clsloan's blog

What's Haunting Dove's Real Beauty Campaign?

clsloan — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 13:57:29 +0000

Every image is haunted by the excluded. Every social movement is haunted by flaws. After reading Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and Nivedita Menon's Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law, I became a bit haunted by the possibility of subversion. These two texts tell us that ghosts, in various forms, are absolutely everywhere, and after ruminating on their content and methodologies, I started to see ghosts, too.

Gordon's book criticizes canonical sociology being far too focused on the present, the physical and the empirical, and for failing to account for “missing” and the “disappeared” subject positions. These absent presences, the ghosts that haunt our supposedly complete accounts of societies and histories, need to be accounted for. The ghost, for Gordon, is “the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (8). In other words, what societies exclude, keep out and make abject are, paradoxically, at the very heart of cultural meaning.

At first glance, Menon's study seems pretty far removed from Gorrdon's subject matter. While Gordon's book makes itself tantalizingly fantastic by splaying references to ghosts and hauntings all over its cover page, Menon's text looks pretty down-to-earth. Weighty, serious terms like “politics” and “the law” indicate no-nonsense subject matter. Imagine my surprise when I realized that Gordon and Menon's projects actually share a lot of crucial points. Menon, like Gordon, suggests that cultural movements are haunted by unintended subject positions. Menon emphasizes the overwhelming power of discourse and demonstrates that even apparently revolutionary action can backfire if it's energized by problematic reasoning. Menon gives the general example of abortion “rights” early in her book: pro-choice discourse that claims abortion as a “private right” for women who deserve to make their own decisions about their own bodies necessarily forecloses on the possibility that abortion could be a public concern that requires, for example, insurance coverage or even subsidies. Menon focuses on legal discourse, but we can infer that all social movements and campaigns are bound by the rules of intelligibility: what can be said is limited by what makes sense given the current cultural climate. Because of this intrinsic problem with discourse, that only culturally available ideas are, well, available for mobilization, revolutionary discourse becomes haunted by counter-revolutionary possibilities, the ghosts of future oppression.

When it comes to the difficulties of emancipatory discourse, people craving equality for various gender and sexuality subject positions have certainly struggled with some double-edged swords. The highly volatile, highly relevant, intensely current debate on gay marriage springs to mind. By appropriating the universalizing discourse of the normalcy of monogamous marriage, many gay couples strive to secure valuable legal rights and cultural intelligibility. On the other hand, does this appropriation simply re-affirm the value of monogamy, the desirability of a capitalism-driven “normalcy”, and/or erase the multiplicity of queer experience in favor of the bourgeois “loyalty, romance and procreation” model of sexual relationships in mainstream culture?

Another interesting movement, a supposedly all-inclusive self-esteem builder for women, has been picked up by the Dove soap company. Their “Real Beauty” campaign strives to differentiate Dove from other hygiene or clothing product companies that rely on exclusive, unattainable ideals of attractiveness to sell their merchandise. This advertising scheme (which can, perhaps, double as a social statement) implies that our current standards of beauty unfairly exclude women who are too old, too fat, too ethnic, too “physically flawed.” Instead, Dove's visual ads argue that our concept of beauty needs to expand so that we see all women as beautiful. Of course, there are some problems here. The image of “beautiful” women of diverse races and body types is haunted by a few obvious exclusions: women with blemished skin, women with disabilities, women who might not be immediately recognizable as women, women who aren't sparkling and clean who, perhaps, can't afford Dove soap. Isn't it unfair, though, to criticize a soap company for not suggesting that dirty women can also be beautiful? I can hear some of my practical friends asking. Not when their ad campaign focuses on beauty as an all-inclusive category, I can hear myself snidely responding. Like “universally recognized rights,” “universally recognized beauty” seems like a completely unattainable dream.

And even if it weren't, even if we could exorcize the ghosts from this image and convince the world that beauty is, indeed, about confidence and personal pride, are there any discourse-related problems we should be thinking about? About a week ago I came across a public-service campaign. There were several signs taped up on stall doors and beside mirrors in a public women's restroom. Drawn in marker on colorful construction paper, they assured the reader, “You are beautiful!” and that “Beauty has no rank order.” Even as I recognized that the campaigners certainly meant the absolute best and were doubtless motivated by great intentions, I was immediately prompted to wonder: so I deserve to be encouraged about my beauty but not my happiness, my intelligence, or my ability to help others? The signs, even in kindness, even in the suggestion that all women were beautiful, relied on the discourse of attractiveness to empower. Self-worth is still couched in terms of physical appearance, even if we're getting a bit more generous with the required criteria.

Erasing Wyldstyle: Heteronormativity in the LEGO Movie

clsloan — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 13:43:33 +0000

Artist Jason Freeny's LEGO Anatomy Model

Image Credit: hiconsumption.com

In my last post, I laid out the theoretical groundwork of biopolitics for a critique of the subversive potential of the LEGO movie. Biopolitics, or the epistemological and sociopolitical forces that determine how individuals understand bodies and “life,” lets us examine both the LEGO movie's own critique of social constructivism and comment on the movie's failure to adequately separate itself from static models of gender and sexuality.

The movie looks most promising in its progressive depiction of the positive biopower of the multitude. First of all, the revolutionary potential of the LEGO Movie is distinctly global in scope. Individuals from radically different worlds comprise the heterogeneous, but unified, community of Master Builders. This representation suggests that big business and corrupt politics can be overcome only by spanning various ways of life and drawing energy from multiple cultures. Hardt and Negri argue that despite Empire's dominating, international reach, the negative impact of globalization might be countered by a new, post-proletariat class, the multitude. These laborers are linked together through their mutual exploitation under the power of Empire, but these very powers that exploit them facilitate community formation. In the LEGO Move, of course, Lord Business attempts to segregate the worlds. His oppressive power in each realm, however, inspires Master Builders to come together despite the borders between their worlds.

The Master Builders

Image Credit: Yahoo! Movies

Secondly, the very structure of this universe serves as a perfectly apt metaphor for the subversive potential of the multitude. Lord Business builds his Empire out of LEGOs, constructing what appear to be stable landscapes, buildings, and, less concretely, paradigms and daily routines for his citizens. These backdrops, however, can be dissassembled by Master Builders, individuals with the amazing capacity to create structures without instructions, the imaginative heroes of the movie. Lord Business's ultimate act of villainy involves his plan to freeze the LEGO worlds in place using “the Kragle,” a secret super weapon (super glue, in fact) that will destroy the dynamism that makes the LEGO universe so promising.

Finally, the LEGO movie makes a truly sophisticated theoretical move (not to mention a savvy business move) in its counter-radical support of revolution from within the system. Hardt and Negri argue that multitude derives its energy from Empire, and can cause reform, even structural collapse, only from inside Empire itself. If Emmett learns about the joys of thinking outside the instruction manual, the initial political radicalism of the Master Builders gets sharply reined in. Essentially, Emmett proves to this group of visionaries that an individual following social codes has just as much creativity and imagination as the most talented Master Builder. In Wyldstyle's moving speech to the multitude, broadcast to all LEGO worlds from Lord Business's own communications system, she admits that institutions constructed by Empire have generated a truly creative, powerful populace. She says that Emmett was

a face in the crowd, following the same instructions as you. He was so good at fitting in no one ever saw him. I owe you an apology cuz I used to look down on people like that. I used to think they were followers with no ideas or vision. Because it turns out Emmett had great ideas. Even though they seemed weird and kind of pointless, they actually came closer than anyone else to saving the universe. And now we have to finish what he started by making whatever weird thing pops into our heads. All of you have the ability inside you to be a groundbreaker, and I mean literally. Break the ground! Peal up the pieces, tear apart the walls! Build things only you can build. To defend ourselves, we need to fight back against President Business's plans to freeze us!

I can change just about everything except my own name!

Image Credit: Lego.com

Unfortunately, this film fails to demonstrate that gender roles and sexuality are just as ripe for imaginative deconstruction as everything else in the LEGO universe. If part of the central message is that everyone, including “average” folks that revolutionary radicals might accuse of being brainwashed, is special, Emmett himself only aspires to greatness because of his attraction to Wyldstyle. In a conversation with her, he admits, “when you said I was talented and important, it made me want to do everything I could to be the guy you were talking about.” Even when Emmett meets Wyldstyle, the movie subtly highlights the liberatory potential of romance. Emmett first sees her digging around after hours at the construction site. He consults his instruction manual and reads aloud, “If you see anything weird, report it immediately. Well, I guess I'm gonna have to report y....” He break off because at this point Wyldstyle throws back the hood of her jacket and tosses her lovely LEGO hair. Emmett, completely arrested in his action by her beauty, watches her in awe. Sexual attraction, in this case, causes Emmett to unintentionally deviate from “the instructions.” Biopolitical critics like Foucault have pointed out that painting sexual fulfillment and romance as “subversive” only reaffirms the importance of sexuality and gender, a strategy that ultimately fails to imagine new possibilities since capitalist societies rely so heavily on the heterosexual family structure.

In addition, the movie ultimately breaks Wyldstyle down into Lucy, her “original” identity, a move I found just as inexplicable as it was disappointing. Emmett initially points out that “Wyldstyle” isn't quite a normal name, and this joke is played for laughs at multiple points. When Wyldstyle takes Emmett to Vitruvius, the prophetic Master Builder who originally predicted the rise of “the Special,” adds another, decidedly less humorous, angle to her name. When she identifies herself as Wyldstyle, he asks, “Are you a student I used to have who was so insecure she kept changing her name?” Watching this exchange, I became immediately flummoxed. This is the only point in the film where change is figured as a result of “insecurity” instead of creativity. Wyldstyle, a Master Builder, can take apart alleys to make motorcycles, but apparently she cannot take those sorts of deconstructive liberties with her own identity. Instead, she must admit that her name is “Lucy,” and, eventually, both Emmett and Batman (her brooding boyfriend) address her by this much tamer appellation. In a LEGO movie about the joys of breaking things apart, the satisfaction of putting them back together “incorrectly,” the glee involved with sticking dragons on luxury condo buildings, the female protagonist's primary arc involves rediscovering her “real” identity.

WHY, LEGO Movie? Just...Why?

Image Credit: examiner.com

I haven't had space this post to talk about the meta-level of the LEGO movie. All of the lovable main characters, in their fight against oppressive sociopolitcal and economic systems, are actually being controlled by humans, you know, playing with LEGOs. There's a lot more to say about this metafictional structure (does it completely undermine their rebellion?), but I'll only mention one irksome point. We never actually see any “female” players. The standard, white, middle-class family referenced here is comprised of “Dad,” the Lord Business-style bad guy, “the son,” the creative mind behind Emmett's rebellion against order, “Mom,” a voice upstairs upstairs whose only line involves calling Dad and Son up to dinner, and “the daughter,” a young girl who also obtains the right to play with Dad's LEGOs thanks to her brother's imagination and heart. The very safe heterosexual family here seemed so much like a cop out in a movie about reconfiguration, creative possibility, and the jouissance of chaos almost ruined this otherwise highly intelligent movie for me. Until I listened to “Everything is Awesome!” again. A quick fix for any disillusionment.

The Building Blocks of Biopolitics: The LEGO Movie, Empire, and Multitude

clsloan — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:59:56 +0000

Image Credit: Forbes

Not only did seeing The Lego Movie (2014) lodge the parodic pop song “Everything is Awesome!” firmly in my skull, it also sent me scrambling for a way to intelligently theorize the film's highly sophisticated commentary on politics, capitalism, gender and the body. I emerged from my search with a brief history of biopolitics firmly in hand, and, with “Everything is Awesome!” still running through my head, I will now start assembling the theoretical pieces needed to construct an insightful critique. Part 1 of my ruminations on The Lego Movie, then, provide an introduction to the theories I'll be using in Part 2. Stay tuned, all, because EVERYTHING IS AWESOME. Hopefully these posts will nicely compliment Scott's awesome thoughts on how The Lego Movie capitulates to some disturbing movie cliches in the name of creativity.

The Lego Movie deals specifically with the way politics intersects with everyday life. Thomas Lemke's useful Biopolitics, an Advanced Introduction, defines biopolitics as “a constellation in which modern human and natural sciences and the normative concepts that emerge from them structure political action and determine its goals” (33). In other words, the ways we understand “life,” through science, sociology, and other disciplines, affect political action. For the French philosopher Michel Foucault, the theorist credited with the birth of biopolitical thinking, it is a “specifically modern” (Lemke 33) form of power, a historical phenomenon. Biopolitics replaces the absolute authority of old sovereign rule with disciplinary mechanisms designed to keep bodies bound by certain space and time restrictions. Power, in a biopolitical disciplinary society, reveals itself in regulatory measures that determine the lives of its citizens. Institutions like schools, hospitals, prisons and military barracks exemplify the principles of a disciplinary culture.

Foucault argues that the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society in eighteenth-century Europe sparked the emergence of disciplinary societies. Other theorists have since expanded upon Foucault's work, tweaking and refining his understanding of the link between “life” and politics. Gilles Deleuze, for example, argues that our society has moved past its disciplinary moment into a radically different area: one of control. In their groundbreaking 2000 work Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri use Deleuze's concept to demonstrate the importance of globalism and capitalism for today's sociopolitical structure. According to their work, in a society of control, power “extends throughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social relations” (24). If discipline relies on institutions regulating the movement of bodies, control internalizes the process so that individuals effectively regulate themselves. Institutions become less prominent, but each and every aspect of social life becomes saturated with biopower.

For Hardt and Negri, biopower is “a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it” (23-24). They call the global prominence of biopower, bolstered by the international reaches of capitalism and global communications technologies, “Empire.” Empire is a modern, diffused form of sovereignty, a global presence, spread through all dimensions of social, political and economic existence. Empire, however, derives its energy from the “multitude,” a radically new sort of global proletariat, a group that simultaneously fuels Empire and threatens it. Instead of despairing over the total reach of Empire, Hardt and Negri argue that “the passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation...The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges” (XV, “Preface”). The positive biopower of the multitude stands in promising opposition to the restrictive biopolitics of Empire.

As Thomas Lemke points out, however, Hardt and Negri seem to arbitrarily assign a liberatory, ontological existence to the bio(em)powered multitudes. Treating “life” as a “transhistorical entity” (Lemke 74) can problematically break down into “natural” assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and identity. There is a danger in the power of the multitude: could the emancipatory principles of global biopower function as another way to re-inscribe hegemonic ideologies? Judith Butler's Gender Trouble can intervene neatly into any revolutionary impulse that relies on foundational identity politics to carry it through. Butler's work largely dismisses feminist politics that rely on idealizing “repressed” female identities; the glorification of the maternal and the retreat into lesbian political consciousness does not, Butler argues, dismantle compulsory heterosexuality. Rather, these strategies reaffirm socially constructed gender identities and re-inscribe “woman” as a starkly delineated, ontological category. Carrying Butler's theory from gender politics into the broader realm of biopolitics, we are prompted to ask: if we assume an essential, prediscursive, creative power from the multitude, what hegemonic principles might be unintentionally reinforced in any revolutionary moves “against” Empire?

The Lego Movie, a 2014 computer-animated film, seems practically created to serve as a fictional, highly stylized thought experiment for Hardt and Negri's liberation of the multitude. The movie follows Emmett, a regular old Lego figurine living out his normal life in an urban Lego landscape that looks suspiciously like a vision of corporate America. Up-beat, top-of-the-charts pop music assures the citizens of this Lego world that “Everything is Awesome!” even as their leader, President Business, casually drops references about the end of the world and putting disobedient individuals “to sleep.” No one can pay attention to these cryptic signs anyway, since, after all, it's almost Taco Tuesday.

Image Credit: GeekTyrant

Seriously, though. Taco Tuesday sounds awesome. Just like this music video!

Through a series of accidents, Emmett falls in with a group of revolutionaries bent on taking President Business down, reuniting all of the various Lego worlds and liberating Lego citizens around the Lego globe. The revolutionaries are all “Master Builders,” individuals with the uncanny ability to take apart the tidily assembled Lego landscape in order to craft their own unique creations. Gradually, Emmett learns to delight in deviating from his rule book and the revolutionaries learn not to underestimate the “normal,” apparently brainwashed citizens of President Business's society. Ultimately, Emmett and the Master Builders rely on the creative powers of the masses in order to dismantle President Business's overly strict, rule-bound world. The Lego Movie can be read as a rather sophisticated allegory about using the master's tools (or Lego pieces) to effectively deconstruct the master's house. In just such fashion, the multitude might reconfigure Empire, turning their mutual citizenship into teamwork, their individualism into self-pride and their indoctrination into a weapon.

Image Credit: Comics Bulletin

"Yes, excuse me? I thought we were being subversive?"

This reading, however, leaves out several crucial points. If a capitalistic, tyrannical global Empire can be so easily compromised, why doesn't the function of gender roles shift in the utopia of the multitude? Arguably, Emmett only finds the strength to break apart this global Lego Empire because of the promise of a relationship with Wild Style. The movie prompts Wild Style herself to discard her revolutionary monicker, a name she has chosen for herself, and return to Lucy, her given, much less threatening, name. The actual “bodies” of these Lego figurines also provide a fertile ground for a performativity critique. The sexes assigned to the protagonists come from repeat performances of gender prompted, of course, by the way the “hand in the sky,” the human actually playing with the Legos, understands it. Can reimagining Empire actually dismantle all of our problematic ideologies or must hegemonic building blocks, like the ontological existence of gender, fuel the deconstruction of other social injustices?

Questioning the Gaze and Studying Ballroom Culture

clsloan — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:27:23 +0000

Image Credit: Wikipedia

I was initially going to begin this rumination with the pretty dull introductory phrase “In Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary film Paris is Burning,” but before the virtual ink had dried on the virtual page I was struck with pretty massive doubts. In what sense could Paris is Burning really be solely attributed to Jennie Livingston when the movie's energy, its drive and message, clearly came from the lives of the New York City ballroom scene participants Livingston interviewed? So would calling Paris is Burning a collaborative documentary effort solve the issue of artistic attribution? Well, kind of, but that seemed to somewhat cheapen the lived experiences of the ball culture community by reducing them to stylized components in a cinematic production. Calling an interviewee an artist leaves over some troubling remainder, a residue of “real life” that doesn't make it into the credits. Even more troubling was the threat of de-centering Livingston's gaze as the focusing lens of the documentary. If it felt wrong to implicitly give Livingston all the credit for the film, it felt worse to call the piece a purely collective effort when Livingston's preferences, questions, decisions and selections dictate the entire film.

In Bodies that Matter (1993), a work expanding on the notions of gender performativity first laid out thoroughly in Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler examines the function of Livingston's (and the camera's) gaze. To set up this examination, Butler quotes bell hooks on Livingston's position in Paris is Burning. hooks argues that Livingston explores the ball culture as “an outsider looking in,” an outsider who does not question her own perspective but assumes the transparent objectivity of her gaze. This assumption proves problematic since it threatens to replicate a structure of white privilege, exposing the spectacle of black bodies in order to “magnanimously” grant ballroom participants their moment of fame. Specifically, hooks says that “since her presence as white woman/lesbian filmmaker is 'absent' from Paris is Burning, it is easy for viewers to imagine that they are watching an ethnographic film documenting the life of black gay 'natives' and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and formed from a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston” (hooks qtd. in Butler 92).

Butler, on the other hand, wonders whether or not Livingston's lesbian identity might shift the apparent transparency of her camera. Butler agrees with hooks that the camera is a locus of power, a site of affirmation, and that this power needs to be theorized and methodologically examined instead of taken for granted. According to Butler, “the camera acts as surgical instrument and operation, the vehicle through which the transubstantiation occurs. Livingston thus becomes the one with the power to turn men into women who, then, depend on the power of her gaze to become and remain women” (93). It is interesting to consider how the medium of film participates in the gender construction of the ballroom scene, perhaps enacting, not obscuring, the importance of the witness or viewer to the actual gender performance. Even this angle, or the possibility that some of Livingston's scenes enact unspoken lesbian desire, fails to expound on how “the Livingston perspective” intersects with the lived realities of ballroom contestants in terms of, for example, gender, class, and race. In this documentary on performative identities, the dangers of transgression, the joy of spectacle, and the importance of community, does Livingston's gaze emphasize some aspects at the cost of losing others? Does her perspective distort, and if so, is there even any way to counteract misrepresentation in a cultural study?

Marlon M. Bailey's phenomenal ethnography Butch Queens Up in Pumps (2013) offers an intriguing response to these questions. Even though Bailey's book lacks cinematic presence, he metaphorically puts himself “on camera” with the individuals he discusses, interviews and analyzes by engaging in “co-performative witness,” a technique for bridging the gap between researchers and the subjects she studies. According to Bailey, this technique “requires one to perform and lend one's own body and labor to the process involved in the cultural formation under study, particularly when it involves a struggle for social justice. Performance thereby becomes the vehicle for moving across seemingly disparate social locations and registers of knowledge” (22). Bailey's active participation in the ballroom scene over many years allows him to claim the status of co-performative witness, and this status implicates him in his own interpretations of the community. Of course, Bailey's proximity to the culture he analyzes opens up a new set of questions: does being too close to a “subject” cause a different sort of distortion? Does it suggest that an unfair, “overly appreciative” reading has occurred? Of course, the respective proximity of the researcher to the subject in these distinct methodologies indicates differing end goals. For example, Butler's removed analysis lends itself to an examination of ballroom culture that focuses on the theoretical subject of gender subversion or capitulation while Bailey's intimacy gives his description of “survival and the pursuit of a better quality of life” more emotional impact (54-55). It does, however, seem difficult to argue that a researcher can ever safely erase herself from a cultural study without implying that her gaze or perspective should not be questioned.

Scopophilia in A Game of Thrones

clsloan — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 14:05:06 +0000

Image Credit: Fanpop.com

An incessant struggle for dominance. A never-ending vigil against opposition. A fierce match of razor-sharp wits. A game, one might say, of thrones. Wait, no. I meant a game of feminism.

Bloggers, journalists and internet activists galore have flocked to bloody forum battlefields contesting sexism, feminism and gender politics in HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin's bestselling fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire . The show, preparing to air its fourth season in April, has attracted supporters who argue that the series sympathetically illustrates the struggles of politically vulnerable women, along with others who suggest that HBO has even made feminist-friendly improvements to Martin's sometimes questionable vision. In the other camp, opposition asserts point-blank that the show treats women as sex objects and glorifies sexual abuse. One clever response to HBO's obsession with softcore pornography has cataloged 10 Unnecessary Sex Scenesand explores their irrelevance to character development and plot progression.

The sides seem to skirmish on two main fronts: 1) can the female protagonists be classified as “feminist” depictions of women? and 2) can the show's dependence on excessive sex be reconciled to a “feminist” agenda? I put the term “feminism” in quotation marks and therefore under careful scrutiny here since the definition can be quite slippery. For example, if one critic defines a “feminist” character portrayal as reliant on agency/ accessibility to power/ an erasure of gender politics, she might have a tough time coming to terms with the split between the masculine and feminine spheres in A Song of Ice and Fire . Another critic, however, posits that “feminist” depictions involve illustrating how marginalized groups respond to hegemony and manipulate systems of power. The conversations about whether or not Arya, Sansa, Cat e lyn, Daenerys, Brienne and Cersei help or hinder the feminist thrust of the series are many and multifaceted. When it comes to what viewers of the show actually see of women's bodies, the argument that HBO has somehow broken the feminist mold becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain.

Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” describes the general pervasiveness of a gendered scopophilia in films. Mulvey explains ho w camera angles ca n encourage the male-coded viewer to v oyeuristically enjoy passive, often female, figures on the screen . The “male gaze” has been the fruitful topic of debate in several disciplines. Scholars have asked whether or not the gender coding might be too simplistic and challenged Mulvey's theory to provide examples of what non-heteronormative “viewing” might look like. For HBO's A Song of Ice and Fire, however, the 1975 version of “male gaze” fetishism seems to fit the bill quite nicely.

Image Credit: Omega-level.net

Even when the show attempts to use sex to make interesting comments about characters, themes, and even its own medium, these moments are muted by their own content. For example, e pisode two of season two, “The Night Lands,” includes an interesting scene encapsulating one of the show's major themes: we are all objects of someone's intrusive gaz e. A ll of the secrets, all of the spying, constructs a dense web of lies, knowledge and power, and there's no guarantee that the watchers are not being watched. The scene begins in Littlefinger's brothel. A prostitute has sex with a client in an (apparently) private room. A pan back from the camera, however, reveals another client, a voyeur, watching the two have sex while another prostitute performs fellatio on him. Yet another pan back from the camera reveals Littlefinger himself, watching the voyeur. The pattern asks the viewer to mentally “pan back” yet again and question his/her own participation in this culture of voyeurism. The less visible messages of smart, self-referential scenes like this, though, are threatened by their own content. Can visual stimulation be too pleasurable, too satisfactory, to result in an effective criticism of networks of voyeurism?

It's certainly difficult to ignore the abundance of female nudity in the show, and the gratuitous sex scenes tend to distract from the (more important) driving forces of the plot. While sex certainly features prominently in Martin's original novels, it's harder to think of it as a selling point the way it often see ms to work for show. In addition to the sensual, consensual lit-erotica, Martin's novels include references to rape and sexual assault (which are treated as horrifying realities in the harsh cultures Martin has created) but these “scenes” are generally removed from the reader by the consciousness of a third-person narrator, so that the implication of viewer pleasure generally isn't there. The issue, then, isn't about lots of sex in the show; it's about using sex to stimulate your audience instead of for any larger thematic purpose. The frequent appearance of sexualized bodies, along with the impressive amount of screen time given to sex acts, makes the show seem much more comfortable using visuals of a highly oppressive, abusive gender system to arouse its viewers than the novels. This is definitely not to say that Martin's books do not exploit explorations of (typically female) sexuality to titillate readers , but the visual prominence of nude women in the HBO adaptation stands out in ways text-based sex scenes can't. Of course, I'm quite uncomfortable with that statement even as I make it, and there is now a conversation to be had about mediums of pornography, specifically comparing literary versus visual erotica, but I'm lacking the space to tackle that fascinating subject.

Nudity, My Dear Watson: Sherlock and The Woman

clsloan — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 14:35:27 +0000

Image Credit: Personal Screen Capture from Amazon Prime

BBC's ongoing show Sherlock is a present-day adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's nineteenth-century detective stories, and it gleefully delights in its modernity by incorporating new technology and polishing up old visual tropes associated with the rationally-minded crime solver. Whether it's confronting viewers with just how resistant Sherlock himself is towards the popularity of his infamous deerstalker or transforming a first-person narrator's short stories into fodder for a personal blog , Sherlock 's self-referentiality invites its fans to think about the implications of these alterations. The alteration of the media used to tell the tales of the Great Detective Sherlock Holmes also introduces some arresting issues. If Sherlock's deductions were shrouded in mystery or only available to readers through Holmes's own explanations, the show actually allows viewers to “see” the detective's thought processes by stylistically superimpos i ng text onto the show's images.

Generally, the camera will helpfully zoom in on an item, suggesting the microscopic power of Holmes's vision, and neatly tag it with the conclusion Holmes draws from miniscule clues. In some cases, the viewer is able to n eatly follow the chain of logic. Wisps of short white hairs adorning a suit leads to the tag “Dog Owner,” for instance. In others, however, the magic is enhanced by a tagged conclusion that seems several steps removed from the image, or even fairly unrelated to the item in question. Holmes's penetrating observation yields information, data, facts that can then be presented in the manner of a conjuring trick to an awe-struck public.

In the Sherlock episode “Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock actually encounters a visual that yields absolutely no data. Not only is Holmes stumped, but the viewer is invited to experience his perplexity with several images accompanied, not by the coolly confident array of labels and conclusions, but with impotent strings of question marks. So what baffles the Great Sher l ock Holmes? A naked woman.

Image Credit: Personal Screen Capture from Amazon Prime

Holmes's failure to “deduce” anything about Adler suggests that a nude female body simply does not exist in the trac e able, reasonable world of causation. Unlike the attired bodies Holmes frequently analyzes for information, bodies that present information in terms of clothing choices, mud accumulated on particular brands of shoes, for instance, a naked female body is a complete and utter blank, a string of question marks. It is an indicator of nothing but its own immanence. Even before Holmes's confrontation with Adler, Sherlock has taken great pains to make the cunning blackmailer a veritable avatar or ideal for female sexuality. Her chosen profession, high-class dominatrix, couples with some cross-cut scenes before her meeting with Holmes to emphasize her sensuality. The scenes in question capture the “preparation” of both parties for their confrontation. Holmes attempts to pick a disguise that will help him infiltrate Adler's home (he ultimately settles on a clergyman). Adler sashays into a closet full of clothes wearing only a skimpy negligee. Holmes asks Watson to punch him in the face to contribute to his disguise. The camera zooms in on Adler putting on makeup (she chooses “blood” as her shade of lipstick). Finally, Adler tells her assistant that she will greet Holmes in her “battle dress.”

Image Credit: Personal Screen Capture from Amazon Prime

As Irene Adler boasts, it becomes quickly apparent to the viewer that her sensuality is indeed her weapon of choice. Throughout their confrontation, she seems gracefully in control of the situation, elegantly quipping to Holmes that any “disguise” is inevitably a “self-portrait” and jeeringly asking Dr. Watson, when he evinces discomfort with her nakedness, if he's “feeling exposed.” Adler's comfort with her own sensuality neatly contrasts Holmes's extreme discomfort with his. Adler's sexual power, clearly a comment on a woman's ability to manipulate masculine expectations and desire for her personal ends, certainly deserves its own conversation, and many writers on the internet have already tackled the sexism, or feminist empowerment, of Irene Adler as a character. Holmes's inability to glean any information from her nudity, though, seems particularly troubling and perhaps even inconsistent. First and foremost, the nude woman as a transparent marker of sexuality, is a popular conception that desperately needs to be challenged. For Holmes, there is simply no information to be obtained from Adler. She has made no clothing choices that would reveal personal quirks, individual experiences, taste, education, etc. She has “removed” all referents. Holmes does, however, take away her “measurements,” a combination of numbers that turn out to be the code to Adler's safe. Her physical fitness, her makeup, her hair style, apparently reveal nothing. I'm certainly not arguing that Sherlock should endorse the idea that an individual's “visual” bodily identity is somehow a completely reliable marker for “deeper,” perhaps essential, truths, but the idea that the female body communicate s only its own immanence is a notion that's disturbing in its own right. Along these lines, Holmes's insistence that she is “THE Woman” looks less like a compliment elevating her to eminence within her gender and more like an admission that Adler's inaccessibility makes her a perfect ideal of what woman really means: mystery, sex, embodiment, and, implicitly, anti-rationalism.

Despite Adler's cleverness, sexual potency, and air of mystery, Holmes does ultimately win the day. This point, incidentally, is a stark departure from Doyle's original story, “Scandal in Bohemia.” In the original, Adler absconds with the photographs, essentially besting the Great Detective, evinces no sentiment for Holmes, and requires no ultimate rescue. Admittedly, the show does play out this plot. It ends about thirty-five minutes into the episode, and the remainder is a creative extension of Adler's story. In Sherlock 's version of the tale, Holmes figures out the 4-letter password that unlocks Adler's “ SHER”-locked camera phone thanks to information he has gleaned from her body. Instead of the solid obstacle to rational discourse her body once was , Adler's dil a ted pupils and elevated pulse during an intimate moment with Holmes yields a piece of crucial information : love. Perhaps unintentionally, the show enacts a lesson in “reading” a woman's body, a lesson that ultimately gives Holmes the ability to outsmart Adler, to use her sensuality against her.

The Visual Scandal of Freeing the Nipple

clsloan — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 14:07:15 +0000

Image Credit: Huffington Post

In 2005, the artist Jill Coccaro was arrested in New York for exposing her breasts in public. In 2012, Jessica Krisgsman was arrested in New York for topless sunbathing in a park. In 1992, New York courts ruled that banning female toplessness in public violated equal protection clauses and, as a result, it became legal for women to bare their breasts in the state. Apparently, the memo about the legal rights of topless women is still in circulation. Social activist and actress Lina Esco is slated to release her film Free the Nipple in June of this year. The movie will explore American cultural discomfort with the alleged “lewdness” and “indecency” of women going topless. Esco has written several fantastic Huffington Post progress reportsfor her project, chronicling the struggles she has faced in the composition of her movie , struggles like police involvement during filming and battling social media networks that have banned her accounts for putting up pictures of partially nude women. Esco also beautifully captures her own bafflement about what she sees as bizarre standards of American morality, asking why “acts of baroque violence, killing, brutalization and death are infinitely more tolerated by the FCC and the MPAA, who regulate all films and TV shows in the US.” Shooting a film about breasts has proven more difficult that shooting a film about, well, shooting. The Free the Nipple campaign has attracted the attention, and largely benefited from the patronage, of celebrities like Miley Cyrus, whose December tweet on New York toplessness laws generated quite a bit of internet buzz. Her tweet was accompanied by a photo of her flashing the camera, breasts colorfully covered with photoshopped hearts.

So what are the stakes of normalizing the public exposure of female breasts? Some activists identify the controversy as a fight for equal rights. Since men are not subject to regulation or judgment for being topless, women shouldn't be, either. Many affirm that prejudice against women willing to bare their breasts in public is an archaic, leftover standard from puritanism in America's background. According to this view, American culture has decided that female b reasts are inherently sexual in nature and that no situation exists that could strip them of their “natural” sensuality. Those fighting to normalize the sight of female breasts argue that th e notion of inherent sensuality , based in religion for some, evolutionary determinism for others, and collective ideas of common decency for still more, objectifies and hypersexualizes the female body. For example, if all I want to do is sunbath, maybe catch up on my reading in the park, how can I be blamed for inflaming the lusts of those around me? Only if female breasts are innately sexual.

In a case where one side of the argument is primarily concerned with the way women's behavior impacts men, in this particular case through unsought arousal and possibly even moral contamination, it's pretty safe to say that I'll be found firmly in the opposing camp, setting up a tent and looking for a clean water supply because I'm prepared for a long stay . Is there any possible way, though, to argue that normalizing toplessness somehow doesn't serve the best interests of women? It seems to depend on whether or not we take certain social truths for granted. Emily Yoffe caught a lot of flak for writing about the relationship between binge drinking and sexual assault. Yoffe's article, in an attempt to be practical and helpful, encourages women to avoid heavy drinking at parties so that they will not be targets of sexual predators. Other feminists responded negatively to Yoffe's opinion piece, arguing that her “helpful advice” was just another form of victim blame. Women, they assert, should be able to drink without fearing assault . Louise Pennington responded to Yoffe with an article of her own, snappily titled “The Best Rape Prevention: Tell Men to Stop Raping.”If we assume, with Yoffe, that sexual predation is a simple, tragically unfortunate fact of life, then topless women might be making themselves vulnerable to objectification, even physical danger. It would be a sad truth: our society is incapable of responsibly handling the public liberation of the female body. Contra a Yoffe-like position, opponents could argue that the normalization and legalization of toplessness would serve to deconstruct our cultural belief that breasts are inherently sexual, thereby demystifying the female body and helping to decrease objectification. I find myself a firm supporter of the latter idea, but I continue to be impressed with the varied, arguably feminist responses to what can and can't/ should and shouldn't be seen of the female body.

Consuming Images of Black Friday

clsloan — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:42:56 +0000

Image Credit: Huffington Post

This past Thanksgiving/Black Friday combo gave me some time to reflect on (read: be befuddled about) some of the paradoxical impulses these distinctly American holidays encourage. On Thanksgiving day, as I finished cobbling together the world's simplest casserole to take over to a friend's, my partner was snoring the next room, trying to catch a few proverbial Z's before heading in to work for a midnight shift. I muttered my frustrations into gravy that stubbornly insisted on being lumpy, desperately trying to mobilize holiday vibes and feel thankful about the jobs my partner and I are lucky to have. No dice, though. The fact that someone I love had to miss out on dinner with friends in order to be awake for a middle-of-the-night work day made me all sorts of spiteful. Increasingly, more and more people are in this terrible boat.

It didn't help that, come Black Friday, the internet (myself included, being a denizen of that place) was bombarded by images of people brawling over discounted towels, standing in staggeringly long lines and stampeding madly through aisles lined with price-cut goodies.

Image Credit: ABC News

Now, call it my liberal proclivities, but Thanksgiving itself has always made me all sorts of antsy. I don't think that our culture should be able to neatly shake off the genocidal realities that are integrally attached to this holiday, but what to do about that particular paradox escapes me. The Black Friday thing might just be the nail in the coffin for my personal Turkey Day (which, serious issues about American history aside, is hard enough to celebrate with your meat-loving family when you're a vegetarian). At dinner itself, sympathetic ears enabled me to laugh bitterly about the polarized urges associated with the back-to-back “holidays” of Thanksgiving and Black Friday (I'm calling Black Friday a holiday in the bacchanalian sense). Thanksgiving supposedly asks us to count blessings, take stock of the most important things in our lives and reflect upon our good fortune. It's day about contentment, right? Nipping hard on its heels, however, comes Black Friday, a day to ferociously acquire more and more, revel in materialism and forget about all those points of contentment from yesterday.

Did I say yesterday? My mistake. This year big-name stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy decided to open their doors on Thanksgiving Day, ringing in Black Friday before the leftovers had time to cool. Granted, many professions give up their holidays every year in order to ensure the safety and well-being of others. Police officers, nurses, doctors, fire fighters, can't simply check out and head home en masse. When retail workers join the herd of “crucial service providers,” though, something, somewhere, has gone horribly wrong. Flipping through images of fights and arguments, the only news about Black Friday seemed to be bad news: basic humanity forgotten, common decency left at the sliding glass doors. Is this a good thing, though? Visual activism to discourage Black Friday madness? I find myself wondering whether this massive influx of images will help quell the raging fires of consumerism or simply toss more fuel on the culture of Black Friday. If part of the celebration (here's the bacchanalia again) involves enjoying the violence and the spectacle, maybe visual exposés aren't really the way to go.

