Longreads: Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas

 Disney often codes their villains as queer: This is widely known and accepted. First noticed by scholars during the Disney Renaissance of the late ‘80s through the ‘90s, critical observations about characters like Scar (The Lion King) have since disseminated into pithy, viral tweets and TikToks. A quick Google search of “gay Disney villains” will turn up dozens of articles, all repeating the same litany of facts: That The Little Mermaid’s Ursula is based on the iconic drag queen Divine, that Hollywood often uses British accents and effeminate mannerisms in men like Robin Hood’s King John to signal moral decrepitude.[...]

Pocahontas has one of the top-five highest-grossing Disney soundtracks of all time, but that’s generally where any lingering nostalgia dies. To say that the film itself is problematic is an understatement. While the screenshot of Chief Powhatan, Pocahontas’ father, saying “these white men are dangerous” has found a rich afterlife on social media, the film’s historical inaccuracy and deliberate whitewashing of colonization and its aftermath have cycled it out of many a millennial’s “comfort film” rotation, something that has generally gone unaddressed by the corporation. (The fact that Mel Gibson voiced John Smith hasn’t helped, either.) [...]

Ironically, even the most chaotic queer-coded villains are rarely bent on creating their own power structures — they only ever desire the kingdom and, seemingly, the lives of their straight-coded, heroic counterparts. Jafar wants to be sultan, but has no conception of what to do with that power once obtained, to the point he cannot strategize enough to realize that the genie is beholden to others. Scar believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Pride Lands, only to drive the kingdom into a barren wasteland: The queer failure of reproduction, on which society so purportedly rests, made manifest. “Fuck the social order and the child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized,” queer theorist Lee Edelman writes in No Future — the anthem of Disney villains everywhere. [...]

Colonizing isn’t worthy of punishment in this film, nor is racism, otherwise every white character — John Smith included — would be in chains. The reality is that Ratcliffe is punished for failing to assimilate within the crew successfully, for not embodying the right kind of masculinity, for not reading the room, and attacking the much-respected cowboy-esque leader who the men ultimately mutiny for. This is his crime: not trying to assassinate Chief Powhatan, but wounding one of his own. Meanwhile, Thomas, a colonizer who explicitly murders an Indigenous warrior, Kocoum, is given … a redemption arc, complete with Pocahontas’ forgiveness.

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The New Yorker: Inside the U.S. Army’s Warehouse Full of Nazi Art

 Much of Nazi propaganda was ephemeral: posters and flyers, designed to be mass-produced and spread quickly. The paintings stored on high metal racks in Fort Belvoir’s warehouse were part of a different project, meant to give the Reich’s predations a patina of high culture. One of the best-known works is “The Flag Bearer,” painted by Hubert Lanzinger a year after Hitler came to power. It depicts the Führer astride a black horse, clad in shining armor and carrying a Nazi flag. “It’s Hitler as a Teutonic knight,” Sarah Forgey, the Army’s chief art curator, told me, standing before the painting. “It’s showing there’s a connection between the Third Reich and Germany’s feudal past.” [...]

All propaganda is meant to obscure the truth, but two paintings inadvertently highlight the decline of the Nazi project. The first, “Hitler at the Front,” was painted by Emil Scheibe in 1942, about a year after Hitler launched his titanic, megalomaniacal invasion of the Soviet Union. It shows a buoyant Führer surrounded by a throng of German soldiers—young, well-scrubbed Aryans gazing at him in adoration. The second work—“East Front Fighters,” by Wilhelm Sauter—was painted two years later, when the Nazis were being rolled back by the Soviet Army. The soldiers in this canvas are exhausted and battered, if still unbowed. The message to Germans is clear: The war is tougher than we thought, but our soldiers are indomitable. Not long afterward, Hitler killed himself, and the Nazi regime imploded.[...]

