viz. - gender

Theorizing the Body

clsloan — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 14:00:00 +0000

by Casey Sloan

We rely on images of the human body in advertising, in art, in visual arguments, and, quite simply, in navigating everyday social life. Over the years, many philosophers and theorists have grappled with questions like: What constitutes the body? Can the body think? How is the body produced? Why are some bodies more socially acceptable or desirable than others?

In the 1600s, the French philosopher René Descartes' theory of dualism posited that the individual was composed of two distinct substances. The mind, the core of the individual, was immaterial. The body, on the other hand, was unthinking matter, an extension of the mind. Descartes' dualism clearly emphasized the importance of the mind as the lofty seat of human rationality. The body was little more than its physical seat. The self could be neatly separated from material being; the ideal individual was ethereal. This philosophical hierarchy bolstered social and political hierarchies, as well. Women and racial minorities, for example, were often associated with bodily or carnal existence while a select group of men considered themselves bearers of higher thought processes, intellect and rationality.

Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, focused attention on an essentialized, natural body as the source of individual identity. Freud argued that all individuals developed mentally according to certain erotic instincts or drives. He famously claimed that culture itself comes from siphoning sexual impulses into socially productive channels. Freud's theories emphasize that an individual's natural sex determines which developmental road his/her mind will set out upon. These narratives of development clearly privilege one sex, basically equating being male with power and being female with submission.

Theorists since Freud have questioned his understanding of the body as essential, or inherent and natural. Michel Foucault's theories of biopolitics suggest that bodies in modern society are sculpted by social processes. Cultural ways of understanding the body (through sciences like biology) and social practices of discipline (through regulatory regimes like mandatory school attendance) inscribe the body with discursive meaning. For Foucault, bodies do not have any essential attributes. Contra Freud, Foucault argues that “bodies” (or an understanding of bodies as possessing natural, pre-cultural qualities) comes from society, not that society comes from natural impulses in bodies.

Feminist theorists have made use of Foucault's understanding of bodies as determined by culture. Judith Butler, for example, argues that “sexed” bodies are not naturally occurring, but are rather constructed by repetitive performances that communicate gender. Her theories of performativity posit that the body is always in the process of becoming, always in the process of being created. An individual body is never in a static state of being, never simply “male” or “female.”

Understanding that “the body” has been theorized in a variety of ways by a variety of thinkers keeps us from making automatic assumptions when the human form appears in visual rhetoric. We should always ask: what claim does this particular representation make about the body? Does this body have a clear or “natural” sex? A clear or “natural” race? What relationship does this body have to the self? Why does this representation want or even need to make this sort of claim?

Works Cited and Related Sources (by publication date)

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish (1975)

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982)

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter (1993)

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies(1995)

Penney, Joel. “Visible Identities, Visual Rhetoric: The Self-Labeled Body as a Popular Platform for Political Persuasion” (2012)

What's Haunting Dove's Real Beauty Campaign?

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

Image Credit: People's Lab

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?

The LEGO Movie, Narrative, and Children's Play

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:00:00 +0000

1978 LEGOS Ad. "a toy that stimulates creativity and imagination for years." Source: Ourlifeintoronto.com

Sometimes, it’s hard to separate a film from the circumstances in which you watch it. In my case, I saw it as a father of a 1-year-old, sitting at the Alamo Drafthouse, following a preshow that included one of the early advertisements for LEGOs, then a European import newly reaching America’s shores. On multiple levels, I kept thinking of how much The LEGO Movie might represent a low point in both how we imagine children’s entertainment, and how we imagine children themselves.

2014 The Lego Movie: Explosions, Lens Flares, and Desperate Running. Source: IMDB.com

That isn’t to say that The LEGO Movie isn’t interesting. In fact, one of the things that makes it most noteworthy is that the film actually tries to say something. Rather than just attempting to sell LEGO’s, the show presents a dialectic between two conflicting (yet enthusiastically childlike) phrases: “everything is awesome” and “you are special.” “Awesomeness,” in this movie, is tied to conformity, but also cooperation; as the opening song has it, “everything is cool when you’re part of a team.” “Specialness,” on the other hand, is explicitly presented as the movie’s central theme. As multiple characters put it throughout the film, “you are the most talented, the most interesting, and most extraordinary person in the universe. And you are capable of amazing things.”

1955 ad for Lego System Image credit: Youtube.com

Perhaps it’s hard not to feel special when playing with LEGO’s; where the original advertisement for Lego Universal System emphasized the ability to build individual objects, LEGO sets do give children the sense of having godlike powers, of creating a world that answers to them and them alone. At its best, The LEGO Movie's visuals echo the anarchic pleasure of building with LEGO blocks, celebrating ugly juxtapositions (“special!”) rather than frozen perfection (instruction-following “awesome”). When the movie does encourage such anarchic construction, it evokes the childlike pleasures of a LEGO's aesthetic: conflicting colors jarred together in defiance of mature adult tastes.

