viz. - Feminism

Viz's Visual Guide to Feminism Part 1 (banner.jpg)

Laura Thain — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 14:40:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post Viz's Visual Guide to Feminism Part 1.

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.

In Your (Type)Face: Part I

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:16:23 +0000

Image via Parimal Parmar, Bēhance.net

I'm in the midst of the (long) process of building a digital magazine called Covered with Fur for Austin small press A Strange Object. This week I'm choosing typefaces, which, as one editor puts it, is a "vertigo-inducing" prospect, especially on the web. As I research and test various webfonts, I'm struck by a) how many exist, b) how many ugly and/or illegible fonts there are, and c) how little I know about type design and type designers in the digital age. I mean, I watched Helvetica, just like everyone else, but I don't put nearly enough thought into the people who design the typefaces I use regularly (which include, of late, Times, Helvetica Neue, occationally Didot, if I'm feeling fancy; I used to be strictly Garamond, but I grew out of that, thank God).

My first question: what typefaces, if any—old or new—are designed by women?

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Here's what I've found out. Several of the fonts in your word processor were likely designed in the 1990s by Carol Twombly, who created Trajan, Myriad, and Adobe Calson while working for Adobe Systems. The omnipresent Mrs Eaves, a "sensitive revival" of Baskerville for the screen, and Filosofia, a web version of Bodoni, were designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. And perhaps most recognizably, Kris Holmes co-designed the Lucida system with Charles Bigelow. Today there are some extremely awesome lady type designers working on new fonts that often have a vintage appeal, like Veronika Burian and Laura Meseguer (whose kickass Magasin is pictured below).

If you're interested, you can read a great interview in which Yale School of Art's Director of Graphic Design (and first tenured female professor o_0) offers an answer to the question at the heart of my inquiry: "What does it mean to be a female designer in a mostly male institutional history and culture?" This question (plus my follow-up: "What does it mean that most typefaces, print and digital, that we read and type have been created by male type designers?") will guide my viz. series on contemporary typography.

Image via Laura Meseguer's artist portfolio

Though typography might seem fairly innocuous, the overlap between the age of advertising and the rise of digital media—plus the increasing amount of time spent in front of screens covered in type—means that how words and numbers look has huge implications. As Walter Ong has it, "Typography...made the word into a commodity." Making language visual and standardized (for most of print history, this process involved casting the letters themselves in lead, i.e. movable type, though today it means drawing them on graphic design software) makes it concrete—or concrete-seeming—and makes it harder to think of language as a fluid, dynamic, creative process wrought by use.

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.

If you're like me and you're just diving into the wide world of typeface design, here's an animated video primer that may be of use.

*Shoutout to Jake Cowan for having Ong ready to hand.

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?

Militant (Feminist) Grammarians

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 20:49:35 +0000

Cropped from image below

You know you’re a huge nerd when multiple people from various corners of your life all forward you the same link, and that link is a bunch of diagrammed sentences.

This snazzy, minimalist new print from "renowned" infographic artists Pop Chart Lab satisfies the demands of everyone's favorite niche demographic (all those grammar-fiends/”classic-literature”-snobs/data-visualization-enthusiasts/fans-of-quality-design in your life) to a T. But before you place your order, let’s take a closer look at what this “Diagrammatical Dissertation” actually visualizes.

Image via Esquire

Apart from the anti-feminist overtones of the Reed-Kellogg diagram schemata itself—which just reflect the gendered taxonomization of the English language (from whence do we derive concepts like objectification and subordination, exactly, if not from the rules that structure everything we say?)—this poster perpetuates all the standard inequalities we’ve come to expect from lists of “Notable Novels.” Of the 25 opening sentences the poster presents, four were written by female authors (a whopping 16%). One black author makes the cut, Toni Morrison. 13 have male subjects or refer to male characters; only 4 of the sentences contain female characters or narrators (and in one of these the female appears as “fire of my loins” w/r/t the male narrator, so that probably shouldn't even count). Only two women are their sentence's subjects; seven male subjects voice their own sentences. It barely needs to be said that none of these sentences come from openly queer writers.

Cropped from image above

I know what you’re thinking. "This isn’t news, yo! It’s just a reflection of literary history. More men historically wrote and published novels, and more novels have been published about men, therefore any chart would demonstrate this inequity! And besides, they're talking about classics. When reading or penning a classic, race and gender magically disappear. Right?!"

Wrong. Here's (one of) the (many) problem(s), provided for us in the poster maker's own humble description of his or her (but in all likelihood his) product:

This chart diagrams 25 famous opening lines from revered works of fiction according to the dictates of the classic Reed-Kellogg system. From Cervantes to Faulkner to Pynchon, each sentence has been painstakingly curated and diagrammed by PCL's research team, parsing classical prose by parts of speech and offering a partitioned, color-coded picto-grammatical representation of some of the most famous first words in literary history. Whether you’re a book buff, an English teacher, or a hard-line grammarian, this diagrammatical dissertation has something for the aesthete in all of us.

Gross. This chart offers its list as a set of “famous,” “revered,” “curated,” “most famous in literary history” works for “the aesthete in all of us.” All of whom, might I ask? And talk about range! It covers "Cervantes to Faulkner to Pynchon"—and all the straight euro/anglo male novelists in between. The problem with using words like "notable" and "classic" to describe a set of authors that is 96% male and/or European by origin in 2014 is (duh) that it simply perpetuates the idea that some literature is more important than other kinds; and that most of the "important" books EVER have been written by or about (straight) men. To which I say, uh, nope.