Among the hundreds of pieces at Fort Belvoir, the most curious are four watercolors by Hitler. During the First World War, when he served as a foot soldier, he carried paper and often spent free moments drawing—the remnants of an early dream of succeeding as an artist. As a young man, Hitler was twice rejected for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the works at Fort Belvoir make it easy to see why. The draftsmanship is painstaking but stolid, without personal vision or lightness of touch. Most of the pieces are nostalgic street scenes, like something that might hang in a dentist’s office—except that the streets are eerily devoid of people. “Hitler couldn’t paint the human form,” Forgey said. One of the works—“Railway Embankment,” a brown-toned, faintly Impressionist work from 1917—depicts two human beings, but they are little more than dark blurs. Over the years, the Army has lent pieces from the collection to museums, but curators don’t ask for the Hitler watercolors. “They are only interesting because of who produced them,” Forgey said.

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Vox: How museum gift shops decide what to sell

 Gift shops are like the final exhibit of an art museum. They’re often located toward the exit and are unmissable on your way out the door. Souvenirs inside can range from Vincent Van Gogh socks to giant stuffed soup cans to Mona Lisa rubber ducks. But how do gift shop curators decide what to sell?

Stocking decisions often revolve around how curators want visitors to perceive the art lining museum walls. When you see a certain piece of art on a lot of merchandise, that usually means curators think that artwork is important. And thanks to a psychological phenomenon called the mere-exposure effect, the more you see that art, the more you begin to think it’s important.

Infectious Historians: The Medieval Translation Movement and Late Ancient Medical Texts with John Mulhall

 John Mulhall (Harvard University) joins the Infectious Historians to talk about the famous medieval translation movement and his own work on late antique texts. John first talks about what the translation movement was (and was not) along with how it worked and why it is so central to histories of medicine, science, and philosophy. In the second part of the episode, John turns to his own work on late ancient medical texts that were innovative in their understanding of medicine, disease, and especially plague as reactions to events happening in the world. At the end, he reflects upon what these new texts will mean for histories of the plague.

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BBC4 In Our Time: Medieval Pilgrimage In Our Time

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries, which figured so strongly in the imagination of the age. For those able and willing to travel, there were countless destinations from Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela to the smaller local shrines associated with miracles and relics of the saints. Meanwhile, for those unable or not allowed to travel there were journeys of the mind, inspired by guidebooks that would tell the faithful how many steps they could take around their homes to replicate the walk to the main destinations in Rome and the Holy Land, passing paintings of the places on their route.

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Byzantium & Friends: Byzantium in video games, with Troy Goodfellow

 A conversation with Troy Goodfellow (Paradox Interactive) on how Byzantium and other premodern civilizations are represented in video games, and how the mechanics of the games structure those representations, player's goals, and the dynamics of historical change. Thanks to Marion Kruse for joining the conversation and to all of you listeners who sent advice and helpful links. Your comments indicate how important this area is to so many of you (and yet still so understudied!).

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UnHerd: Poland’s rise to cultural power

 Last month, CD Projekt Red released another game, Cyberpunk 2077, to critical and commercial success (if marred, on some consoles, by technical bugs). Even before its release, Poland, surprisingly, was the world’s fourth largest exporter of video games, behind only China, Japan and Hong Kong. [...]

That seems to be changing. Over the past few years, Polish cinema and literature, as well as video games, have earned international acclaim — bringing modern craftsmanship to the nation’s history, and welcoming people to landscapes as brooding and mysterious as Scandinavia’s, cities as beautiful as France’s, and industrial wastelands as poetic as the North of England’s. [...]

None of this has come without controversy. As Polish art has achieved more international recognition, Poles have been divided on the image of their nation that is being portrayed. Take Ida: many conservatives were troubled by the film’s dwelling on the complicity of some Poles in the persecution of the Jews. Activists campaigned for text to be inserted to emphasise that countless others struggled and suffered to protect Jewish people. [...]

