The Further Adventures of Ron in Skanky and Slaggy Amazon Land

Every so often one is reminded of just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. One of the things that I used to like about Amazon was that it was, to some extent, global and that it offered services around the world. One could, for example, compare and contrast the cost of product at Amazon, Amazon.CA, Amazon.UK, and Amazon.De and buy product from one and all.

Given how greedy mammon worshipping Amazon is, however, they eventually realised that customers were engaging in comparison shopping, and they recently made it either impossible or prohibitively expensive by increasing postage, to order items from Amazon beyond ones constructed Amazon "shores". They made it impossible for me to buy,  because they won't ship it to the US, for example, the thirteenth season of Heartland from Amazon.CA at a cheaper price than for what it or its marketplace flunkies and sycophants sell it at Amazon or for me to buy less expensive Doctor Whos from England (I have an all region DVD and blu ray player) because of the cost of postage. Additionally, and this says volume about this gilded corporation, Amazon established its Amazon Global service to sell items one used to be able to buy at a more reasonable cost from Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK. 

Interestingly, since I can no longer buy product sold by Amazon.CA or from Amazon.UK I decided to cancel my Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK accounts. Not surprisingly, however, I can't. Amazon may not allow one to buy globally but they have a global (and increasingly mediocre) digital information system so if I want to cancel Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK I must also cancel my Amazon account. That I can't cancel my Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK accounts, neither of which I use anymore because of the reasons cited above, shows just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. Skankyness and slaginess, in other words, are in Amazon's cultural DNA. I think it is time once again to contact the office of the Attorney General of New York State.

Further Musings on Political Correctness and Cancel Culture

It is remarkable, though not surprising, how easy it is for demagogues to manipulate the masses and even the chattering class of right-wing intellectuals these days. The reasons for this are not hard to discern. Both are largely historically illiterate, and both prefer what "history" they do know to be largely of the mythic and political, and I would add ideological, correct variety and ahistorical. 

In reality, of course, and contrary to those who have contracted ideologically based historical amnesia, both political and ideological correctness and cancel culture have long histories stretching back centuries.  For example, Alkibiades and his circle's supposed desecration of the statues of Hermes in Athens in the fifth century BCE was an act of what we would today call political incorrectness though others might call it a lack of patriotism, an act of vandalism, or an act of heresy, whether he and they actually "desecrated" the statues or not. The Spanish Inquisition and other inquisitions like it before and after aimed at Christian "heretics" and Jews was an act of political and ideological correctness and cancel culture, sometimes very deadly cancel culture. The deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman by the United States government in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The banning of the Communist Party in the United States during the Cold War was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The blacklisting of hundreds in the United States during the Cold War, such as scholars like Moses Finley, was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. 

What is, of course, remarkable, is that the historically illiterate and those whose minds have been colonised by right wing historical myths, manichean fantasies, and negations think and argue, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, that political and ideological correctness, is novel and that it is the product of a liberal or left-wing conspiracy to take over American educational institutions, America itself, and the world. I recently, for example, saw a comment from someone who attributed the fact that Timothy Hutton wasn't in the recent iteration of the TV show Leverage, Leverage: Redemption on IMDb TV, to liberal and left wing cancel culture. Needless to say, such an "argument", if I can call it that, has to ignore the fact that the accusations against Hutton, as I discovered very quickly during a search online, have been corroborated by someone who knew the person who was allegedly raped, and was told by that person that she had been raped at the time. It also ignores the reality that in the world of consumer capitalism corporations, like those that produce media product, these corporations are constantly conscious of their brand and, in a world where public relations is a fact of corporate (including educational corporations) and increasingly everyday life, of their reputation and that having someone with accusations of rape hanging over him star in a television show might not be good for their brand or for viewership numbers and hence the possible financial gains that come from commercials that run during each episode of the show and on which the show depends for its continuation. What, in sum, the nattering nabobs of the right don't see, in other words, is the mote in their own eye, their political correctness, which they fetishise or transcendentalise, their own involvement in cancel culture both past and present, and empirical reality. All of those, of course, are impressive examples of how ideology creates a rather perverted "reality".

The Books of My Life: The Soul of the American University

Humans are, as well as being economic, political, geographic, and biological animals, cultural and meaning giving animals as George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) makes abundantly clear. Marsden's book, which places cultural history at its centre, explores how American colleges, once dominated by sectarian Protestant groups like the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, became, by the twentieth century, universities where "secularism" (or better the sacralisation of certain meanings) rather than Protestantism became the established "faith". 

