viz. - race

The Hidden Perils of Q&As. (Junot Diaz TILTS.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 19:02:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post The Hidden Perils of Q&As..

The Hidden Perils of Q&As. (Junot Diaz.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:56:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post The Hidden Perils of Q&As..

The Hidden Perils of Q&As. (Franzen and Morrison Time Covers.jpg)

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:56:00 +0000

This image was uploaded with the post The Hidden Perils of Q&As..

The Hidden Perils of Q&As.

Jenn Shapland — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 18:45:00 +0000

Image from TILTS.

If you attend enough talks and readings, you start to get pretty familiar with the basic elements of the Q&A session: the rambling question; the non question; the irrelevant question; the already-answered question; the indecipherable question; the adoring fan question; the tiny soapbox disguised as a question. If you’re cynical like me, you’ve realized by now that most questions are asking something very different from what they claim to ask. Q&As with contemporary writers always contain at least one version of the following: What’s your writing process like?/How often do you write?/Where do you write?/What do you wear whilst writing?/What snacks do you eat?/How productive are you?/Do you wear socks? You get the picture.

This type of question amounts to one thing, in my mind: a budding writer is desperate for the secret key to writing success. “Tell me, how do you do it?” It tends to come off, in my experience, as either a) amateurish, b) flirtatious, c) stalkeresque, or d) some hideous combination of the three. Why is it so much more pressing to find out how a writer writes than it is to hear about what or why she writes?

I think, in part, this stems from a desire to visualize the writer as he or she creates content that speaks to us. Perhaps it’s as innocent as seeking a material connection with a person to whom you feel connected on the page. Fielding an unwieldy question about universality during his TILTS Q&A on race Tuesday morning, Junot Díaz hit upon the following: when a person talks about a writer’s universality or universal reach, what he really means is not that a writer is able to speak for all of human experience, but rather that he speaks to the particular experiences of "at least two people," the writer and the reader.

Which means that the person in the back with her hand raised is really just shopping for images. She wants to get a better image in her mind of how the writer looks when he’s crafting language that speaks to her; she wants to know how she might (at best) offer the same kind of connection to others, (at worst) look like she’s doing so. Do you use a pen or a computer? Does it make a difference what time of day you write? Where'd you get those shoes? How many drafts? What price bananas?

Díaz, who described writers and scholars who work explicitly on race and white supremacy in the contemporary moment as “salmon in a fuckin’ desert” (i.e. they can’t even find the stream to swim up), referred to novelist Jonathan Franzen’s prominence as an example of the continuing marginalization of race in contemporary culture. The writerly image maintains its hold over the imagination, but the conversation has yet again stalled in an unending debate around the “Great American Novel,” a category that implies some kind of universal (read: white, male, heteronormative) American experience while denying the plural particulars of any actual experience. References to the GAN perpetuate the same image of the writer that a person who asks about writing process is looking to buy. At the root of this question is the assumption that writing, like many other so-called American dreams, is for sale not to the most talented or to the hardest worker or to the person with something to say, but to the one who has the secret password, the right look, or the right technique.

Images from Time Magazine covers archive.

I find the consumerization of creative practice to be an extremely sad thing. And Díaz really impressed me with his answer to this question, and the answers he gave to the follow-up chorus of questions around the room that amounted to how can we write (or teach) like you for the audience that matters to us—that is, how can we speak to the particularities of black or female or gay or transgender experience in a meaningful way—when the most recent writer on the cover of Time isn’t Toni Morrison, like it was in 1998, but is instead none other than J. Franzen himself (who, I should mention, I’ve never read, which makes it a lot easier to speak not to his work but to the cult of image he represents in literary culture) with the words “Great American Novel” plastered under his face, claiming that his furrowed brow speaks for “the way we live now”?

