From Work to Beer to Text

Today, I am satisfying the desire of You Made Me Theorize's legions of readers: I am allowing you to be flies on the wall of a class discussion. So here's the big reveal: Yesterday, we talked about The Beer Summit. Oh sure, we also talked quite a bit about representation and social constructionism and discursive power formations. But throughout all of that, The Beer Summit remained a very rich example that brought to light many of those aforementioned concepts.

And so, I come to you today to cite my own sources, as I was inspired to use The Beer Summit as a class example by this esteemed blog, which took its own inspiration from this insightful article. With that, I'll reiterate one of the driving questions that our class has been asking for the past few weeks: Who are the authors, and who are the readers here?

And now more questions: Where are the lines between those groups drawn? Do we think that someone (or some group, more likely) authored this whole Red, Light, and Blue thing, or are the readers--the social critics--just fighting to take control of the significance of this meeting, killing off the authors, so to speak? Discuss below.