One-Dimensional Issues and Characters In Orange Is the New Black

clsloan — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 14:21:01 +0000

Image credit: Orange Is the New Black Wiki

Remember when I said there weren't many things about Orange Is the New Black that made me cringe? Well, I recollected one. The show's ability to construct multi-dimensional, psychologically complex, believably flawed characters is one of its primary successes. One of its primary problems, however, manifests when the show occasionally forgets just how well it does create dynamic characters.

Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, for instance, gets humanized very seldom. From the get-go, her overt racism, homophobia, zealotry and ignorance neatly label her villainous, imminently mock-able and nearly impossible to sympathize with. Now, I'm certainly not arguing that there aren't people out there ready to make life absolutely miserable for others, but Orange Is the New Black so beautifully emphasizes basic humanity in order to point out the cruelty of stripping it from incarcerated individuals. A brilliant friend of mine who has the uncanny ability to pick up precisely on what movies, shows and books want their consumers to feel told me that she positively rejoiced when Pennsatucky was placed in solitary. “Pennsatucky just makes the other characters' lives a living hell,” my friend confided. “She's really horrible.” I was shocked to find that I agreed. After the poignant Thanksgiving episode that worked so hard to establish the horrors of being placed in solitary confinement, I felt like I was being asked to celebrate a really wicked inmate getting her just rewards. Maybe I'm simply a terrible person and the situation actually boasts some complex layers. Rooting vindictively for Alex to take vengeance on Pennsatucky didn't precisely feel consistent with the other thematic points of the show, though.

I'm also a little antsy with how the show handles abortion, and I would love feedback from others about this. Given America's contemporary political climate, I'm highly interested in the way our culture's fiction handles the topic. I remember being genuinely shocked when an anti-choice group I ran into on the street a few years ago used Juno as an example of why we shouldn't worry about coercing teenage girls into carrying unwanted pregnancies through. Ever since then, I've been on the lookout for how abortion comes across in film and television shows. I was a bit taken aback when Orange Is the New Black felt the need to suggest that one of Pennsatucky's psychotic tendencies was seeking abortion after abortion. In a flashback, she sounds so horribly callous when she rejects her lover's suggestion that she should maintain one of her pregnancies. Pennsatucky also isn't the only one who confronts the decision about whether or not to have a baby. After accidentally getting pregnant in prison, Dayanara asks Mendoza to help her have an abortion. Dayanara's mother, however, conspires with Mendoza to sabotage the process. I was immediately outraged that Dayanara's response to this trick was to sympathize with her mother and agree to have the baby. Does this show vilify abortions and the women who undertake them or am I just far too sensitive?

Bathroom Stalls In Orange Is the New Black

clsloan — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 18:22:32 +0000

Image Credit: Heroine TV

Given my fascination with what's visually acceptable and what's considered outré or even repulsive about women's bodies, I'm personally shocked that I haven't yet made time to talk about Orange Is the New Black, a semi-new Netflix Original Series. Season 1 appeared en masse on July 11, and I, for one, lost a few days of my life greedily devouring every single hour-long episode. The premise at first gave me pause. An upper-middle-class white woman, Piper Chapman, is incarcerated years after the fact for helping an old girlfriend smuggle drug money across some international borders. Trials and tribulations for her ensue in a women's prison. I was a bit concerned that the show would make light of its own topic and elide very real health, safety and human rights issues facing minority women serving time. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the thoughtful, sympathetic way with which the show attempts to deal with sociopolitical issues. The cycle of poverty, drug use and LGBQT discrimination all get decent airtime, and, though I'm a bit removed from the experience, I can't recall many particular moments that made me cringe (though I do plan on using a later post to discuss the show's treatment of abortion).

My interests, however, concern the “mysteries” of the female body, and the show has some creative ways of highlighting what American culture considered unspeakable. In light of the tampon fiasco this summer in Austin, TX, the way the inmates turn sanitary napkins to account by using them for everything from shower flipflops to eye masks, betrayed not only touches of realism but the deft touch of symbolism. Sofia praises Piper for her “creativity” in using pads as shower shoes, and Piper presents her bunkmate with an eye mask crafted of rubber bands and a Maxipad. These items, provided due to “biological necessity,” are transformed into marks of a shared, female experience.

The poster I've included features a key point of shock in the pilot episode. Piper Chapman struggles with the humiliation of being expected to use the bathroom in a stall with no door, making her visually accessible to the other inmates in what has heretofore for her been a moment of extreme privacy. The show even subtly reenforces this point when it shows Piper retreating to her own bathroom before being imprisoned to hide her weeping from her fiance. I'm still trying to work out the implications of the door removal. When Piper is finally able to use the doorless stall with a minimal amount of embarrassment, she seems to have asserted herself as a member of an intimate community. The absence of privacy, in this sense, signals belonging. However, and as the poster reminds us, the inmates bodies are also exposed to the violating gaze of corrupt prison guards and officials. The poster also suggests that the show itself removes the doors and lets the viewer witness incredibly personal, probably humiliating stories. The sophistication and smirking wit of this metaphor serves as an indicator of just how smart this show can be.

Misusing Miss Universe?

clsloan — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 14:43:06 +0000

Image Credit: Gulfnews.com

There are some things that even I, in all of my high-minded preachiess, feel squeamish about approaching. The gender studies climate in my field has been influenced by critics who laud the values of embracing “girl culture,” celebrating personal gender choices, and moving away from blaming an insidious patriarchy for indoctrinating women. However, I can't help but notice that social and economic inequality still haunt gender divides, and, politically speaking, it might be responsible to keep harping on glass ceilings and body image issues until everyone acknowledges that sexism, like racism, is still a “thing” in American culture. How does one properly balance these two positions? I struggle with this question constantly. Take the Miss Universe pageant, for example.

Casually flipping through images of contestants on the internet confirmed my assumption that “beautiful” women are still expected to be remarkably thin. Fears of inspiring anorexia in young women aside, the very notion that individuals can, and implicitly should, compete to be declared gorgeous makes me antsy. Doesn't this unfortunately suggest that there's one, and only one, proper way to be beautiful? I don't think there's an event that pits different genres of music against each other or judges various schools of painting using one set scale. Subjective taste and context come into the equation somewhere, and we seem to respect that in many cases. Why haven't we reached a point where different body types and face shapes can be appreciated for their uniqueness instead of put into direct competition? In case I'm starting to sound a little too idealistic, I'll admit that highly publicized beauty pageants do at least promise to offer avenues for national pride, individual excellence, and perhaps even social change. Titi Yitayish Ayanaw is the first black Miss Isreal. Miss Bulgaria Veneta Krasteva is currently in remission for breast cancer and uses her title to raise awareness about the disease. In 2012, Jenna Talackova became the first transgender woman to compete in a Miss Universe Canada pageant. Do these landmark women signal social change? Should we celebrate their achievements or remain concerned over their adherence to specific beauty standards?

Larger social concerns aside, what about respecting a woman's decision to actively pursue pageant titles? After all, feminist movements have emphasized a woman's right to do what she pleases with her body. Can beauty pageant contestants be chastised for doing just that? To further complicate the issue, aren't all cultural standards for excellence as arbitrary as beauty, anyway? Shouldn't individuals be able to decide where they want to try to shine? For example, I certainly wouldn't win any community service awards, but I do try to keep my friends entertained with tomfoolery. If I had grown into a tall, slim stunner I would probably be irked at critics who wanted to impress upon me the “subjugation” of women upheld by beauty pageants.

There are certainly conversations to be had about the social implications of beauty pageants, with decent points on various sides, but I will firmly declare that some of the requirements for competing to become Miss Universe are absolutely, 100% ridiculous. According to the Miss Universe FAQ page, contestants must be between 18 and 27, because we all know that women simply stop being attractive when they hit 28, right? They also can't be married, can't ever have been married, can't be pregnant and can't have children. I'm so confused about the message here. Isn't the point of the Miss Universe pageant to award physical excellence? If so, then why all these restrictive requirements? Why the emphasis on being single? On not being a mother? Arbitrary standards of beauty are one thing, and they definitely deserve discussion, but I can't even come up with a hypothetical scenario to defend arbitrary requirements for even being considered visually gorgeous.

A New Kind of Castle: Disney, Feminism, and Romance

clsloan — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:25:04 +0000

In 1937, Disney's endearingly helpless Snow White cooked, cleaned and sang her way into the hearts of seven protective men and then slept her way into a happily ever after. Giving due props for the breathtaking animation, Snow White's reliance on heroic male figures to solve all of the naïve princess's problems will naturally prompt eye-rolling from feminists still riding the ripples of wave two. Before unleashing angst and anger at Disney, don't we have to acknowledge that Snow White is surely a far cry from the hardworking grit and psychologically complexity of Tiana, the heroine of Disney's most recent “princess” movie? Even though Tiana has a song sequence that basically accompanies her cleaning up an old mill, she's inspired by her own ambition instead of by the saccharine goodness of her squishy heart. Disney has certainly attempted to respond to cultural shifts in how America understands gender roles and romantic relationships. The question is: have these changes been sufficient?

