by Anne Gabriel
You hear a guy say nervously that he’s about to show his girlfriend his favorite movie. It’s a flop by a respected name with a decidedly mixed reputation—Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. You don’t know anyone involved, but you announce to him and everyone else who will listen that this decision shows straight men live on a completely different planet.
It is difficult to imagine doing this in real life and not looking like a complete asshole—especially once the girlfriend announced she actually loved the movie—but that doesn’t stop this kind of shade from being the bread-and-butter of online discourse, where trolls can be expected to sneer at even the most benign sentiment for attention or just to feed hostile urges they can’t safely vent at work or at home. An announcement amounting to “it’s movie night!” being met with identity-based bullying is just another Thursday on the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
What was different this past Independence Day is the bully in this case was neither an anonymous account with an inside-joke for an avatar nor any of the accounts known almost exclusively for such identity-based engagement farming, but instead a pioneering curator associated with UCLA and formally with the Guggenheim Museum with nearly 30,000 followers named Chaédria LaBouvier.
The other difference from a usual Thursday online that this time it didn’t take.
Despite the fact that Chaédria LaBouvier’s jab at film critic Brandon Streussnig had, as of this writing, garnered over 600 Likes and nearly 6 million views, the clapbacks have been even more popular, and the reaction overall online has been surprisingly negative—even within circles normally sympathetic to LaBouvier and her concerns.
LaBouvier’s jibe made the rounds in art and film-nerd circles, which, like the rest of the broad drift of online leftist and culture discourse is usually fairly tolerant of arbitrary hostility so long as its expressed by someone in a clearly marginalized group toward someone who isn’t in one. In the context of this kind of online discourse, black women’s accounts are usually accorded “most protected” status—but apparently there is an upper limit to even culture vultures’ patience.
While a variety of film-world accounts, black, white, queer, straight, male and otherwise, expressed sympathy for LaBouvier’s target, LaBouvier herself continues to issue a confusing string of claims in X messages—asserting over the following days that she is herself straight, that she believed straight people generally have bad taste, that she is conducting some sort of study of those disagreeing with her, that she doesn’t care if queer people or women like the movie, and that “I don’t ride the storm, I AM the storm.” As of eight minutes before this writing, she is still posting about it.
The last time LaBouvier was in the news, it was for making accusations that lead to the firing of longtime Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector wherein LaBouvier repeatedly referred to her treatment by that institution as “violence.” While the key facts of that situation remain murky, it is clear that at least LaBouvier is willing to go places that many colleagues are no longer willing to follow.
Image: Chaedria Brandon Streussnig tweet Miami Vice