The Orient of Business
So, it’s been about a year since anyone has touched this blog. I was content to let it fester in the murky muck, as perhaps we’re all too busy with more important things and the blog never hit its mark.
That is, until I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Sociological Images, and it struck me how amateur one of the posts is. Don’t get me wrong, most posts are great — but I thought we were ready to move past a post-colonial theory 101 class’s first take on Orientalism. In a series of topical postcards, they present it as though it’s all about exoticizing the foreign, specifically the non-Westerner.
This article actually made the case to me that I would’ve probably taken part in objectifying the Other, rather than showing how insidious the ways consumption and identity work (construction of Self through Other, blah blah blah). If you were living in a relatively closed and industrial society, wouldn’t you be fascinated by something, gasp!, new? People going out to seek that new may have had a hand in producing that novelty, to the detriment of the oppressed and personified Other, but the superior sense of self that came about wasn’t the product. Rather, it was the byproduct — and that’s what makes this so treacherous. So festersome.
All this is to say, that it made me realize that I wanted to focus on venting about the business class that I’m taking (in an attempt to market myself better as a good worker bee).
I’ve censored myself in my business 101 class a few times, unwilling to dig into the essentialist statements, like, for example, “women are more likely to follow an ethics of care while men tend to prefer an ethics of justice.” Do business folk even realize what that means? Why it might mean that? And why is it so judgmental when it talks about arbitrary women who make decisions based on empathy but avoids saying much harmful about men who follow rules blindly, except that their standards are sometimes too rigid? Or does rigid not have the same stigma that arbitrary does?
Should I bring in the Phallus? Rigidly? (Note to self: don’t look up “phallus” while at on a public CPU, even if you’re intending to link to a wiki article about the symbolism within psycho-analytic & feminist theories).
But I hesitate to be too strident in the face of folk who base their findings on studying categories like “white men, ages 16-18″ and “Hispanic single moms, ages 25-32″ without interrogating what these categories mean or how the data relates to the category it is supposed to represent. Taxonomies, rather than systems. I’m there to learn from them for now… I think that this ties back into Orientalism in that it figures one set at normal and that there’s a mixture of identity and product at play.
The study of business, itself, may be one of the last great frontiers.
Chocolatey Racial Political Goodness
I first saw this ad when Julia and I went to see Rachel Getting Married, but that was a good movie that didn’t put me to sleep so I sort of half put it out of my mind. Last night, Calgary and I were on our way to see He’s Just Not That Into You (sold out! at every theater!) and I started talking about this ad. Lo and behold, all of a sudden everything that was wrong with the ad hit me. (What can I say? I am slow) and we got to talking about the racial implications of the ad. You know, like the idea of white women consuming a chocolate man. The complete objectification of him as he breaks pieces of himself off for the hoards of white women who find him irresistible.
Yea. It’s called “Dark Temptation.” There isn’t a single woman of color in the whole ad. A woman bites his ass on a subway. Um, it’s called “Dark Temptation.”
Then, at a 9:50 showing of The International (the only movie still available for viewing in New York City) I got to see the ad again. As soon as it came on the black couple in front of us looked at each other, sort of a little freaked out, and Calgary said “It’s like a minstrel show!”
Seriously. It is.