There are several controversies surrounding The Princess and the Frog (2009), and I think two of them are particularly arresting. The lighthearted manner with which the writers treat “voodoo” elides the religion's cultural history and uses it as a near synonym for dangerous magic. In addition, Tiana, Disney's first black princesss, spends a decent chunk of her own movie as a frog. Disney's endeavor to be more “culturally responsible” sort of falls flat in a few places, and the ongoing obsession with Barbie-shaped women who wind up married irked, especially after the breakthrough promised by Lilo and Stitch (2002). While I'm in no position to comment on whether or not Lilo and Stitch successfully and sensitively creates a culturally-conscious Hawai'i (and would be quite interested in the thoughts of others), I do think that the movie's treatment of gender leaves all other Disney movies in the dust. I say all in order to not-so-subtly prompt disagreement, but after roughly a day of brainstorming, I can't think of one other animated Disney film that includes so many female characters and passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. I even harbor a suspicion that Lilo and Stitch tactfully comments on what I'll call the “Prince-Charming-Cure”: the Disney deployment of romance as a deus ex machina for all of life's problems.

Snow White and Aurora are saved with a kiss, Ariel's happy ending relies on getting a strange man to smooch her after three days in his company, and Belle liberates herself by falling in love with her captor. The Lilo and Stitch version of Prince Charming, on the other hand, swoops in right when all appears lost, when Nani has lost every chance of finding employment and it looks as though their small family is about to be split up. Instead of fixing the issue, though, he can do little beside give the sisters a brief reprieve from their troubles by going surfing with them. This simultaneously undermines the Prince-Charming-Cure while emphasizing the importance of relationships. Any one connection can never magically fix all your problems, but it can certainly help you work your own way through them. Let's get symbolic, shall we? While Prince Charming might carry Snow White away to his castle in the sky, a veritable heaven attainable only by fairytale romance, the sandcastle David helps Lilo and Nani build has more real-world relevance. It might be temporary, but at least it's comforting.

A Very Viz-y Halloween: The Horror of the Female Body

clsloan — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 13:04:28 +0000

Image Credit: Picgifs.com

At least once a year, my fevered, candy-addle, jumped-up-on-Halloween brain grapples with the compelling notion that the horror genre somehow contains the key to unlock some delightful secrets about our cultural, if not our human, condition. The genre fascinates because its appeal rests on its ability to draw forth all of the emotional and physiological reaction we, as a species, have been conditioned to be very, very wary of. I can understand why romantic comedies command so much cultural popularity, but horror movies? Revulsion, repulsion, terror, horror, disgust...the viewer is bombarded with stimuli that are designed to make you feel as though you should flee as quickly as you possibly can, and yet, riveted we sit, consuming horror with more fervor and delight than we consume popcorn. So how does this genre relate to gender?

In my travels through the windy realms of random conversation, I have stumbled upon the opinion that horror movies take advantage of cultural anxieties (dangerous strangers, home invasion, loss of self) in order to shock and titillate. Many horror movies mobilize these anxieties in a Christian-Old-Testament manner, using powers beyond human comprehension to dole out a form of moral judgment on any reprehensible flouters of social law. Consider the trope of the massacred drunken, sexually-active teens coupled with (pun intended) the survival of the abstaining, typically female, virgin. Halloween (1978) seems to be the big-name film that cemented this motif in the modern horror genre, though the trope itself goes back much, much farther. I'm particularly interested in this cliché because it idealizes the adrenaline-flushed, active female body while implicitly condemning sexually-oriented energies. Is it sublimation? Is it a way of giving the (supposedly heteronormative male) viewer a pseudo-pornographic thrill without the taint of actual sex? Speaking of a supposedly male viewer, what does the constant stream of female protagonists in horror movies indicate? The skeptic in me berates the genre for a) deriving so much affect from strictly female suffering and for b) parading a female body in front of the viewer to generate erotic responses while refusing to let the heroine herself enjoy her sex life without being chased about by ghosts, serial killers or zombies. Double standard, horror genre.

However! The optimist in me wonders whether or not the female protagonist might serve as a point of identification rather than an object of stimulation. Do we not feel her fear? Her despair? Does the emotional connection we make with her transcend the threat of her reification? In addition, some horror movies tackle sexual anxieties from a female, not a puritanical, perspective. Alien (1979) not-so-subtly preys on fears of pregnancy, “monstrous” or overbearing maternity, and parental responsibility. The Ring (2002), the American remake of the Japanese Ringu, examines a single mother's struggle to raise her precocious child. Coincidentally, the supernatural threat in the story happens to be a little girl whose adoptive parents “failed” to control or understand her. If horror movies do rely on secret social terrors to illicit fear in their viewers, the genre's politics, and maybe monsters, rely on the community those anxieties are being drawn from. A hyper-conservative moral community might generate a noncommunicative, hand-of-god executioner. A perceived viewing group of men and women worried about raising children in a modern landscape yields ghost children. Of course, the formula for monster creation isn't so simple, but it's a promising thought experiment.

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor: The Impoverished Viewer

clsloan — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:55:34 +0000

Image Credit: Magnum Photos

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor features photographs of the impoverished tenants of a San Fransisco hotel and of an affluent group of select individuals, also shown in their homes. As the most obvious dimension of the title suggests, the photos serve as a comparative essay on class and the disparity of wealth in America. Goldberg compiled this collection through the late 70s and early 80s and it was originally published by Random House in 1985. The Harry Ransom Center's current exhibit, Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age (September 10, 2013 – January 5, 2014), includes several images from Rich and Poor.

As I walked through the exhibit, alternately admiring the pieces and feeling guilty for not knowing enough about photography to be properly appreciative, Goldberg's work in particular caught my eye. The composition of these pieces is, in and of itself, visually striking: a black-and-white photo is surrounded by white space marked with heavy, black, handwritten text. The presence of text has interesting implications for meaning as well. As I read through the testimonies attached to the images, I found myself compelled to think about the ethics of photojournalism and the limits of visual media. My encounter with each piece unfolded dynamically, and reading the text after carefully taking in the images led me to reflect on my role as detached observer with no little amount of distaste. For instance, while I closely examined the image of the piece signed “T.J,” my geared-for-interpretation-brain zeroed in on the woman's not-quite-sexy pose, the tilt of her head, the flatness of her stare, the bed as the only other notable feature in the frame.

Image Credit: Magnum Photos

I cobbled together something about female sexuality and kept idly wondering whether this picture was trying to challenge norms or partake of them while I read through the text. It says, “To me Life seems so messed up But lilttel by lilttel i am trying to over come that. Because it is hard being a woman and to accept me as I am. T.J.” This visceral commentary caused me to be immediately overcome with the insufficiency of any interpretation I could possibly bring to bear on this photo. The model herself, with her intimate, affective link to the creation of this image, to the experiences the photo gestures towards, to the reasons behind the tilt of the head, the pose, the bed, had already asserted an incredibly rich analysis of this image, and any others paled in comparison. All of a sudden, Rich and Poor acquired new, media-oriented dimensions for me. The richness of the images grew poor against the force of the models' statements. The poverty of my own understanding as a viewer came into harsh relief.

Of course, this striking experience itself was carefully tailored by Goldberg, with the help of his models. I have yet to read through Rich and Poor, but, from what I've gleaned off the internet, I understand that the statements on the photos were hand-chosen by Goldberg, and the authenticity of the handwriting, suggestive of a spontaneous overflow of emotion, itself is an artistic technique. However, Goldberg's collection still asks viewers to examine their own privilege and think hard about both financial and artistic exploitation.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

The Politics of the Sexy Pose

clsloan — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 13:31:03 +0000

Image Credit: Comic Book Resources

What's so amazing about Spiderman? Setting aside the superpowers and the solid-gold heart, his greatest talent appears to be marketing. On this 2009 J. Scott Campbell cover, Spidey appears in three different ways: swinging away in person from his on-again-off-again love interest, caught in an action shot on the cover of a newspaper, and staring out at the viewer from an impressive vantage point on Mary Jane's t-shirt. If we think of “amazing” in terms of “eyecatching,” which Spiderman lives up to his full hero title? From a framing standpoint, it's the front-and-center shirt version, the version showcasing Mary Jane's ample breasts. On this cover, The Amazing Spiderman, much like The Amazing Spiderman, draws focus away from the hero himself and onto an idealized female form.

Mary Jane herself features on this cover in an interesting way. Aside from the unrealistic proportions and the highly uncomfortable-looking pose, she also has a few media echoes that emphasize her value as an object instead of a character. Like the newspaper on the coffee table, she has provided the blank ad space necessary for housing Spiderman's image. Mary Jane has effectively become a walking Spiderman news column, and the steaming coffee she clutches not only cheekily reminds the viewer just how “hot” she happens to be, but just how hot off the presses Spiderman's story is. The fashion magazines beside her on the couch feature women on their covers filling a function very similar to her own: they're there to help sell issues. In the world of fashion magazines, it's about selling a certain look. In the world of comic books, it's about selling the female body itself as a consumable item.

Some invested individuals in various online communities, however, aren't buying what's being sold. They pepper the internet with scathing parodies that provide visual counterpoints to overt sexualization of women in visual media. Fan reinventions, for instance, seek to illustrate what they see as the artist's senseless objectification by redrawing this particular Mary Jane cover, toning down the sexy pose and concentrating on her facial expression. The Escher Girls blog includes several impressive examples. Escher Girls itself is devoted to archiving instances of anatomical impossibility in popular culture that hypersexualize the female body, instances that tend to rely on twisting the spine to show off both breasts and rear. Other critics have mocked the cover by trying (and necessarily failing) to mimic the contorted pose in real life.

