Greetings!
I’m Michelle, a Miami transplant currently living in New England (a region famous for Del’s Lemonade and winters that freeze off your fingers). Since I was a kid, I’ve loved talking about television and film—I used to scribble down quotes and rewind my favorite moments on VHS tapes. (Sigh, remember those?)
As a teen, I scoured film sites to find out what other people were writing about in the pop culture world. In middle school, I started gravitating toward reviews by feminist critics—they helped pinpoint why, exactly, certain moments in the media left me feeling alienated. They broke down bias in art, offering up clever, funny forms of analysis that tethered me to a wider feminist community. They let me know that I was allowed to react, to feel estranged from what I was watching because of how poorly the female characters were treated, to not like movies and television even if male reviewers labeled them “prestigious.” The film critic greats, Pauline Kael, Emily Nussbaum, Susan Sontag (and many, many more), showed me the ways in which film and television leave cultural imprints, shaping how we understand and engage with the world.
Of course, art isn’t perfect (neither am I!) and that is why these conversations are so important—we don’t always have to follow a perfectly ethical consumption of media. That’s not how art works! Instead, this blog is all about dialogue: What do I appreciate about the media I am watching? What do I love, with every fiber of my being, regardless of questions concerning “quality”? What even is “quality”? And, most entertaining of all, what do I despise?
After receiving an MFA in Documentary Film from Stanford (it almost killed me, but I survived), I’ve realized how important it is to share a space with others who love television, film, and kicking the patriarchy’s ass. I’ll be digging into pop culture, drawing out details and combing through all kinds of stories. Let’s be weird. Let’s ask questions. Let’s talk!
This blog is for all of you pop culture aficionados who want to geek out over film and television with a feminist twist.
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