See what I mean about the question that disguises its intentions? The implications of Díaz's answer would take awhile for me to get into, but, basically, he suggested that therapy, self-care, and taking the time to process your own experiences are the most important means for channelling what you care about into writing. Which is a great answer, and one of the best I’ve heard, and certainly one that requires more work than having a rigorous writing schedule, say, or using a particular brand of notebook. It suggests that the way to write or teach the things that matter most to you isn't a matter of time or talent or equipment. Rather, his answer implies that by delving into the personal and analyzing the things that have affected you, you will find the best way to communicate your experience.

Reading Django Unchained as Camp

Laura Thain — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:13:13 +0000

Image Credit: Vanity Fair

Although it’s been two months since its initial release, the internet is still abuzz with social critique of Tarantino’s newest film Django Unchained. Roxane Gay, a staff writer for Buzzfeed, argues that rather than encouraging a national discourse on slavery, slavery is instead “the movie’s easily exploited backdrop.” The movie functions instead as “a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.” Finally, she concludes, “Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom. It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.”

Many of Django’s critics couch their arguments in similar terms—that is, that while Tarantino claims to reignite a discourse on slavery in Django Unchained, he in fact privileges genre over content in a way that dangerously decontextualizes our most central national trauma. I have argued in an early post that privileging medium over content can function as a form of censorship. Here, I want to discuss how the same aesthetice practice can simultaneously suggest and defer engagement with tragedy and trauma.

When Django Unchained was in the drafting stage, Tarantino hinted at his new project to The Telegraph’s John Hiscock:

"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done. I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it…But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it."

In trying to find a way to engage with Tarantino’s claims—his claims to authority, his privileging of genre--I found DD’s argument on WhitesEducatingWhites the most provocative. In his article entitled "Whiteness Unchained: When A National Shame Becomes Camp," the author argues that although “[the] movie supposedly centered around a slave turned bounty hunter in pursuit of revenge,” it “stars white people with Black people in supporting roles.” Although DD never unpacks his claim that Django Unchained is campy, it struck me that reading Django Unchained as camp is key to deconstructing some of its problematic relationships to slavery, race, violence, and history. I refer here to Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp” for some basic definitions of the form and its mechanisms.

First, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp depends on hyperbole and in always privileging form above content. Second, camp requires rhetorical distance: “Things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” Third, camp is a comedic form, it “proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy.” Following this, it requires aesthetic engagement in the act of detachment: “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.” The aesthetic experience in camp is formed with a sensual engagement with the artifice—the genre, the medium, the act of mediation—itself, rather than, as in tragic forms, the content of that artifice. And, as Sontag notes, “Detachment is the prerogative of an elite.” Finally, its “essential element is seriousness.” Camp is earnest, even when that seriousness fails. Camp cannot be ironic.

Image Credit: Chief Crew

“Campifying” violence and tragedy becomes especially problematic because earnestness is the defining element of camp. There is no room for irony, critique, or satire in camp as a discourse; rather, respect for the artifice or mediation itself is the militant narrative force. If, as Northrup Frye argues, irony is the central discourse of satire, then sincerity has the same function for camp. The moment campiness attempts irony, it becomes satiric. This is why a movie like The Producers draws on elements of camp but is not campy itself—it instead implements elements of irony to levy critique against the “producers” of Broadway performances specifically by way of aestheticizing the public’s near-universal disdain for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The moment The Producers ridicules Nazism through camp, it becomes satire.

For Tarantino to claim the rhetorical distance that irony provides in addressing the national shame of slavery would be problematic from the onset, but in privileging genre over content, he extinguishes even this possibility. Instead, the film functions to aesthetize a violence so terrible that, as Tarantino notes, we as a nation struggle to “deal with,” especially in filmic depictions. By doing so, he creates rhetorical distance from the content itself. He does not campify the experience of slavery so much as he avoids its portrayal, which exists little outside of highly-mediated (i.e. highly aestheticized) depictions of violence. It is the “campification” of this violence that is so dangerous, because it encourages the reader to indulge in the violent fantasy from all angles—that of the slaver, that of the slave—without interrogating it. In operating on the assumption that slavery is universally rejected by the contemporary American audience, Tarantino defers engaging with violence in an immediate sense. Rather, he hypermediates and hyperaestheticizes violence at the cost of content—and in the case of Django Unchained, that content is any substantial character development for the people of color within the film, as well as any depiction of the actual practice of slavery.

