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“Why Does Everyone Like Joe Goldberg?” – Strangership and Privilege in Netflix’s You
The popularity of the Netflix thriller You is garnering increasing media attention from critics, theorists, and fans alike after the second season was released at the beginning of January 2020. Falling under fire for the obsessive attention that the psychopathic protagonist, Joe Goldberg, has gotten from young fans, the depictions of stalking, violence, and murder from the narrative perspective of the perpetrator himself is an intriguing – if not a risky – narrative angle. Reactionary criticisms aside, I argue that the series proffers a wealth of subversive discourse critiquing the presentation and acceptance of violent behaviour by privileged folks in a platform easily accessible to a wide-ranging, diverse audience. The main question asked…
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“You, Who Have Devastated the Souls of the Living”: Heroes, Hubris, and the Victorian Gothic in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Although Christmas time and ghost stories seem to us strange bedfellows, the two were commonly found lying together in the nineteenth century. Ghouls and ghosts, seances and mystics, changelings and revenants were all immensely popular among the Victorians – and their presence was felt year-round in high society. Christmas was especially fraught with the souls of the dead, as the Victorians were well-known for spending their Christmas Eves telling spooky stories around the fire amidst the gifts, candles, and cakes. Considering the majority of our current western Christmas traditions were founded in the Victorian era, it stands to argue that contemporary tales merging the uncanny with the holly-jolly would be second-nature to us,…
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The Burden of Being: Exhaustion as Praxis in ‘Intersectional’ Academia
UBC is an alarmingly inaccessible campus. It was when I began my undergraduate degree on crutches, it continued to be when I transitioned to a cane, and occasionally still is now that I am mobility-aid free in my daily life. Navigating the campus as a freshman is difficult enough, but when construction projects block accessible routes from class buildings to the bus loops; ledges or other obstacles stand in the way of ramps and elevators; bathrooms are located on different floors than classrooms and only through darkened stairwells; and winter travel is obstructed by un-shoveled snow turning into unsalted ice through major campus corridors, my overwhelming first-year fear of conspicuous lateness…