Like the Buzzfeed quizzes I mentioned a few weeks back, curation has ossifying powers. Every time I see a new list of “best books,” which is what this actually amounts to, the same ugly old narrative about who sets the cultural bar rears its representational head. And it isn’t any surprise, is it? Just take a look at the latest VIDA statistics: we’re STILL publishing an average of 75% male authors in the most read magazines in the US for nonfiction and fiction ("Drumroll for the 75%ers: The Atlantic, London Review of Books, New Republic, The Nation, New York Review of Books (actually holding steady at 80% men for four years) and New Yorker"). Mainstream book reviews have always skewed overwhelmingly toward books written by men. In words from Cate Blanchett's controversial acceptance speech at last week’s Oscars, “The world is round, people.”

Image via VIDA count 2013

And maybe, just maybe, if this much-tweeted-and-"liked" and temporarily back-ordered diagram had included a more varied group of authors and texts, it wouldn’t be basically all direct objects and strings of subordinate clauses—that one was for you, feminist grammar nerds. Is it any surprise that the only sentence on the chart that neither takes an object nor subordinates a clause is the opening to Beloved, “124 was spiteful”? Subject noun + copula + subject complement = simply exquisite.

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.

Frozen: The Anatomy of a Gaze

Scott Garbacz — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Image credit: The Guardian

The first song composed for (but ultimately cut from) the recent Disney blockbuster Frozen explicitly engages with Disney's presentation of female characters. In the song, entitled "We Know Better," young princesses Elsa and Anna lay out a laundry list of objections to the traditional idea of a "Disney Princess." The film's two heroes refuse to be the sort of princess who "always knows her place," insist that a real princess “laughs and snorts milk out her nose," and maintain their right to mention “underwear.” Though whimsical, the film sets out its heroines' priorities: the only things they take seriously are their sisterly friendship and the political demands of ruling the realm. In climactic two-part harmony, the girls promise to "take care of our people and they will love / Me and you." If films like Tangled and Brave taught Disney that their princesses can (quite profitably) take center stage without dressing up as boys, Frozen insists that its female leads will be more concerned with national policy than with the clothes they wear.

The film's feminist aims were reflected in early reviews. NPR discussed the film's hit single, and the message of empowerment that many tweens heard in its lyrics. Social media exploded with a list of "7 Moments that Made Frozen the Most Progressive Disney Movie Ever." On the other hand, Frozen came under fire for perpetuating some of the worst tropes of the very "Disney Princess" genre it mocks. From critiques of Elsa's embodiment of Disney's Madonna-whore dichotomy to concern over the ridiculous gender dimorphism of its CGI character-models, the movie collected criticism as well as praise from feminists. Frozen was often compared unfavorably to Lilo & Stitch, a movie with its own fascinating treatment of social narratives.

In this post, however, I'm not particularly interested in praising or condemning Frozen so much as in understanding how it works. In particular, I want to draw attention to a visual contradiction that I see energizing much of Frozen. On the one hand, the the film claims to be a reversal of what we expect from a Disney film. On the other hand, in its meticulous computer animation actually displays a deep reliance on the sorts of traditional, emotional-powerful images created by Disney and other culture-makers over the years.

Take, for instance, the following freeze-frame, an image featured in various promotional materials, including (as seen below) Disney.com's website for the film:

Image credit: Disney.com

This image is particularly powerful because, in its essence, we have already seen it a million times in previous fantasy films and cartoons (though never, perhaps, executed with such icy beauty or complexity.) A young protagonist gazes upon an exotic, striking location, while the viewer's gaze is drawn along the explorer's eyeline through careful image composition. At the top of the image is a distant, female beauty, more of an icon than a person; Elsa's face is an indistinguishable blur, looking over her elegantly-clad shoulder as her dress swirls about her.

Such an image announces its continuity with previous riffs on the same motif, such as the scene where Prince Phillip hacks his way towards his future wife's magical castle in Sleeping Beauty, or the scene where Alladin's titular hero looks out at the city of Agrabah while dreaming of the life lead by its princess, Jasmine. Indeed, the parallels from the former seem particularly striking. Frozen is the first "ultra-widescreen" Disney fairytale since Sleeping Beauty, and Eyvind Earle's detailed, decorative background work on Sleeping Beauty stands as a predecessor for the elaborately ornate (yet often-threatening) nature of Frozen's arctic scenes.

The two protagonists' red, flowing capes are also suspiciously similar. Image credit: Evensi.com

If Frozen shares much in common with Sleeping Beauty, it also follows T.S. Eliot's dictum that "immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." The most obvious shift is one in the characters' gender and motivation. Where Prince Phillip seeks merely to rescue his love and obtain the obligatory "happy ever after" of marriage, Anna's goals are doubled--even doubled against each other. She seeks to be reunited with her sister and thereby restore their family bond, but she also wants to save the realm from her sister's magic, a political task that places the two of them in a (potentially) adversarial relationship. Within this freeze-frame, then, it is fitting that Anna herself is duplicated. While Elsa's body faces away from the reader and seems ready to confront Anna, her reflected gaze points vaguely to the right of the image, her mouth slightly open in uncertainty. This doubling might also be seen to echo Anna's larger character-arc, in which she longs to be the heroic masculine figure capable of saving the realm from Elsa's sorcery, but also wants to be the beautiful ingenue, "Fetchingly draped against the wall / The picture of sophisticated grace." Anna is no prince charming--but she sure can dress for the role.

One thing is certain. In aligning the viewer with Anna, Frozen both re-creates and revises one of Disney's most oft-repeated images. Whether this hybridity represents a feminist deconstruction of a powerful gender stereotype or a hypocritical "feminist" gesture in a story mired by inherited images and old forms is a philosophical question beyond the scope of this blog. That such a question might emerge from a single freeze-frame in a popular Disney film, however, is a testament to the power and complexity of images, even those images that flash momentarily on the screen in one of the year's many blockbuster entertainments.

