Dramacow Kevin Allred - Professor of Beyoncé Studies (no, seriously), arrested for threats to kill Trump voters.

[Ginger Piglet]

So I was reading Popehat on my phone while returning from the wilds of the Surrey stockbroker belt yesterday and I found this post:

https://popehat.com/2016/11/16/true-threats-v-protected-speech-post-election-edition/

And this started me thinking. This Kevin Allred character. Well, he made death threats to Trump supporters but that's not exactly unusual and doesn't in and of itself make him a lolcow. But then I read about him being a professor of Beyoncé Studies, and followed his links, and read his Twitter, and I thought, yep, why isn't there a thread on the Farms about this character.

Kevin Allred isn't actually a professor, first of all, though his Twitter claims he is. He is, in fact, an adjunct lecturer (not sure what that is exactly, not ever having been involved with American academia) in Women's Studies (what else?) at Rutgers University. He designed a college course on Beyoncé Knowles, which can be read about here. It's taken him 6 years to design and produce this course and apparently Beyoncé is now a political figure because she did that performance where she gyrated around in front of the word "FEMINIST" in possibly the biggest virtue-signalling episode the world has ever seen. Apparently this was a profound political statement and she deserves to be eulogised as an important and seminal black feminist:

Beyoncé Knowles is known as many things: singer, songwriter, actress, performer, designer, half of hip-hop and R&B’s most powerful couple, wife, mother. But, few take her seriously as a political figure (although this is changing recently due to Beyoncé's own insistence). This course attempts to think about our contemporary U.S. society and its current class, race, gender, and sexual politics through the music and career of Beyoncé. On the surface, she might deploy messages about race, gender, class, and sexuality that appear to coincide with certain stereotypical social norms; but during this course we will ask: how does she also challenge our very understanding of these categories? How does Beyoncé push the boundaries of these categories to make space for and embrace other perhaps more “deviant” bodies, desires, and/or politics? We will position Beyoncé as a progressive, feminist, and even queer icon through close examination of her music alongside readings on the history of black feminist struggle in the U.S. (all by black women/feminists themselves), both historical and contemporary. We will not read about Beyoncé; rather, these juxtapositions will put Beyoncé’s work in conversation with larger issues in an attempt to answer: can Beyoncé’s music be seen as a blueprint for progressive social change?

Really? I thought she just sang songs about being an independent woman who don't need no man and virtue-signalled a lot, but apparently "If he liked it then he shoulda put a ring on it" is profound, deep, and thought-provoking.

Oh dear. What a pseud.

So, he tweets about running Trump supporters off the road and advocates shooting them, is taken to a mental hospital for an evaluation, and then no sooner does he get out does he start reeeeeeing about how "Trump's crackdown on free speech has absolutely begun." And we know this is a crackdown on free speech because all the people who hourly make death threats to women, people of colour, women of colour, etc. don't get arrested, so clearly he's being singled out by Trump's jackbooted thugs. LOL JK, it's because he advocated murdering people for their political beliefs and someone in law enforcement found it to be a credible threat worthy of investigation.

Whoa, hold on, is... is that a MULLET?

Sorry. Slight digression there. Scrolling back through his twitter reveals a constant stream of chimpouts and shitlosing ever since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Interrupted by a spaz attack at the prospect of Taylor Swift, calling her a "white devil." I mean, I know her music is pants, but that's a bit strong don't you think?

Anyhow, he tweets scores of times a day and describes his class on Beyoncé Studies as "we had a great conversation." He also reckons that his spergings about Beyoncé Giselle Knowles Carter Ruck Strappington Crappington De Billygoat Gruff or whatever her name is is more relevant than what other lecturers etc. teach because they all assume they have a right to be listened to.

The Independent (which used to be a fairly good British newspaper but is now an online only clickbait factory) claims that last year he caused a squawking match when he claimed that there was no such thing as a good white person, only less evil ones. He is, of course, as white as a sheet so I suspect he's been drinking the economy of privilege Kool Aid for ages and as such there's almost certainly vast amount of content going back some time. He also hosts a podcast called "Bey-Ond Popular Culture" which attempts to mix the music of Beyoncé with politics.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialkevinallred/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KevinAllred
Website: http://www.kevin-allred.com/
Beyoncé Studies: http://www.politicizingbeyonce.com/

I think I'll leave that there. I'll just post up one final tweet that I thought was highly amusing though, and rather sad and pathetic in his delusionality:

Which kinda sums this man up as an out and out virtue signaller.

