People of Wal-Mart? I Guess I'm One Too

[zingerella]

Dear Friend, Colleagues, and Fellow-Travellers,

Can we knock it off with the puerile snickering over People of Wal-Mart, already*? Also with the classist Wal-Mart slang-"Walmart children," "Walmart creatures," etc?

I mean, sure, it's really easy to feel superior to a population of largely poor people, many of whom are fat, many of whom may be on

Comments

[corbet]

Thank you for saying this.

[krinndnz]

Rock on. Making fun of the powerful is a wellspring of comedy. Mocking the powerless is almost always mere sadism.

[zingerella]

Like blackface, it serves only to assert the social order and the mocker's own privilege, not to challenge it.

[audrawilliams]

That's sort of how I feel about drag!

[zingerella]

I have mixed feelings about drag, really, in part because it can be used by different groups in different ways, you know?

Drag as in "straight guys stuffing their bras and putting on makeup for lulz"? Not so much with the funny.

Drag as in "gay guys participating in a part of gay culture that uses hyperfeminized personae as a source of lulz"? Not my thing at all, and something that I think might benefit from intersectional analysis. But maybe not quite like blackface, because it's more complicated than that.

Drag as in "experimenting with the gendered clothing of a gender other than your own to see how it works for you and aligns with your sense of how you want to present yourself, no lulz intended or expected"? I'm okay with that.

[human_loser]

Right on.

[xturtle]

This. I've shopped there with full knowledge of how heinous the company is because they were the only option. And if the hipster assholes who run that site think they're doing anything to walmart by making fun of the people walmart exploits, they're far more mock-worthy than the people on their site.

[zingerella]

Exactly. I'm all for making fun of the store, sending up its policies, or whatever. But making fun of the people? If that's what passes for hipster humor, then count me a humorless old fart.

[biblionerd_girl]

BRAVO.
That site made me almost physically ill the first time someone sent me a link. Worse, it was sent to me by someone who has never lived out of New England and claims to find American Apparel gauche.

[audrawilliams]

I love you so effing much.