Beyonce's ***Flawless Feminism

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 23:46:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

I’m so glad to be back on viz again after some time away, especially as having to write posts again gives me the chance to discuss Beyoncé Knowles’s newest record, Beyoncé, which was released without any press or preview in late December as a “visual album.” The album has 14 songs and 17 videos included in it. While critics had things to say about Jay-Z’s verse on “Drunk in Love” and the remixed audio from the 1986 Challenger disaster in “XO,” the most noticeable song was “***Flawless,” which features an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on feminism. Paste Magazine’s review of the album noted the album’s feminist thematics, which others have discussed as well. Since I’d like to add to this conversation about Beyoncé’s feminism, I thought I’d take up how Beyoncé’s visuals, especially in “***Flawless,” depict those concerns.

Image Credit: Beyonce's SoundCloud

Some necessary backstory for the song, however: the major verses actually were first previewed in May 2013 in a track called “Bow Down/I Been On.” The cover depicts the singer wearing a pretty pink dress while surrounded by trophies; yet the proud young girl’s visage is contrasted by the song’s bridge:

Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
H-town vicious, h-h-town vicious
I’m so crown, bow bow down bitches

The rough vocals emphasize the “H-town vicious” identity she’s claiming here as she announces her superiority; the “crown” imagery links to her husband’s own assertions of power as it also reinforces her position as Queen Bey. The heavily modulated vocal pitches her braggadocio into masculine tones, juxtaposing her aggression here with the girl power rhetoric of her earlier song catalogue. Critiquing Beyoncé’s language here, Rahiel Tesfamariam notes, “While intentionally deciding to have an all-woman band was a cutting-edge and progressive decision for Beyoncé to make, why would she undermine it by releasing a song that says she reigns supreme over other women?” How can we reconcile the female slur with the empowerment that Beyoncé purports to offer as a declared feminist?

The song’s remix into “***Flawless,” which pairs these lines with both Adichie’s discourse and video from Beyoncé’s 1993 appearance on Star Search, turns Beyoncé’s declaration of superiority into an invitation for other women to join her in accepting themselves as “flawless.” Even as the framing video points out a less successful moment (her group loses out to the generic metal band Skeleton Crew) for the star, we read it within her larger career arc as an incredibly successful performer. The Beyoncé who confronts the camera here is familiar: tiny shorts, beautiful wavy long hair, heavy jewelry. However, her plaid shirt and wide eyes are tougher and more aggressive from, say, the Beyoncé of “XO.” The camera weaves back and forth towards her as if in battle and the dancing at the video’s end where she’s surrounded by four dancers seems to remix the famous “Single Ladies” dance—the hands here more back and forth faster, the movements are jerkier.

Image Credit: Perez Hilton

The shift into the Adichie excerpt in the song’s middle creates a visual and aural correction to these earlier moments. If Beyoncé dominates the screen early on, we see punk-looking men and women moshing and Beyoncé is only occasionally visible within the crowd. Other women present the same confident direct gaze to the camera as Adichie declares, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’” Reading this in contrast with the earlier lyrics, it’s as if Beyoncé is responding to her critics. In other words, when Beyoncé asks women to “bow down, bitches,” she’s not demeaning other women. She’s just repping her own greatness, and in so doing, encouraging other women to see that as being possible for them, too. Likewise, when Adichie mentions that “We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are,” the album’s other songs like “Rocket,” “Blow,” and “Drunk in Love” show Beyoncé as sexually aggressive in the marital bed, “graining on that wood.” The kind of feminism that Beyoncé constructs within “***Flawless” unapologetically claims visual, verbal, and sexual equality with men.

Image Credit: Screenshot from "Drunk in Love" video

If the early song declares her own process, the hook where she croons, “I woke up like this, I woke up like this / We flawless, ladies tell ‘em,” shifts into the inclusive “we.” All the ladies (single or not) are flawless, too. The title’s three asterisks perhaps don’t just stand in for the three-star rating Girls’ Tyme received. They also serve as an ellipsis for listeners to read into: do the asterisks acknowledge how woman’s flawlessness is always conditional, represent Beyoncé’s humility, or note her own work-in-progress as a black feminist?

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

However, as I’ve been writing this blog post today, I’ve been following some of the commentary on Richard Sherman’s boasts at the NFC title game, where an amazing play on his part prevented a San Francisco 49ers touchdown. Sherman, a cornerback for the Super Bowl-bound Seattle Seahawks, declared himself “the best corner in the game” in an interview with ESPN’s Erin Andrews, and talked some trash about the 49ers’ Michael Crabtree. Many media personalities have been hand-wringing about Sherman’s “classlessness.” An intersectional reading of “***Flawless” might also point out how the title’s asterisks note the problems of African-American success: to demand your competitors to acknowledge your greatness and to “bow down” invites heavy criticism. Perhaps Beyoncé’s visual and verbal immodesty might then be true feminism: asserting equality of excellence across race and gender.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who Wore it Better? Kimye Edition

Laura Thain — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:33:04 +0000

Image Credit: Entertainmentwise

Celebrity fashion is a no-holds-barred spectators’ sport, and, like the fashion industry itself, it features and targets women as its primary audience. Free Thought blogger Greta Christina described the language of fashion succinctly in her recent post “Fashion is a Feminist Issue”, arguing that if we interpret fashion as a “language of sorts…an art form, even,” we can begin to view fashion as “one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men.” But, she continues, “it’s [no] accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.”