Image Credit: Wondersinthedark

What we receive instead is proto-Klansmen who are humanized through the demotic language that distracts from the intent to commit unspeakable violence. We see women slaves sauntering the plantation grounds or dining aside their masters in the garb of the aristocracy. And we see Django himself executing his first act of revenge in emasculating, Fauntleroy garb. (Sharen Davis, the film's costume designer, designed the valet "uniform" after Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy".) The lives of slaves themselves are mythologized—most explicitly, Django and Broomhilda as Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the Nibelungenlied—while the white characters are humanized, individualized, and given complex characteristics. Because of this dynamic, King Schulz leads the film, acting as its primary agent.

Image Source: Think Progress

Finally, I would like to suggest that the film’s Academy Award nominations serve as further evidence for the dangers of camp and Hollywood’s complicitness in this sort of problematic and incomplete engagement with slavery. The film was nominated for a total of five Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. Best Screenplay and Best Picture are all accolades that belong primarily to Tarantino himself and show the Academy’s admiration for Tarantino’s vision, and Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing rely heavily on the film’s engagement with the genre of the Spaghetti Western. All of these nominations demonstrate the Academy’s deep respect for the bare-bones aesthetic of the film itself. But Christoph Waltz’ nomination and win for Best Supporting Actor implies complicitness even with the false premise (of engagement with national trauma, of engagement with slavery) of the film itself. Although Christoph Waltz has the most lines, the most screen time, and the most character development—criteria that in virtually any other film would qualify him as the “lead”—his nomination for Supporting Actor is necessary to support the films’ other Academy-nominated accolades. We must believe that Waltz supports Jamie Foxx as lead to believe in the film. But this is one final fantasy that collapses under scrutiny.

Mashups and Misreadings: “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume” Revisited

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image credit: STARS

I know that we just survived another Halloween, so you’re probably already on to thinking about your Thanksgiving plans. Humor me as I ask us to think about Halloween again. While perusing Colorlines, a daily news site about contemporary racial justice issues, I stumbled upon a fantastic visual campaign by Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) organization. The campaign, “We’re a Culture, Not a Costume,” is smart, scathing, and to the point. It’s everything I ever wanted in a campaign to raise awareness about the everyday racism that is often shrugged off in moments of embarrassment and frustration. As expected, the campaign has garnered national attention, but its message has been mocked by mashups posted all over the Internet. We need to think critically about the messages about racism in both STARS’ campaign and in its Photoshopped reiterations. Something’s askew in the mashup world, if you ask me.

According to Jorge Rivas' post on Colorlines, the Ohio University organization behind the campaign, STARS, created the images after the organization’s president, Sarah Williams, saw a person in black face at a Halloween party last year. To bring attention to the insensitivity of many Halloween costumes, Williams holds an image of a woman completely covered in black body paint, wearing a chain around her neck and a baseball cap on her head.

Image credit: STARS

The young woman points to her obviously false teeth (another key part of the costume) while a man wearing a vampire costume feigns going in for a bite on her neck. It’s all fun and games, right? Not to African Americans, like Williams herself, who are being mocked. Everything about the costume is a stereotype—the chain, the hat, the fake teeth. If we’re now “post-racial,” as some commentators have argued since the election of Barack Obama, this image seems like it’s out of time. In fact, it is. This is blackface no matter how hard we try to shrug it off. We see Williams’ serious face, and we know it’s not just a joke, a harmless costume. Her somber face and dark clothing contextualize the image she’s holding. We can’t help but agree with the words above the image: “This is NOT who I am, and this is NOT okay.”

Despite these visual cues as to how to read the campaign, some viewers seem to have taken Williams’ and STARS’ message lightly. On The Chive, “home to the best funny, viral and interesting photos from around the world,” the campaign is seen as a “FAIL.” In a post called “C’mon guys, let’s take Halloween seriously,” Mac the Intern collected 21 mashups of the campaign, using fictional characters, animals, and movie stars.

