How to Respond to Multiple Apocalypses: A Cultural Note on Furiosa, Ren, and Andrew Culp

You know something is a bit off in the world when you wake up unexpectedly at 4.45am and the first thing you do is read an interview with Andrew Culp, the sleep still crispy around your eyes. The only two words that appropriately respond to this behaviour are 'oh' and 'dear' in that order, although I'm sure Culp himself would no doubt appreciate it if you reversed the order and invoked 'dear O'.

Andrew Culp's main thesis is that joy as a phenomenon has been consumed from the inside out by contemporary capitalism and the neo-liberals of the 21st century. Joy has been weaponised against us, as our Western society is forced to equate joy with consumption, or further sag flatly in the face of politics by participating instead in happy-clappy joy agendas. He laments that his sometime hero Deleuze, remembered often now for his attention to the subversiveness of joy, is now being quoted in corporate meeting rooms, having been recycled into widespread business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!”

I get it. In the suffocation of everything under 21st Western century consumption, where even the world itself is forced to eat its own body in a cannibalistic kind of climate catastrophe, Culp wants us to hate the world as an act of opting out of it all. What he entreats us to do in his book Dark Deleuze is start to hate. Hate everything!

Hatred is a powerful force to mobilise and even our darkest of Deleuzians have agreed that hate and love are two incredibly energetic and enigmatic phenomena with deep political potentials. I recently wrote a forthcoming article on how 'love' as a concept had been used to silence a student's work in her viva. The student's radical love was deemed unseemly, too rooted in practice, and needed to be replaced with more a happy-clappy, all forgiving, whitewashing, theoretical love. The article is called The Reverse Engineering of an Exorcism and is forthcoming early next year. In the face of this, yeah, I felt the urge to quote Andrew Culp, or even turn Dark Deleuze into noise metal lyrics and scream it down the Cambridge corridors I have been frequenting these past years.

But that's where it stops.

Because of Mad Max Furiosa ;) . And because of RenMakesMusic.

How can you fuse the two together? Let's start with Furiosa. Admittedly, Furiosa was a bit fluffy (I read somewhere it was as if Mad Max had been directed by McG) and lacked the depth of it's predecessor Fury Road. However, i quite liked the Baudrillardian simulcra style heroes and antiheroes, because that's exactly what we're talking about. We're talking about an Earth poised on the edge of apocalypse and a simulcran, lacklustre, enslaved society. Furiosa's nemesis Dementus, played rather well by Chris Hemsworth (?! I know!) has a teddy bear chained to his back, chest or his crotch for most of the film. That weird vapid connection to an imagined past (or nostalgia-danger as critics call it).

When he boldly screams "where were you going so full of hope? there is no hope!" and proceeds to drag Furiosa's lover around behind a car in that waterless, apocalyptic wasteland until he is no more than pieces, we get a sense of the spirit of the age: apocalypse, climate catastrophe, endless genocides, the rise again of the far right. It's all so hopeless. My thought is that Culp's call is not unlike Dementus' here: "there is no hope! ... But do you have it in you to make it epic?" Culp goes for epic. I kinda imagine him now with a teddy bear chained to him.

And that's why it's a big no thank you to Culp from me. I agree, we can't fight our current apocalypses through happy clappy Deleuze-business mantras. But you can still stay alive and you can still fight with joy. Not with platitudes or scary new 'utopias' which always turn into the very thing they tried to correct in the first place. But with real, bonafide, painful, delicious joy. With life.

Ren Gill is an astonishing UK rapper who became seriously ill shortly after being signed by his first label. He has gone on to create incredible songs documenting his relationship to his illness and the debacle of social and medical responses to it all: just medicate yourself!

In Sick Boi (2023) he sings: "it's not me, it's the world that's sick!" as he has a dialogue with a clinical psychologist who occasionally turns into a pig that is its own butcher. It's powerful. Medicate your mood, find 'joy'. The pig is interesting. It's almost cannibalistic. It cuts Ren and remains covered in blood splatter, reminiscent at the same time of pig and butcher. I can't think of a better metaphor for the crises that corporate and financial Western capital have wrecked on the Earth than this horrifying creature that won't stop. That will even eat itself.

