We're throwing it back to the 1996 cult classic film The Craft just in time for Halloween! We begin with a conversation about Hannah and Marcelle's teenage witch phases (of course they both had them), before digging into the filmic landscape of the 90s. Hannah argues that The Craft's interest in girlhood and power was a catalyst that paved the way for pop culture to come, like Buffy and Charmed and Practical Magic. Hannah then draws on Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford’s “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism" and Jessica Rosenberg and Gitana Garofalo’s “Riot Grrrl: Revolutions from Within" to help understand the resonance of film. If you too went through a witch phase, or indeed are still a practicing witch, then this episode is for you!

***

Works Cited

Bastién, Angelica Jade. “The Profound, Enduring Legacy of The Craft.” Vulture 27 October 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/10/the-craft-its-enduring-legacy.html. 

Gillis, Stacy, and Rebecca Munford. “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism.” Women’s History Review 13.2 (2004): 165–82. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1080/09612020400200388

Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake, eds. Introduction. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 

Jacobs, Matthew and Julia Brucculieri. “Relax, It’s Only Magic: An Oral History Of ‘The Craft.’” Huffpost 20 May 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-craft-oral-history_n_5734f7c9e4b060aa7819d362. 

Walker, Rebecca. “Becoming the Third Wave.” Ms. Magazine January/February 1992.

***

To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team!

Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.

*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both.

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another Material Concerns, another long check in! Followed by Creature Report and Mailbag Sampler (Spreadsheet Sampler??).

Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II! For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!

***

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

~ This episode contains some spoilers about The X Files ~

This week we dive into beloved television series, The X Files (1993-2002), with Leigh Dyrda! Leigh (she/her) is an academic whose research interests include EcoGothic, a field that probes the eerie overlap of ecocriticism and Gothic. We figured Leigh would be a perfect guest to dig into this show about alien-human hybrids, monsters that defy taxonomical definition, and cancers courtesy of government microchips.

In our first segment, Marcelle explains the show was distinctly of its time. She considers its popularity in relation to the backdrop of Clinton era politics, post-Watergate government distrust, television viewing practices of the 90s and the early days of the internet. She then leads Leigh and Hannah through some theory. Drawing on Charles Soukup's 2002 article, Television Viewing as Vicarious Resistance: The X-Files and Conspiracy Discourse, Marcelle examines the way the show's mytharc and monster-of-the week narratives allowed audiences to feel as if by watching the show, they were "doing something."

If you're a fan of The X Files or you've never really watched it, no matter. Come for the theory, stay for the thesis — and let us know what you think in an Apple Review or a comment on Spotify!

***

To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there!

***

Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.

*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another Material Concerns episode — this time with a cold open! Because why not? In this episode, we begin with a check in, jump into Oops All Oops and end with a new segment — Patreon Party! It's a ball!

Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II featuring Okay, Hear Me Out and Coach makes Marcelle and Hannah do some improv! For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!

***

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sometimes an episode is such a longtime coming that the enthusiasm from our hosts is palpable! Such is the case with this episode about The Simpsons, a TV show that pervaded Marcelle's childhood due in part to...you guessed it... syndication! In this episode, Marcelle reminds the audience how television worked before streaming and the nature of syndication. Together, she and Hannah think through the influence of The Simpsons' first 300 episodes between 1997 and 2003 (Marcelle's teen years). They explore the attractive quality of the sitcom as a genre, the reproducibility of Bart Simpson (and others) as an icon, and the show's criticism of and self-aware complicity in capitalism and consumerism.

This episode is for The Simpsons NERDS and casual viewers alike. Happy listening.

***

To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there!

***

Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.

*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We check in for 20 minutes and for that, we're sorry! We follow our check-in with a quick Apocalypse Toolkit and then leave the rest of the segments (Creature Report, How the Sausage is Getting Made, and Voice Memo Dispatch) to Part II over on Patreon!

Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen! For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!

***

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we're talking about beloved computer game, The Sims, with special guest Ruth Ormiston. Ruth (they/them) is a book designer and cultural worker with an MA in English Literature from the University of Victoria (where they specialized in late-nineteenth-century children’s publishing) and a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser University. And they're a fan of The Sims.

Released 25 years ago, the game has seen many updates and dozens of expansion packs, all while retaining a grip on children and adults alike who flock to it for escapism, world-building, chaos, and play. In our conversation, Hannah contextualizes its reception in the early aughts and helps us understand its enduring success across a diverse audience through a look at Jack Halberstam's work, The Queer Art of Failure. Together, Ruth, Marcelle and Hannah consider the pleasure of the open-endednesThe Sims provides, while still being a designed game that has particular ideas about the world coded into it. As you can imagine, the conversation turns to heteropatriachy and capitalism before deep-diving into the exit-less pool of subversive possibilities enabled in the gameplay itself.

This episode cites work from Tanja Sihvonen, Jack Halberstam, Diane Nutt, Diane Railston, Hanna Wirman and Rhys Jones..

***

To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there!

***

Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.

*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another Material Concerns featuring Consumer Retorts and Oops All Oops! And some light panic from the team. We're fineeeeee!

Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II. For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!

***

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jordan Peele's Get Out is a masterpiece both firmly planted in the rich tradition of horror and at the forefront of the growing genre of new Black horror. As auditors of the zeitgeist, we simply had to talk about the splash it made in 2017 and the conversation around its legacy since. In this episode we consider what made the narrative so impactful and we take a closer look at its reception by white audiences and critics who were particularly interested in claiming Peele's work as an example of "Black Excellence." Marcelle and Hannah parse the complexity of the term and pull on Cheryl Thompson's work to understand how "Black Excellence became the veil that shielded people from seeing how our systems and institutions are still rooted in White supremacist notions of ‘success’." To better understand the film itself, Marcelle then draws on “Horrifying Whiteness and Jordan Peele’s Get Out" written by Julia Mollenthiel — an artcile that defines a theoretical lens to help us think about the growing genre of new Black horror: “horrifying whiteness.”

Even if you're a weenie when it comes to horror, this is an episode you don't want to miss! We promise there are no jump scares!

***

To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there!

***

Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.

*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Material Concerns Hannah, Marcelle and Coach start with a sweet little check in, including Hannah's ideal way to start the day, a Pitt update from Marcelle, and some very exciting creative news from Coach. Then Coach leads a "Left on the Table" segment that turns into an impromptu Coach's Corner. And to finish off part one, the trio each gets a minute for their "Okay, Hear Me Out" segment, in which cases are made for: being nude around your friends, reading books written or set in the place you live, and that graphic novels should not be pulled from shelves in Alberta. 

Head to Patreon.com/ohwitchplease to listen to Part II. For as little as $54/year, you'll get ad-free episodes, bloopers, a backlog of content and part two of all Material Concerns episodes! Go to patreon.com/ohwitchplease now to join a tier that works for your budget!

***

Music Credits:

“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020

Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.