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oliviastowell.bsky.social
olivia stowell
@oliviastowell.bsky.social
2.9K followers 670 following 1.7K posts
theory bimbo, professional reality tv watcher

tv/film editor @ Mid Theory Collective
phd candidate studying television, race, gender, labor, and industry
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oliviastowell.bsky.social
27 was an INCREDIBLE year! but today i’m 28! this upcoming year is going to be full of big changes but i am ready for it! i am running into a new year!
me when i was 27 standing in front of a pink flowering tree! me when i was 27 standing in front of a wall of vinyls!
May 19, 2025 at 3:08 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
i’m pixie power ballad lol! (and if you’d believe it, i’m working on a study about the daylists lol)
spotify daylist titled “pixie power ballad thursday afternoon”
May 15, 2025 at 6:40 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
CALL FOR BIDS to host the post45 graduate symposium!! hosting the symposium at michigan this year was INCREDIBLE, i cannot recommend the experience enough! share w your depts & grad students & pals! more details & link to bid submission form here: post45.org/graduate/202...
open call for bids post45 grad symposium bid details
May 6, 2025 at 9:26 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
one thing that is very fun about studying popular culture is entering minute pop cultural events into the scholarly record. for instance, the gaylor "daisy" theory or vanderpump rules fans trying to review bomb tom sandoval's bar on yelp.
screenshot from the reputation is about karlie kloss masterdoc excerpt from an academic article detailing how vanderpump rules fans tried to review bomb schwartz and sandy's
March 19, 2025 at 1:19 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
re-upping for folks who missed yesterday—my new article in IJCS on Taylor Swift, Gaylor, and microconspiracy, and how Gaylor shows us that conspiracy (as a social/epistemological/aesthetic category) is not always what we imagine it to be. happy to share a PDF with anyone who'd like one!
This article takes the online subculture Gaylor (theories speculating that pop star Taylor Swift is queer and encodes queer themes in her music and persona) as a case study to argue that the style, tropes, and aesthetic vernaculars of conspiracy theorizing have dispersed into other social arenas without maintaining the wide-ranging scale of conspiracy theorizing proper, creating what I term “microconspiracies.” By engaging in non-participant observation of a Gaylor community on the social forum platform Reddit, I demonstrate how digital microconspiracy spaces engage with conspiracy aesthetics, yet deploy them on a minor scale and toward minor ends. Understanding microconspiracy opens up new ways of thinking about conspiracy thinking and cultures, while also charting the extension of conspiracy's style beyond the domains it is conventionally imagined to inhabit. By pointing to conspiracy theorizing's ability to work across axes of macro/micro and scale/scope, I offer a revised understanding of conspiracy theories and conspiracy-thinking, and their roles in contemporary culture.
March 18, 2025 at 2:58 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
so grateful to read this compelling and instructive conversation between Omid Bagherli and Omar Khalifah!
Khalifah on the problem with “trauma” and the “trauma plot” as a paradigm and form:
Many scholars are deconstructing the whole fetish of trauma and whether trauma can capture the magnitude of the events occurring in various parts of the world. In the Palestinian case, my problem with trauma is that it doesn’t do justice to the Nakba, because trauma for me connotes an event that happened in the past. It connotes a finite event in the past that’s still affecting people in the present. But the Nakba is an ongoing condition. There is no “normal time” and “trauma time” for Palestinians. There is Nakba time.
March 6, 2025 at 8:08 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
bumping CFPs for the two roundtables i'm co-organizing for ASAP/16 in Houston this October! One co-organized w/ Mitch Therieau on "What's So Public (About Public Criticism Today)?" & one co-organized with Molly Keran on "Minor Violences." email me at [email protected] or DM with questions! due 3/15!