[NOTE: since I posted this six hours ago, the video has been removed because of an ongoing dispute between Ren and Kujo Beats, which has gone viral. Ren has just released a new video in response to the dispute in which he sings about struggling with his own hate and violence over the immense greed of the world called 'Kujo Beatdown'. It's supremely disturbing. Feels rather apt given the context here! However i managed to find another version of the original so hopefully this one will stay up for awhile - here below]

In this powerful reel (click link below), Ren goes right to the heart of immigration and race issues in his 2019 song Money Game. Interestingly, the Instagram reel below was released shortly before the UK riots but during the multiple discourses surrounding the USA election race and the overall racial violence in America, Gaza, and all the subsequent international violence that continuing genocide is causing . Ren looks abroad in this excerpt taken from the original 2019 YouTube video (which is a shockingly visceral and powerful protest song and requires a trigger warning). But I mean, in July 24 when he released the excerpt, we could all feel it brewing in the UK too.

These were the riots which resulted in embassies across the world sending out recommendations to their nationals not to travel to the UK for fear of attack, even if just on holiday. A hotel was set ablaze. 53 police officers were injured in one riot in Southport. Children were attacked as well as adults. And all the while the Reform party leader (who's name I won't mnetion in case I conjure him up Candyman style) stirred up the pot. I can tell you I still myself don't feel safe. But I will not hate the world.

Hate produces worlds. We live in one such world. I understand the urgency of response. Rage. Defend. Refuse. Fight in the face of creul and multiple extinctions. But to refuse to live in the world on the basis of hating the violences it inflicts is perhaps to make the mistake that Furiosa did not make in the 2014 Fury Road edition. When Furiosa played by Charlize Theron finds that even her joyful memory of home (read: nostalgia / utopia again) - the secret 'green place' - is gone, swept up in the apocalyptic forces of social and climate destruction, she knows she has to turn back to uproot to the city she ran from. Because there is no outside. Because this is it. There is no utopia. You have to deal with it without utopic hope. You have to go back and do what you can.

In a sense this is what Dementus (Furiosa 2024) in his final scene is enticing her to do, but without joy. Living and breathing only hate. In a scene that was unexpectedly deep, our eponymous hero refuses Dementus' enticements, but clearly must ask herself (and by extension the viewer must ask themself) how can you fight injustice without falling into the grip of utopia (and it's happy-clappy cousin denial) or into hateful revenge as the final stage of the story? The film shows an interesting response: play out all the stories and then land on this, once all cyclical stories have been exhausted, create something new in the hope that in all this darkness some small seed of difference will sprout. The words she uses are not 'save' or 'heal' the world, but 'adorn' it. There's something about the power of the aesthetic here. Of something beautiful for it's own sake alone which problematises how we make meaning.

Furiosa 2024 leaves us with a few shots from Fury Road 2014, where the story now will pick up (in linear storytime). Here, in Fury Road, the Furiosa played by Charilze Theron, kidnaps the captured brides in a reversal of her own kidnap story to take them to her utopic/nostalgic green place. Once she discovers it is forever gone, she knows that she has to fight the darkest of powers, Immortan Joe, ruler of the remianing world. She knows this because there is nowhere left to go. There is no outside story. There is no outside at all. No escape or transcendence. And that's the lesson of the story. The Furiosa of Fury Road, much like the Furiosa of the 2024 film grows a tree out of Dementus. She knows that you have to do the work, no matter how frightening and impossible. That's how you face it all. Not with sing-along joy. Not with blindenss or hope of a utopic elsewhere that keeps you trapped. But with dirty, messy, bitter joy. By staying with the trouble (as Haraway would have it) Because we bleed. Because we survive. And because we love.

Colour, Immersion & My Mother: Ways of Seeing the Megan Rooney Exhibition

Megan Rooney's 'Echoes and Hours' exhibition at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, is all about immersion. She spent three weeks painting directly onto the walls in the first gallery, and then creating large canvases for the main space. As soon as I walked into the mural room, I felt a strange compulsion to look at the doorway and walk backwards in order to experience the work rather than walk forwards, seeing one section at a time. The direction didn't come from the staff, the exhibition catalogue, or the text introducing the work written across the entrance walls. It came from the colour. I could hear it saying 'in order to really see me, you need to move yourself. You need to see me on the move'. And that's thing thing about immersion. You have to move inside it. You are implicated. You are part of it all. There's no exteriority to hold onto - no bird's-eye-view. No appeal to 'objective science'. You are in it. You are part of it. There's nowhere to go. I can't help thinking that as the world burns right now in so many ways, we need to learn this lesson urgently: there's nowhere to go. There's no outside. Here we are. How do we want to be in all this violence and all this colour?