1981: Yet Another LEGO builder who needs no instruction manual. Image source: womenyoushouldknow.net

However, I was more disturbed by what The LEGO Movie seems to think it means to be an individual, or "special." We start with the same character as almost every Hollywood epic: a white, normal-looking straight man who just can’t fit in. The film’s story, then, runs down a checklist of “epic movie conventions” so hackneyed I can recite them in my sleep. We have

1) The aforementioned white protagonist, who

The middle-class looking nerdy boy is the first to train dragons! Who would've thought? Image source: imdb.com

2) meets the immaculate, superlatively competent girl who falls inexplicably in love with him,

Even the most creative of films rely on old stereotypes. Image source: imdb.com

2) finds himself among a group of people who seem to be pretty special themselves, but ultimately will give heartfelt speeches about how much better he is than them,

He may be foreign to their culture and have little understanding of their situation, but all the Na'vi look to the human Jake Sully for guidance. Image source: avatarmovie.com

3) and of course is aided by the death of the Magical Negro, played by Morgan Freeman, the most magical and godlike of all black side characters to throw himself beneath a bus for his white heroes.

Guess which of these guys gets to die not once but twice so that his fellow ex-CIA killers may live and have a sequel? Image source: comingsoon.net

4) Finally, as seems to be the case in all kids movies these days, the hero slaughters a horde or two of mundane, drab-looking folk simply to prove his own awesomeness; no one cares about how many policemen get lasered, drowned, crushed, or otherwise slaughtered in The LEGO Movie.

Gandalf: True courage is found in knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one. Bilbo: Did you really just say that with a straight face? Have you even read the script for this movie? Image source: lotr.wikia.com

Sure, some of the details do satirize the film’s color-in-the-lines Epic Movie construction. It’s nice to see a woman reject Batman as a boyfriend, for instance. (Batman is the boyfriend that no one deserves, and no one needs.) Freeman’s joke at the end does give him access to the most whitest of white cultural positions, the hipster. Yet why does the movie’s only female lead continue to be a cookie-cutter idealization of our current domestic ideal (the badass competent human being who can provide for our hero’s security in an economically-fragile world, but also the swoony fem who needs to be attached to the main character, and serves as his ultimate prize)? Why is there no living black character by the end of the movie?

Each of the stereotypes that The LEGO Movie uses is, perhaps, useful from both a marketing and a creative standpoint, yet The LEGO Movie's insistance that children's imagination is made up of nothing but these well-trod cliches is disturbing. Real children's imaginations tend to be discontinuous. jarring, confounding to adult sensibilities. Children are clever at picking up on our clches and narratives (sometimes when we don't want them to), but they are also capable of combining bits and pieces of stories they've heard into new wholes with all the enthusiasm of a young girl slamming together discordant blocks in hopes of creating a LEGO masterpiece. But of course, such free play has nothing to do with the mechanical repitition of Hollywood formulae running in our theaters. Nor is frewheeling creativity something that recent LEGO marketing wants to encourage, especially for girls.

Recent LEGO models targeted to a female consumer-base are specifically designed not to interact with normal Lego sets, clearly implying that the pieces featured in The LEGO Movie are off limits to girls. As the very girl featured in the 1981 ad points out, “in 1981, LEGOs were simple and gender-neutral, and the creativity of the child produced the message. In 2014, it’s the reverse: the toy delivers a message to the child, and the message is weirdly about gender.” Of course, there are financial incentives for doing so; not only are parents unable to re-use LEGOS for children of different genders, but girls and boys are each encouraged to buy the latest pre-made sets. LEGOs becomes less and less about creativity and exploration, and more and more about following the narrative laid down by Hollywood scriptwriters and advertisment execs.

I left The LEGO Movie humming “Everything is Awesome,” and it’s been the background to much of my headspace for the past week or so. But I also left wondering who it is that we allow to be seen as special in our society, and how we encourage our kids to think about the idea of “specialness.” I am also confused by how very eagerly critics seem to take the movie at its face value, or even praise it for demonstrating “how the weight of ‘adult concerns’ conspires to kill the child in all of us." But the thing is, children don't tell stories as uninspired and predictable as that found in The LEGO Movie--unless, of course, they receive enough signals that these are the only stories worth considering. If LEGO was once "a toy that stimulates creativity and imagination for years," The LEGO Movie seems to be just the opposite; a love-song to the death of creativity wrapped in clever-yet-superficial satire and a thoroughly disingenuous claim that "everyone is special."

Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 20:10:32 +0000

Image still from Twin Peaks episode two.

Inspired by Casey's Halloween post on gender in the horror genre, I'm continuing to riff on the same theme; I'll talk about boredom and violence, truck stop killers, and, of course, Laura Palmer.

