While some hate it, others admire it - it is a simplified description of the understanding of woke culture in contemporary society, a phenomenon that certainly did not arise yesterday, but whose certain elements could affect the global and local tomorrow, both opposing sides similarly reason. Admittedly, they do not agree on whether woke culture - that ambiguous term loaded with different meanings - brings civilization a bright future or the apocalypse. Slavoj Žižek believes that woke culture is already there as an integral part of our lives and that it does not intend to disappear from the public sphere, while a whole galaxy of public workers and politicians finds it as the main ingredient of their own political activity in the fight against this hateful cultural phenomenon that touches them personally.
Putin sees it as a sign of the general decadence of the West, and the controversial multibillionaire Elon Musk resonates similarly, adding a personal element: namely, Musk lost a son due to the woke culture, but gained a daughter, when he allowed his own child, then sixteen, to undergo one of the sex change treatments thanks to which his son became Vivian Wilson. Speaking of names, the eccentric Elon gave one of his children the name X AE A-XII, which personally reminds us of a technical name for, for example, a carburetor, while Musk thinks that name is full of futuristic symbolism.
When celebrities start using certain terms, that's the ultimate sign that it's something popular. Through the lens of woke culture, we observed the recently concluded Olympic Games, counting the genetic grains of the athletes, the mythical struggle of the left and the right has already been reduced to a cultural war between woke and non-woke cultures, and geopolitical actors justify their hegemony by advocating for the affirmation of the culture of awakening or else its negation. The very term woke - the English word for waking up, and then awakening - entered the public discourse only in 2010, it means waking up from a dream, in a figurative sense, the awareness that the world we live in is full of inhumane and discriminatory phenomena that have passed under our radar for centuries.
At first, the linguistic term went viral when it was appropriated by the Black Lives Matters movement: be awake and aware of racial segregation, police brutality, and social insensitivity—that troubling and irreparable trio of American democracy. Virality leads to new fans, so the list, along with the eternal activist Meghan Markle and Greta Thunberg, who repeatedly called the world to wake up and be aware of environmental problems, also includes Le Bron James and director Spike Lee. Each of them loaded something typically of their own into the woke culture: Meghan denounced sexual predators, Greta the capitalist ones, Le Bron and Spike Lee advocated a less discriminatory position of the African-American population in the USA.
Woke culture is a completely predictable continuation of many movements for individual and collective emancipation dating back to the second half of the last century. These are the years that led to national emancipation - former colonies become sovereign countries, and many nations achieve the desired independence. Racial and gender discrimination is also reduced: although racism has never been eradicated, it has remained present in more perfidious forms, and the same is true with sex-gender discrimination. The most entertaining part for the public were the sexual revolutions of the 60s, which brought the spirit of liberalism into the public sphere, although in the private sphere they probably always existed in similar forms, only in those years did they see the light of the public, causing admiration for some, and fear for others.
Since the 1990s, identity politics have flourished: everyone knows, even too many, how the national feeling has awakened, but not only that, but also many other identity determinants: racial, cultural, religious, gender identities have become an unavoidable part of public discourse. It is mostly not about identities in the plural - according to Matvejević, accepting the plurality of identities is the criterion for whether identities are healthy and safe - but about those in the singular that compete in exclusivity and conflict.
However, of all the evasions, manifestations and modifications of one's own gender identities cause the most uproar. In principle, when the average person hears about woke culture, many of them automatically have a primordial fear: that one morning their beloved son will declare himself to be like her, or that the next day their sweet daughter will decide to grow a mustache and choose to work on a farm. Such phenomena, related to gender reassignment - oops, it is not politically correct, so the term gender-affirming surgery in which primary and secondary sexual characteristics are modified, added or taken away - is mostly amused or upset by the public. Especially when in some American states, such as California, through the law AB 957, legal legislation is being innovated that makes it easier for minors, adolescents and adolescents to change sex, which is not only a medically very invasive process, both for the body and the spirit, especially in the sensitive phase of youth .
The German philosopher Hegel once stated that once humanity learns the principle of freedom, there is no turning back. It is the same with woke culture, whose positive aspect is related to denouncing and fighting against many inhumane phenomena, but which, like every struggle for freedom, often turns into its opposite, characterized by numerous contradictions. But at the same time, a symbolic like for woke culture in its more extreme forms automatically provokes numerous counter-reactions. Thus, through conflicts, identity wars feed and survive, and almost everything that is socially and politically relevant is eliminated from the sphere of people's interests.
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