This post seeks to read the rhetoric of celebrity fashion coverage in light of remarks like those of Greta Christina. How can we read celebrity fashion as an arena that in principle grants women more freedom than men, but in practice consistently limits the freedom of both men and women to express themselves? How do the voyeuristic, hypercritical impulses of celebrity media intersect and inform the world of fashion, particularly women’s fashion? I take as my case study here the much-photographed couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, sometimes known as a couple by their nickname “Kimye.”

Image Source: Kendall and Kylie

I’ll begin my examination with a convention of celebrity fashion coverage—the “who wore it better” genre. In its most serious iteration, the formula encourages competition among fashionable women of means by enlisting an audience of fashionable women without means as judges. Most often, the comparison is inspired by two celebrities wearing an identical piece of fashion, usually from a premiere designer’s current season. In the race to consume runway fashion, celebrities are pitted against one another to not only be the first to sport a fresh-off-the-runway look, but to also wear it better than the competition that will inevitably follow. And anyone who’s done their homework on fashion marketing knows that, while the choices offered by mass-market or “commercial” fashion are vast, high-end designers promote their brand by strategically limiting supply and in order to create an illusion of exclusivity. Celebrity stylists must compete viciously to bring the runway to the red carpet as quickly as possible, but because of the particular way in which exclusivity and reproduction oppose each other in the market of high-end fashion, repeat-fashion choices are granted to audiences to sort out—a mechanism that also helps assuage the ordinary audience’s feelings of exclusion. Only one woman can “own” the look—so who wore it better?

Image Source: Us Magazine

Of course, as much as tabloids present photographs as hard evidence, many factors matter in how an audience responds to the choice between two celebrities in the same outfit. Besides the unstable nature of the content itself (lighting, pose, position, composition, etc.), context also matters. Kim, for instance, is often matched up against one of her sisters (as are Kylie and Khloe in the larger spread above), making an intertextual argument about Kardashian fashion and celebrity status as a separate category from other A-listers. Kim is paired with her sisters to highlight behaviors that exclude them from mainstream celebrity status: they (gasp!) share clothes; they are reality show stars and not movie stars; they prefer Louis Vuitton and Gucci to Marchesa and Chanel.

Tabloids don’t only use Kim’s fashion choices as evidence that she doesn’t belong with other A-list celebrities. Tabloid media often uses them as to openly mock her, as well.

Image Source: We Know Memes

Image Source: College Humor

Image Source: Robin Williams' Twitter

All of these examples lambast Kim for her weight gain during pregnancy or her refusal to wear conventional maternity clothes. Kim’s signature, curve-hugging style becomes the greatest source of tabloid fixation and ridicule, rather than praise. Because Kim’s curvy body can no longer be sexualized and consumed, she becomes as a ridiculed, mocked commodity instead.

Interestingly, we can trace this shift well before Kim’s pregnancy. When the reality star began dated Kanye West in March of 2012, celebrity media speculated over how Kanye’s reputation for dressing his girlfriends might affect Kim, who rarely strayed far from her signature, curve-hugging, leather-and-spandex style. Kardashian’s reality show even featured an episode in which West loaned Kim his stylist and gave her closet a makeover.

As soon as Kim started stepping out in looser, more daring, more “editorial” or “high fashion” clothing, she received harsher criticism in the fashion press than ever before. Kim had made her mark by wearing body-conscious status-designer clothes (that is, mass-marketed and expensive but readily available designer fodder like Vuitton, D&G, Gucci, Versace); her transition into high-end, couture fashion (like the Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy dress above) was met with resistance by tabloid press and audiences alike. What was sexy, leather studs-and-animal print Kardashian doing trying to wear sleek, demure French designers?

But Kim can’t win no matter what she wears--if she meets expectations in hip-hugging, cleavage-bearing LBDs, the tabloids commodify her sexuality but call her trashy or tasteless; if she defies expectations in loose silhouettes or bolder colors, the tabloids instead portray her as inauthentic, posturing, a parvenu.

Image Source: NY Daily News

Image Credit: Loop 21

Now that I have demonstrated some potential strictures placed upon women in an arena that claims to privilege expression and artistry, I’d like to extend those arguments to Kanye West and suggest how issues of class and gender affect men’s forays into fashion, as well.

Kanye West, the self-proclaimed “Louis Vuitton Don”, is himself no stranger to fashion controversy. But while, as I’ve argued above, Kim struggles against classicism in her efforts to establish a powerful fashion ethos, Kanye must battle much more stringent gender norms in his pursuit of fashion superstardom.

Image Source: Red Carpet Fashion Awards

Below, Rihanna wears a mensware jacket to the notice of no one but a minor fashion blog. Women wearing menswear is about as subversive as a puppy in a kitten costume—far from the controversial political and anti-establishment statement androgyny made in the fashion world of the 1960s, elements of menswear in women’s fashion are accepted and, to an extent, expected in 2013.

Image Source: The Telegraph

Not so for men's fashion. When Kanye West donned a kilt-style skirt for a Hurricane Sandy benefit concert last fall, he received so much flack from both the press and fellow hip-hop artist and MC Lord Jamar that he asked that Getty Images remove all photos of him performing in the skirt. Lord Jamar released a biting criticism of West’s dress in the song “Lift up Your Skirt,” which he heavily annotated on the rap annotation site RapGenius.