One could hardly pass over the political implications of art but one should avoid being incorrect, or condescending, or opportunistic. Filip Mazurek, a Polish critic, has written that “English language reviewers have ignored or even denied” the “metaphysical, quasi-religious” elements of Tokarczuk’s work, choosing to focus on “Tokarczuk as an anti-nationalist.” (Polish critics, Mazurek argues, did the opposite.) Again, this is not a criticism of Tokarczuk, but one can hardly be shocked that conservative Poles have been less than enthused about her international acclaim when it is premised, to a large extent, on her status as a symbol of opposition to their beliefs.

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CNN: Inside Europe's stunning abandoned churches

 Across Europe, hundreds of churches that were once filled with worship and song are now at the mercy of the elements. With religion's role declining sharply around the continent in recent decades, the most promising outcome for many of these centuries-old structures is being reincarnated as residential or commercial properties.

Hoping to capture their faded splendor before it's too late, French photographer Francis Meslet has spent almost a decade documenting abandoned churches, chapels and priories in varying states of disrepair. His stunning images show dilapidated pipe organs, overgrown cloisters, long-empty pews and sunlight pouring into naves strewn with dust and rubble. [...]

Featuring images shot across France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Portugal, his new book, "Abandoned Churches: Unclaimed Places of Worship," offers an eerie tribute to a building type he describes as "very special in the history of architecture and the history of men." Meslet, who once wanted to be architect, has a sharp eye for structural symmetry, with his collection spanning styles from gothic to neoclassical.

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SciShow Psych: The Dark Side of Disgust

 We’re all super familiar with the feeling we get when we smell rotten food or see gross bodily fluids. But this visceral emotion does a lot more than that, and it’s important understand to how the darker side of disgust can influence us.

UnHerd: How Big Slave ruled Britain

 Throughout, the forces of Big Slave have the nation in their grip, bound with a tithe on every barrel of sugar brought from the West Indies — money that affords the plantation owners a £20,000 annual marketing budget to promote the titular Interest in the press and politics. This was lobbying, pure and simple. As detailed and devious as anything Bell Pottinger ever cooked up, served with much the same shrug of corporate amorality. Thus, for every Anti-Slavery Monthly Review, there are plenty of journals like the popular Quarterly Review, in which Regency Richard Littlejohns bash out punchy jeremiads against the wet snowflakes of abolitionism. [...]

In his opposition to emancipation, Canning was joined, often for quite different reasons, by figures as grand as Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, and the future prime minister William Gladstone, himself the son of a wealthy slave owner. Cardinal John Henry Newman, recently canonised by Pope Francis, called on slaves to be content with their situation. [...]

When non-white guests came to dine at Wilberforce’s society, Taylor reminds us, they had to sit at the other end of the table, behind a screen. Macaulay deplored “miscegenation”, and the anti-slavery barrister George Stephen announced he would not help a family of “halfcastes”. Who could have predicted none would have the mores of a 2020 Goldsmiths grad student?

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BBC4 In Our Time: Albrecht Dürer

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) who achieved fame throughout Europe for the power of his images. These range from his woodcut of a rhinoceros, to his watercolour of a young hare, to his drawing of praying hands and his stunning self-portraits such as that above (albeit here in a later monochrome reproduction) with his distinctive A D monogram. He was expected to follow his father and become a goldsmith, but found his own way to be a great artist, taking public commissions that built his reputation but did not pay, while creating a market for his prints, and he captured the timeless and the new in a world of great change.

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Social Europe: The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi

Applebaum is appalled by the ‘extreme left’ which does not wholeheartedly trust such well-known forces for good as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Every movement or actor critical of the status quo contributes to ‘polarisation’ and is an enemy of democracy; to not believe in American ideals is to be a ‘cynic’. In Applebaum’s idealised narrative of the US there are no illegal wars, poverty or corruption or flaws in its increasingly distorted capitalism. [...]

Applebaum’s only material explanation for the weakening of democracy is ‘social media’, where propaganda spreads and people are radicalised. True, such mechanisms are powerful and often underestimated. But the logic of Twitter and Facebook confirms Applebaum’s own way of seeing the world: the moral and emotional stories of our time are reinforced and these platforms become the perfect scapegoat to avoid thinking about other, underlying factors. [...]

