Attraction and Repulsion. Modern views of electricity. 1892.

French composer and synthesizer pioneer Éliane Radigue, Paris, 1971; Photo by Yves Arman

Love me because I’m beautiful - i-D magazine (1996)

i guess i think this is sort of like the "dante's inferno is fanfiction!" take in that it's like, well, for sure this idea is useful for helping people understand that fanfic/rpf is not really all that outré or different from storytelling practices that get more mainstream respect, but if you don't sort of go forward into "fanfic and dante's inferno are really interesting examples of how texts can be in conversation or in conflict, let's apply other postmodernist ideas here, let's apply other historical materialist ideas here" you're kind of trapped in one particular layer of analysis

like ultimately is it more useful to look at these things (camera work, graphics, marketing, the arrangement of statistics, the amplification of the drama) as rpf, or is it more useful to look at them as kayfabe

i think if we look at them as kayfabe, it gives us a lot of language to talk about the methods through which these characterizations come top-down from the people in charge of the sport, the ways they come bottom-up from the fans; about how intentional the narrativization of sports is, without making the storytelling piece of sports sound more deceitful or nefarious than it is; about ourselves, the crowd, as characters in the story; about gimmicks, pushes, and storylines; faces and heels, who gets to be a face and why, the difference between "being characterized as a heel" and "having a bad reputation", whether people are being treated unfairly by the story and in what ways; in particular, about how a given athlete either leans into being a heel or refuses/resists the role

i thought this was such a great piece of the interview: