mkhaupt's blog

Crimes of Fashion,* Part 1 in a 2-part series

mkhaupt — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:28:24 +0000

A couple of t-shirt designs have ignited discussion in the interwebosphere of late, and since they represent the extremes of feminism (i.e., radical feminist to decidedly NOT feminist), I thought it would be interesting to put them in conversation with each other, especially under the rubric of what constitutes "free speech" and "visual rhetoric."

First is the "I was raped" t-shirt masterminded by Jennifer Baumgardner, the poster woman for radical third-wave feminism:

Baumgardner was quoted in The New York Times as hoping to "force [rape] into everyday conversation." Many, many people find such a maneuver to be terribly intrusive and not appropriate for everyday wear. To quote one commenter on Jezebel.com, "Worn at a protest, a walk, a rally or your group's booth at the student center, fine. Cheesecake Factory? Not so much."

Essentially, people's reactions mirror the issue Baumgardner is trying to combat: we treat rape as an untouchable subject in this society. Will donning a confessional t-shirt in the public sphere (without the context of a Take Back the Night rally or similar event) help to de-stabilize the taboo? Or will it merely drive people away from the topic even further?

What does it mean, too, that the image is printed on American Apparel brand tees? Many folks have pretty valid reasons to hate American Apparel (the exploitative advertisements, founder Dov Charney's tendency to masturbate openly in the workplace, the revelation that the company is NOT sweatshop-free); does this undermine Baumgardner's project?

*with apologies to Jezebel.com

Visual rhetoric and "reading too much into things"

mkhaupt — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:05:01 +0000

A couple of discussions online of late have got me thinking about what happens when we interpret an image one way and are called on the carpet for "mis"interpreting it or reading too much into it. What do we reveal about ourselves and our own possibly subconscious biases when we publicly interpret an image, especially a problematic one?

A couple of weeks ago, a blogger on Feministe.com posted the cover of the current issue of Vogue, which features LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen in a pose that the blogger felt was racially insensitive:

Note here that her commenters were pretty much split in their assessment that they couldn't see the problem with the image or that Jill was spot-on in her analysis.

Many people thought it was a cute image, and others argued that on the spectrum of things, this image wasn't worthy of getting one's knickers in a twist. When pressed for an explanation for her outrage (she didn't provide much commentary in her original posting; she added the image from King Kong later), she replied, "I see a scary animalistic black man, a primal scream, and a beautiful white woman." A later commenter added, "If LeBron wasn’t hunched over and roaring, with his left hand curled into a paw…" And that's when things got ugly. To wit, "Oh wow. You’ve officially crossed over the line between interpreting racism and putting in a whole bunch of your own."

That's where things get interesting to me: at what point are we crossing over pointing out racist "dog whistles" and instead telegraphing our own prejudices based on our word choice in interpretation/analysis?

Another example is a Wrestlemania billboard in Florida that appears to have the men's nipples airbrushed out of it:

Boing Boing linked to the original post on this image from the Sociological Images blog, which argues, "It may illustrate that it is women's bodies that we think of when we think of bodies on display because of the adoption (by men and women alike in this culture) of a (heteronormative) male gaze."

What's interesting about this image is not Sociological Images' analysis of the image (mostly because I don't buy this blogger's argument and find that statement fairly meaningless), but the comments on Boing Boing, which take offense at SI's "pomo babble" and the "insularity of academia."

All of this to beg the question: How do we engage in ethical analysis of visual rhetoric without alienating our audience? And who, ultimately, is our audience?

I am the condom friend ever useful to you

mkhaupt — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:07:23 +0000

Here's a Telegu (East Indian) sex-ed video extolling the virtues of using a certain brand of condoms, featuring a Bollywood-style anthem and men dressed up as dancing condoms. I have to wonder, though, who is the target audience for this video? They address men and women both gay and straight, but the message seems geared toward a younger demographic. At the very least, the dancing condoms juxtaposed with line drawings of gay sex is jarring. But this might just be a problem of cultural legibility.

At any rate, at 7 minutes long, the video is sure to get its point across, no matter who the intended audience is.

(Contains some images that may be offensive to some, and likely not safe for work.)

The Stuff White People Like problem

mkhaupt — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:29:59 +0000

The person pictured below is Christian Lander, one of the authors of the much-discussed blog, Stuff White People Like.

Some love the blog, some find it offensive. I fall into the latter category because I think to write about "Stuff White People Like" (which feels grammatically wrong somehow), even satirically, is to exclude non-whites from the things that the titular white people like, like recycling, pricey sandwiches, dogs, kitchen gadgets, and Mos Def (?). While I admire the project of poking fun at the Gen X and Y Brooklyn- and Echo Park-dwelling hipsterati who have more money than actual sense, I do think it's a bit irresponsible to present such a limited view of whiteness and declare it ALL whiteness. What does it mean to the white person who rejects the Prius or can't afford a $300 Kitchenaid waffle iron (or never learned to ride a bicycle as a kid because their family couldn't afford one)? What about the person of color who practices alternative medicine, or lives by the water? Or the white woman who loathed Juno?

What I do like about what Lander has done with his most recent entry, as well as the recycling entry is that he has made himself complicit with the white people he's lampooning by making himself the visual representation of the problem he's diagnosing (as opposed to using the stock images he usually utilizes). Also of note is the Star of David on Lander's t-shirt in the recycling picture. If you read the comments on the Sarah Silverman entry, you'll see that there is some (uncomfortable) debate as to whether Jewish people are technically white (ouch, I know). He seems to be answering that question by posing in that t-shirt (outside of a Whole Foods, natch) for the recycling entry.