Images credit: The Chive

With these Photoshopped images, the tone and power of the original STARS campaign is completely ignored and, I would argue, diffused. Yes, it’s funny that people dress in dog costumes. But, when we see that this humor is pointed out using the exact format of the original campaign—the dark background, the orange “We’re a culture, not a costum” banner, the “This is NOT who I am, and this is NOT okay”—we only see the campaign and its creators suffering a fate similar to the one that they would suffer when seeing someone dressed up in a racist costume. Like the creators of the campaign who, embarrassed and ashamed, were forced to stifle their anger and hurt because they’re in a public setting, these images stifle the strong message of STARS’ campaign. We’re supposed to shrug it all off. Halloween’s a time of jokes and treats. But I can’t help but feel tricked.

So, as you’re thinking about roasting a turkey and falling into a contented slumber, know that we’re not done with Halloween yet. There are still all those Facebook Halloween pictures to look at.

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

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

Giovanni Bortolani, from the Fake Too Fake series

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

Giovanni Bortolani, from the Fake Too Fake series

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

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

A Posterior for Posterity

Kimberly Singletary — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Temeca Freeman via J'Adore Magazine

On 10 March, 2011, Germany’s Pro7 TV aired a story about U.S. “po” model Temeca Freeman in New York City for Fashion Week. As a butt model, Freeman voluntarily welcomes people to stare unabashedly at her backside. But Pro7’s story went beyond a curious stare and into a visual “fressen” – a German term which means to devour, or consume like an animal. NSFW content after the break.

Temeca Freeman via GLCityMusic

Although the video, which has been edited as more than 4 different stories with at least two different reporters, is dubbed into German, one doesn’t need German to visually devour Freeman; the camera eye acts as lingua franca. Freeman’s portrayal is reminiscent of the treatment of Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, a Khoikhoi woman made into a one-woman traveling show, in part, for her large bottom, in 19th Century Europe.

When Freeman goes to her first massage, for example, one reporter tells us, “Here we come, the first time, in the enjoyment of [Freeman’s] curves. Everything’s real, claims the Po Model.” Note that our visual enjoyment of seeing Freeman on the massage table is more important than her enjoyment of a massage; the statement also throws into doubt Freeman’s claims about her naturalness. We, the presumably majority white, male German audience, are given authority over Freeman’s body to verify or reject her claim. In another video, the white, male masseuse is asked verify her claims.

Freeman’s story also featured clips from an earlier story about U.S. butt model Nicole “Coco” Austin; the stories were spliced together as if in conjunction, highlighting stark differences in how white, blonde Austin, was portrayed compared to Freeman. Freeman wistfully outlines her dream of being world renowned, and the camera jumps to Austin who stresses that hoping without work ethic isn’t enough. (Austin's advice: we can't all be scientists: some of us have to work at McDonald's) Austin is identified as a butt model and internet millionaire, while Freeman, “wants to make a career with her butt,” – despite having notoriety enough to be backstage at Fashion Week.

These women and their backsides represent American excess, but they’re not presented as equally excessive. Austin’s beauty is verified through her financial success, though Freeman’s bum, the reporter notes, is 4 centimeters larger than Austin’s. Apparently, it’s not the size of the butt but the beauty of the butt’s owner which determines success.

Double exoticization is at the heart of this German story, whereby mythical America, represented as New York’s hopefulness or the cynical, hardened sexiness of Hollywood is paired with an invitation to stare at racial difference, to see exactly what it is about black women that makes them so (un)sexy, (ab)normal, (freakishly) desirable. The Pro7 stories use the butt to re-center white women as the standard of beauty, to bestow rights of ownership to white males to speak for black women, and to Other the black body.

Nicole "Coco" Austin via Coco's World

To see "Trend Mega-Hintern," one of the versions of the stories featuring both Freeman and Austin, please click here. (NOTE: This video is apparently only visible in Germany.)