Now for your turn!

 

[drain]

Holy shit, and I thought that "Women Studies" alone was pathetic.

2016, we finally have a college course on Beyoncé. What a time to be alive.

 

[introman]

I got a syllabus from a Rutger's mole that used to attend(rutgers) back in 2010; it's pretty cringeworthy to be honest. He would also talk about his previous "career" as a queer musician while teaching class.

Spoiler: Five pages of the scanned PDF

 

[CatParty]

Name: Kevin Allred

Mailing Address: 252 Franklin St. Apt. 2L, Brooklyn New York 11222 US
Phone: +1.6179906204




https://www.facebook.com/kevinallredmusic/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-wtab0l_y7rVuc8M8TH6iQ

http://www.spokeo.com/Kevin-Allred/New-York/Brooklyn/p17150521001

http://theconversation.com/why-i-of...-one-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-people-22966

Beyonce recently topped Forbes’s celebrity power list. “Who runs the world?” they ask. “In entertainment, it’s Beyonce.” This resonates particularly with me, since for the last few years I’ve been offering the first university course on this influential and powerful woman.

The course is called “Politicising Beyonce”. It looks at her music and career in order to relate her fame and celebrity to the history of black feminism in the United States. Her new status as entertainment leader serves to reinforce that this is a course worth offering and that by analysing Beyonce, we are also analysing the culture and world around us. I’ve been denigrated and scorned from various quarters for offering such a “flimsy” subject for study, but why can’t culture be studied as it’s happening: it needn’t be old to be worthy of intellectual interest.

Beyonce is known as many things: singer, songwriter, actress, performer, mother, wife, and now, according to Forbes, the most powerful entertainer working today – but still, few take her seriously as a political figure or object of intellectual curiosity.

Some of that may now be changing, particularly because she’s recently put a lot of emphasis on feminism in her music and writing. Her new album Beyonce is self-consciously feminist, and she penned a short essay for the Shriver Report denouncing gender equality as a myth. But, even as she has cautiously entered this political arena, she’s not thought to have much to do or say about the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the US or beyond.

Over the course of a semester, I attempt to position Beyonce as a progressive and feminist figure through close examination of her music alongside readings on political issues, both contemporary and historical, by classic black feminist thinkers and writers. I encourage students to question what, if anything, has changed in the interim between these black feminist texts and the release of Beyonce’s latest music. I ask if her music videos – through the visual images they put forward – challenge the same structures of power that any of these writers did. By juxtaposing her music with these writings, students are asked to interrogate if her work can be seen as a blueprint for progressive social change. And they are encouraged to think about what form social change does and could take, not in the past, but today.

Let me give you an example. We’ll look at a song like Partition alongside readings by bell hooks. I’ll ask why Partition is one of her most visually explicit videos, despite not being lyrically that sexually explicit. I push students to think about this video and song as performance.

When seen in this context, it becomes clear that Beyonce isn’t sensationalising her own body and putting it on display for viewers to gawk at. Rather, she performs the historical objectification of black female bodies and replays that objectification in order to point out that, stereotypically, black women have had few means of garnering attention beyond sexual performances. She goes so far as forcing the viewer to be complicit in this objectification by positioning them as the direct viewer of the show she is enacting. This is a key, and necessarily political, distinction.

When not arguing that Beyonce herself is unworthy of study, some other opponents of the course have taken issue with my pairing highly-regarded black feminist writers with Beyonce’s music. While I’m not making explicit political comparisons with the likes of Angela Davis, Alice Walker, or Sojourner Truth (all of whom are assigned in the course), I do think that performances by black women in pop culture, particularly Beyonce, speak to the very same trajectory of black feminism as the previous authors mentioned.

Academia desperately needs to escape this overly rigid emphasis on validity of sources. We need to look to the ways young people are learning about and engaging with the world, and encourage a critical perspective through them. More often than not, students in my classroom have been introduced to feminism (and black female empowerment specifically) by Beyonce herself, which has led them to authors like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Kimberlé Crenshaw (all of whom, again, are assigned in my course).