Marsden argues that the seeds of secular establishment and Protestant disestablishment lay in evangelical Protestantism, the form of Protestantism that dominated American colleges, itself. As evangelicalism confronted the children of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment such as evolutionary Darwinism and evolutionary and historically oriented "higher" biblical criticism, evangelicalism split into the more "traditionalist", at least in self perception, conservative evangelicalism and moderate and liberal and even socialistic evangelicalism. This more moderate and liberal evangelicalism, claims Marsden, created a brand of Protestantism that adapted to and adopted Darwinism, adapted to and adopted "higher" biblical criticism, and tied mission to ethical and moral development and advocacy activism. Over time, the Protestant character of all of these was demagicified or secularised creating the modern university, a modern university shorn of its once dominant WASP Protestant heritage.

Though Marsden seems to place most of the blame for university "secularisation" on science and pragmatism and on academics, reality is a bit more complicated than that as Marsden seems to sometimes realise. Faculty did, as Marsden notes, come to place free speech and free inquiry (autonomy) at the heart of the faculty enterprise. It is not the faculty, however, who ran or who run American universities. As Thorstein Veblen noted in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 it is capitalist economic interests with their practical need for trained workers and for technocrats who, through university Boards and university administrators, really control and run America's universities. Today, the dominance of universities by economic interests and their fellow travellers who fetishise a particular economic ideology that has been dehistoricised and who worship the holy trinity of Mammon, Greed, and Managerial Professionalism, has provided American universities with a corporate model of governance, a corporate model of corporate planning (the planning is our plan mentality), and a corporate retail model of education where the customer, those consumers universities are trying to attract and maintain, students, are almost always right.

Beyond empirical issues there are problems associated with the normative aspects of Marsden's book. In the concluding chapter to The Soul of the American University, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", Marsden goes all normative on us calling for and advocating a return of religion, and particularly Christianity, to the ivy covered groves of academe. Using postmodernism in the same way Mormon intellectuals do, Marsden takes a postmodernist approach arguing that if tolerance and diversity are truly central to the academic and intellectual enterprise religion too should be tolerated in a university environment that preaches the gospel of diversity.

There are, of course, several problems with such an argument. In an age where the Bircher/Dixiecrat anti-intellectual and inquisitional variety of Protestantism in both its religious and "secular" form has taken over the Republican Party should universities, with their emphasis on facts and valid approaches to empirical facts (economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic methods and strategies), allow such hate filled paranoid and conspiracy driven perversions of reality to enter the academic playing field? Should those intolerant of any views other than their own and who have made demonic inquisition central to their ideologies and practises be allowed into the halls of academe? Marsden implies they shouldn't arguing instead for the creation of Habermasian like boards of experts who adjudicate what varieties of religion are acceptable on college campuses along with the need for religious groups themselves to agree to certain broad rules of the academic game. Marsden, in other words, accepts that universities should and must have standards and those that violate such standards should not gain admission into university halls. Moreover, as Marsden notes, religious organisations are already present on university campuses. University campuses are full of religious oriented groups that students can join and find community and friendship at if they so wish (see, for example, Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield, Religion on Campus, 2001). I, for instance, used to go to Hillel periodically when I was a student though less for religious reasons than for community and friendship. If students are not availing themselves of such opportunities is that the fault of "secular" universities or, for example, the fact that many of these religious groups are intolerant of and inquisitorial towards a number of empirically grounded political, economic, and cultural ideologies? Finally, one can and should question whether corporations, like universities, are "persons" with souls.

Now don't get me wrong, I quite like the structure of the University of Toronto, where I was admitted, with its three postgraduate theological colleges and its three religious based federated religious colleges that are part of the public University of Toronto (Canada has taken a different approach to the separation of religion and state than the US). I wouldn't mind if this structure was replicated in the United States and Marsden notes that there were attempts to replicate the Canadian model in the US and that they had limited long term success. It must be remembered, however, that the history of English Canada is different from that of the US and this is one reason religious colleges are affiliated with or federated with public and private universities in Canada. It also must be remembered that a "secular" curriculum is at the core of the federated colleges at the UofT--and should also be if the Canadian system is copied in the US, on the primary, secondary, or higher education level--and that, as D.S. Masters noted in his book on Protestant church colleges in Canada, such federation and affiliation played a major role in "secularising" church colleges in Canada. In Marsden's terms, I suppose, this brings us back to square one once again where we don't seem to be able to pass go. It brings us back to square one for when change occurs, as it, historically speaking, always does, religion adapts to this change and adopts aspects of these changes as both the history of Protestant liberalism and Protestant reactionism well show.