History Written on the Body: Of Another Fashion

Megan Eatman — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:26:31 +0000

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life Magazine, via Of Another Fashion

This week, I want to focus on a site I discovered when I was trying not to work. While browsing fashion blogs, I encountered Of Another Fashion, a digital archive of "the not quite hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of US women of color." In recuperating these women as alternative icons, the site emphasizes the complex historical intersections of public and private as they play out through clothing choices. It also provides needed role models to counter the often problematic and still white-dominated fashion industry.

Personal collection of Lisa Henderson; via Of Another Fashion

The site features both photos from other archives, like the Library of Congress, and images from contributors' personal collections. Blog author Minh-Ha T. Pham includes whatever information is available about the image and its subject, and these stories, even when brief, are one of the most enthralling parts of the project. For example, the image above is of the contributors' great grandmother, Bessie Henderson, who died in 1911 at the age of 19. The contributor tells us

She lived on a small farm with her ailing grandparents. Her arms are burned dark from work in the sun, but she would have shielded her fair face with a bonnet or straw hat. The lockets mystify and sadden me. Neither my grandmother nor her sister ever saw them. They had nothing of their mother’s, save this picture. (Lisa Henderson)

Photo by Francis Stewart, via Of Another Fashion

The image above, taken in 1942, shows a Labor Day fashion show at Tule Lake Relocation Center, an internment camp in California. The image highlights the day-to-day survival strategies of women in a very difficult situation. The staging of a fashion show in particular places the emphasis on beauty, play, and modernity, but also labor. Women within the camp would have made most of the dresses; in some cases, women probably modeled what they made, thereby showing not only their beauty but also their virtuosity.

Personal collection of Rosemary Garrido; via Of Another Fashion

Making fashion the focus of an alternative history gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of these women and how they were shaped by both personal desires and broader historical forces. For me, this blog really highlights the complex conditions that produce the visual rhetoric of fashion.

Beyonce in Blackface

ladysquires — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 15:00:00 +0000

(Video Credit: QueenBeyonceStan, Youtube)

These images have been circulating just about everywhere, but the subject matter seemed particularly appropriate for viz. In this photo shoot for the French magazine L'Officiel, Beyonce has been styled in looks that evoke "authenticity" African dress, and in some of the images, Beyonce's face is deliberately darkened. The shoot--in keeping with one of the themes of Beyonce's newest album--was meant to play tribute to Nigerian musician Fela Kuti.

I want to offer these images with minimal commentary other than a few questions. Are these images creepy in a cultural appropriationist sort of way? Does it make a difference that this is a French magazine rather than an American one? Is Beyonce's mixed race heritage a factor in how we might read this as Lisa at Sociological Images suggests? And is this use of blackface ironically progressive in a context in which fashion mags regularly lighten the complexions of darker-skinned celebrities, Beyonce included? I've included a L'Oreal ad where Beyonce is clearly whitewashed for comparison. I believe her skin is darkened in only the last two photos in the L'Officiel series.

(Image Credit: QueenBeyonceStan via Tom and Lorenzo)

(Photo Credit: ONTD via Jezebel)

The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

noelradley — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:16:27 +0000

"Revolutionary" By Wadsworth Jarrell Via Howard University

What does 1960s black nationalist art say to us today? TVLand's recent documentary on the Chicago-based Afri-COBRA movement suggests a few major takeaways. One is that images created for a community--by a community--inspire revolution. But I'd like to draw out a second theme voiced by former Afri-COBRA members who argue in a variety of ways that change starts with mind, and not the body.

"Wall of Respect" 1967 Via University of Chicago

The mural Wall of Respect was the beginning of Afri-COBRA activitism. The collaboration was meant to promote African-American heroes and artists while avoiding the physical clash that characterized racial rioting in 1960s Chicago. This begins the film's organization of artistic form (mind) apart from public protest (body). Artists created the positive imagery to change minds and insisted they were transforming their own minds. "We were confrontational in the sense that we were confronting ourselves and our people. We weren't confronting anybody else," said Afri-COBRA artist Napolean Jones Henderson. "We were challenging ourselves to see ourselves as we are."