Verse 1 from Lord Jamar's song. Image Source: Screencapture from Rap Genius

Lord Jamar's personal annotations on Rap Genius. Image Source: Rap Genius

It’s not only Kanye’s fashion choices, but his interest in fashion, that feminizes him in the eyes of elements of the hip-hop community and the fashion tabloid media. Yet, just as Kim’s recent fashion choices increasingly buck her “bod-icon” status and experiment with self-expression, Kanye asserts his interest and his choices subversively, even when (or especially when?) those fashion choices fail to enhance his reputation as a fashion icon. I’d like to close with one last “who wore it better?” to drive this point home:

Image Source: Fashion Bomb Daily

Kanye West may be wearing the same women’s wear shirt as Jessica Simpson, but damn it, he’s wearing it better!

New Forms for Old Needs in Norman Bel Geddes’s "House of Tomorrow"

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:43:11 +0000

Image Credit: Metropolis Magazine

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s excellent Norman Bel Geddes exhibit, one thing that struck me is that while Bel Geddes is particularly famous for his large industrial designs—radios, cars, cities, and stadiums, for example—he also directed his talents towards the intimate spaces of the American home. Before Bel Geddes designed prefabricated homes for the Housing Corporation for America in 1939, or published his 1932 book Horizons, he wrote an article called “The House of Tomorrow” for the April 1931 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. The “twentieth-century style” he describes is one that he sees uniting form and function anew for the needs of the twentieth-century individual—or rather, what he imagines the twentieth-century individual to be.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons

Bel Geddes’ design philosophy is evident both within the article and in his manifesto Horizons, published the following year. As Bel Geddes and others saw himself principally as a set designer, he reframes his interest in industrial design as a kind of art for the modern era, where design has greater importance than ever before:

We are entering an era which, notably, shall be characterized by design in four specific phases: Design in social structure to insure the organization of people, work, wealth, leisure. Design in machines that shall improve working conditions by eliminating drudgery. Design in all objects of daily use that shall make them economical, durable, convenient, congenial to every one. Design in the arts, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture, that shall inspire the new era. (4-5)

Bel Geddes here presents himself as an artist, who, like all others, “is sensitive to his environment” (6). He carefully notes the circumstances of life in 1930s America—post-industry, mid-Depression—and argues that they require new approaches to design in all these four phrases. He also works to break down the divisions between these different areas when he argues that “in the point of view of the artist who fails to see an aesthetic appeal in such objects of contemporary life as a railway train, a suspension bridge, a grain elevator, a dynamo, there is an inconsistency” (11). Bel Geddes argues that as modern life has centered increasingly around work, there is a greater need for conveniences, objects that function to promote ease and efficiency. Thus, while late nineteenth century art defined itself through Walter Pater’s formulation of “art for art’s sake,” Bel Geddes sees art in the perfect union of form and function

Visual design is concerned with form, space, color; with the proportioning of solids and voids and the rhythmic spacings of these elements. The governing factor as to what is pleasing to the eye is the idea, which is of an emotional nature—an emotion of pleasure, satisfaction, excitement, exhilaration, stimulation. (18)

What’s interesting here is how much emphasis Bel Geddes in this quotation places on the emotions of the artist. Elsewhere in Horizons, when he predicts that twentieth-century art will detach itself from galleries and statuary, he describes what he sees as the continuity between the art of the past and tomorrow: “The work of the artist always has been, and will be, a distinctly individual product—the antithesis of ‘machine-made.’ Fundamentally, the artist is an emotional person in that he relies more upon his feelings and intuitions than upon reasoning” (11). It’s easy to think that functional design must be based upon reasoning, but Bel Geddes flips the script to emphasize emotion, feeling, and intuition—language typically associated with the feminine.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

However, does publishing “The House of Tomorrow” in Ladies Home Journal necessarily imply that the twentieth-century figure he imagines is a feminine one? There could be a reading of the article that would point out the fact that the house is pink, that would consider the intertextual relationship between the drawings and discussion of design with the inset poem, “Hunches” by Elizabeth Boyd Borie, that would connect Bel Geddes’ intuitive designs with feminine thinking and feminine spaces. Yet such a reading might be incongruous with the Ladies Home Journal’s history, a magazine which published not only the muckraking work of Jane Addams but also Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs. This widely-read magazine, like Bel Geddes himself, often contemplated questions of function, questions Bel Geddes emphasizes in “The House of Tomorrow.”

In fact, Bel Geddes quickly establishes the reasons he sees for a change in home planning and design: “The keynote of all the good contemporary work is that it must perfectly suit its ultimate purpose. We have returned to simplicity because we have realized in this age that the overornamentation and elaboration of the past are not in keeping with us today. We are more forthright people than were our forefathers, we bother less with forms and conventions, and so it is surely fitting that we carry our ideas into our homes.” This description of the modern American individual is one perhaps that sounds suited equally to our age as to the 1930s; he neatly transitions from thinking about the people to the houses that should shelter such folks.

Image Credit: Alcade / The Harry Ransom Center

His solutions include moving the bedrooms from the front of the house to the back, nearer to the sunshine and expansive yards that are beautiful to behold. Even as he proposes to build more with steel girders and concrete, which might sound ugly, he notes that “in pursuit of light and air, since we are not bound down by any arbitrary limits, we can make our windows stretch the whole length of our rooms,” and likewise turn our roofs into flat spaces suitable for gardens. The emphasis he places on light, convenience, and the unity between interior and exterior design all bespeak his interest in making the home a place that does not trap its inhabitants but allows them “to take full advantage of all the innumerable aids to more convenient living that have been evolved in the past few years.” This emphasis on function is much in line with the kinds of rhetoric used in 1940s and 1950s advertising that encourages women to buy appliances to help with their domestic labor, but what’s refreshing is how ungendered his language is throughout the piece. If Bel Geddes expects the modern house “to assure complete satisfaction of every material and psychic need of the owner” (138-9), it seems that ownership is shared equally between the men and women in the space. Women have since the Victorian period been seen as the domestic goddesses, but Bel Geddes contemplates a twentieth century where their needs and interests extend beyond the interiors outward. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, considering that Bel Geddes changed his name to include the “Bel” when he published his early writings alongside his first wife and collaborator Helen Belle Sneider, but Bel Geddes’s futurism offers new forms for old needs for women as well as men.

