Welcome to Pop Goddess, a home for my reflections on movies, television and other pop culture offerings. My tastes are eclectic – from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Galactica to the Good Wife; from Turner Classic Movies to Hindi and current Hollywood films; from Victorian literature to comic books. My posts will reflect these tastes, so they won’t be in any way systematic or comprehensive, but instead kind of random, intensely personal, and thought-provoking. My writing will reflect my interest in how identity, race, and gender intersect with and are expressed through popular media. I embark on this venture advisedly, keeping in mind what a character in the recent film Contagion said: “A blog is just graffiti with punctuation.” I hope that in the randomness you recognize the patterns of your own tastes, that my graffiti offers a new perspective on the familiar forms of entertainment that surround us.
About the author:
Shanti Wesley is a writer living in Jersey City, NJ. She has been published in Catamaran, a journal of South Asian American writing, and online publications such as Monsoon Magazine, EGO, and Racewire. Shanti has a M.A. in Divinity from the University of Chicago, where she focused on gender and sexuality in the Hebrew Bible, Hindu mythology, and South Asian cinema. She has a B.A. in English from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where she examined ideas of gender and desire in Victorian literature.
Shanti has worked at Manavi, an anti-violence organization for South Asian women, and at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a civil rights organization. She is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and has experience in both film and theater. She was a production assistant on Mira Nair’s film The Namesake and appeared onstage at the Public Theater in New York City in TEN, a showcase of ten short plays by Asian American writers. She brings a global perspective to her personal taste in film and media, having lived in the U.S., Germany, and India.
