Everyone's a Critic: On "Media Consumption," the BDS Movement and Learning to Divest
Consumers may not play the biggest role in the climate crisis, but we play a bigger role than we like to think in the cultural arena – and it's time we face up to that fact.
TW: brief mentions of child pornography, incest, rape and pedophilia
On August 6, 2019, Twitter user @makeupbyshaniah made this tweet (pictured above) in response to another user’s appallingly presentist and flat out ignorant comment about how “our generation,” as opposed to past generations, would have rebelled against the institution of enslavement in colonial Britain and America, failing to recognise that 1) enslaved peoples did fight back against their conditions, in whatever small yet vital ways they could, as any basic knowledge of Black American history would tell you, 2) condescending to people’s means of coping with the exigencies of survival while enslaved is not the flex you think it is, and 3) “our generation” – Gen Z, millennials, what have you – does not, in fact, have a premium on being bolder, more progressive, or more “enlightened” than previous generations simply because we are young and alive and have the benefit of hindsight, which we are disinclined to use. The reality should make us embarrassed. As Shaniah rightfully points out, we can’t even boycott Chic-Fil-A, referring to customers’ reluctance to divest, even temporarily, from the provisions of the Georgia-based fast food chain despite its continual funding of anti-LGBT+ organisations, resurfaced in 2019 via an exposure of the company’s tax files.
This is (or should have been) a learning moment. BDS, signifying the three pillars of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality under the country’s continued occupation by settler colonial state Israel (backed by the US government). In 2021, news of the Israeli militia’s forced displacement of families in towns and cities across Palestine, including Silwan and the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, broke on social media, giving rise to an information campaign spearheaded by the El-Kurd siblings. Attention was once again directed to the existence and operations of the BDS movement, est. 2005 and now a global movement, involving A) the boycott of “cultural and academic institutions, and… all Israeli and international companies engaged in violations of Palestinian human rights”; B) structural divestment from “the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid”; and C) sanctions that put pressure on “governments to fulfil their legal obligations to end Israeli apartheid, and not aid or assist its maintenance,” e.g., by ending military trade and free-trade agreements with Israel. The success of this movement has fluctuated, at least within the imperial core/Global North.
I lay out the stipulations in detail because it is important to understand the material, systemic basis of the BDS movement and its aims. Boycotts and divestments are not a new concept to any activist worth their salt or informed proletariat. The history of worker strikes, labour unions, anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle should teach you as much. Even right-wing conservatives know how to boycott something that clashes with their racist, homophobic, and transphobic beliefs; though it’s not really a “boycott” if they’re the only ones doing it out of all the audience / clientele. Liberals and self-proclaimed leftists on the other hand…
A brief exposé: racism and fandom culture
Many people who think of themselves as politically progressive populate fandom circles online. Many Marvel fans, anime fans (of the Hetalia and Attack on Titan variety), Steven Universe fans (of the not-the-target-audience variety), etc., are not inclined to think of themselves as harbouring disreputable, or straight up harmful, views and attitudes. Actions, however, have a way of revealing people’s true colours, no matter the rhetorical manoeuvres.
Many white fans, time and time again, have ignored, neglected and/or denied the racism in much of the media they fawn over, in favour of seeing two (usually white) men behave homoerotically on screen, or to idolise/infantilise an angst-ridden villain or anti-hero, usually a white man. This is, unfortunately, a part of a wider pattern of anti-intellectual audience engagement with media, entertainment and literature in general. A barrage of examples comes to mind: the virulent racism John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran faced during the Star Wars sequels, tied to white women’s fixation on Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey’s (Daisy Ridley) relationship to him, specifically in John Boyega’s case; the resurgence of Twilight in certain circles after Youtuber Lindsey Ellis’ video on it and during its ten-year anniversary in 2018, both of which failed to acknowledge the anti-Native racism in the books regarding Meyer’s portrayal of the Quileute tribe – who issued a response to it in 2009 – because fandom spaces are dominated by white fans; the racism and antisemitism in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books that have always been overlooked by white gentile readers and fans, to say nothing of people’s refusal to let go of the franchise and all its associated mythology after Rowling showed herself to be a TERF and is actively influencing transphobic and transmisogynistic policy; non-Black people’s refusal to criticise, let alone cease engaging with, a show like Our Flag Means Death for its woobification of slavers (a la Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton); the list goes on. This manner of reception is mundane, and doesn’t even begin to go into how escapism is a privilege, actually a prerogative, for those who can, by default, afford to turn off their brains and just “enjoy” something without worrying about the ramifications (an essay for another time).
