Category: Blog

“Duel of the Fates:” J.M.W. Turner and the Storm

J.M.W. Turner’s Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Habor’s Mouth displays a battle between elements: fire and ice. The spiraling, harsh, and violent brushstrokes enclose upon a lone steamboat, struggling to stay afloat. By attacking the canvas and refusing to define his objects, Turner conjures chaos—the imperceptibility of the snow storm. The dominant palette of grays and blues display a bleak landscape, while oozing dire emotions of hopelessness and isolation.

“I Like Trains:” Tracking the Locomotive Through Modern Art

My tracing of the train from the 19th to the 21st centuries interrogates the use of locomotives in art and how they reflect and interact with the historical climates of their artists. Tracking the temporality of the train displays an arc of modernity: from fascination, to struggle, to disdain. If modernity has offered us nothing but violence and environmental degradation, what might the future hold? Will we keep riding its train, hoping to arrive at a different station despite its circuitous tracks, or shall we fly off the rails towards a new, uncertain destination?

“Liberty and Death:” The Danger and Ignorance of the Kansas City COVID-19 Protest

"Liberty and Death" was the first opinion piece I have ever written with the intent of publication. I completed it around Mid-May with the guidance of my instructor, Craig A. Ford Jr., who taught the Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Religion Hybrid Learning Consortium course at The Barstow School. I had aspirations of submitting it to the Kansas City Star, but its publication was quickly overshadowed by the gruesome murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. The outrage that mobilized into international protests declaring that black lives matter provides an interesting contrast to the "white" protests I critiqued, occurring approximately a month earlier. I have seen side-by-side photographs of white citizens demanding "haircuts" and black citizens demanding "to live." I believe the urgency of the protests today demands the risk of COVID-19, for black lives must face the lethal effects of anti-blackness at all times. I believe white students, especially at predominantly white institutions, should mobilize their privilege for creating a better future that is not contingent on black death through both scholarly and grassroots means. Black death saturates our social media and accumulates at the limn of the white consciousness. I believe white students like me must re-frame their encounter with black death from "an isolated, unfortunate phenomenon," to approaching black death as the outcome of a structural violence that constitutes white social life. I have decided to publish "Liberty and Death" because I believe it represents the kind of intersectional anti-racist work and research white students like me should undertake. The analysis I conducted exposes some of the glaring systemic issues in Kansas City that have made COVID-19 so devastating for the city's black residents. For this reason, I think its publication is important.

Terry Evans: the Anti-Futurist

The Martinez Family stands at the receiving end of the masculinizing disruption of mother Earth. The power in Evans’ image comes from its vivid portrait of care, love, and family; not triumph in and of itself. Evans emphasizes seeing and documentation, forcing the audience to reconcile the human impact of industrialization with its economic benefits, whereas Boccioni venerates the insidious process.

Theorizing Domestinormativity in Captain Marvel: Abolition, Motherhood, and Terrorism

I conceptualize domestinormativity as championing traditional monogamous relationships and nuclear families as normalized or preferred over other modes of existence to stratify the acceptability of certain bodies, relationships, or kinships. Captain Marvel does not have a lack of “seats at the table;” it has an issue with domesticizing and diluting its characters instead of activating their potential to represent a wide-variety of groups, especially those who occupy multi-vectored identities. In other words, it can handle a white woman as the lead, but not a black woman playing Captain Marvel. It can handle female co-parenting, but not a queer interracial relationship. It can handle an alien force of foreignness as deserving empathy, but only insofar as it subscribes to heteronormative social formations. In this sense, the domestinormative propagation of misogynoir, anti-queerness, and xenophobia form Captain Marvel rather than give attention to or address these structural violences. As we expose these forms of power as central to the constitution of the film and its message, Larson’s supposed “radical feminism” reveals itself as merely “saying ‘We need diversity’ and then relying on the performativity of this statement to be a force of diversification.”