In 2023, Ryan Ruby argued that we have entered a “golden age of popular criticism.” For Ruby, “quantitatively and qualitatively, critical production is flourishing, despite—and in some cases because of—the dire economic state.” Part of his point was that academics, either forced out of the university or frustrated with its strictures, were turning to magazines and other public-facing publications as more appropriate forums for their writing. At the same time, the past few years have seen an institutional push to bring public criticism into the fold of the university. As higher education contracts under increasingly political and economic pressures, popular criticism is often discursively figured as a lifeboat of sorts—a way to establish and cultivate a personal brand as a public intellectual, to signal the import of one’s work beyond the “ivory tower” or make one’s research “accessible” to “the public,” or even simply to continue doing one’s work after the job market has pushed one out of the institution itself. Is this all public criticism is for? What does popular writing actually do—beyond narratives of what public intellectualism does for personal and institutional brands? Who (or what) is the public intellectual in the contemporary moment, and who or what is their public? How should the university support this kind of work? How can we best set up our students for success in the world of public criticism—at both undergraduate and graduate levels? This roundtable discussion takes such questions as its occasion. Through a roundtable discussion of writers who engage in what is variously called “public writing,” “public humanities,” “popular criticism,” and sundry other names, we will move beyond received and institutional narratives of what it is we do when we engage in such writing, to instead probe what the meaning and function of such writing is under increasingly hostile cultural, political, and economic conditions. Despite a sense that such things should be obvious, the question of what constitutes harm or violence is often ambiguous and contested, both in narrative media and in everyday life. This roundtable turns its focus to the question of minor or gray-area harms and violences—circumstances in which someone has been wronged, but not necessarily in ways that make recourse to legal or procedural retribution available. This roundtable explores the affective, political, and structural dimensions of such supposedly “minor” instances of harm or violence, such as the microaggression, the unmedicated gynecological procedure, disordered eating behaviors, Lili Loofbourow’s theorizations of “bad sex,” the unsolicited dick pic, the PR smear campaign, threats of violence from anonymous social media users, etc. How do these harms index macro and structural conditions of subjugation? How do these instances trouble our sense of what counts as justice? How do fictional and narrative media try to represent these forms of violence? How do minor violences break or remake our senses of the world? What is the affective and ethical texture of having-been-wronged? To submit to this roundtable, please submit a 200-250 word short abstract of what topics and/or texts you would want to bring to a roundtable conversation on minor violences, as well as a 50-100 word bio, by March 20, 2025.
March 4, 2025 at 3:42 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
me & the girls
me with lulu (a french bulldog) and maisie (a shih tzu)
March 3, 2025 at 5:01 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
what if the oscars were only my personal opinions?? announcing the winners of the academy of olivia’s opinions awards (happens annually in my notes app)
Academy of Olivia’s Opinions Awards - [ ] Best Picture: The Brutalist - [ ] Best Director: Brady Corbet, The Brutalist - [ ] Best Actor: Colman Domingo, Sing Sing - [ ] Best Actress: Zendaya, Challengers - [ ] Best Supporting Actor: Adam Pearson, A Different Man - [ ] Best Supporting Actress: Soheila Golestani, The Seed of the Sacred Fig - [ ] Best Original Screenplay: A Different Man - [ ] Best Adapted Screenplay: Nickel Boys Best Picture nominees: Anora The Brutalist Challengers A Complete Unknown A Different Man Dune: Part II I Saw the TV Glow Nickel Boys Sing Sing
March 2, 2025 at 8:37 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
@mitchtherieau.bsky.social & I are convening a roundtable for ASAP/16 on "What's So Public (About Public Criticism Today)?"
Our roundtable asks: What is public & popular criticism for in the present moment?
CFP below; submissions through ASAP's Ex Ordo platform; DM me with any questions!
In 2023, Ryan Ruby argued that we have entered a “golden age of popular criticism.” For Ruby, “quantitatively and qualitatively, critical production is flourishing, despite—and in some cases because of—the dire economic state.” Part of his point was that academics, either forced out of the university or frustrated with its strictures, were turning to magazines and other public-facing publications as more appropriate forums for their writing. At the same time, the past few years have seen an institutional push to bring public criticism into the fold of the university. As higher education contracts under increasingly political and economic pressures, popular criticism is often discursively figured as a lifeboat of sorts—a way to establish and cultivate a personal brand as a public intellectual, to signal the import of one’s work beyond the “ivory tower” or make one’s research “accessible” to “the public,” or even simply to continue doing one’s work after the job market has pushed one out of the institution itself. Is this all public criticism is for? What does popular writing actually do—beyond narratives of what public intellectualism does for personal and institutional brands? Who (or what) is the public intellectual in the contemporary moment, and who or what is their public? How should the university support this kind of work? How can we best set up our students for success in the world of public criticism—at both undergraduate and graduate levels? This roundtable discussion takes such questions as its occasion. Through a roundtable discussion of writers who engage in what is variously called “public writing,” “public humanities,” “popular criticism,” and sundry other names, we will move beyond received and institutional narratives of what it is we do when we engage in such writing, to instead probe what the meaning and function of such writing is under increasingly hostile cultural, political, and economic conditions.