Some twenty years ago I studied the performance method of Jacques Lecoq. We spent at least a month, possibly more, nine a.m till nine p.m, Monday to Saturday 'being' colours. It was one of the key opening sequences of the two-year intensive programme. It's quite a hypnotic thing to do and it certainly changes your way of understanding what the world is. Colours really do move. It's a frequency thing or a vibration thing. Some pull you in towards them, some push you away. We embodied colours individually and then as pairs and groups. We found out how one colour might collaborate within itself (Kandinsky was always great at exploring this through shades and intensities), and then how multiple colours collaborated between each other, mixing and moving together, or pushing and resisting eachother. We stared at paintings in galleries as an ensemble and turned them into performances. By the time we finished the 'colours' segement of the pedagogic journey, I found it hard to walk out in the street because my god everything moves! Every colour is literally pulling and pushing, embracing, repeling, dancing, sulking! The colours are lively! They are alive!

Standing literally inside Rooney's painting I thought about all these things as I moved around and documented with my phone. Feeling my way through the deep blues and the pastels, the intentional lines made in stubs and flows, meeting its particular universe halfway, realising I was already becoming part of it, as gravity pulled lines of paint down in gentle drips like a jealous lover 'this way only!'  until encountering brushstrokes floating up up up, resisting gravity. All this change. All this interiority. And I thought about the last time I was immersed so completely not just in a gallery work but in a gallery space, feeling the art and the artworks as one flow of experience. It was in my mother's gallery.

What is it about time and motion? How space-time-matter all entangle so that I could be in a gallery in 2024, immersed in the movement of colour as part of a painting, and at the same time be in NYC in 1986! Present with me now I could feel my memory bringing another space into this space in an everyday flash of superposition. Not just colours but spaces - they too are alive. Always present.

My mother's gallery was not colourful. Sure - she showed colourful pieces of very contemporary art. But she had decided to rebel against white cube. She painted the entire gallery, all it's walls, all it's ceilings, black. I used to sit in the gallery everyday after school immersed in the black that made the paintings she exhibited under theatre lights 'pop' like corn kernels. (She never kept any exhibition going too long as the heat of those lights would have made any respectable painter nervous!) "Not bad for a little girl from Mashhad, who has no art training and left school at 16!" she used say.

Not bad at all. Of course the gallery dream couldn't last long and we left the NYC pretty quickly and mum and I ended up in refugee housing in Stockholm with my exiled grandmother in a real riches-to-rags story. But that's all for another time. What I want to say is that in a sense I took the gallery with me and have always taken it with me.

Mum was adept at navigating all terrains in her gauge-yer-eye-out stilettoes. So she covered the entire floor in tiny pebbles like a zen garden. This made it incredbly hard to walk across if you were in anything other than sturdy boots! She used laugh sometimes and say "that'll teach those NYC stiletto b-tches!" (yes literally) and whilst she was something of a queen of the glitterati back then, she was also capable of adapting to anything (like many 20th century children of Iran).

Me, I never used to just sit in the gallery gormlessly hanging around from the 3.30pm drop off by the school bus till 6pm when she closed up. What looked like a seven year old child bored in a sea of black for two-and-a-half hours a day in gallery whose walls had glimpsed the stars of NYC and even Hollywood rock up as they mooched around the new trendiest day spot in town, was not that at all. I wasn't zoned out or bored at all. I was quietly and very actively immersing.

Once mum exhibited these life size horse sculptures. They were half solid and half chicken wire, or hobby horse, or nothing at all. They even had their own little stable wiith hay. They pranced in and out of reality, their partial bodies captured mid gallop and trott. In the blackness I saw them all spring to life. I saw them move!

The Freudians here will most likely stroke their own imaginary beards, adjust their little Viennese glasses on their noses, and say 'Ja! The blackness is the womb! See how she writes about ze immersion and ze mother!' (apologies for the badly transcibed, imaginary Austrian accent here...) By all means. But I am not a Freudian. I don't centre all things around the so-called 'human'. Because as so many contemporary scholars have lamented, who gets to be human in the first place? Who decides the parameters - which have changed throughout history? Some groups, ethinicities, genders have been denied the exclusive naming (and all the susbesequent violent rammifications that follow from these exclusions).

Humanisms have a lot to answer for. Sure, there's a lot of beauty in Humanism, but at what price? What happens to all those other dancing many-worlds? There's a more than human world of spritely agencies, of colours and forms, trees, animals, cells, amoeba, plastics, circuits, selves and bacteria. How do they engage us? Immersively speaking to us, as us.