Image Credit: The Hawkeye Initiative

The Hawkeye Initiative is another homegrown internet movement that sprang up to denounce gender double standards. According to the website, The Hawkeye Initiative “uses Hawkeye and other male comic characters to illustrate how deformed, hyper-sexualized, and impossibly contorted women are commonly illustrated in comics, books, and video games.” Swapping a tantalizingly-arranged female character for a typical male counterpart helps demonstrate the egregious sexualization of women in these genres. While portrayals of idealized women thrive in the mainstream comics industry, an online counterculture of visual commentary questions the politics of the sexy pose.

Starfire Revealed At Last: A Prelude to the Politics of Sexy Poses

clsloan — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:35:04 +0000

Image Credit: dc.wikia.com

In future posts I would like to delve into the ongoing conversation in the comic book world about the hypersexualization of the superhero women who fly, strut and kapow their way across the industry's glossy pages. Before reaching out to this debate in abstract terms, I would like to present one of the key images that catalyzed the explosion of feminist rage, feminist approval, and, quite frankly, some sexist reactionary defenses. In 2011, DC announced the New 52: a complete relaunch of their comic book line including, surprise, 52 titles all starting, or starting over, at issue #1. DC followers set the internet aflame with reactions, thoughts and feelings about the ensuing comics, and a particularly impressive inferno sprang up around Red Hood and the Outlaws #1. Why? Here's a hint. It's the reason this post is tagged Not Safe For Work.

Starfire, a lesser-known DC character outside of the comic book subculture, features in this issue, gracefully splaying her body in suggestive poses and sporting one of those magical, physics-defying bikinis of the lift-and-separate class. A quick comparison with a Tales of the New Teen Titans cover from the 1980s provides a thorough story, told through visuals, about this character's meta-bildungsroman. Both Starfires are alien princess and on-again-off-again members of various superhero teams on earth, but the visual shifts that have accompanied Starfire's growth distinguish these two particular avatars. The 80s Starfire, though still scantily-clad, demonstrates some of the abilities that help define her as a superhero. She soars vertically through the air, her long, impressively buoyant hair leaving a flashing trail beneath her, marking her ascent. A beam of energy shoots towards the viewer from her outstretched hand. Sure, she sports a smile, an immaculate coiffure and a bikini, but we are encouraged to see her as active, exercising the abilities that make her super. The text beside her “REVEALED AT LAST! THE SHOCKING SECRET LIFE OF PRINCESS KORIAND'R!” becomes wryly amusing when juxtaposed with the 2011 Starfire. Revealed at last, indeed.

Image Credit: read/Rant

This Starfire's bikini has gotten even smaller, unlike the other prominent attribute of this frame. Admittedly, this outfit is not meant to serve the purpose of a uniform, but that's part of the point. This Starfire is showcased, not as a superhero, but as a hypersexualized pin-up girl. The vapor trail that signaled breakneck speed on the old cover has become a languid, sparkly trail of ripples in the water, marking the sensual path of her Venus-like emergence from the sea. Where the 80s Starfire crosses an arm over her chest to fire a ray at some unseen mark, the new princess's arms are pulled back and away from her torso, drawing attention to her breasts. The creators emphasize her desirability by including the ironic thought “I'm not wanted here” beside her bikini top in hot pink text.

The debate about unrealistically-portrayed superhero women includes the following questions: Are depictions of sexualized women, like that of the New 52 Starfire, inherently sexist in their objectification of the female form? Contrariwise, are they inherently feminist in their celebration of women's sexual liberation? Is there blame to go around for the convention of the supersexy heroine? Are comic book creators morally or ethically bound to make women's bodies more realistic? Or is the audience at fault? The industry itself? Are these images harmful to those consuming them or harmless fantasies of a cultural beauty standard?

Superhero Footwear Part 2: Do Stilettos Have a Point?

clsloan — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 13:36:30 +0000

Image Credit: TV Tropes Wiki

Look closely. There's blood spattered on Black Canary's stiletto. The splash of red suggests that immediately before launching herself into this flying kick she put the heel of her fashionable shoe right through some villain's skin, intentionally using the deadly-looking point to her advantage. Juxtaposed against the Batwoman cover I used last week, it's difficult not to notice a few things about this action shot. For one, Black Canary's trademark fishnets are in full-throttled evidence, drawing the line of sight away from the kick itself and down to her immaculately posed, well-endowed torso. I had to look at this image several times to even notice the blood on her shoe. Batwoman, comparatively, seems a bit more clunky, more roughshod, more loyal to the demands of physics. Black Canary, here, is idealized, positioned in an anatomically unfriendly, spine-twisting way in order to showcase her breasts, hips and legs. The stilettos, perhaps, add to that sense of idealization: the very pinnacle of what's possible for the female body appearing in toto with Black Canary's pose. Neither the idealization of the female body or superhero high heels, each exemplified in this image, can be considered an isolated incident. The TV Tropes Wiki examines the popular trend of “combat stilettos” in superhero fiction, and a future blog post will discuss how the female body has been traditionally represented in comics. The heels, however, demand our attention today.

In Christopher Nolan's most recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman also sports an incredibly wicked pair of combat stilettos.

Image Credit: Batman-news.com

Nolan's Batman films already walk the line between the campy comic-book universe of highly saturated colors and the practical reality of the everyday, coming down somewhere in the middle with a dark realism he constantly struggles to assert against the unlikelihood of superhero culture. For example, the Batmobile, that iconic, somewhat silly symbol of bat-justice, becomes the gritty lovechild of a tank and a humvee, the product of Wayne Enterprises weapons research for the military. I half-expected Nolan to give Catwoman a costume that emphasized pragmatism and fit in with his drive for realism (in other words, complete with flats), but instead Anne Hathaway made her Selina Kyle debut with heels roughly as long as the film's midnight showing lines. Interestingly enough, Nolan gestures towards a realist explanation for this choice. In one scene, a thug sneeringly asks Catwoman whether such impractical footwear makes it difficult to walk. She snidely thwacks him with her heel and playfully asks, “I don't know. Do they?” The audience's takeaway from this scene is that these heels are basically specialty weapons. They're impractical the way any armament is impractical; they require certain skills.

Girl culture, then, has become a powerful weapon, one requiring great proficiency and talent to wield. Granted, there are critics who remain concerned about the physical cost of some of fashion's demands, for superheroes and citizens both, but Hathaway's brand of strength, symbolized by her deadly shoes, adds a distinctly feminine twist to the male-dominated world of crime fighting. Perhaps where Batwoman make the concession of giving up outward girl culture in order to adopt a masculine martial style, Catwoman's heels signal the validity of interests culturally coded as feminine. All of a sudden, stilettos seem less a hindrance or a mark of weakness than a respectable symbol of both physical mastery and feminist pride.

The connection between girl culture and superhero strength even takes a real-world, physical turn in Anne Hathaway's own comments at a press conference for Nolan's movie. USA Today's Bryan Alexander reports, “Hathaway credited her breakout role as a magazine editor assistant in 2006's Prada as fundamental training her for the required action in Dark Knight. It gave her the leg up on the skills needed to kick right alongside Batman (Christian Bale)...'The Devil Wears Prada was really good training for that,' Hathaway said at a press conference on Sunday. 'I kind of ran all up and down Manhattan then. Now I just ran up and down Gotham.'” The leap from an editor's assistant to supercrook-turned-hero isn't all that large, provided you're wearing the right shoes.

Superhero Footwear Part 1: Giving High Heels the Boot

clsloan — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:59:35 +0000

Image Credit: Dark Knight News

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Imagine: you're a tough, streetwise individual at the peak of your physical prime. You've got a flair for the dramatic, a go-get-'um attitude and a highly developed sense of justice. So, you've probably figured out, you're a superhero. In the world of comic books, and, increasingly, television and film, a few critical questions remain: what's your modus operandi? Your motivation for fighting crime? Do you have superpowers? If you happen to be a woman, you also have before you a seemingly trivial but, in my humble opinion, tellingly crucial decision: what sort of footwear do you sport with your obligatory flashy costume?

When I was a kid I was active in track & field, positively obsessed with superheroes, and more than a little unimpressed with girl culture. Nothing irked me more than seeing my favorite female characters with high heels strapped to their feet. Highly impractical, my awkward, prepubescent self scowled. Dashing across rooftops and delivering roundhouse kicks simply couldn't be accomplished in stilletos, and artists doubtlessly depicted women this way only to emphasize their weakness and narcissism. Batman: The Animated Series featured a Catwoman in flats, and for this sage move I awarded this brilliant, noir 90s show much credit.

Nowadays, along with picking up a shameless delight in many aspects of “chick culture,” I have a few more gender studies perspectives in my utility belt to bring to this ongoing conversation. In part 1, I'm going to stick with the serviceable, androgynous flats my childhood self would have admired. Part 2 will examine the potential for another brand of feminism in more distinctively feminine footwear.

So what does it suggest about their brand of empowered women when character designers choose shoes? For the sake of thematic continuity, let's stick with the Batman DC universe and take a look at Batwoman. Batwoman was revitalized by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman in 2010 with a self-titled series all her own, and their boot selection goes a long way towards characterizing this highly independent, powerful, no-nonsense hero. As a side note, to be fair, These babies are tailor made for the pragmatic crime fighter and include a flat heel to facilitate ease of movement, an inch or so on the bottoms to give her some height, some grip on the sole for leaping across rooftops and some overall heft to give kicks some weight. There aren't any straps or laces threatening to come untied at the worst moment. These shoes emphasize the sheer physicality of derring-do-gooding and offer little in the way of distinguishing their owner's gender. The subtle V at the top might be considered a giveaway, but when we look at them next to a pair of Batman's footwear, said V becomes an interesting inversion of his own boots style.