Musings on China as Evil Other...

It is always intellectually fascinating to see that while things change much, simultaneously, remains the same. Take anti-communism, great power struggles, and nationalism, for instance. China, for instance, may be communist, if perhaps in rhetoric only, and the paranoid conspiracy theories of demagogues may continue to scare the masses by making threats of commie conspiracies dance in their socialised heats, in reality, however, China is predominately nationalist and bureaucratic, much like any other traditional, modern and postmodern nation the world has seen up to this point. China is, in other words, nationalist. It thinks of itself as a great nation and, given its economic, political, miilitary, cultural, demographic, and geographic power, it acts much like any of the great powers of the past and the present, particularly the nationalist great powers of the recent past, who were also stimulated by ethnocentrism in its traditional and modern nationalistic forms. Now this is not to say that nationalist entities aren't dangerous and that they don't engage in what some would call, to take one example, human rights abuses. Like the great powers of the past, including the great powers of Western Europe and the great power the United States, this mixture of ethnocentrism and economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic power can be and often is toxic and deadly to "dissident" others within and "inferior" others without. It simply means that some -isms, such as communism, socialism, and liberalism, often function as emotional identity markers of an us superior identity community and as sources of amnesia for the multitude of sins, including human rights abuses committed by the nation-state to which they believe they belong and with which they identify.

The Books of My Life: The Lord's University

Once I learned what BYU was like when I arrived in Provo, Utah as a doctoral student in sociology in the early 1990s I soon realised that I, an agnostic if not atheistic non-Jewish Jew with Quakery and Anabaptisty social ethical leanings, was not BYU material. Don't get me wrong, I liked aspects of my life at BYU and in Provo. I took some interesting courses, particularly on Mormonism, in the Sociology, History (Marvin Hill), and the Church History (Donald Cannon) Departments at the Y. I made some great friends who I talked with a lot about American religious history and Mormonism. I taught Social Stratification and had some wonderful and very interesting students. I attended many of the films the Humanities College showed via their wonderful International Cinema programme, films, by the way, which were, in my opinion, unfortunately sometimes censored. And perhaps most enjoyably I worked for several years at Walt West Books near Deseret Industries in Provo owned and run by the amazing Walt West.

During my years at BYU, I got into or almost got into cold and hot water on several occasions. I showed, at the suggestion of one of my students, the R rated film Raising Arizona in my Social Stratification class in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. I had members of VOICE, the BYU feminist campus club, come to my class and talk about their personal experiences of inequality and inequity in Mormon culture. I attended the VOICE men can't walk on campus alone protest and supported it. I acted as liaison with the Sociology Club and when the club wanted to bring gay Mormon parents who were sympathetic to gays to campus I worked with Larry Young and David Knowlton to make it happen. Larry was magnificent at the forum. I was turned into the chair of the Sociology Department for bringing a copy of the Tanner's book on changes in the Mormon temple endowment ritual to campus. I went up to the Tanner's Utah Lighthouse Ministry in Salt Lake with John and Rob. I went down to Quaker weekend during the Easter season to protest nuclear weapons testing in Las Vegas and Mercury, Nevada with Larry, Melanie, Rob, and Denise and afterwards, along with Larry, Melanie, Rob, and Denise, helped found the Mormon Peace Gathering, a Mormon group that went down to Las Vegas and Mercury to witness against nuclear weapons testing during the Easter season the next year. I visited a Mormon fundamentalist community down from the bench between Salt Lake Valley and Utah Valley. I drank 3.2 beer and beer beer, which I bought at the exorbitant price of eight bucks a six pack at the state liquor store in Provo. I frequented a coffee house on the border between Provo and Orem. I let my hair grow. I wore too short shorts. I walked during the playing of the US national hymn on campus. I whinged about the paternalistic and patriarchal attitudes of the general authorities in Salt Lake and Provo and especially about their rhetoric about gays and women. I opined against the firings of Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr in the Utah County Journal (though they got my first name wrong) and the Student Review and argued that BYU needed once and for all to make a decision as to whether it wanted to be a seminary or Notre Dame. I engaged in ethnographic experiments which I probably shouldn't have. I was, in other words, a naughty boy, a sometimes very naughty boy. But then I was and am a Gentile. Needless to say, I left BYU behind somewhere around 1993 or 1994 though I didn't leave Mormon Studies behind. 