I blink and flash back to Rooney in 2024. I am now in the reading room upstarirs at Kettle's Yard. How can colour be an identity? How can colour and immersion come to disrupt our identity in 'echoes and hours'? In one of the many books scattered about in the reading room, I found this by Rooney:

The line at the top of the image, to my mind, peers through all the others below: "my paintings are portals, they give me somewhere to go and something to do with my hands". Folding time and space and matter, each brush stroke constructs a doorway to thousands of worlds that exist in thousands of times.

It's interesting that walking through the immersive mural room first creates an entirely new experience of looking when I enter the room dedicated to the canvases. It's not just that the paintings are different - though clearly in Rooney's unique inimicable style. It's that my whole way of looking has changed.

Now when I look at each individual painting, I'm so much more painfully aware of the white space around it. Like each canvas is a doorway, a cut, a portal made so by its sharp suggestion that the whiteness is an exteriority upon which the colour quite literally hangs. So too, I notice the bodies of the viewers change. Now we get static viewing. The cut that lies between canvas and wall locates and fixes the body in a viewer's spot.

In a sense it moves us from experiencing the work like a wave form - shifting moving around the immersive space - to experiencing the work in particle-form, which has a defined shape, much like a canvas defines the shape and deciated positionality of the painting. This idea comes from Niels Bohr who in the early 20th century showed that light was a particle when the experiment to study it was set up in one way, but that it changed into a wave when the experiment was set up in a different way. How could light be two things at the same time - his answer, it changes depending on how you measure it. A canvas tells us 'the work is here'. And immersion blurs the boundaries, making us and our viewing more deeply part of the work itself.

Taking this further, imagine being 'a human' sometimes (when looked at by a certain person) - a human with certain rights and accesses, but not 'a human' in the same way when looked at by someone else. How do we construct what it is to be human? This runs to the heart of identity. To making self. To how violences have swept the world - you are only human when the experiment is set up in a certain way...

That's why all this endless conversation about immersion and colour, vibration and movement is so important. These phenomena literally make up how we experience the world, and so in a deep sense, they make worlds. Worlds that have very real effects on people's lives. And that's why I love how Rooney's exhibition moves us from immersion to canvas-defined portals. They change the way we see. Not just what we see. These 'portals', these immersions, these identities: they lead to an otherwise. An otherwise of seeing. Noticing. Being. Dreaming. Of making worlds. Both rooms do it. They do it differently though. And that's what's interesting - to look at the processes of differencing, not just the differences made.

How can we learn see differently, dream differently in a world that is burning? By making portals. By moving inside immersions, never clinging to an outside answer, but an eternal inside that we are both swept away by, and always responsible for. An ethics of immersion and arrival that dances - always dances!

Diamonds are Never Kenough

The 2024 Oscars saw the 'surprise' reprise of Ryan Gosling's hit song 'I'm Just Ken' from the Barbie movie. There are so many things to say and say again about the Barbie movie. But what I want to focus on here is not so much that film, but what Gosling's Oscars performance did that has been done so many times before and yet is in truth never enough in terms of creating truly radical adaptation. Let me start by saying i loved this and it made me belly laugh. And as a piece of comedy at the Oscars it was perfect. But what I want to do here is really focus in on what the performance does and how it does it. Because in his shiny pink and diamond suit, in several of his poses and postures,and in the moves and the stripes worn by 'the Kens', Gosling (and his directors) were 'diffracting' another movie: 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'.

'Diffraction' is a term that comes from quantum physics but was coined by feminist new materialist scholar Karen Barad to talk about difference-making or the way differences are made. Not difference-making in the sense of this is different from that (categorisation). Nor in the sense of 'difference' is opposite to 'the same' (binary thinking or even 'dialectic'). Not even in the sense of a sliding scale of differences or differences between other differences, each more different than the other (categorisation again but on a spectrum). Barad's 'diffraction' is about the processes of difference-making as they differ from each other. So basically Barad is not looking at individual differences at all, but at the way differences are made, and made again, and made again, and again and so on, to infinity. So, in brief tracing difference-making patterns tell us everything we need to know about how we come to know something (rather than focussing on what we know and that being enough). Focussing on how we know means we can really see how knowledge structures dictate the way we understand and build our world(s).

So, what does the Oscars performance of 'I'm Just Ken' have to do with all this quantum theory / philosophy? Well, to my mind, the interesting thing is that the show doesn't just reference 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes', it diffracts it. It aims to difference it.