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

Girl Power: Taylor Swift beyond The Waves

Laura Thain — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar

This blog post started as a conversation in the break room here at the DWRL. After a discussion of the subversive, alternative female artists of the 90s—not only in band formulation like Riot Grrl or Bikini Kill but especially the singer/songwriters who dominated top 40 radio: Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge, Fiona Apple—someone mused, “Where have all the angry girls gone?”

I can’t say I like the answer. The angry girls have been billed as terrorists (MIA) or criminals (Fiona Apple). Some girls perform anger in a way that only weakly resonates with the general public (Miley Cyrus). But the angry girl has also been rebranded. The inevitable subsumption of alternative culture by the mainstream has cloaked our angry girl in airy dresses with flowing tresses and the voice of an angel to deliver the proverbial “fuck you.” I am, of course, referring to the girl who’s on the cover of every magazine this week as she promotes her new album Red. So hey girl hey, Taylor Swift—this week’s post goes out to you as I explore the paradoxical relationship between the underground and the mainstream, which emerge and subsume and emerge again in a cycle as endless as the couple on the verge of reconciliation (really! I think so!) in “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

So how do we get from Courtney Love to Taylor Swift? Perhaps we might take a look at one of my favorite pieces of concert memorabilia—the sparkly heart barrette sold during Hole’s Live Through This tour.

Image Credit: Tastingsin's Tumblr

Live Through This dropped merely four days after the death of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain, an event many music critics identify as crucial to Nirvana’s transition from underground to mainstream popularity. Certainly we can read Barthes’ Death of the Author into the cultural narrative here, but let us defer that question and focus on the larger movement of grunge and punk rock into what I will call the “stadium rock” sphere in the mid ‘90s—that is, that the initial countercultural impulses of grunge and punk become incorporated into the sphere of mass culture. Hole’s second album serves as an important piece of rhetorical evidence for this. It is drastically more accessible than the first and received acclaim from popular and alternative music critics alike.

There are two ways we might read the heart, which was sold in large quantities throughout the Live Through This tour. We might read it as an ironic statement on Love’s part; that is, that Love is attempting to show her distaste for traditional cultural mores of gender and femininity by expressing her identity in an exaggeratingly feminine object. (The more popular version of the barrette came in hot pink.) The cover of Live Through This seems to affirm this reading:

Image Credit: Amazon

But the mechanism is not purely ironic. As Erika Reinstein famously said in what has come to be known as the Riot Grrrl Manifesto (published in a ‘zine in ’92)

“BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy… BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code of silence… BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit.”

Love’s incorporation of the barrette can be seen, I think, as a reclaiming of femininity on women’s own terms; that women should feel free to take back the domestic or the feminine as a willing and willful act, not as an act of subversion of subservience. The precondition for this, as Reinstein argues, is a self-designated, self-created feminine space.

But as that space became defined by powerful, “angry” female vocalists of the ‘90s, the line between ironic or self-designated participation in the feminine and the feminine space as inferior or restrictive (i.e. a patriarchally defined feminine space) became, in my view, increasingly blurred. Once female-defined, female-inhabited spaces became available for mass consumption, the mechanisms of popular culture transformed Hole’s barrette into a face-value gesture. The anger regarding and demand for social justice, especially for women, transforms into a more palatable “women scorned” motif. Thus, the danger of female anger is contained by means of isolation; by individualizing it (Swift’s endless parade of breakup songs) rather than generalizing it. A breakup, after all, is something we “get over.”

So finally, I’d like make some particular comments on Taylor Swift’s visit to Ellen:

The video has earned Swift some heat for being “humorless,” especially about the central theme of her songwriting—her breakups. (An ecard recently made the internet rounds, expressing “Taylor Swift, maybe you’re the problem.”) But as much as I might object to a particular brand of singer/songwriter that I think Swift represents—the woman who, despite the plethora of social injustices against women that exist, chooses to use her potentially empowering anger to wax generic on winning at breakups—the idea that Swift is obligated to make her personal life available for public consumption for daring to aestheticize her feelings is the worse offense. So although I think we might read Swift as complicit in a tired out old narrative that sanitizes “girl power” into something ultimately less threatening than the demand for social justice, complicit with patriarchal ideas of femininity or not, she can never deserve to be subject to them.

Of Ponies and Patriarchy

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:44:59 +0000

Image Credit: Center for Inquiry's Women in Secularism 2 Conference Website

Controversies over sexism have recently embroiled the online and in-real-life spaces of the gaming, fandom, and atheist communities. The sexist behavior that has sparked controversy and the backlash facing those speaking out against harassment are too hateful and ugly to discuss at any length here. I'll link to two examples with trigger warnings for threats of sexual violence: Rebecca Watson and Anita Sarkeesian. The controversy in the organized atheist community, however, has also seen an act of resistance and some levity in the face of abject misogyny by repurposing a visual trope well known to the community.