Democracy is not just the right to vote. What matters in the long run is justice, and justice can only be achieved through changes in the material conditions of people’s lives. The real dividing line in politics cannot be between ‘evil’ and ‘good’, moral and immoral. What is needed to save democracy is to create new counterweights to today’s capitalism—which undermines it.

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The Atlantic: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

 In the past few decades, Americans have broadened their image of what constitutes a legitimate romantic relationship: Courthouses now issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Americans are getting married later in life than ever before, and more and more young adults are opting to share a home rather than a marriage license with a partner. Despite these transformations, what hasn’t shifted much is the expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet around which all other relationships should orbit.

By placing a friendship at the center of their lives, people such as West and Tillotson unsettle this norm. Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex. [...]

Beliefs about sexual behavior also played a role. The historian Richard Godbeer notes that Americans at the time did not assume—as they do now—that “people who are in love with one another must want to have sex.” Many scholars argue that the now-familiar categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which consider sexual attraction to be part of a person’s identity, didn’t exist before the turn of the 20th century. While sexual acts between people of the same gender were condemned, passion and affection between people of the same gender were not. The author E. Anthony Rotundo argues that, in some ways, attitudes about love and sex, left men “freer to express their feelings than they would have been in the 20th century.” Men’s liberty to be physically demonstrative surfaces in photos of friends and in their writings. Describing one apparently ordinary night with his dear friend, the young engineer James Blake wrote, “We retired early and in each others arms,” and fell “peacefully to sleep.” [...]

John Carroll, who met his platonic partner, Joe Rivera, at a gay bar, describes this type of romantic relationship as “one-stop shopping.” People expect to pile emotional support, sexual satisfaction, shared hobbies, intellectual stimulation, and harmonious co-parenting all into the same cart. Carroll, 52, thinks this is an impossible ask; experts share his concern. “When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. These expectations also stifle our imagination for how other people might fill essential roles such as cohabitant, caregiver, or confidant.

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BBC4 In Our Time: Macbeth

 Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. When three witches prophesy that Macbeth will be king one day, he is not prepared to wait and almost the next day he murders King Duncan as he sleeps, a guest at Macbeth’s castle. From there we explore their brutal world where few boundaries are distinct – between safe and unsafe, friend and foe, real and unreal, man and beast – until Macbeth too is slaughtered.

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Deutsche Welle: Opinion: China's ethnic socialism

 Just a few weeks ago, Beijing introduced a new language policy for schools in Inner Mongolia, whereby instruction in Mongolian will be replaced with lessons in Mandarin in a number of subjects. Many fear that this will massively impact on Mongolian culture. [...]

Most of the inhabitants of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are not Han Chinese, who constitute the majority in China. Until 2012, when Xi Jinping took office, all 56 recognized ethnic groups in China enjoyed equal rights. But Xi, who, if things go very wrong, will be able to let himself be chosen as president for life in 2023, put an end to that equality. [...]

The West did not understand why Beijing could not wait until 2047, when the "one country, two systems" policy would have expired anyway and China would have won. However, for China, this is not a question of rational politics but of ideology, one according to which the Han are considered superior to China's other ethnic groups. The people of Hong Kong, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are not seen as equal partners, and this explains the Communist Party's inhumane treatment of certain groups, who are nonetheless all citizens of China.

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The Prospect Interview #149: Can elitism restore democracy?

 Writer and broadcaster Eliane Glaser joins the Prospect Interview to make a defense of what she deems “progressive elitism.” In the era of populism, trust in institutions and experts has plummeted within the left and right alike. Eliane makes the case for excellence in these divided times—and tells us why restoring standards may in fact restore democracy.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Elites

 Elites: Laurie Taylor explores the anti elitism which has become a common staple of media commentary and political rhetoric. He talks to Eliane Glaser, Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and author of a new study arguing that we are taking aim at the wrong enemy and confusing a corporate elite, which does pose a threat to many of us, with people who make our lives worth living, even save our lives – from doctors and lawyers to writers and artists. Are we letting the ‘real’ elite off the hook? They’re joined by William Davies, Professor of Political Economy at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose latest book takes stock of our historical moment and claims that the basic norms of public life have been thrown into question, as the status of political parties, mainstream media and public experts have been undermined.