Forget about boycotting Chic-Fil-A, y’all can’t even do the non-action, the bare minimum, of not watching a show that is harmful or negatively reinforcing in its depictions of marginalised and already misunderstood demographics and social issues (e.g., 13 Reasons Why, Euphoria, Split, Beastars, A Little Life, see above), of not spending money to go see another Marvel movie or action flick that doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it’s sponsored by the US military (see: the Top Gun movies), of not still insuring the legitimacy of the works of bigoted creators and morally bankrupt corporations because you cannot conceive of a personality, hobby or life outside of media consumption.
As Stitch writes in Teen Vogue, “All experiences of escapism are not created equally.” When a site that hosts child pornography, incest and rape fic, pedophilia and raceplay kink like Archive of Our Own (or Tumblr, for that matter) gets to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations every year, while new and emerging authors continue to struggle to make a living off writing and literary fiction experiences a general devaluation, even the slightest capitulation, or incidental defiance, becomes an avenue of political contest.
Interlude: definitions and history
Boycott, verb: a) withdrawal from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest; b) an act of nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organization, or country as an expression of protest.
Divest, verb: deprive someone of (power, rights, or possessions); rid oneself of (a business interest or investment).
On March 24, 1987, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) held a demonstration on Broadway and Wall Street to protest government and corporate inaction regarding the AIDS crisis:
The motto for ACT UP was “Silence = Death.”
The above vignette illustrates how boycotts and divestments have historically been an integral part of protest movements and political activism. From peasant revolts to civil rights, the most effective way of disrupting the course of the racial capitalist project was via strikes and boycotts. Protest inherently entails divestment. The recent formation of the Amazon Labour Union is another example of this. What has this, then, got to do with streaming Disney+ and going to the movies?
In 2020, Jake Gyllenhaal revealed in a cover story for Another Man magazine that Heath Ledger, his co-star in the 2005 Ang Lee movie Brokeback Mountain, refused to present during the 2007 Oscars telecast because the opening monologue would require him to make a joke about the “gay cowboy movie” both actors had been nominated for. While Gyllenhaal took the facetiousness in stride, Ledger declined attending the Oscars on the principle that BM should be taken seriously as a romantic drama.
This was, in effect, an act of divestment, a one-man boycott of the Oscars. And all because Ledger would not tolerate light mockery of his movie, when everyone else would probably have had no qualms laughing along and then promptly forgetting all about it. It’s all in good fun, right? It’s just a joke, after all. Par for the course for the Oscars, for any public platform. No matter that homophobia is mundane, upheld each day by jokes and taunts that chip away at one’s humanity, one’s right to dignity; no matter that homophobia, just like all other disenfranchisements, lies at the intersection of language and violence; no matter that the Oscars is a (white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal) institution with the power and authority to legitimise (often unduly), and write off, artistic works and labour. You should just take it and go.
A writer on Medium accurately points out:
Politics is the realm of public life in which we all compete and cooperate for resources, rights, responsibilities, and ideals. It is the collective social process of formulating, advocating for, and constructing a vision of society which meets the needs and desires of those within it. We all participate in politics, each and every day. Every argument and discussion, every purchase and donation, every contract signed and agreement made, and every act of public kindness or cruelty is a political act. (my emphasis)
The BDS movement calls for institutions and organisations to take action against Israel’s state violence, but the spirit of protest takes the above understanding of politics for granted. So-called second-wave feminism, for all its discontents, taught us that the personal is political. What you do, think and feel in private does not exist in a vacuum; no amount of denial or pretension is going to change that fact.
Bootlicking: capitalism and learned helplessness
It is a common refrain that the individual lacks true power in a capitalist society. Yet capitalism is built on the myth of the atomised, productive individual, the worker who pulls himself up by his bootstraps and doesn’t complain, doesn’t defy or disobey, doesn’t withhold his labour, his time, his energy. For it’s not enough to separate culture from politics; people have to be tired enough from the workday, from the bombardment of news and headlines, from the constant talking heads of “politics,” to actively detest any association of leisure or entertainment – at least for the rich, non-disabled and middle class – with social and political agendas. The SJWs, the feminazis, the loud POCs, particularly Black, Indigenous and brown people, who can’t stop politicising (derogatory) everything because media and entertainment apparently have nothing to do with cultural ideas, social attitudes, political sentiments and personal values. Who gets to “escape” into fandom, into the anodyne space of fan subcultures shielded from the realities of everyday life that don’t actually affect you to a degree that justifies your claim on comfort? Certainly not people who lack the luxury of laughing at the joke, of taking slights on one or another’s humanity in stride. Not even people who simply wish for something different, who demand better, who ask for more.