February 27, 2025 at 11:48 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
in my class the past 2 weeks, students had to make two collages: one of representations of women/femininity in the media they consume, and one of representations of men/masculinity. here's a list of who appeared most frequently across the 75 students' collages:
Taylor Swift, various Kardashian/Jenners, Kamala Harris, Katniss Everdeen, Margot Robbie as Barbie, AOC, Jess Day from New Girl, Regina George, Anne Hathaway, Elle Woods, Olivia Rodrigo, the women of Sex & the City, Michelle Obama, Sydney Sweeney Timothee Chalamet, Harry Styles, Chuck Bass, Patrick Dempsey, Michael B. Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, Ryan Gosling, Tony Stark, Troye Sivan, Donald Trump, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Jacob Elordi, Mr. Big, Patrick Bateman, The Rock
February 6, 2025 at 5:20 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
💫
What does it mean to place advertisements for lingerie, lipstick, deodorant, and tanning oil, all featuring sexually charged images of parts of women’s bodies, alongside a recipe for pheasant soup, a photograph of deli meats, and Reubens’s The Judgment of Paris? The answer is not waiting on the next page in discursive form. There is no way to be certain whether I have “gotten the answer right,” because that is not what Ways of Seeing is teaching me to do. It is teaching me to take a risk, by withholding any recourse to other ways of engaging the images it contains. Seeing comes before words.
February 5, 2025 at 11:28 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
karla sofía gascón’s tweets are so horrible, genuinely evil shit. but i have to admit this is one of the funniest “apologies” ive ever seen in my life
“my most sincere apologies to all the people who may have felt offended by the ways i express myself in my past, in my present, and in my future”
February 4, 2025 at 3:10 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
however, this show has made me realize that Jen Tullock (who plays Mark's sister Devon) and Olivia Colman should play siblings in something. tell me i'm wrong.
Jen Tullock as Devon in Severance olivia colman
February 3, 2025 at 11:53 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
i also had a LOT of fun making the images for this piece's slide deck. my particular favorite is the tumblr poll i found showing that in a poll of almost 10,000 tumblr users, Goncharov beat The L Word (65% to 35%!!!) for "Best Piece of Queer Media"
a collage of Goncharov posts from tumblr A collage of Goncharov memes
February 3, 2025 at 2:30 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
good things
korean cucumber salad & fried tofu two plates of dumplings and chili crisp
January 30, 2025 at 3:10 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
this is an amazing essay. i would like to share two sections that particularly spoke to me. the close of the second screenshot speaks to the parts of this problem that many at so-called "elite" institutions do not (or cannot) see, and do not (or choose not to) know.
While teaching with close reading might be a near-universal obligation of literary studies instructors at every rank and type of institution, publishing scholarship is rarely an expectation in contingent contracts. Even tenure-track faculty at community colleges, public branch campuses, and small liberal arts colleges might go many years without a publication, in large part because of ever-increasing expectations for teaching, service, and other“student-facing” activities in their contracts. As I have argued elsewhere with Annie McClanahan and Louise McCune, scholarship is being intentionally “unbundled” from teaching as part of the casualization, deskilling, and gigification of academic labor pursued by administrators of the neoliberal university, by educational technology firms, and by the investor class that influences both (Seybold et al. 2023). We are already approaching the time when academic scholarship in literary studies will be exclusively published by “famous critics at wealthy universities,” because few others will have the time, resources, or incentives to publish it. By Kramnick’s definition, these are the legitimate practitioners of a professionalized literary studies. I suspect that many administrators, donors, and technophiles will happily capitulate to his definition, conveniently espoused by an elite member of the profession, because it can be misused to justify further depreciation of the overwhelming majority of the labor done by literary studies PhDs. hopelessly fucked. If those of us committed to public scholarship are “preoccupied with PR,” with building a brand we can “scale up and face out,” or with creating “synergy . . . well-suited for troubled times,” then we deserve the scorn Kramnick’s ironic invocations of corporate jargon invite (100– 105). He is right that the corporatization of institutions and individuals provides no answers to the crises in literary studies, because it causes those crises. In Kramnick’s account, public is a shorthand for that corporatized EdSpeak. For him, the antonyms to public in public scholarship or public-facing criticism are private, peer-reviewed, unpopular, or specialized. Going public is what you do after you scale up and face out. For me, however, the only antonym to public that matters is paywall. Public criticism is not trading the subscribers to Critical Inquiry for the subscribers to the New Yorker; it’s circumventing the subscription model altogether. And the goal is not to condescend to “general readers” from outside the academy. It’s to reach the thousands of my professional peers, outside the academy and inside it, who are on the other side of those paywalls. I write this review essay knowing that my colleagues and I at Elmira College will not be able to read it until 2034 because our library, through a combination of austerity budgeting and platform profiteering, has been priced out of every tier of access to MLQ on publication