Through this very immediate focus on the way historical and contemporary concerns are present in Beyonce’s music, students are also encouraged to think of their own lives, regardless of the background of their identities, as political. I believe that this kind of teaching is the future of education.

When I first taught the class in 2010, it was easier to write Beyonce’s music off as inadequate for critical academic enquiry. But it’s becoming harder and harder to do that these days. Not only has Forbes named her the most powerful celebrity – she also leads Time’s 100 most influential people this year.

With these continuous accolades she has undoubtedly proven that she is a force to be reckoned with. And as a black woman still living and grappling with the US’s history of racism, these achievements speak volumes. A powerful critique of gender, race, sexuality, and class relations in the United States can be harvested from analysing Beyonce’s career, music, and videos, and I am proud to engage my students with such a thoroughly contemporary and discerning outlook.

 

[Henry Bemis]

Academia desperately needs to escape this overly rigid emphasis on validity of sources. We need to look to the ways young people are learning about and engaging with the world, and encourage a critical perspective through them. More often than not, students in my classroom have been introduced to feminism (and black female empowerment specifically) by Beyonce herself, which has led them to authors like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Kimberlé Crenshaw (all of whom, again, are assigned in my course).

There's a thick line between a willingness to examine new media and rejecting facts entirely. If you manage to skip over that line, there's a problem.

 

[Kiras left nipple]

wearing t-shirts and acting queerer...

that's how you overthrow governments...

how do these fuckwits find themselves in academia..

 

[Ruin]

I really wish I had gone to college eight years prior before twats like these started devaluing college degrees.

 

[Lurker]

I got a syllabus from a Rutger's mole that used to attend(rutgers) back in 2010; it's pretty cringeworthy to be honest. He would also talk about his previous "career" as a queer musician while teaching class.

Spoiler: Five pages of the scanned PDF

View attachment 154809 View attachment 154811 View attachment 154812 View attachment 154813 View attachment 154814

God forbid someone's absent more than once for such an important, useful class where the information learned within will most certainly be used in all areas of life. And by life, I mean Tumblr.

This is why college is a joke. This is why people my age are fucking r.etarded. This shit right here. Why any college would allow such a fucking joke to teach, even if he's merely an adjunct "professor", is mindboggling.

 

[CharlesBarkley]

Even Chris could beat this loser up.

 

[*Asterisk*]

Beyoncé Knowles. Actress.

Spoiler: ART

 

[Robert Lowe]

Don't hate a man just because he's more attractive than you. Typical bernbot liberal trash behavior.

 

[*Asterisk*]

Don't hate a man just because he's more attractive than you. Typical bernbot liberal trash behavior.

Hi, @Bertram.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I got a syllabus from a Rutger's mole that used to attend(rutgers) back in 2010; it's pretty cringeworthy to be honest. He would also talk about his previous "career" as a queer musician while teaching class.

Spoiler: Five pages of the scanned PDF

View attachment 154809 View attachment 154811 View attachment 154812 View attachment 154813 View attachment 154814

Oh look. Antonio Gramsci, Theodor W. Adorno, what is this? Taylor Swift as a cultural hegemony?

I have to hand it to him, it takes a pretty exceptional individual to turn Kanye West's VMA interruption rant into a whole college class.

 

[Chiang Kai-shek]

It's always the whitest motherfuckers that tweet about "white devils." These people really wish they were born beautiful trans womyn queer POC.

 

[NailsOnAChalkboard]

Anyone know if something will come out of his psych eval?

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Anyone know if something will come out of his psych eval?

I think the news reports indicate there was nothing resulting from it, but he's reeeeing never the less. That, and engaging in rampant whataboutery about how come the Powers That Be don't clamp down on KKK rallies or rape threats against WOC.

 

[Honeybunny]

I remember hearing about Beyonce college classes years ago (it was basically just courses about Gender Studies and Feminism but named after Beyonce), and it was just dumb then as it is now

That it's a chubby tattooed twit in a grotesque manbun-mullet combo doesn't really help with my prejudices on the matter

 

[smallmilk]

His ears look like theyre trying to get away from the bullshit his mouth is spewing

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

I never thought someone could make me think Beyonce was even more overrated than I already did.

 

[CervixHammer]

he claimed that there was no such thing as a good white person, only less evil ones.

d-does he think being "queer" makes him not white?