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Showing posts from October, 2020

Artificial Intelligence: Misogynistic futures without women

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Warning! This post if full of spoilers of the 2001 movie AI, which, if you haven't seen yet, you really don't need to. It is looong and cheesy, and oh boy does Spielberg have mommy issues! Send him to therapy please. Anyways, here is the rambling: Reproducing without women has been a constant nightmarish fantasy of white men, and it could be read as the underlying motivation under the whole project of scientific discourse under European enlightenment, AKA the philosophical and political project of white men to demonstrate their superiority and thus the need to exclude women and men of colour and non binary folks from political power. And, as is expected, rampant sexist jokes and representations abound from the beginning of this 2001 Stephen Spielberg's movie.  A.I. Artificial Intelligence revolves around a white man's project of creating a (white) child who will be able to love. Yes, a futuristic Ghepetto. The creepiest part, he is conceived as the replacement of the sc

Aliens and the white man's paranoia

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 I have always had a suspicion about horror and sci-fi movies. They reflect the paranoia of cis-het white men of eventually being violently retaliated. The colonizers, the oppressors, the ones that know what it was done, and how they benefit from it. They sleep at night with the nightmare of all that violence that was perpetrated against colonized, unruly female and queer bodies is coming back to haunt them.  Alien invasion movies reflect the paranoia of being violently colonized by a "more advanced" foreign civilization with which we cannot communicate or understand. Our ways of being are threatened, but in the end we always succeed thanks to the leadership of the US military. We are made to vicariously participate in the military imperial project this way. As I am watching 1953's War of the Worlds, a sort of blueprint for this genre, it just makes sense how this idea would be a perfect pitch to refer to the invasion of communism amidst the peak of the Cold War. In thi