January 29, 2025 at 12:09 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
this is a mask off moment. imagine admitting in print that you laughed along to being called “one of the good ones,” that you yearn to say the r word and demean fat people for a cheap laugh, that you feel “freed” and “empowered” by being an asshole & jockeying up to racists
“The hold the left has is coming to an end because you guys were making bad decisions," a droll, self-confident IDF soldier tells me at Butterworth's. "When you go too far, you isolate people, you polarize people. The pendulum effect is real." Here, she says, "is where you can say whatever you want!" It's true that over the past few months since Trump was reelected, I had begun to feel these young conservatives influence seeping into my own polite circles like The Substance. We no longer had any patience for the identity warriors on our timelines. A friend and I started swapping clips of Megyn Kelly on Instagram; we thought they were hilarious. (Our favorite was her take on the fires in L.A.: "The last thing I want to see if I'm in a burning building is (a) a woman and (b) an obese woman.") I was unleashed: the R-word, fat jokes. No one, not even the bleeding hearts I know, ever seemed to get all that offended - the only time I lost friends in the past year for political reasons was debating the war in Gaza - and mostly, even if they wouldn't say it themselves, they chuckled. "OMG you're tacky for that one," one would text me back, in those moments. It felt freeing, empowering, though perhaps in the same way that bullying someone does when you're in middle school. On my last night, I got to smoking with a model type in a fur coat with a vaguely European accent. I'd later discover she's married to an alt-right activist with ties to white nationalists. "How can one country be so entertaining? Americans are just made of something different," she said to me. "Everything became so puritanical" I nodded my head in agreement. The next morning, I woke up sick. • archive.is
January 27, 2025 at 10:16 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
google's inescapable AI overview, so useful, so true, so accurate, so needed
google's AI overview generated answer to the searched question "how many words should a dissertation chapter be"; reading the obviously inaccurate answer: "The length of a dissertation chapter depends on the type of chapter and the length of the dissertation. Dissertation chapters can range from 1,500 to 6,000 words or more. "
January 25, 2025 at 9:53 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
i loooooooove doing scholarship
a collage of goncharov memes
January 25, 2025 at 5:27 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
this absolute banger of an essay by @kellypendergrast.bsky.social is unstoppable!! don’t miss it! come for the references to Totoro straw stoppers & Moana 2 themed baths; stay for incisive analysis of the meaning of the TikTok/reel aspect ratio
body for the viewer's gaze. Like the classic GRWM, the Stanley video also expresses something about its creator's class status (or at least their class anxieties). The cups themselves are expensive, and collecting enough accessories for an effective GRWM requires a financial and time investment. Each clip-on addition is a talisman of got-my-shit-together-ness -these fragments I have shored against my ruins-with the fully dressed cup acting as a stand-in for an aesthetically organized life. While Stanley's roots as a purveyor of knockabout camping vessels are retained to an extent in next-gen Stanley culture (and creators do appreciate their cups' utility value), the cup's to-be-looked-at-ness is the real story: the Stanley is a doll, a dressable mini-me that is also an accessory for and symbol of the real me. everything else move around it. To swipe through a dozen #StanleyCup clips is to see a screen filled with Quencher after Quencher, stitched together by a series of jump cuts both within and between videos. Swipe, a Stanley from the POV of its owner, being packed with ice CUT TO cup filling with water from the faucet CUT TO cup moving through space held by a disembodied hand SWIPE TO another cup, getting ready for game day, each football-themed accessory appearing with ASMR clacks and zzzzps via invisible jump cuts SWIPE TO unbox my Stanley with me, a single-shot unwrapping of the tumbler from its cardboard carapace and tissue liner, reminiscent of the fetishistic way a tech blogger would unbox his Macbook Pro on YouTube a decade ago (landscape mode for the laptop body). Close app. Montage is dead, and the cup stays in the picture.
January 22, 2025 at 2:24 PM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
exhibit F: curly haired dad character who spends the first season dealing with the consequences of his financial management ( @micahbateman.bsky.social furthering the theory again)
jimmy cooper from the oc howard archibald from gossip girl
January 21, 2025 at 3:08 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
exhibit E: these are the same guy, looks-wise and narratively (thank you @micahbateman.bsky.social)
caleb from the oc bart bass from gossip girl
January 21, 2025 at 3:05 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
exhibit D: around the midseason, a chaos agent character appears and warps the blonde girl protagonist's sense of reality by spinning a web of lies
oliver trask from the oc georgina sparks from gossip girl
January 21, 2025 at 2:49 AM
oliviastowell.bsky.social
exhibit B: one-liner brunette bestie with troubled blonde bestie who dates the male lead (coincidentally, in both shows the brunette acts circles around the blonde)
summer and marissa from the oc blair and serena from gossip girl
January 21, 2025 at 2:42 AM