The Who’s “I’m a Boy” as Transgender Anthem

Gender identity is over-determined.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier as Liberal Fantasy – A Review

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is part of the ideological state apparatus

XX-Men: The Failures of Brian Wood’s All-Woman X-Team

X-Men’s record of including women is still only good in relation to the rest of superhero comics.

Reviews in Brief (3/19 to 4/09 – 2014)

Sympathy for “Sympathy for the Devil”

The finest trick humanity ever played was persuading itself that he devil was real.

Reviews in Brief (3/12/2014)

“Movies, Museums and the Hall of Fame” – Beat Street & the Past Future of Hip Hop

Hip Hop got up big time, and I love that, but its focus on cultural production left its political potential untapped.

Reviews in Brief (2/12/2014)

Brief reviews of: Hawkeye #16 | Ms. Marvel #1 | She-Hulk #1 | Superior Spider-Man #26 | Thor, God of Thunder #18

“Let’s Rewrite Some History”: Captain Marvel & Feminist Revisionism

The first major story arc in DeConnick’s series is an attempt to write Ms./Captain Marvel into a revisionist feminist text – a laudable attempt to make manifest the purported feminist subtext of the character.

On the Interpretation of Mind MGMT

Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT unfolds like a dream, but what do dreams mean, if anything?

Rock On and Drive: Songs in Conversation

Rock n’ roll songs about rock n’ roll disillusionment.

2013: Reviewing The Year It Wasn’t

An overview of all the posts I planned to write or started writing but that never quite came together.

Oglaf: Sexual Phantasmagoria (NSFW)

The shock of the queer in Oglaf undermines a genre where uber-masculine hyper-hetero adventures are the norm.

Robert Mayer’s Superfolks: Grist For The Mill

A resource that better writers can mine to develop something more sophisticated.

Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Derivative Character as Meta-Comic

At the heart of Dan Slott’s run on She-Hulk is a alternately critical and nostalgic concern with continuity and rupture in serialized superhero comic books.

Nothing (But Taxis): Songs in Conversation on the Environment

I prefer a song that explores our conflicted relationship to “nature.”

“And Then We Take It Higher” – Interpreting Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue”

Poor black and brown people in the West joined by music and their relation to power.

Black Lightning Always Strikes Twice! – Double-Consciousness as a Super-Power.

Jefferson Pierce’s “blackness” is explored in relation to his superheroic identity, but doesn’t get anywhere.

Calling Out To (Anti)Liveness: Recording and the Question of Presence

Here we are, live in the studio, putting it on wax.

“It’s Not About a Salary. It’s All About Reality. . .” KRS-One, ‘My Philosophy’ & Discursive Tension

By All Means Necessary a record that tries to consciously address a variety of issues in the communities of people listening to it, while not sacrificing the braggadocio and arrogant subjectivity that so often gives hip hop its energy and fun.

“Invisible (Watch)Men: The Impossibility of the Black Superhero”

Miles Morales or Trayvon Martin are more likely to be victim of a “heroic” vigilante than to be one.

The Middle Spaces

Comics. Music. Culture.

Author Archives: Osvaldo Oyola