So I just finished watching Twin Peaks. I'm behind the times in tackling this one, but now the show is up there on my list of favorites. That said, while watching over the past few months, I couldn’t help but notice that the underlying message seems to be: Young Women who display independence and/or sexual curiosity will probably be murdered by a deep woods demon. Laura Palmer is only the first casualty. By the series’ end—no serious spoilers here—we have to wonder what will become of our various other heroines. Audrey Horne, Donna Hayward, Shelly Johnson. And of course there remains the question of questions: How’s Annie?

Twin Peaks is a slow, small town with a toxic heart; like most small towns, you might say. In depicting this fictional Washington community, the show flips back and forth between scenes of boredom and scenes of violence. Sometimes everyone is sitting around talking about how great the pie is, or they’re eating donuts from perfectly organized stacks. And then sometimes they’re beating one another with bars of soap, trying to garrote one another in bed, or shooting each other point plank. And isn’t this the way with any good horror scenario or urban legend? Things have to start out a bit too quiet, and that’s when terror comes to roost.

Plenty has been written about Twin Peaks, specifically about the use of the mutilated female body in the show. Why is Laura Palmer’s plastic-wrapped body in the pilot episode so chilling and so beguiling? (Remember that Lynch found a local girl to play Laura, claiming he hired her "just to play a dead girl"; "But no one—not Mark, me, anyone—had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead.") The fact that this wholesome-seeming, community fixture from a wealthy family, who happened to be played by a beautiful young woman, presents a haunting image once murdered and thrown in the lake? Not all that surprising.

Image still from Twin Peaks pilot episode.

But I’m thinking now of other kinds of violence toward women that tend to go unseen, unnoticed, or unremembered. Vanessa Veselka’s "The Highway of Lost Girls," published in GQ and collected in the 2013 Best American Essays, describes hitchhiking as a teenaged female runaway in the 1980s, taking rides from commercial drivers from truck stop to truck stop. Veselka has a run-in with a truck driver she will suspect, years later, is famous serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, whose “trucking logs place him in the area of fifty unsolved murders in the three years prior to his arrest alone.” Veselka argues that Rhoades was able to get away with these murders—“at his peak he was killing one to three women a month”—because the victims he chose weren’t a part of any group that the community valued. As Veselka continues to search for evidence of other women Rhoades likely killed, everyone she asks, from local law enforcement to truck stop owners, denies ever having heard of the dead women. Despite the fact that the body was found in their dumpster, for example.

Veselka writes, “our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims.” This is the case when the victims are drifters, women who don’t belong to any clear family or community, or women who have removed themselves from such communities, especially through engagement in the sex industry. Or, as the FBI's Highway Serial Killings Initiative describes them, "The victims in these cases are primarily women who are living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse and prostitution." While the fictional Laura Palmer’s death brings in a full-on FBI investigation (conducted by an all-male team of investigators and local law enforcement officers), hundreds of real women meet the same fate along the interstate daily and, as Veselka’s piece illustrates, can never even be properly identified (The Highway Serial Killings Initiative, started in 2009, took an initial count of over five hundred bodies around truck stops and rest areas alone.)

To bring this back to the context of fictional Twin Peaks, here's the question on my mind: does anybody really care about Ronette Pulaski?

Two Sex-Scandals: Focusing in on the Problem

Cate Blouke — Sun, 22 May 2011 14:16:36 +0000

AP Photo/Chris Pizello via NY Daily News

Given the increasing hullaballoo surrounding this week’s two sex-scandal stories (Strauss-Kahn and Schwarzenegger), this image of Schwarzenegger and soon-to-be ex-wife, Maria Shriver, strikes me as paradigmatic of how these scenarios seem to play out: focus in on brooding, somber (occasionally apologetic) male politician; blurry, out-of-focus female victim in the foreground. While the impetus behind these stories is supposedly exposing the men that “done them wrong,” it’s often the women who suffer most from the media backlash.Kate Zernike's New York Times article makes the point well, both the Schwarzenegger scandal and the Strauss-Kahn case “raise similar questions about imbalances of power” when it comes to sexual indiscretion and assault. With teams of high-powered attorneys and publicists at their disposal, both men have the means to launch vigorous counterattacks, circulating rumors and exposing the women’s lives to excrutiating public scrutiny.

Media stake-out of Mildred Baena's home - Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times

It’s unsurprising that women are hesitant to come forward regarding sexual assault when such a media circus is bound to ensue, and/or when it doesn’t seem to have much impact. As Michael Shaw’s post on BagNewsNotes points out, Schwarzenegger’s infidelity and aggressive sexuality are nothing new – the man won the gubernatorial race despite exposés regarding his mistreatment of women by both the LA Times and Premiere Magazine. The only real news this time is living, breathing, incontrovertible evidence.

