Hard as it is to attract a substantial audience to a website that deals with indoctrination in college dorms, critical global studies, and changes in school mascots, our task has been especially tough in the last few weeks. School is out. People would rather think about preferred beaches than race preferences. As if that were not enough, Michael Jackson goes to the big Ferris wheel in the sky, Governor Sanford tangos down Argentine way on the Appalachian Trial, and Farrah Fawcett’s cheesy swimsuit photo is all that remains forever of the golden poster girl.
Give us a minute. We’re looking for the academic angle.
One “Ian Spiridigliozzi” has proposed, facetiously we think, a Michael Jackson Studies Program at the University of Kansas. In his letter to the Chancellor, he explains:
"Jackson’s infamy and fame; his innocence and guilt; marriage and pedophilia; opulent wealth and forecasted poverty; blackness and whiteness; adulthood and lack of maturity; natural nose and surgical updates; claims of honesty and obvious omissions of truth; drop the baby or not, these represent all of America’s internal dialogues, conflicts, and perhaps their resolution."
This is not so great a stretch as Mr. Spiridigliozzi might think. In 2004, Yale University’s Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies co-sponsored, with the university's Department of African American Studies, an interdisciplinary conference titled “Regarding Michael Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender, and Sexual Difference Center Stage.” Where there is an interdisciplinary conference, there is a “studies program” just waiting for the institution transgressive enough to seize the opportunity. The time is at hand.
The tango has already spread world-wide. You can take tango lessons in Hong Kong, Oslo, and Calgary. Yes, and in South Carolina too, at the Charleston Argentine Tango Society. I had a graduate student who once considered doing a study of tango in Japan. But other anthropologists are all over the dance floor. Rice University Professor Julie Taylor more than thirty years ago lectured on “The Triumphant Victim: Tango and Male Dominance in Argentine Culture.” More recently, Dorcinda Knauth submitted a master’s thesis at the University of Pittsburgh titled Discourses of Authenticity in the Argentine Tango Community of Pittsburgh. Nor should we forget Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995).
Victims, passion, authenticity—the story behind the tearful news conference is all here. Scholarship deconstructed this man’s fall from political grace long before he met the alluring Marie.
Farrah Fawcett’s death seems to me the saddest of these stories of human frailty. She was a celebrity actress of modest ability who spent much of her life since bouncy fame in the 1970s trying to prove herself a serious actress. Her self-produced documentary about her own impending death from cancer allowed her to star in a final role.
But no event escapes the post-modern academy’s fascination with popular culture. Duke University press takes the occasion of Fawcett’s death to have Elana Levine, author of Wallowing in Sex: The Sexual Culture of the 1970s American Television, reminisce. “In the mid-1970s there was no greater symbol of non-threatening feminine attractiveness and power. “
Meanwhile, Mihailo
