A friend alerted me to the controversy that has (rightly) erupted in the UK following the airing of a Mars chocolate ad featuring the man who never goes out of style, Mr T. (see the ad, above) If you cut and paste the url below you can read the TMZ story about this brouhaha. http://www.tmz.com/2008/07/29/mr-t-i-pity-the-homophobic-fool/
Since I am equally as juvenile as the advertising creatives that conceived the ad, I could not resist the thought of another reaction to the ad: the "academented" one.
This is so problematic, in so many ways, swishy walk, 1970s aerobic short shorts, a cannon aimed at a backside, the nuts in the chocolate....and SO SUBTLE too, you really need a PhD in Semiotics from Brown to figure out the nuances behind the textual and visual tropes, I am impressed that TMZ parsed the subtext so ably and then explicated it to the un-schooled audience. Is somebody going to give a paper at the MLA about this? "Aiming the Can(n)on: Mr T's Nuts, Subaltern Mimicry and Queer Minstrelsy"
3 comments:
Dear fair and balanced audience of this web log,
Sharing this website's spirit of appalled coverage and repeated display of severe indignation towards PC-insensitive subjects like this homophobic snicker ad, or the recent New Yorker's Obama cover, I am requesting the renaming of this blog.
My reason: The name "Petite Maoïste" is an equally outrageous instant of blatant disrespect to:
- munchkins (not the first offensive post to the short people among us, if I may add (-> anybody care to remember the anti-HRC dwarf video?)
- wearers of size "petite", male and females alike.
- approx. 1.5 billion Asian females (are they really all Maoïstes, as the grossly stereotypical Asian China [sic!] figure suggests?)
- and Maoïstes united all over the planet (are they really all Chinese as the China [sic!] figurine suggests?)
The uncritical appropriation and disfiguring conflation of those signifiers cannot be condoned any longer.
I therefore demand immediate action in form of a sincere apology to all of the above and their supporters.
Alternatively, a tentative commitment to unilaterally disrespectful anti-PC propaganda might do the trick too.
Otherwise you'll stand guilty as charged for the time being!
Sincerely,
Marc
This calls for another CAA or MLA conference paper, where Petite Maoiste dramatically reveals her true identity, thus taking risks with her academented career while eliciting confusion among the attendees as all 3 of her loyal readers are not among them. Petite Maoiste wil then embark on a public admission of guilt using gender and post-colonial theory jargon!
By the way, I am indeed a size Petite.
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