Maybe this Lander kid is smarter than I thought.

Yes we can/no we can't

mkhaupt — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:57:22 +0000

By now, you've probably seen the moving and (I assume) influential video by the Black-Eyed Peas' Will.i.am "Yes We Can" video in support of Barack Obama, which sets Obama's New Hampshire primary speech to a stripped-down tune, the words voiced by a coterie of A- and B-list celebrities:

While some might argue that seeing/hearing Scarlett Johannson sing Obama's words might dilute their power, the video certainly helped determine where my vote, once belonging to John Edwards, would go. I had not previously heard Obama's speech, and hearing his indirect (yet rhetorically powerful) reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., sung by John Legend certainly caught my attention.

Equally interesting is the "spoof" video (one among many, I am sure), which adopts many of the same techniques, casting "real" people in the celebrities' roles and portraying their dismay at John McCain's pro-war rhetoric. The producers, "Election 08," claim that "earnest people reacting to a candidate is the future of music video":

House Bill 282: No Fat Chicks?

mkhaupt — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:17:24 +0000

Sandy Szwarc over at Junkfood Science reports on the controversial bill on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives. If it had been passed into law, HB 282 would have prohibited restaurants from serving obese customers. According to Szwarc, customers suspected of obesity would be required to weigh in at the door of their local dining establishment; those with a BMI over 30 will be turned away.

Szwarc, a RN with a staggering "introduction" page, doesn't really distinguish herself in her analysis of the bill; others have discussed it elsewhere. What is truly disturbing about this blog author's particular breakdown is her choice of images. Commenters on other blogs have likened this potential law as a 21st century reiteration of Jim Crow laws, but I'm not sure this is apt, nor am I convinced that this is responsible use of imagery to make a point.

Is it ethical or even good argumentation to invoke imagery from the era of segregation in this case, thereby forcing an equivalence between fat-hatred (via the rhetoric of an "obesity epidemic") and our nation's complicated and troubled history of slavery, segregation, and institutionalized racism that still lurks in our most hallowed halls?

Yes, it is wrong to discriminate against fat people, and it is wrong to automatically make the leap that fat people are fat because of gluttony and legislate against them as a result. But are fat people really in the same category as a race of people forcibly removed from their countries of origin, forced to work as slaves for generations, victims of rape and murder, and so on? I think not.

God's Eye View

mkhaupt — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:53:14 +0000

Back in July, the Creative Review blog posted an entry regarding an art exhibit that imagines scenes from the bible as seen via Google Earth.

The entry's author quotes James Dive, one of the artists from the collective responsible for the work as saying, "As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted, it has been interesting to mess with that trust.”

With that in mind, it's particularly interesting to read the comments on his entry, which range from head-scratching as to whether they got the time of day right for the crucifixion to a condemnation of "the ‘art’ of discrediting a trusted source like satellite imaging, with lies and deceit."

And here I was, thinking it was pretty cute to look up my address on Google Earth to see how bad my yard looked when the photo was taken! (Thanks to Jodi Egerton to alerting me to this topic.)

The BMI Project

mkhaupt — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 05:02:27 +0000

Fat-acceptance activist/blogger Kate Harding has assembled a collection of photographs to illustrate "how ridiculous the BMI really is." Each photo title states the person's BMI status (underweight, normal, obese, and morbidly obese), and the range of representations is both shocking and breathtaking. My favorite is Moxie, the morbidly obese cat with a BMI of 58.6.

What I really love about this collection is that not only does it challenge the arbitrary categorizations of what it means to be "normal" or "morbidly obese" (one woman in that painful category is pictured at a Tai Chi tournament in Japan), but it also challenges the individual's conceptions of what those categories represent. For example, a "normal" individual may actually look "underweight," while many of the "obese" (such a loaded term) women are, to put it bluntly, smokin' hot. And then there is Shauna Marsh Reid, who has lost fully half of her body weight, going from 352 pounds to 176, extensively documented here, yet still falls under the BMI category of "overweight." Despite the fact that she is healthier than she has ever been in her life, the lack of context inherent to the BMI works to condemn her as still somehow unacceptable.

Dove onslaught

mkhaupt — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:20:52 +0000

Dove expertly uses visual rhetoric to combat the insidious forces of ... visual rhetoric.

Passive-aggressive rhetoric

mkhaupt — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:32:48 +0000

Earlier this week, my lunch was liberated from the refrigerator in the grad-student lounge. After I sent a gently scolding email to our listserve, my friend pointed me to passiveaggressivenotes.com, where readers submit exchanges between themselves and coworkers, roommates, and strangers when conflict arose. (more below the fold)

My favorites are those that deploy changes in font formatting and those that start out politely, but end up as full-fledged, ALL-CAPS RANTS. Be sure to check out the note wars, too, which often transpire among roommates who clearly hate each other.

Glorifying rape or visual rhetoric?

mkhaupt — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 02:09:52 +0000

Some feminists are all atwitter about Italian Vogue's questionable new "photostory," decrying it as a glorification of sexual violence in theatres of war. (And yes, the spread is pretty heinous on many levels.) But I'd like to submit that the American flags splattered all over these debauched, disturbing scenes function as a none-too-subtle criticism of our government's actions. What do you think? (Warning: some nudity.)