The film continues a visual divide between politics and aesthetics. Historical marches, speeches, and sit-ins from 1950s America (in grainy black-and-white) appear less vibrant, if only in a visual sense. Against footage from the civil rights movement, Afri-COBRA paintings glow with rich "cool aid" colors and celebratory imagery. Afri-COBRA was a continuation and not a critique of civil rights, but the sets of images do register distinctly: domestic American civic imagery versus Africanist imagery, 1950s versus 1960s, documentary film versus imaginative new iconographies, African-Americans struggling to be seen at all versus African-Americans proactively setting out how they will be seen, often with non-Western forms or motifs.

Screenshot of JET Cover Via Googlebooks

Afri-COBRA art often plays up its own rejection of literal revolution, such as the bullet motif. The 1971 JET cover features one of Jet Jarrell's fashion pieces, a bullet belt. (The mixed media painting "Revolutionary" incorporates real bullets.) In the Jet cover, the model wears the bullets and uses a butcher knife, menancing signals that she has the means defend herself physically. But that's only the first step in the representation here. The idealized 1960s domestic setting, the assured posture of the female figure and her knowing stare communicate that force won't be necessary. Change is inevitable, it says to JET readers, and is happening from within. You don't have to believe in the mind/body split to buy Afri-COBRA project, for the art movement was never truly disembodied. The rhetoric of mind, rather, was about Afri-COBRA members creating life on their terms, avoiding socially proscribed behaviors and ways-of-seeing.

"When I Rise" Tonight on PBS

noelradley — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:24:42 +0000

Don't miss the premiere tonight of When I Rise from Independent Lens (PBS). The documentary narrates the experiences of Barbara Smith Conrad, African-American opera singer and alumna of UT-Austin. Produced by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the movie documents the bigotry and discrimination Conrad faced while a music student at the University of Texas in the 1950s. The film is featured Feb. 8 (tonight) at 9 p.m., Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 13 at 3 p.m. CST. For UT's coverage of the story, read here, "The Story of a Voice."

Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:58:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

If you’re a member of the so-called “Facebook generation,” it’s probably been pretty hard to ignore the recent coverage of David Fincher’s The Social Network, the movie that purports to tell the story of Facebook’s founding in a Harvard dorm-room circa 2003-4. Websites like Jezebel have critiqued the movie’s treatment of women, writers on Slate have criticized the movie’s portrayal both of Harvard, and others have questioned whether it accurately represents the website's creator Mark Zuckerberg. When I saw the movie, I was more struck by the ways in which Sorkin uses conventional tropes of class and gender dynamics to ask questions about how Facebook has potentially rewritten these issues, as well as changing identity, social interaction, and the idea of the public sphere.

I’d like to decode here for viz in the ways in which it not only pictures a different kind of class warfare, but also helps visualize friendship in its competing images of Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, and the (fictional) Erica Albright.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, the story is pretty simple: Mark Zuckerberg, a borderline Asperger’s Harvard sophomore, is rejected both by his girlfriend Erica and the final clubs to which he longs to belong. When two WASP-y brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, ask him to help them create a dating website called Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg decides to create a different website based around social interaction: “People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? … I’m talking about taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online.”

What follows is his quest to make this dream a reality, while fending off lawsuits from the Winklevoss twins and his co-founder/friend Eduardo.

The movie risks portraying Zuckerberg as unsympathetic, but watching the trailer above helps viewers find points of connection with him. As it begins, we see what look like screenshots from Facebook of its users sharing pictures of their tattoos, their parties, and their children, commenting on their friends’ profiles, overlaid by Scala and Kolacny Brothers’ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” These images eventually dissolve into a picture of the man who links all these profiles together, Mark Zuckerberg, who appears just as the vocal track angelically sings, “You’re so very special.” The juxtaposition of image and word here creates an eerie effect—the Facebook users and Mark are all linked through the lyrics that describe them:

I don’t care if it hurts,
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice,
when I'm not around.
You're so very special,
I wish I was special.

