2011-09-19
Explanation
This comic introduces "The Contextualization Fairy," a magical creature who appears whenever people are having a reasonable discussion and reframes it as a larger social justice issue, derailing the conversation. In the first scenario, two politicians are about to agree on legislation when the fairy appears and declares it a "classism issue," prompting one to call the other an "elitist." In the second scenario, a woman tells her partner she is not in the mood for sex, and the fairy reframes this as a "gender equality issue," though the woman firmly shuts this down by asserting bodily autonomy.
The comic then takes a self-aware turn: a character acknowledges that contextualizing can be done to excess but argues that assigning labels to social issues is important for getting social change to actually happen. This nuanced, reasonable point is immediately undermined when the fairy reappears and declares the meta-discussion itself an "intellectual integrity issue," with the character accused of "betraying the cause." The joke is that the fairy makes productive discourse impossible by constantly escalating the ideological stakes of every conversation.
The final panel labels her "The Contextualization Fairy: Ruining Discourse Since Always," cementing the satirical point. The votey panel shows the comic''s author (as a bearded figure) thinking "This time I''m writing the hatemail myself," a self-deprecating acknowledgment that a comic touching on gender politics and social justice framing is guaranteed to generate angry responses from all sides.