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The Guardian: Tudormania: Why can’t we get over it?

 Right now, the Tudors hold the nation in an especially fearsome grip. In the British history section of my local Waterstones, in a not terribly royalist part of London, I measured four shelves of Tudoralia, covering the period from Henry VII’s snatching of the crown on Bosworth field in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. (The next most popular period was the 19th century, with two-and-a-half shelves.) The Tudor titles were mostly variations on a very limited set of themes: The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Henry VIII: King and Court; Elizabeth the Queen; The Elizabethans; Young Henry: the Rise of Henry VIII; Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII; Elizabeth’s Women. [...]

The Tudors are the first people in British history into whose eyes we feel we can gaze. We slip into their world – or what we imagine to be their world – with ease. They were the first people to have lived in recognisable houses, rather than in the draughty great halls and militaristic castles of their medieval forebears. There is something comfortingly domestic and ineffably English about these dwellings, which is surely why mock-Tudor has been, since the late 19th century, such a persistently revived vernacular architecture. Some of the inhabitants of these houses had even been women, whose characters were a little more than cyphers (such as the redoubtable matriarch Bess of Hardwick who, with her four husbands, rivalled Henry VIII in marital energy if not murderous tendency). Hans Holbein’s portraits of Henry’s court carry an air of realism verging on the photographic; even those stiff, flat-as-a-pancake Elizabethan portraits of country squires and their be-ruffed wives have something bewitching about them. Unlike their forebears, they spoke what we can recognise as our language, the language crystallised by England’s most towering and inescapable literary figure. [...]

The different ways in which the Tudor period was used by past generations can throw light on the way we see them now. Take the narrative of Hampton Court, which was opened to the public by Queen Victoria. The 19th-century tourist clutching the standard guidebook, published in 1841, would have received a completely different view of the palace from that conveyed today. The palace had “a striking lesson” to teach “on the mutability of human greatness”. Its hero, however, was not Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn, but Cardinal Wolsey. Henry gets short shrift – a single brief chapter, as opposed to Wolsey’s six. The Victorian story was much more invested in the lad who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, attained the chancellorship of England – and “fell a sacrifice to his own ambition”. The message was that worldly desires should be tempered by “humility and piety” – a lesson quite absent from our present dealings with the 16th century, whose protagonists provide spectacle rather than moral instruction. [...]

This secularisation, as well as perhaps a discomfort with the idea of revolution, explains how relatively little thought we give, as a culture, to the following century – the century of the English civil war. Martin Davidson told me that for him and his colleagues at the BBC, historical periods have certain textures; they serve as “story engines” for different kinds of narratives. “This place, this time that we call Tudorland, Tudorville has irresistible ingredients,” he said. “It is sex becomes death, via intrigue … I wish we could do more on the civil war, to be honest. But it’s difficult to find attractive characters, and it doesn’t help that they have zero sex lives,” he said. And, besides, the 17th century is too complex. “In a 60-minute programme, you spend 57 minutes explaining the rump parliament, ship money, the Irish issue.” Had we more confidence in the Westminster parliament now, perhaps, like the Whig historians of the 19th century, we would have more fondness for its 17th-century champions.

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UnHerd: The last gasps of a European empire

 What happens in The Man Without Qualities? Nothing much. Characters have long and seductive conversations about the soul, bisexuality, the blossom in the garden. There are weather reports. A bit of incest looms in the last few hundred pages, but Musil’s final workout prevented its consummation. It lacks a few other things, too. It doesn’t take place across a great span of time and space — Musil gives you a year in Vienna, starting in the summer of 1913. There’s no big cast of characters of the sort you find in Proust or Dickens. Ulrich, the title character, isn’t a tragic hero, but a privileged and directionless dilettante with a background in mathematics, a married mistress and a slightly misguided philanthropic interest in a sex murderer called Moosbrugger. [...]