'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' (1953) is at least in this day and age, phenomenally disturbing. But what I want to draw attention to is the one iconic musical number in it that has been diffracted time and time again: Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend. What is it about this unsettling hit - that shows Marilyn Monroe refusing the advances of a literal gang of men, whilst groups of women are trussed up in what might be described as 1950s soft bondage, reduced to being literal objects, whilst the song suggests Monroe's character (Lorelei) is just in it for the money. When I read that line back it seems rhetorical and sarcastic, but let's not forget that this movie has been reviewed time and time again as one of the greatest movie musicals in history. So let's go to that scene again.

The idea that Monroe/Lorelei has any power of refusal here is laughable. Though she smacks the gang members on the nose with her fan, she is so clearly utterly powerless, part of an unfolding sadomasochistic game of cat and mouse where she is the only cat and yet is surrounded by an seemingly ever growing army of mice. The scene has gone down in history and is in some ways rather indicative of Monroe's own life struggles with powerlessness. But why reprise it now in 2024 in the form of 'I'm Just Ken'? In order to really see the difference-making patterns let's look at a few other of this scene's diffractions.

Flash forward from 1953 to 1985. Madonna is a huge hit and in January of that year releases Material Girl. The diffraction here shows Madonna playing herself, but unlike Monroe/Lorelei, now the message is that in order to impress her the rich studio boss has to throw away his diamond gift and instead pay a man to give him his beat up old truck to take her out on a date. Of course, this is just a ruse, he is the 'big cheese' and is shown right at the beginning of the music video ordering an underling to get Madonna to meet him 'now!' Clearly not much has actually changed. Madonna hasn't subverted or upturned the power relations here, the trappings are simply different: here the man lies about who he is, but it all still upholds the trope of being desired by the rich, top dog 'prince'. Women aren't literally bound up and turned into objects to adorn the homes of wealthy men, but perhaps the echo of it all still haunts the space in and around Material Girl as if to say, one day you too can be a discovered, desired, diffracted Monroe.

Flash forward again from 1953, to 1985 to 2001. Moulin Rouge has just come out. Now it's Baz Luhrmann's turn to have go. Nicole Kidman plays 'the Spakling Diamond', a Parisian prostitute who aims to get the attention of the richest man in Paris not just to pay to sleep with her, but to pay for the whole theatre she works in to be renovated. Her theatre director assures her that with the Duke funding her she will become 'a real actress', suggestive that what is being diffracted is not just Madonna and Lorelei, but Monroe's own biograohy.

In the scene from Moulin Rouge, this time the mistaken identity game is different to the one in Material Girl. This time Kidman/Satine mistakes McGregor/Christian for the Duke and they start a love affair. The scene doesn't use the iconic pink colour in Monroe or Madonna's versions, but the trope remains, the woman rebuffs the men in their formal top and tails in order to turn them on more. She has no real power at all. My favourite part of the film challenges the trope - Christian says 'a life without love that's terrible'. Satine responds 'no, being on the street that's terrible'. Christian rebuffs, 'no, love is like oxygen. All you need is love'. She scoffs at his (and the Beatles' who's song lyrics he uses) idealism. But this is what's perhaps most interesting in this diffraction. It is not the grand scene itself, but the response the characters and perhaps by extension, us the audience, has. When a trope is played again and again and again and it's challenged it does perhaps seem scoffable. It seems against common sense. And that's the power of tropes and fables and stories. They create our so-called common sense. Sometimes that common sense could do with a bit of challenging. Not in the sense that we don't need oxygen, but that the story-atmosphere has had all its creative oxygen drained out of it. So how? How can we find some fresh air?

Flash forward again from 1953 to 1985 to 2001 to 2020. This time Margot Robbie directed by Cathy Yan, plays Harley Quinn. Again, like Moulin Rouge which diffracts loads of hit songs from the 60s onwards to make a film, Birds of Prey: The Emancipation of One Harley Quinn diffracts the DC comics' character Harley Quinn. DC and Marvel characters have been going for decades reprised and diffracted themselves for as many years. So in a sense we have diffractions of Monroe, diffracting diffractions of DC characters. Believe me, once you go down the diffraction rabbit-hole you can really see how these stories form an almost lattice around our imaginations. I say this in disagreement with Jungian scholar Joseph Campbell who proposed that there are a finite number of stories in the world. I've argued elsewhere, along with greater scholars like de la Cadena and Blaser and Savransky, that stories are multiple and where they are not, where it seems that there are only a few tropes, it means the strangehold on our imaginations to dream other worlds, other myths, other values and therefore other possible futures, is too tight. Or perhaps in the spirit of Moulin Rouge's way of diffracting famous songs to make a point, I might chime with Hendrix that 'there must be some kinda way outta here'.