While perhaps this opening distinguishes between the users longing to be perfect and the “special” Zuckerberg, the rest of the trailer draws the two together. Zuckerberg here is presented as an outsider without real friends. The movie opens with him struggling to have a conversation with his girlfriend Erica; she has trouble keeping up with him as he jumps between topics:

However, the scene concludes when Erica finally gets mad at Mark for implying that she’s slept with the bar’s door guy and that she goes to an inferior school. Her words to him closing the scene, implies Sorkin, motivate Mark for the rest of the movie: “Listen. You’re going to be rich and successful. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Viewers spend the rest of the movie following Mark and his actions, left to judge at the end along with Rashida Jones whether or not Mark is an asshole, or just trying to be one. Is Mark—and is the viewer with him—a creep? How are we to read Mark, and how is Mark left to read the social codes surrounding him?

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Social Network

The movie helps us do this in part through its costuming and visual rhetoric, setting Mark against both his friend Eduardo and the Winklevii. Mark dresses throughout the movie in something like a uniform: exchangeable grey hoodies or North Face black jackets, jeans or shorts, and ever-present t-shirts. His cluelessness about how to talk to Erica is visually mirrored by shots of him running through the snow in Adidas sport sandals, unaware of the cold. His hacker-mentality appears in the pajamas he wears to a meeting with a venture capital firm. His clothes mark him as young, but still advertise an educated background; he appears in Phillips Exeter Academy shirts several times (the prep school the real Zuckerberg did attend).

Image Credit: The Social Network

The Winklevoss twins, on the other hand, visually represent the traditional Harvard elite. They wear suits so dressy that Larry Summers jokes that they’re trying to sell him a Brooks Brothers franchise. Armie Hammer’s bland good looks complement both his pastel tie and the wood-paneled rooms of the Porcellian in which he stands. He looks like the kind of “gentleman of Harvard” that Cameron Winklevoss claims to be. While Zuckerberg has similarly elite connections that separate him from many of the movie’s viewers, the costumers make the Winklevoss twins look different enough to set up the binary between the two groups. Eduardo’s suits throughout hint that while he might want to be Mark’s friend, ultimately he’s closer to being the enemy.

This visual dynamic plays over into the characters’ interactions in the script: not just how the friends are visually portrayed, but the way in which The Social Network pictures friendship at large. Competing visions of friendship are offered by Mark, Eduardo, and Sean. Mark’s friendships with these two men play out homosocially (which helps explain why the women seem so unnecessary at times), and their abilities to relate to Mark drive the website’s development. When Eduardo first appears in the movie, he’s ready to comfort Mark after reading Mark’s LiveJournal entry that describes his breakup with Erica; what Mark wants from Eduardo isn’t emotional support, but the mathematical codes that will help him create the website Facemash.

As Eduardo is punched by the final club The Phoenix, Mark derides him at every turn in (apparent) envy at not being included. Eduardo’s vow to protect Mark from what he sees to be Sean’s bad influence leads him to sign the stock restructuring agreement that effectively phases him out of the company, ending his friendship with Mark. Yet Mark warns Eduardo that he might be left behind if he doesn’t come out to Palo Alto to help out with the company’s development there, a warning Eduardo fails to heed. Sean seduces Mark over drinks and a shared vision for the company, but he gets forced out when caught snorting coke off Facebook interns at the end of the film.

While the movie makes frequent use of classic Sedgwick’s homosocial triangles, the movie’s energy primarily emerges from Mark’s continued and ongoing attempts to keep a friendship with the one person in the movie who rejects him constantly: Erica Albright. At three points in the movie Mark confronts Erica with friendship on the line. When she breaks up with him, they have a heated exchange:

Erica: I think we should just be friends.
Mark: I don’t need friends.
Erica: I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you.