The Lord's University: Freedom and Authority at BYU (Salt Lake: Signature, 1998) by Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel is a history of the BYU I knew and the BYU and Mormon history that I lived through. Waterman and Kagel cover the history of BYU from where Gary Bergera's and Ronald Priddis's history of BYU, Brigham Young University: A House of Faith (Salt Lake: Signature, 1985), leaves off, from the 1980s to the end of the 1990s. Waterman and Kagel explore the BYU right wing Bircher fellow traveller, paranoia ridden, conspiracy theory ridden, and apocalyptic ridden Ernest Wilkinson, who was president of the Y as it "modernised" between 1951 and 1971, built. Waterman and Kagel explore Wilkinson's battle for dress and grooming standards, Wilkinson's surveillance of "liberal" and "left wing" faculty, Wilkinson's strategy to put some student-controlled practises, such as the honour code, and publications, like BYU's "student" newspaper the Daily Universe, under greater administrative and faculty control. Waterman and Kagel also explore the periodic purges of politically, economically, and culturally incorrect BYU faculty, BYU administrative oral policies, and the attempts of the BYU administration to clarify freedom of speech at the university, a university that, on the one hand, was a little bit Bob Jones and, on the other, a little bit Notre Dame, after Wilkinson retired.

Waterman's and Kagel's excellent, well researched, and very readable history of BYU in the 1980s and 1990s argues that the BYU that emerged in the wake of World War II was the product of a re-emerging American conservatism, the impact of intellectual American conservativism with its condemnation of communism, socialism, the counterculture, feminism, and gay and lesbian activism in Mormon culture and among Mormon political elites (e.g., J. Reuben Clark, Ernest Wilkinson, Boyd Packer, Merrill Bateman), and the culture war that emerged between these conservatives, neo-conservatives, and right wingers and "modernist" "secular" liberals.

Waterman and Kagel are certainly correct when they argue that the post-World War II culture war had an immense impact on Mormons and Mormonism. However, they don't, I would argue, take this culture war back far enough. Mormon and some Mormon elite were impacted earlier by culture wars over anti-evolution, which Waterman and Kagel do mention, over modern biblical criticism, over the New Deal, something which, in the long run, merged Dixiecrat states rights rhetoric, laissez rhetoric, and Bircher anti-communist rhetoric and which took over the Republican Party in the wake of Richard Nixon's George Wallace like Southern strategy and which also impacted Mormon culture in ways similar yet different to how they impacted American White right wing Protestant culture throughout the twentieth century and which increasingly tied them to White Protestant right wing evangelicalism and fundamentalism and right wing and conservative Catholicism in the late twentieth century. Local factors like the Mormon doctrines of continuing revelation and living prophets, doctrines which make Mormonism inherently authoritarian, the Mormon Correlation programme, which brought with it greater conformity in the Mormon community, Mormon patriarchalism, and Mormon paternalism also wove and threaded their way through these various battles in the twentieth century culture wars from evolution to Bolshevism to feminism.

I know there are some, including many Mormon elites and Reformed Christian historian George Marsden, who want to make BYU the hero and victim of a culture war on religious universities in postmodern America. However, by ignoring the way Mormon authoritarianism, inquisition, and a right wing and conservative political, economic, and cultural or ideological correctness, an economic and political correctness grounded in an ideology of revelation that polemicises for modern liberal laissez-faire capitalism and right wing and conservative politics and intolerantly makes these central for a Christianity that is, historically speaking, pre-modern, they seem to miss what BYU is really, empirically, like. What BYU is really, empirically, like, is that it is a place where academic freedom is limited and undermined by an authoritarian ideology of revelatory authority and power. For this reason alone one can readily raise questions about the continuing re-authorisation of the accreditation of BYU by the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges and about whether BYU's continuing and, ironically, worldy attempt to bring a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to campus, should succeed. There are certainly students at the Y who are worthy of membership in Phi Betta Kappa. I am not sure the university is worthy of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, however.
 