Since the early 2000s, the "new atheism" has attained prominence in the wake of outspoken and sometimes polemical writings. The most prominent of these writers are known as the Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

Image Credit: Paul O'Flaherty

The Four Horsemen name alludes to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, and it attempts to play off religious beliefs that the atheists criticize and evoke the emotional fervor that all sides invest in religious debate. Images like the one above cast the four authors in an arrangement that speaks to a serious, knowing demeanor, but it also evokes a somewhat forbidding feeling as well with their faces partially obscured in shadow. The fact that all four atheists are horsemen hints at the trouble with sexism in the organized atheist community. (The presence of all-white horsemen also speaks to atheism's trouble with racial diversity, but that's an issue for another time.)

Despite the role of women in the history of freethought, as documented by Annie Laurie Gaylor, and the presence of women writers and activists working today, women remain marginalized at various levels of organized atheism. Attendance at conferences often has a gender imbalance, and the leadership of some advocacy groups resist engaging with criticisms about sexism in the community.

The visual markers of patriarchy in the atheist community are not clear to those unaware of the operation of male privilege, though a critical appraisal raises red flags. For example, artist Saejin Oh published the drawing below of famous atheists who had influenced his thinking.

Image Credit: Saejin Oh

The atheists stand on a rocky rise against a threatening sky in confident poses befitting superheroes in a panel of a comic book. They are exclusively men. Those commenting on his work remarked on the absence of women, to which he replied, "I couldn't think of one that influenced me as a person of reason, unfortunately." At the time, Jen McCreight, a prominent blogger and advocate for feminism in the atheist community, remarked that she found his explanation "sad," suggesting that this was yet another example of gender imbalance in atheism.

Image Credit: Unknown Author

Other images ostensibly serving an epidiectic function of building atheist community demonstrate similar sex biases. Both the images above and below circulated in the popular atheism subreddit. Each carries the text message "Fear not hell, for if it exists, you will find yourself in good company" embedded over or around the faces of famous people who are also atheists. While these collages do contain some women, the imbalance is still noticeable, and these images are only a small part of much larger problems in the community.

Image Credit: joebbowers

The backlash facing those standing up against sexism has been brutal. Jen McCreight recently suspended her blog due to stress from online harassment. Pteryxx, commenting on a blog entry about sexism in atheism, jokingly suggested that "Perhaps we now have our Four Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse," referring to four prominent women bloggers. The commenter immediately after asked, "Is it terrible if I envision them riding out on My Little Ponies?" Soon, another commenter names embertine sketched out that vision.

Image Credit: embertine

More than four bloggers were eventually immortalized on ponies at Jason Thibeault's blog. In all the images, the bloggers bear weapons befitting an apocalyptic rider: whip, sword, daggers, mace and more. Oddly enough, in the first four images, the expressions of the riders contrast markedly with the expressions of the ponies. The riders' faces seem happy, while the ponies show grim determination and displeasure. These pictures hardly make up for the indignities the bloggers and other women in the community have faced, but they begin to push back on the sex imbalance in atheist visual rhetoric.

Hey Girl, I Made This Meme For You

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: F--- Yeah Ryan Gosling

Some recent procrastinating led me to Jezebel and thus Joey Thompson’s recent YouTube video, in which he teaches men how to look like actor Ryan Gosling. I was intrigued because I have been following the proliferating Ryan Gosling memes for a while—which have gone on long enough that they’ve been accused of jumping the shark. Still, I’d like to take some time to think a little bit about what their newest evolutions might tell us about memes, form, and feminine desire.

Image Credit: Poli Sci Ryan Gosling

In case you don’t know what a meme is, Richard Dawkins first defined it in The Selfish Gene (1976) as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The Internet has lead to the proliferation of memes, from "all your base are belong to us,” to Xzibit Yo Dawg, to the most prolific of them all, the LOLcat. What many memes share is a consistent form: a picture with humorous text superimposed over it. Frequently the memes—like the LOLcat—even use the same fonts to create a visually consistent appearance. What these memes do is to create communities through the shared humor and enjoyment of the same structure. Thus, the LOLcat meme developed certainly consistent cat characters like Ceiling Cat, and further iterations would feature new references to Ceiling Cat.

Image Credit: Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling

The earliest Ryan Gosling meme started with a humble blog named Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling, which gained notoriety when Ryan Gosling read several posts from it during two separate MTV interviews. What followed were numerous other Tumblr blogs, including Feminist Ryan Gosling, Typography Ryan Gosling, Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling, Campaign Staff Ryan Gosling, and of course Rhet/Comp Ryan Gosling. The Goslimania culminated in protests against Bradley Cooper when People declared him the Sexiest Man Alive over Ryan. While People will go on to find more sexy men and Gosling more work, I’m left wondering what this decidedly symbolic protest represents.

Image Credit: Feminist Ryan Gosling

Anne Helen Peterson’s excellent post on the topic argues that the Gosling meme only works as long as the pictures support what he says. When it came to versions like Feminist Ryan Gosling, “you could actually imagine Ryan Gosling saying the very phrases that adoring bloggers were photoshopping into his mouth.” However, she argues that versions like Biostatistics Ryan Gosling go too far because they don’t fit the meme. She reads the meme’s appeal in the juxtaposition of star and text, creating connections between Gosling and his fans:

Pairing star images with dense theory is funny. Every scholar wants to think that an object of their desire would be interested in the things they’re interested in — would have a discussion in which you share a secret language familiar to a select few (and then, after you’ve had a good debate, you go to the Farmer’s Market and snuggle). I wish Ryan Gosling’s image wanted to get his PhD in media studies with me. But it doesn’t — he fell in with the gender studies people long ago. That’s where his image belongs. That’s where it works. To take it beyond can be funny……but, if we’re honest with ourselves, misses the point. It’s a meme built on a meme, and thus evacuated of its core.

