Review: #These Are Not Your Mother's Karens
The Karens Written by Peter Gray Directed and edited by Michael Alvarez Presented by The Muse Collective via streaming August 13-27, 2021 Morgan Danielle Day, Felicia Santiago, and LaurenSage Browning. Courtesy Emily Owens PR. Watching the protagonists of Peter Gray's comedy The Karens market social justice as part of their personal brand strategies, it is hard not to think of Nancy Fraser's analysis in Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (co-authored with Rahel Jaeggi) that capitalism presents differences "as consumer of lifestyle options" (186) and that what she calls "progressive neoliberalism" has appropriated emancipatory politics in order to "'diversify'" the existing meritocracy rather than "abolish social hierarchy" (Polity Press, 2018, pp. 186, 203-204). The eponymous Karens here are not the entitled middle-aged, manager-and-police-summoning white women for whom the name became a shorthand in popular discours...