Kat Rosenfield’s latest work on today’s Identitarian conspiracy theories filling the pages of the New York Times. All of which is representative of a culture careening head-long into absurdity.
Self-reinvention narratives have always played well in America — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the origin story of the country itself. From the feel-good to the sinister, the Great Gatsbys to the Talented Mister Ripleys, there’s something enticing and titillating about the idea of uprooting from one location, one identity, and starting over in a place where nobody knows your name (or, in its darker iterations, where nobody knows the face of the person whose name you’ve taken). ---- For those not familiar with the early-2010s dynamics of Tumblr: Katherine Dee has described the site, accurately, as the “digital sideshow attraction” from whence much of today’s weirdest and most toxic identitarian political discourse originates. What is worth discussing,....is how easily Tumblr’s cult-like fandom culture became the default mode of engagement for its adherents, a way to not only participate in fandom but to understand the world. The way discourse functioned on the site, it was a brief step from writing gay fan fiction about, say, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, to fantasising openly about a same-sex romance between the men who played them, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman — and then to lashing out publicly at actress Amanda Abbington when she had the audacity to not only be cast as Watson’s love interest, but to be Freeman’s paramour in real life.
A fandom culture that has thoroughly infected the New York Times.
Case in point:
Did The Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
Companion Post
The Guardian as well.
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