Image Credit: Batman Wikia

Granted, every artist will have their own renditions of Batwoman and Batman, but the boots seemed to hold steady over a few Google searches. Now, back to the inverted V. We could step into some Freud and infer phallic/yonic imagery going on here. We also, however, can't ignore the visual suggestion that Batwoman is a hero of Batman's ilk with her own personalized twists. If something as simple as boot top design tells them apart, there's not much gender space between them, at least not in the shoe department.

I suspect that in this particular comic cover (issue 0, the very first Batwoman title), Batwoman's boots are also performing some hefty symbolic work. The spiky bat on the sole doesn't need much explication, but what about the large W on the heel? Given that this area is where other female superheroes have sported steep stilletos, their erasure and replacement with a much more subtle indicator of gender, only visible when you're being violently assaulted with it, suggests a rejection of the old world of fashion-first lady heroes and a wholehearted embrace of the empowered (importantly, physically empowered) woman. Did I mention that Batwoman's current backstory involves being booted out of military school for violating don't ask, don't tell? In Part 2, I'll look at whether superheroes in high heels are doomed to objectification and weakness or have opportunities to make girl culture another imposing weapon in their arsenal.

Graffiti? I'll Know It When I See It. Or Not.

clsloan — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

When approaching a situation from a place of unfamiliarity or doubt, long-standing habit takes me to the Oxford English Dictionary. According to this semi-sacred text, graffiti (noun), means “words or images marked (illegally) in a public place, esp. using aerosol paint.” I etched this definition onto a spare wall in my brain and set out, quite purposefully, to find some street art. I knew from casual observation that some fences outside my apartment complex, the bus stations along my street, some building walls and even the backs of some signs sport small splashes of graffiti. All that remained was determining and documenting which offerings qualified as real graffiti (once again, “words or images marked (illegally) in a public place, esp. using aerosol paint”). Simple, right?

Oh, so wrong.

A friend tagging along, wielding our camera, first pointed to some text stretched along a newspaper stand.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

“Want me to get that?” He asked, good naturedly.

“Yeah! That's...Hang on.” Uncertainty immediately clouded my mind. I was pretty sure the bold red letters weren't exactly sanctioned by the government, but they bore little to no relation to the elaborate sketches I'd seen decorating other walls in the city. This was just...a name? Maybe? I leaned closer. I couldn't even make out the letters properly, but it certainly meant something to someone. Perhaps even several someones. But could it be called street art in any sense of the term? And here my OED training sort of fell apart.

What, exactly, is the nature of graffiti? Is it a type, a definable item? That didn't seem likely, given that tagging, text, names, splashes of color, images and designs all seem to qualify as graffiti. Or is it an artistic style? That seemed a little more promising, given that each example we passed as we trekked down Cameron road bore a distinct family resemblance, but that didn't seem fair, either. Is it defined by its illegality, then? Can we safely say that any display erected against the law qualifies as graffiti? Well, then, what about art done anonymously on sanctioned public walls? The OED itself includes (illegally) parenthetically, an additional, smirking bit of the denotation added, almost as an afterthought superimposed upon (and altering) the baseline definition. Maybe legality wasn't the way to go.

Is graffiti, then, none of the above? Better yet, can graffiti, by its very nature, be properly codified? Classified? Defined? Graffiti has always been one of those words I associated with rebellion, heroic individualism and youthful risk. Was it fair of me to go to a dictionary in an attempt to understand the phenomenon better? Maybe not. Perhaps graffiti was more about an ambiance instead of a definition. Perhaps I needed to trust my gut, not a rationalist approach. Surely, now I would fare better.

Oh, so wrong.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

As I turned from example to example, I found myself snapping multiple pictures but disregarding any highly personal messages with some embarrassment. If I could make out a legible name, I avoided a photo. If the message was hateful, I passed it by. I was drawn to samples I could a) decipher and b) appreciate. But was that fair? How can we discuss graffiti in toto without accounting for, well, every mark on every brick on every corner? At the end of an afternoon of searching, I was left with more questions than answers.

Is that the nature of graffiti?

For more on graffiti, see this week's other contributions:

What is graffiti and who does it belong to?

Graffiti as Advertisement

Jeremiah the Innocent Icon

The Politics of Tampon Jewelry

clsloan — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 23:00:18 +0000

Image Credit: Politix

In the wake of the menstrual pad confiscation outside the Texas senate gallery, protesters made some highly creative and intentionally jarring visual statements using, primarily, unwrapped tampons. Sanitary napkin accessories, as far as I know, haven't made a big nationwide appearance yet, but the compactness of tampons, coupled with the built-in string, makes it a relatively easy object to manipulate in craftsy projects. I noticed some bold souls stringing them together to make impromptu necklaces at the state capitol the day of the outrage, but the country tuned in when Melissa Harris-Perry daringly donned some tampon earrings on her MSNBC Sunday show. You can see a brief video capturing her demonstration here.

So, what exactly is the message behind hanging tampons from your ears? Harris-Perry's own statements offer a clue. As she put on the homemade earrings, courtesy of her producer, she noted “...the Texas state legislature said that you couldn't bring tampons in when they were going. These women who, in fact, stand up for their own reproductive rights, weren't allowed to, initially, to bring tampons, so just in case that ever happens again, ladies, you can bring them on your earrings.” This observation implies that the legislature was intentionally targeting medical equipment specific to the female body on a singularly biological basis. This focus served to viscerally emphasize an apparently essential or innate distinction between the “uncontrollable” and “dangerous” female body and, by contrast, the “normal” male body that could move between the public and private sphere without having to surrender any threatening toolkits. Melissa Harris-Perry caught on to the implication: women, according to general expectations, are medically bound to their menstrual cycles and can be neatly subjected to prejudice based on that condition.

The chosen retaliatory method? “Bring them in on your earrings.” Instead of identifying tampons and, by extension, menstrual pads and cups, as the symbols of an irksome but necessary biological burden, Harris-Perry suggests embracing them as representations of the cultural experiences women can share. Inserting tampon earrings and displaying them as accessories suggests that inserting tampons during a menstrual cycle need not be considered an anatomical necessity but, rather, an aspect of female culture. While you can't perfectly control your physical states, the idea is that you can pick your jewelry, and that your necklaces, earrings, anklets, nose rings and bracelets say something about your personality. The rhetoric of the accessory brings personal style, individual flair, and, most importantly, an aspect of choice to an altercation previously about innate anatomical conditions. Pretty appropriate given the context.

There Might Be Blood: What Can and Can't Be Seen About Women's Bodies

clsloan — Mon, 02 Sep 2013 20:19:40 +0000

Image Credit: Facebook, NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut

On July 12, 2013, I was standing in a long, winding line inside the Texas state capitol. For hours I had been chatting with the amazing men and women around me, sharing stories, sharing space, and, quite frankly, sharing boredom as we patiently inched towards the Senate gallery, hoping to secure a seat as the Texas senate debated and voted on a bill proposing abortion restrictions. Visually speaking, I was bombarded. Abortion rights activists wore saturated or burnt orange while anti-choice protestors wore various shades of blue. Images and slogans splayed across signs and t-shirts caught my eye, inevitably drawing up visceral responses that, more often than not, ended in my grabbing my partner's elbow and chattering excitedly into a long-suffering ear. Protests have such an amazing, indescribable energy about them, and that day I became convinced that a large amount of the electricity in the air depended on the spectacle created by individuals proud to display their thoughts and feelings literally on their sleeves.

Then a volunteer dashed by us in line clutching a cardboard box to her chest, breathlessly asking if anyone had any tampons or pads in their bags. Apparently, state troopers were forcing people to throw away feminine hygeine products before allowing them in to the gallery. The volunteer told us what smartphones soon confirmed: security was concerned that enraged audience members would launch their pads and tampons in a highly symbolic assault at the senators. A mother and daughter in front of me in line shared a shocked look. Of course they had pads in their bags, but they couldn't surrender them up to the box already a third full of innocent-looking, brightly-wrapped “projectiles,” and for a perfectly natural reason. They were both on their period. A little while later, before word came through that the DPS had stopped forbidding pads, they left the line together.

Being present for this little farce, humiliating and enraging as it might have been, got me thinking. All day, people around me had dragged powerful images into my sight: from gorge-raising, magnified abortion leavings to the minimalist, chilling images of wire hangers, instruments that have meant injury and even death to many desperate women. Though few of these pictures actually depicted it directly, they were all haunted by the unseen presence of the female body in peril. On the other extreme, outside the realm of abortion-rights rhetoric and in mainstream culture, the sexy, healthy female form is pasted on billboards, in magazines, on television, in movies, in comic books, and, well, you get the idea. In the common cultural background that makes up our day-to-day lives, however, the permutations, the bloodiness, and the sheer excesses of the female body remain unseen and, because unseen, coded with abjection, shame, even danger. Intentionally stripping individuals of their pads, tampons, and panty-liners, communicated, clearly, that the female body is, somehow, horribly threatening. As my opening image attests, satirists later incisively pointed out that guns (accompanied, of course, by a license) could be taken into the gallery while cotton wadding designed to keep menstrating women comfortable had to be confiscated for safety purposes.

In upcoming posts, I would like to explore some of the following questions: what depictions of the female body make standard appearances in visual rhetoric and what about it cannot be seen? What parts, types, or states are frequently represented? Conversely, what existing conditions are hardly ever represented? Are there any ways to explain these divisions? Finally, is there a way to push back the veil and visually assert subversive truths? Maybe by way of, for instance, defiantly hanging tampons off your ears or around your neck in response to being told to throw them in the trash? I plan to discuss the ins-and-outs of that particular rhetorical assault on the status quo next week.