Bird's of Prey diffracts Monroe, but also self-consciously diffracts Moulin Rouge on account of the fact that Ewan McGregor, who also starred in Moulin Rouge, is no longer the idealist championing that love is more important that oxygen, but is in this film the dark misogynist Black Mask, Harley Quinn's abductor. This time the Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend scene is diffracted differently. It is shown for what it arguably is: a fantasy that is in fact a creepy tale of the sadomaschocistic objectifcation of women. As Harley is punched hard in the face she drifts off into another world where she's playing Marilyn/Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . Here, the gang of suitors is transformed into Black Mask's gang of thugs and Harley is trying to dance around them whilst one lets off a machine gun. Instead of kissing her, McGregor/Black Mask punches her in the face again, which brings her to. He's asking about the location of his big diamond. (Interestingly, the diamond itself is featured as an object in its own right but also containing at the molecular level, a code that will reveal the account number of an even bigger fortune. This is rather like our story-tropes. The diamond stands up on its own but is latticed all the way down to the atomic level with tinier and tinier versions of the trope. The trope here: money.) Harley looks straight to camera, her face bloody and bleeding, perhaps almost disappointed at being brought out of the fantasy (which was little better than the reality) and says to the audience 'call me crazy but I thought the guy was meant to get the girl the diamond.' Harley/Robbie here draws our attention to the fact that the story appears to have been subverted, but in reality it's all still the subjucation of women.

Flash forward from 1953, to 1985, to 2001, to 2020, to the oscars of 2024. Here again we get the now familiar signatures of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes but this time it's no longer a pretty blonde woman, but a pretty blonde man in the pink clothing. Gosling/Ken's costume is sewn through with diamonds and the gang of suitors in other diffractions are now all 'The Ken's' who do still flirt and 'suit' in those unmistakable stripes, but who are also all still versions of Ken, whilst Ken himself is now finally the star of the show. Now he diffracts Barbie, diffracting Harley (who is actually the same actress as played Barbie), diffracting Satine, diffracting Madonna, diffracting Lorelei.

I loved the Barbie movie, but herein lies the issue of 'diffracting' the iconic 1950s film through it in this performance. As hilarious and delightful as I found it, I feel like we missed a step. Whereas Harley drew attention to the sadomaschocistic objectification of women, and whereas indeed the Oscars performance does have some mock-slapping / violence depicted as he sings 'will she see the man behind the 10 and fight for me', I am left wondering whether - once again - the trope has actually been changed. And indeed, in the Oscars the performance uses the song as a means for Ken to claim his power. Does Ken need to claim his power in order for Barbie to be liberated? There's something 'a little murky' here.

Putting a man in a woman's shoes as it were, does not necessarily change the trope itself, it simply reverses the power roles of the players. The game is still the same. Power and domination remains unquestionable, unsubvertable, unthinkable. It seems like the way the world works. Like 'common sense'. And that argument gets wheeled out time and time again to justify all sorts of things. It often gets paired down to something called 'human nature', which as posthumanists and new materialists alike argue is a fantasy that has had very real and very bloody consequences in the world. As zoologist and new materialist Donna Haraway argues, how can we start to create tropes that are more "response-able". Is it time we left the weird, Enlightenment legacy of an irrefutable split between 'nature' and 'culture' behind? Enter again the potential of Barad's idea of diffraction that moves beyond the binary splitting, gendering, and categorisations of 'things' and instead focusses on processes of difference-making rather than units of difference.

I think the Barbie movie aimed to address this by storying Ken to understand that he was "Kenough' without having to dominate a woman to instrincally feel that. It also had Robbie/Barbie declaring that she wanted to 'do the imagining'.

This speaks deeply to third wave and posthuman feminisms that arguably focus more on performativity and worldingg, changing the instrinsic structures of stories not just who 'wears the crown' in them. So, indeed some re-storying was made, but there was still a lot of focus on who ruled Barbie-land. Again, it's a lot to do in one movie, and it could be argued that Barbie-land represented the storied world of Western women's imaginations so who rules it is key. But I am left wondering if we are still in need of a new radical diffractive storying of Diamonds that questions the trope of a somehow irrefutable need to play out sadomashocistic gendering or if, after four attempts now, Kenough is Kenough.