Books of My Life: Buffy Goes Dark

 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I became a fan of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its fifth and final year on the WB. I was unable to follow Buffy to UPN in its sixth and seventh seasons, however, the seasons that the writers of Buffy have described as centred and focused on "oh grow up", in the case of season six, and "back to the beginning", in the case of season seven. I wasn't, as a result, able to see Buffy resurrected in season six, all the Scoobies, including Buffy, Willow, Xander, Anya, and Spike, struggle in a world which Buffy thought might be hell, or the extended Scooby gang struggle against and finally triumph against the First Evil, until I got the DVD's and was able to watch seasons six and seven in reruns. Like many others I noticed that tone wise there was something different about season six to previous seasons, I eventually realised, however, that season six was all about the loss of innocence and the traumas that accompany growing up, something that was not absent in earlier seasons, in, for example, the first season episode "Nightmares", several intense episodes during season two including "Surprise"/"Innocence", "Passion", "I Only Have Eyes for You", and "Becoming", and in the episode "The Body", episodes all that reach the levels of emotional intensity and adult traumas of any Ingmar Bergman film, The emotional traumas associated with growing up, however, seemed to be much more prominent and central in season six.

Buffy Goes Dark, edited by Lynne Edwards, Elizabeth Rambo, and James South (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), by and large, explores various aspects of seasons six and seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Essays in the collection explore what two of Buffy's writers, Marti Noxon (David Perry) and Jane Espenson (David Kociemba) brought to Buffy, in Noxon's case, according to Perry, echoing Buffy creator, writer, and director Joss Whedon, some sado-masochism. Other essays explore Buffy characters Willow and Tara (Alissa Wilts and Brandy Ryan) and Andrew (Ira and Anne Shull and South). Still others explore a variety of aspects and the narrative threads of season six and seven (Michael Adams, Rhonda Wilcox, Gregory Erickson and Jennifer Lemberg, Elizabeth Rambo, Paul Hawkins, Agnes Curry and Josef Velazquez) engaging the question of whether season six, in particular, is different from earlier seasons of the show.

As with any anthology with a variety of essays grounded in a variety of perspectives there were some essays in Buffy Goes Dark that I found more compelling than others. I found the narrative focused essays by Wilcox, Erickson and Lemberg, and Rambo fascinating explorations of the symbology, existentialism, and structure of season. On the other hand, I found the essays by Wilts and Curry and Velazquez characterised by one of the three problematic traps of crystal ball textualism, specifically, the tendency of some to judge a text by the critics own political and ideological predilections, and hence more normative than descriptive analyses. Textual analysis as political and ideological social ethical activism! Wilts essay, it seems to me, misread the Willow and Tara relationship in ways noted in the essay by Ryan. Wilts wanted the Willow and Tara relationship to conform to what she wanted it to be and was less interested in what it, textually speaking, actually was. Curry's and Velazquez's contention that Buffy is anti-liberal, that it is manichean, proto-fascist if not fascist, and militarist, misses several textual facts. Curry and Velazquez miss that in the Buffy text evil is, while not entirely manichean, real rather than a social and cultural construct, that fighting this evil, according to the text, requires a leader (Buffy has charismatic and traditional authority as Max Weber defines them) and that the mission and strategy of the Scoobies, according to the text, at least until season seven, is reactive or defensive and essential though not triumphal. Like Wilts, Curry and Velazquez read their ideology and politics, in Curry's and Velazquez's case a self-proclaimed liberalism, into the Buffy text. I suppose in this context we should take a moment to recall the existence of many interventionist liberals in the pre-World War II years and during the Cold War era in the US.

I quite enjoyed reading the essays in Buffy Goes Dark. It was nice to see an anthology largely focused on the controversial season six and season seven. I learned a lot from several of them. Recommended to anyone interested in film, television, and literary criticism, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Books of My Life: Undead TV

 

Like many others I was late to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV programme party. This was partly because I have long been more of a fan and had more of an interest in British television. I have for some time found some British TV better written and more intellectually stimulating and challenging than most American television I have seen over my sixty plus years. I also, and I am ashamed to admit this, missed the Buffy partly because I initially judged the Buffy book by the Buffy cover and assumed the show was yet another example of American television tween fluff. I somewhat unintentionally intentionally missed the Buffy party, in other words.

Boy was I wrong about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I finally caught up with the show in its fifth season. I initially happened upon Buffy one night during a couple of passes through all the over the air channels my small SONY television set could pick up. I stopped, for some reason, on a station that was showing an episode of Buffy that I later learned was the fifth season episode called "The Replacement". I found the split personality and difficulty in growing up metaphors of that episode intelligent and ultimately quite moving on both an intellectual and emotional level, something I thought that only some British TV shows could do. From that moment on I was hooked on BtVS and I began I looking backwards and forwards in order to try to catch up with every episode of Buffy that I could and to catch up with it in broadcast order since I quickly recognised the novelistic nature of the show. Today, Buffy remains, with Inspector Morse and Lewis and others, one of the finest things I have ever seen on television, seen on the cinema screen, or read in books.