Beloved science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote:
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.
In other words, imaginative literature has the responsibility of protest. It has the responsibility of resistance. This is not a new or fanciful idea – art has always been inextricable from power and politics, whether people admitted to it or not. The only difference is the level of willingness to accept that fact, that the same structural forces that shape the grit of our personal lives also shape the art we make, the media we consume, our conduct with these ostensibly private matters (ironic, by the way, considering we go on social media precisely to share these private enjoyments).
Media consumption is not activism, nor is critical engagement with said media activism, in the strict sense of the term. But just because you can’t physically campaign for social and political change doesn’t mean you can’t do anything tangible to contribute to the aims of grassroots organising, or consciousness raising. As mentioned before, protest is both an ethos and a practice. There are many ways to exercise the values of social justice, not just through boycotts and other tactics of undermining capital (e.g., looting), though they are often the most direct method. That is why activism stresses the power of the collective – and boycotts (and street protests) demonstrate this perfectly. If enough people decide to divest from something, to take action against something, to put their foot down about something, change can be made, even if it is gradual and ambivalent. Freedom is a constant struggle, as prison abolitionist Angela Davis stressed. It has to be kneaded like dough, watered like a plant and taken care of by each one of us, not left to other people – usually those already expected to perform these types of labour and bear the burden of advocacy – to fight for and protect while the rest of us sit tight.
It’s a cliché (oft-repeated but rarely embodied or reckoned with), but Uncle Ben was right when he told Peter Parker, in a word of paternal counsel to his adoptive son, that “With great power comes great responsibility.” (Coincidentally (or maybe not?), Spider-Man as a character is coded as Jewish in the original comics, and is considered a putative “everyman” superhero.) We none of us has power as individuals, which is precisely why when it comes to the intimate arena of our favourite movies, TV shows and books, we have to see it, too, as a commons, as a territory of protest. It is a way of reclaiming power as individuals when we are deprived of it elsewhere.
Conclusion: joy and criticality
An anonymous asker on Tumblr once told me (re: Jojo Rabbit and Our Flag Means Death, believe it or not – Taika Waititi’s work), very generously, that argumentation is “like a love language” for (some) Jewish people, and it is in this spirit that I write, and want to end on.
Criticism has acquired an inherently negative connotation in contemporary culture, but its original/root meaning is actually more neutral. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as such (by order of primacy):
The art or practice of analysing, evaluating, and commenting on the qualities and character of something, esp. literary texts or other creative works, or (later more generally) restaurants, wine, food, etc.; the work of a critic.
A piece of writing or other review in which a text, creative work, subject, etc., is analysed or evaluated; a critical essay or article; a critique.
The passing of judgement on a person or thing; esp. the expression of a harsh or unfavourable opinion of a person or thing; fault-finding, censure.
An act or instance of criticizing. Also: a critical remark or comment.
In other words, criticism is democratic. Everyone is, and can be, a critic. This would be a good thing if we didn’t associate critique so irrevocably with censure, and if much criticism didn’t reproduce prejudices and systemic violences, e.g., as a form of erasure and silencing. But for many multiply marginalised people, criticism is not a luxury – it is often the way of engagement. In fact, based on the first and second definitions provided by the OED, criticism is actually the modus operandi of the arts and humanities, including journalism. So why all the pearl-clutching? If you cannot separate your personal feelings about a piece of media from the reality of its harm – or its benefit, for that matter, and the balance between the two – whether social or psychological, that is a failure of imagination. And that is on you.
To love is to see something for what it is, and accept it anyway, so that it can grow into the space demanded of it. Acceptance does not equal exoneration; it means, simply, that understanding is necessary for transformation. To debate a proposition, you have to accept its premise, at least temporarily. To argue effectively, you have to understand what, or who, you’re arguing against. To love something truly, which so many people seem to claim to do, is to accept the thing’s fallibility. Love is not about escape, love is not ignorant. It is a language of protest, of critical engagement, a mode of joy and grievance coexisting.