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I haven't a clue why so little is written about humor. Having a background in sociolinguistics, I have a particular interest in language practices and in how things get said, not just in what gets said. Humor plays such an important role in the community making process, cutting across fan interactions and practices, including romantic and erotic talk.

As I argued in Cyberspaces, humor is bound up with class, gender and by extension race and ethnicity and nationality.

Due South with its American fan base was part of what Chris Barker calls reverse flow. In his 1999 book, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, he challenged the notion that the one-way flow of American programming to the rest of the world would lead to the homogenization of culture and the erasure of local and national identities. The more likely outcomes, he argued, were fragmentation and hybridization.

there are different ways in which the idea of the commons has worked its way into being one of the most significant memes of the last few years - Pete Linebaugh is not Silvia Federici is not Toni Negri is not Lessig, and so on. Federici, for her part, signals a timely warning in Caliban and the Witch against assuming that ‘the commons’ was without divisions of labour, particularly a gendered division of labour.

Yet, as the idea of ‘the commons’ became resolutely attached to discussions over IP and various other forms of knowledge production it - much like the precarity meme - was often put to service as a way of reimposing a certain claim to ownership and division of labour, namely: the implicit assertion that knowledge-production only involved those who are marked (or mark themselves) as knowledge producers in a certain division of labour.

the concept of the undercommons is disruptive of claims that the commons was an idyll, without difference and without divisions of labour.

A friend recently commented that she sometimes misses the days when fandom seemed like this shiny, egalitarian place where issues surrounding race (and gender, to a lesser extent) just didn't exist and she didn't realize it was an illusion courtesy of her own privilege, and it struck me how telling a comment that was: For a whole lot of people, the anger that their fandoms are being "polluted" or "ruined" by this kind of discussion stems from a deep-seated conviction that these problems didn't exist in fandom before some troublemakers started talking about them, and they view the people talking about them as the instigators of the problems rather the people who have been hurt by them or seen others hurt by them speaking up to say, "This is wrong, and it's something fandom collectively needs to work on."

That is, as the authors say, "Remarkably, emoticons convey emotions without cognition of faces."

This finding has very interesting consequences for understanding how brains process varying degrees of complexity in images. The implication here at least is that more simplified faces become tied more explicitly to a "symbolic" meaning as opposed to their iconic meaning of resembling what they look like. That is, more simplified images strip down the meaning to its core meaning disconnected to the iconic reference that they are framed within.

Severus was being ABUSED. TORTURED, for crying out loud. Severus broke. And Severus later tried to make amends, only to be kicked while he was down. It is just amazing to me that so many people cannot or will not see that this matters in the moral calculus. And it is a perfect example of why we need to stop viewing this scene solely through the filter of "racism" and all the connotations and baggage that holds for each of us: The prejudice against Severus, based on class, appearance, House affiliation, and so on, exhibited in this scene is just as morally and ethically objectionable as the prejudice against Lily based on her circumstances of birth.

I refuse to blame the young man for breaking under torture.

To see Lily alone as right and Severus alone as wrong is to miss the bigger picture of multiple bigotries that interweave and permeate the social and relational dynamics at Hogwarts and in the larger wizarding world--and in our own. Racism, sexism, classism, status-ism, affluence-ism, beauty-ism: It's all connected.

  Is that part of what James meant when he said it was that Severus existed?  He added "if you know what I mean", which is the nod-nod, wink-wink of a racist, roughly equivalent to the loaded statements characters in Seinfeld used to make about homosexuals

Snape is the head ot Slytherin house, and that house has a foreign taint; while all the other founders of Hogwarts have good Anglo Saxon names, Salazar Slytherin shares a Christian name with a Portuguese dictator. Naturally, Slytherin must be the “evil” house. Then there are the foreign students who participate in the tournament in GOF.

Worse yet, they have no compunction about "cheating" humans, and have, it seems, started several wars. This picture of the goblins combines several of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. IT is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

The failure of the academic feminists to recognize differences as a crucial stregnth is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. Divide and conquer, in our world, must become define and empower.

But Rowling's ideology cannot simply be described as anti-racist, for as strongly as she condemns racially-motivated violence, Harry Potter remains a classic work of fantasy. And fantasy is a literary genre intent, above almost all else, on the reassuring order of classification and categorization, of blood lines and inheritances.