacking of literature to serve individual interests to a similar pattern in the "It Gets Better" video project started by Dan Savage. In both projects, writing is produced supposedly to support a social movement with a political program and specific goals for that program; ideally, "It Gets Better" videos would be about supporting and comforting gay teenagers, and feminist scholarship would provide feminist activists with the raw material for activism. Instead, Justin Bieber is among the many straight or otherwise relatively disinterested celebrities jumping on a social movement bandwagon to promote himself, and feminist scholarship obsessively analyzes feminists' own lives and makes much of their thought experiments because feminism is an individual-denying culture. Even as feminists criticize others of their generation for being terrified of anonymity and so desperate to distinguish themselves they sign up for The Real World, feminists are depoliticizing their soapbox so they can use it as a pedestal.

I'll embed "It Gets Better" videos into the presentation, and hopefully feminist consciousness-raising videos as well if I can track them down. My analysis will use Brennan's ideas about the transmission of affect and the need for "living attention," the article on rhetorical economies, the article which covered rhetoric as a form of energy, Bitzer's discussion of the rhetorical situation and Vatz's response, and Massumi's qualification of "pleasantness" as a force of intensity, not happiness/sadness. "It Gets Better" videos and consciousness-raising are cathartic and "pleasant" because they evidence a shared trauma and emotional upset, not because they make people happy.