Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

I wrote the following comment on the board before seminar today, but we didn’t have a chance to discuss it:

“this dude turns from werecat to zombie then in real life he turns into a woman and this dude was black then he bleached his skin cuz he wanted 2 fit in like what the hell”

- YouTube comment on the video for Thriller (accessed Monday night)

I love this comment.  When I first read it, it immediately struck me as almost a synopsis of Mercer’s article.  Mercer is talking about Jackson’s boundary crossings in the Thriller video as standing in for his boundary crossings in real life, which cause a lot of anxiety.  Though this commenter clearly still holds the anxiety about these boundary crossings, he or she has made the same connection as Mercer between the transformations in the video and the transformations in life. I feel that there is a real danger when examining popular culture of feeling that, as scholars, we understand and can make connections that others in the audience don’t or can’t make.  What I like about this quote is that it shows how someone watching music videos on YouTube for fun, and commenting on them in the informal (no capitalization or punctuation) manner that is standard for YouTube comments, can make the same connections that Mercer makes in his article.  This is not to criticize Mercer’s article by any means (which is far more complex, obviously), but just to say that we can’t pretend the average consumer of popular culture is not thinking about what they consume and making connections between things.