Queer Theory, Political Economy, and Life Beyond the State
02 Jun 2025 - Otto Vogel
This is going to be the first in possibly a new type of blog post from me, where I just talk about something I think is obvious but maybe worth commenting on.
There’s been a lot of hubbub about “woke media” in the past year or two. A lot of this is a form of media circus, a constant hum of threat and reprieve, more about the emotional state it maintains than any sort of substantive worry.
Some of the people getting all worked up about “wokeness” in media were always worried about what gets cast as “wokeness” – that is, to use their terms, the presence of [slur redacted], [slur redacted], [slur redacted], feminism, [slur redacted], “anti-white propaganda”, [slur redacted] and not to forget [slur redacted] in their media.1 Mostly these are racialized concerns, because these people tended to be fascists. The presence of Black people or Jews in a piece of media, or some sort of storyline that the fascist reads as “anti-white”, was always a concern for them, because they’re fascist. And some of them are also neo-nazis. But what I’m going to call gender trouble was something that they weren’t always aware of.
It’s hard to be transphobic if you aren’t aware of trans people existing, just as its hard to be homophobic if you aren’t aware of gay people existing. So even if a text had queer themes, if you weren’t aware of those themes, then you might miss those themes, and won’t be bothered by them. If “feminism” isn’t a term in your enemies list, then a female character being more competent than a male character in some male-coded task is maybe a moment of seeing her as cool, or a moment of seeing his failure as funny, or a moment of seeing her as interesting. Or maybe you see her as annoying or unrealistic; we shouldn’t idealize things too much here. The moment “feminism” is this thing you have to be worried about, that’s noxious and attacking you and your favourite things, then that female character is a threat, a reason to distrust the media makers as Jews ideological feminists who, far from loving that type of media so much they want to make their own, are aimed at destroying western society the games industry, or the television industry or whatever.
We collect readings like collectables as we grow up and move through media. You have a reading of the games you played as a kid, thoughts about what they mean, why they were good or bad, and so on. You have thoughts about the movies you watched, the shows you rushed home from school to catch. And part of this is that you had thoughts about what the characters in those pieces of media meant. So when a trans person comes along and talks about how Birdo from Mario is trans, that’s a threat. It’s a threat to your own understanding of that media, your sense of ownership over it and the senses of identity you have built up by being a “fan” of such-and-such media, a fandom that very well may secure your sense of gender.
There’s a real tendency in these circles to present what they’re upset by as a “corruption” of the media they view. There’s an idea of “authenticity” going on there, I think.2 There is the “authentic” reading of the text, and then there are “inauthentic” Jewish influences that aim to divert away from that authentic reading. Those influences range from “activists” to “translators” to “censors”. Against a Barthesian3 or Benjaminian4 understanding of meaning or translation, instead we find something more akin to a fantasy of authorial supremacy.5 This lets the “anti-woke” commenter imagine their own “authentic” text that every other reading must comply with, must in some sense agree with, must coddle.
But then, what happens when that “authentic” reading becomes impossible? One comment I came across recently bemoaned how “gender-bending fiction” used to be funny to him in the 2000s, but now he can’t enjoy it because of all the trans stuff. Now this is fascinating to me. Because nothing about that media has changed. If we read this claim with sort of a Barthesian lense, we find that instead of those texts changing, the commenter has. He has been made aware of the world of gender trouble, instead of just a sanitized version where it arrives as a rupture in the story to be resolved out by the end. He has to watch that film with the knowledge that there are people out there who are not resolved so nicely, who do not just take up their assigned gender and sit, contentedly with it. That gender means more than what the film says it does. The comfort is gone, rendered into a falsehood by the structure of the world beyond the text.
All of a sudden, that “authentic” reading isn’t just a fantasy of authorial supremacy that can be asserted in the face of a messy reality. Instead, it is a fragile thing, one that assumes a world for that text to inhabit to be enjoyed “correctly”. Shutting out queer interpretations at every stage becomes mandatory, because otherwise… well I’m not sure, I guess. Is it because then those readings will press themselves into the “anti-woke” commenter’s mind? Or is it because these readings are somehow “false”? What does this say about the role of media to the commenter? Or what does this say about the commenter’s understanding of “truth”? Or is the queer readings are just ones among many readings, sitting there amongst feminist, Black, immigrant and other readings? Might those readings threaten enjoyment by threatening identity? The feminist reading threatens to make you a sexist or effeminiate. The Black reading threatens to make you racist or too much akin to Black people. The queer reading threatens to make you queerphobic or make you a little too fruity. If your masculinity is constructed out of media enjoyment and consumption, then these readings threaten that construction.
One final point: there’s also a sense of if the commenter is “allowed to enjoy” the text. There’s a general cultural moment – one that we are not immune to – where the author’s politics can function as a criteria for if the author’s texts can be enjoyed. If there is sufficient divergence between the author’s politics and the reader’s politics, then that enjoyment is felt as suspect or as problematic. This of course is setting aside the very real concern about material support that media consumption can entail. The gender trouble in media might be straddling the line between “joke and woke”, and the “anti-woke” commenter might lack the ability to tell the difference. So, queer readings must be banished to reassert the unique interpretation of it as a joke.6
I think I’ll leave this here for now. There’s more to say about how the imaginative figure of the “child” plays into this, how spaces are construed as “male” or “female”, how orientalism figures in – especially when translation comes in play, and how all of this fits into a larger sphere of grifting and content mill type production.
The overuse of slurs in these online spaces speaks to few things. First of all, it acts as a way of maintaining a “safe space” – more specifically, a space where outsiders will remove themselves. By being so openly hostile and racist, they make it clear that minorities are not just not welcome, they’re going to be subject to harassment. Anyone who doesn’t agree with the racism is just not going to be present, because seeing slurs used so casually is unpleasant. Secondly, it reinforces their ideas of being the prosecuted other – since they know they’re breaking some social rule. I will say, while the use of slurs is a shitty thing to do, we are talking about saying slurs on the internet. I don’t think many people have been doxxed over that, or have faced real world violence. Really, it comes across as a deeply pathetic. ↩
There’s another entire thing here that I should write, about how “authenticity” is used by the right nowadays. In essence, I think that a big chunk of the modern racist and anti-trans backlash is built on a white supremacist, heteronormative conception of “authentic social life”. ↩
Where the role of translation is less to merely reproduce the original text verbatim in a new language, but instead to re-create the effect of the original text in a new language. See Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator”. ↩
Both the supremacy and the author are fantastical here. Authors don’t have that much control of their texts, and even then often they didn’t intend the readings that the “anti-woke” commenter assume they did. This is related to the “Myth of the Given” as well I think. ↩
Note how this can be entirely illusory. A show like Ranma 1/2 can work as either comedy working off gender trouble like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or a “modern”, “woke” gender-bending text. ↩