So what are you supposed to draw from it? Don’t take the title as an insult to the PM — Polly Toynbee may have described Boris Johnson as “a man without qualities, devoid of public spirit or regard for anyone but himself … a man to shame the country as its figurehead.” But this is unMusilian: to be without qualities is not a state of moral and intellectual poverty. That’s too easy. Musil is a funny writer, but he’s not an easy one. His protagonist is no self-serving charlatan. Ulrich is possessed of great philosophical and spiritual capital. He knows about history, meteorology, criminology, Buddhism, Leibniz. This wealth, however, remains inconvertible: Ulrich’s command of detail, his passion for ideas, his sensitivity to subtlety and scruple, have brought him to an impasse with himself. And yet, Musil does not ask us to condemn his position, nor even to regard it as an error of judgement. [...]

Here, though, is a kind of consolation. Musil shows us that the world is too complex to be completely understood or mastered, and that it is foolish to pretend otherwise. If a phrase such as “take back control”, “super-forecasting” or “oven-ready” was inserted into The Man Without Qualities, you could imagine it shrivelling to death on the page. It’s a book that encourages you to express self-doubt and to have some cognisance of your limits. Because even if you can’t see them, others will. This is why Ulrich, despite his paralysis, is hard to despise. He can’t see the catastrophes to come, but when they do arrive to shake his little knot of nations to pieces, they will not find him in a dreamworld built of empty phrases.

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Psyche: Recognising our common humanity might not be enough to prevent hatred

 None of us are exempt from these forces. In contemporary Western societies, it’s not uncommon to hear immigrants referred to as a ‘swarm’ or an ‘infestation’. Psychological research also suggests that dehumanisation is not the preserve of extremists. When volunteers are asked to rate the qualities of different groups, even those holding moderate political views will often subtly deny outgroups uniquely human qualities, such as civility, rationality and refinement. In studies of emotion perception, in which volunteers are asked to evaluate the emotional experiences of others, they report that outgroup members experience complex human emotions such as pride, admiration and guilt to a lesser extent than do their fellow ingroup members.

However, look more closely at the evidence, and the claim that outgroups are dehumanised loses some, perhaps most, of its explanatory value. There are two key problems. First, it’s not clear that outgroups really are perceived as less human than the ingroup. Second, even if outgroups are perceived as less human, it’s not clear why this should increase the risk of harm against them. [...]

There are also challenges for neuroscientific research that purports to show evidence of dehumanisation. In a widely cited paper published in 2006, the researchers Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske argued that, when people dehumanise outgroups, they think of them as lacking mental states such as desires, beliefs and goals. Apparently supporting this view, the pair reported that when their research volunteers viewed pictures of outgroup members, such as homeless people or drug addicts, they exhibited less activation in brain areas associated with mentalising, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex. However, Harris and Fiske’s characterisation of dehumanisation is undermined by supposedly prototypical examples of extreme dehumanisation in which perpetrators appear to make mental-state inferences about their victims. For instance, Nazi propaganda is replete with references to what Jews were supposedly lying about and scheming to achieve. These references to Jewish people’s beliefs and goals were inaccurate and filled with malicious intent, but they were mental-state inferences nonetheless – to accuse someone of lying is to make an inference about what they are thinking. [...]

My critique of dehumanisation as an explanation for intergroup harm has implications beyond academic debate. Inspired by work in this area, some researchers have started to develop interventions for social change that aim to reduce dehumanisation. Though well-intentioned, such efforts could be misguided. My analysis suggests that attempts to foster a more inclusive and egalitarian society might be better targeted at other well-established psychological processes, such as the human tendency to stereotype and derogate people seen as outsiders.

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