With known-philanderer (and consequent hypocrite) Newt Gingrich eying the White House, what become increasingly clear are the cultural denial and double-standards we hold regarding men in positions of power.

Post Adapted/Cross-posted from BagNewsNotes, a site comitted to the social, cutural and political reading of news images.

(Re)Composing Bodies - Giovanni Bortolani's Fake Too Fake

Cate Blouke — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Giovanni Bortolani, from the Fake Too Fake series

Using some seriously inventive (and at times disturbing) photoshop, Italian artist Giovanni Bortolani has created a series of photos about the composition of the human form. While the image above suggests a relationship between the body and the organic by superimposing a leaf skeleton on a man's back, most of Bortolani's photos in the series explore bodies in terms of that which is "fake" or constructed. The images in Fake Too Fake are jarring, but they ask us to consider what we're doing to our bodies in this age of plastic surgery and diet pills. NSFW (and somewhat gruesome) material after the jump.

Giovanni Bortolani, from the Fake Too Fake series

Though Joseph Ayoub from White Zine (a website about digital arts) argues that Bortolani's images "can sometimes be too trashy," I think that many of them make interesting and complex arguments about visibility and identity. Juxtaposing male and female, black and white, inside and outside, Bortolani questions how identity is constructed or shared. What is the relationship between inner self and outer appearance?

While the images might be rather risque for some classrooms, it would be an interesting exercise to ask students to come up with captions for these images, or to treat them like advertisements with slogans. The solitary, brooding model is reminiscent of the Calvin Kline underwear ads, and the arguments these images make would certainly fit the context of celebrity, body image, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I can imagine several of these images as strikingly effective anti-drug advertisements which wouldn't be too far off from the scare tactics of current campaigns. Of course, that could also open up a conversation about rhetorical fallacies, but the images are unquestionably effective in terms of getting our attention.

The call is coming from inside the House!

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:53:14 +0000

Check out a new political ad from the Clinton campaign:

I almost didn't want to be the one to blog about this one, because we've got some pretty rich material here. My favorite thing about this piece, though, is that it reminds me of the old Babysitter horror stories we used to/still tell ourselves. It really puts the domestic in domestic threat.

You've never seen sports bras like these.

erinhurt — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:16:03 +0000

I ran across this via Feministing.com, and thought these almost-ads needed to be on the website. The backstory for these ads is that an ad agency pitched them to a running company, which passed on them. They are advertising sports bras, supposedly in a humorous way. They seem menacing to me:

See the other two ads after the jump:

Here are the others:

For me, the blood on these women's faces has overtones of violence, especially domestic violence. Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine that an advertising agency wouldn't be aware of these connotations.

Women in Art (more rhetoric of the montage)

Jillian Sayre — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:04:45 +0000

Perhaps a good point of departure for a discussion of Women in Film would be the creator's earlier attempt to give us an overview of Women in Art:

Does high art create/communicate normative body structures or gender roles in the same way as popular culture?

Perhaps it is the chronological extension (this montage covers 400 more years than Women in Film) but the faces here seem to resist the homogenous beauty of the doe-eyed starlet. On the other hand, it is also interesting to note a similar lack of racial diversity. If modern cinema produces 3 African American actresses, 500 years of Western art produces none.

Women in Film

Justin Tremel — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:52:52 +0000

I recently read a New Yorker article that mentioned the spell-binding youtube video "Women in Film" seen below. It's quite mesmerizing, have a look.

In the article, author David Denby points out certain common visual elements that the diverse group of female stars all share:

The video "Women in Film," on YouTube, morphs the faces of female stars, from the silent period to the present, in a continuous progression, making it clear that eyes may be freakishly pinned open (Crawford) or flirtatiously half closed (Marilyn Monroe), but they must be liquid and voluminous. And lips must be full, the lower gently crescented and the upper a perfect bow. The women were often filmed with chin raised, looking up at men, so the neck had to be a clean line, the shoulders pliant and yielding. Women's hair in the glamour period was curtain and foliage, the luxurious motif of sexual abandon.

The video seems to me a good compliment to the Dove campaign discussed previously on Viz. In a rhetorical avenue of inquiry that places so much emphasis on images of the female body, it is compelling to see how much significant visual study can be done, even when concentrating on simply the face in monochrome. Our students may not recognize any of the earlier Hollywood stars, but I think they'll find the last thirty seconds of the video quite compelling when the morphs take on the faces that they are very familiar with.

The full text of Denby's article isn't currently available online from the New Yorker, though you can find an abstract. You can, however, access his article in html via Academic Search premier:

FALLEN IDOLS. By: Denby, David. New Yorker, 10/22/2007, Vol. 83 Issue 32, p104-114, 7p; (AN 27150834)