"I am still almost as avid a television and film watcher today as I am a reader. I hasten to add that now my pleasure in being engaged by this media is bound up with the pleasure of the interrogating gaze that I direct toward it. My critical spectatorship, then, as astute cultural critic, bell hooks might say, involves the pleasure in being entertained in part by actively viewing and deconstructing representational strategies, in interrogating the politics shaping the 'power of the image,' to paraphrase visual studies feminist Annette Kuhn. What fascinates me about television and film culture is the power of these media to present appealing versions of realities and fictions, to perpetuate and create consumer desires, and to veil the reality of their political implications through the allure of the entertainment mask. Particularly interesting as well is the relationship they suggest between the political and cultural environment, specifically how television and film create, fictionalize, reconstruct, and/or presume to record contemporary social realities."
-Stephane Dunn
"Baad Bitches" & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U. of Illinois Press, 2008)
I don't have much to say beyond the fact that I love reading things that describe how I feel about why I like some of the media I like. Some things are just more fun when you deconstruct them.
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