Steve Dietz

We went to a presentation by Steve Dietz in which he discussed the Unscripting of the political process. I found he had a large and inclusive bracket that made it hard to grasp exactly what it was that was in this Unscripting. However, when he began to present pieces I began to see what he was talking about. What he was looking at is how we as individuals can abstract ourselves from the political controls of our party systems, how we can be social activists and seek to affect our society.
The piece that best portrayed this to me was B.L.O., The Barbie Liberation Organization. In there almost childish assault on the culture perceptions of the proper toys for boys and girls they approached the issues of what are appropriate toys and whether or not the toys that we are playing with act as a form of social programming the enact the norms of our day onto are children. The switching of voice boxes in Barbies with those from GI Joes makes it so you have switched the toys and there attached gender specifics sounds out. You now have an uber effeminate GI Joe and a masculine Barbie. Barbie isn’t suppose to want to kill people, GI Joe should want a nail job, But what is wrong with them being switched.
I feel that The Barbie Liberation Organization succeeded where so many of the pieces we saw failed, in that it was able to gain appeal and presentation to a wide cross section of the population. The normal failure that similar works of what could be called activism is that they only succeed in preaching to the Quire, they fail to recruit new supporters to a cause.