I agree with Peterson that the attraction lies in projecting shared values onto Gosling, particularly feminist ones. We female academics would like to think (and perhaps have reason to suspect) that Gosling shares our values, and that we could talk Laura Mulvey with him—or Susan Jarrett, or any other topic we enjoy. However, I also suspect that the Gosling meme works best on women of this type: political liberal, feminist, and educated. These viewers appreciates how Gosling’s mild, non-threatening appearance can be endlessly appropriated to fit their desires—which is why the meme’s life has extended so far beyond its original appearance. The Ryan Gosling meme's core lies not in Ryan Gosling, but in his audience.

Image Credit: Hey girl. I like the library too.

Thus, Steve Kolowich’s suggestion that “it is unclear whether the blogs are intended as pure irony or as a genuine experiment to test whether the following gambits stand a chance of working even under optimal conditions” is a complete misreading. None of these women are suggesting that the pickup lines attributed to Gosling in the images would work. Rather, Gosling is a space in which women can vocalize desire. I think this is why the meme has been adapted to include variants like Gael García-Bernal Feminista, Academic Coach Taylor and Fuck No Rick Santorum. If Gael García-Bernal Feminista adds social justice overtones and sensitive floppy hair, Academic Coach Taylor embodies a more authoritative—though equally feminist—intellectual male. Fuck No Rick Santorum explicitly flips Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling to protest Santorum's sexist political policies. When so much Internet culture is explicitly sexist, the Ryan Gosling Tumblr memes constitute a safe space for feminist—and female heterosexual—discourse.

Women and politics, then and now

kathrynjeanhamilton — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:29:31 +0000

Visual rhetoric blog "No Caption Needed" featured this doctored photograph in their "Sight Gag" section a few weeks ago.

The bloggers wanted this image, like all images they include in "Sight Gag," to speak for itself, and in many ways it does. The photograph, which appears to date from the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century, pictures women standing outside the White House in cold weather. They are bundled up; we can barely see their faces, but we respect what we understand to be their mission: to communicate a political message. What that message might be we don't know because the joke of the photograph -- the sight gag -- consists of replacing the text on their banners with, "Obama" and "Mr. McCain, America's women have not waited 232 years for Sarah Palin." The text is clear enough. These women aren't alone in feeling that they want more than just a woman in the Vice Presidential office; they want a woman who supports women's issues, a capable leader, someone who's qualified. They want Obama as their president -- even if he isn't a woman.

To me the photograph is poignant because it reaches back into history, juxtaposing the efforts of those first advocates of women's suffrage with the identity politics at stake in the election that just transpired. It makes the argument that the mothers of feminism were after more than just being represented in their capacity as women. It's also worth recalling that in the nineteenth century, advocates of women's equality allied themselves with abolitionists. And for a long time, they focused their energies on ending slavery before turning to the goal of women's suffrage. In fact, it was largely in their capacity as abolitionists that they got political practice, and it was because in many cases they weren't allowed to take leadership roles within that group that they sensed the need to focus more explicitly on women's issues.

So who's to say what women during this period would have thought. It's a clever argument, for sure, but it also brings to mind, for me at least, the disappointment many baby boomer women, those who raised on first-wave feminism, felt when Clinton lost the democratic primary.

“The Girl Effect” typographic video

John Jones — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:55:37 +0000

Here’s another hybrid proposal argument / introductory video, the likes of which I think are perfect for rhetoric classrooms. It was produced by girleffect.org:

While it is certainly possible to disagree with parts of the argument here, I think this format is fascinating. This emerging genre of public discourse is something that rhetoric instructors should be teaching their students to create.

via Information Aesthetics

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

This is what a feminist looks like

erinhurt — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 05:54:46 +0000

On Feministing the bloggers who write for the site have started vlogging (video blogging). These first vlogs feature several of the website's various writers explaining how they came to be involved with the site.

Watching these vlogs, what immediately came to mind for me was the difference between how I perceived these bloggers' written commentary and how I perceived the same bloggers in their videos. The very medium of the video blog seems to add a kind of uncertainty to what one is saying, especially when what's being said is done so informally. While my reaction to the vlogs doesn't necessarily affect how I view the website's written commentary, these video blogs do seem to undermine the assertiveness and confidence that characterizes the writing found on the website. This is not to knock the medium of the vlog - rather, I am interested in how those viewers and/or readers will react who are ambivalent to the site's core values (as opposed to those who come to the site already in agreement with its values). What kind of effect will this have?

Skin = Liberation?

erinhurt — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:36:37 +0000

Recently on Muslim Media Watch , a blog post discussed what the author termed "Veil Fetish Art" (full disclosure: I found a link to this article while I was reading Feministing.com ).

The author writes: "I’ll term it 'veil fetish art,' because every featured woman has most or all of her face and her hair covered. Although the woman herself is the main focus, the veil acts as a sexual catalyst: it brands the woman as forbidden, despite the fact that you may be able to see most of her naked body. So even though she’s exposed, the veil reminds you that she’s “forbidden fruit,” and pushes the viewer to want her even more. [...] The type of liberation these images imply is a sexual one: erotic poses and come-hither eyes imply that this veiled woman just wants the freedom to be the dirty, dirty girl that she is. This simultaneously reinforces Orientalist ideas that Muslim women are oppressed (sexually as well as socially or religiously) and hypersexual. It also supports the idea that covering oneself is oppressive, and that the only way to be a liberated woman is to show some skin."

For myself, this image has a distinctly American bent to it (the Marilyn Monroe-esque pose over the grate of blowing air?). Which makes me wonder, does the author envision the audience to be an American one? This makes sense in light of the painting's "skin equals liberation" move, which is in opposition to some Muslim feminists' portrayal of the veil as a means of freedom from sexual objectification.