Though I do not consider myself a specialist in film studies, television studies, or literary studies, I have kept abreast of currents in Buffy Studies, a subdiscipline of textual studies that has been massively influenced by currents in film and literary studies from the 1950s to today. I even published a paper critiquing some of the theoretical approaches used to study Buffy and my discontents with them. Given my strong interest in social theory and my occasional interest in film studies, television studies, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I have tried, if fitfully, to keep up with what is happening in the scholarly Buffy Studies and Whedon Studies world. So, it was only a matter of time that I got around to reading Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), a collection of essays on Buffy and Angel, the Buffy spinoff, edited by Elana Levine and Lisa Parks.

Essays in Undead TV explore several aspects of the series. Mary Celeste Kearney's paper explores the economic demographics of the WB, the netlet Buffy initially was broadcast on, and the influence this marketing strategy had on the form and on the substance Buffy took. Susan Murray's essay explores the commodification of Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Chosen One and saviour of the world, a lot, and promoter of Maybelline cosmetics. Annette Hill's and Ian Calcutt's paper explores the convoluted and controversial scheduling of Buffy and Angel as children's and young adult shows on the BBC and Channel 4 and how such scheduling required cuts to and censorship of both shows since they weren't really children's or young teen shows. Hastie and Calcutt argue that this miscategorisation of Buffy and Angel, two globally sold television shows, gave rise to specific and local fan concerns. Amelie Hastie's essay engages Buffy as a knowledge making machine and explores how the scholarly and fan criticism that has grown up around it is a mirror that reflects the rich interpretive nature of the show. She also ponders how a feminist approach might have a transgressive power that allows viewers to break out of their dominant hermeneutic square shells they are socialised into. Cynthia Fuchs's paper explores otherness in Buffy and Dark Angel, another female centred show that ran on the WB. Allison McCracken's essay explores the complex transgressive and queer nature of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jason Middleton's paper explores the eroticisation of Buffy, the female hero, in male oriented fan magazines like Femme Fatales sold in comic book shops. Elana Levine's essay explores second wave feminist and third wave feminist readings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer arguing that there are third wave feminist aspects to the show.

Essays and books characterised by approaches that are text centred and anemic when it comes to primary production research, generally speaking, fall into several interpretive traps. First, such criticism is often as much if not more normative or ideologically grounded than descriptive, the attempt by a critic to understand the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts in which a given text is produced. Much contemporary humanities criticism, in other words, is grounded in notions of what the critic thinks the text (and by extension the world) should look like rather than in what the text actually looks like. In this normative or ideological style or form of criticism ideologically grounded ethical and moral concerns tend to overdetermine the empirical description of a text raising questions about the validity of such interpretations, interpretations that should perhaps be ultimately seen as varieties of reader response criticism. Second, such criticism tends to assume that all one needs to do in order to analyse a film, television, or literary text is to analyse the final text as it stands, an approach that one of my former academic colleagues calls crystal ball textualism and another refers to as an approach with a massive empirical donut hole at its heart since it generally doesn't engage in an exploration of the production aspects of the final text. Such an approach assumes that an exploration of the parts of a text is not necessary for an understanding of the whole of the final text, a deductive rather than inductive approach. Third, much contemporary film, television, and literary criticism assumes the existence of ideal readers who read texts in the same way academic and scholarly readers read texts or they assume that readers need the help of experts in order to unlock the secrets of the real nature of a text and can then engage in changing the textual world and the world beyond the text, textual analysis as social ethical activism. Such an approach, however, at least on the level of hermeneutics, is problematic given the differences in social and cultural capital of readers and given what we know about how readers actually read texts. We know, for example, thanks to qualitative empirical research that readers read texts in a variety of ways, including active and focused ways and more inactive, passive, and unfocused ways, and that many readers of texts multitask while watching or reading them. 

What I liked about many of the essays in Undead TV is that they didn't fall into the crystal ball textualist traps as much as essays in other anthologies and books I have read in Buffy Studies over the years. I found many of the essays in Undead TV to be some of the most interesting work on Buffy Studies and Whedon Studies I have read in some time. McCracken's and Levine's essays were, for example, fascinating and somewhat compelling text centred explorations of the queerness and feminist aspects of the Buffy text while Kearney's essay does, and thankfully so, engage in much needed production research, production research that is essential if we are to ultimately understand how cultural texts like Buffy are produced. A keeper. Recommended.