Mark here rejects the idea of needing friends, but when he spots her again in a bar he feels compelled to go up to her to try and have a conversation. She refuses to follow him, explaining, “I don’t want to be rude to my friends.” Finally, the movie closes with him finding her profile on Facebook and sending her a friend request; the screen fades to black on the image of him refreshing the page over and over to see if she’s responded yet. Mark has helped to redefine friendship through Facebook—where users call relative strangers and close companions alike “friends”—but the viewer is left to feel superior to Mark because the one friend he wants is the one he never can have.

Facebook allows its 500 million users to join groups, make friends, and establish a public identity for all to see, but it also creates the kinds of out-groups with which Mark identifies in the end. If Zuckerberg and Facebook potentially allow for the breaking down of certain kinds of class through technology, both also work to reify classes of users and non-users, people with access and those without. I think a part of the reason I left the movie feeling a bit disturbed was because while I might feel a certain schadenfreude in Mark’s failed friendships, by making friends with Facebook back in 2004 I helped to create the monster.

(Not that it stopped me from going home and posting my reaction to the movie on Facebook.)

Visualizing (Post-)Racial Protest and Politics

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:25:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Towleroad

H/T: Hampton Finger

It’s been hard to miss the recent media coverage of the new Arizona immigration law SB 1070, which allows police to stop individuals and require them to show legal papers proving their citizenship upon “reasonable suspicion.” Many have interpreted this as legalizing racial profiling, which has caused protests to spring up against this, most recently the one pictured above where individuals smeared refried beans in the shape of a swastika to point out the potentially fascist implications of the bill. What makes me curious is how racial tensions have been visually deployed during the theoretically post-racial Obama presidency.

I was fortunate to recently attend a talk at the University of Texas’s John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies given by Dr. Soyini Madison on the topic of “White Anger, Crazy Patriotism, and (Post) Black Performativity.” In this talk, Dr. Madison discussed how what she refers to as “crazy patriotism,” which she accounts for as something like a sacred belief in nationalist ideology, first projected their frustrations onto Michelle Obama to portray her as an angry black woman who hates America (as seen on a New Yorker cover previously discussed on viz.), then re-appropriated it as a righteous anger that seeks to preserve American values. This discussion seemed relevant for viz. readers if only because Dr. Madison constantly referred to the visual “momification” of Michelle Obama on newspaper stands nationwide.

Image Credit: Jezebel

Jezebel’s recent post on her magazine covers notes how frequently she likes to pose with her hands clasped:

Why do so many Mobama covers feature the First Lady with her hands demurely clasped? Deliberate signaling of her approachability? Or is it just how she likes to pose? What does it all mean?

Jezebel is clearly onto something here: the pearls she wears, along with her clasped hands, her manicured nails, and the apple on the table all serve to portray the First Lady as a suburban middle-class mom whose causes and views are all as wholesome as the organic foods she grows in her home garden. Yet while some have criticized her for this momification, Madison points out how this particular post-black identity allows the Obamas to displace crazy patriotism yet still maintain race as a part of the discussion. (It’s interesting to consider how her image helps sell magazines as a note, though—she helps sell magazines directed at African-Americans, but “doesn’t produce more than an occasional lift” for general-interest publications.)

The question that I think can come from pairing together what seems like two different discourses is to see how the visuals of post-raciality still lean on racially encoded signifiers. Just as refried beans serve as shorthand to identity an angry Hispanic speaker, Michelle is dressed and posed to present a nonthreatening blackness to viewers.

William Faulkner once wrote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” We can see in these images that while some commentators and Tea Partiers might argue that this law doesn’t involve racial profiling and that Obama is not subject to racist attacks, racism and its legacy remain problems with which we must cope—especially when people are already being arrested according to this law's logic.

African-American visual culture

noelradley — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:56:16 +0000

Image Credit: John H. White (1973) Image NWDNS-412-DA-13759

Portrait of Black Chicago for National Archives

John H. White's image of a sidewalk vendor in the South of Chicago in 1973 reminds me of Coye's and Laura's recent posts on the visuality of food culture. Looking closely, one gleans an untold story of race, urban food markets, and of the style of life in Chicago in the 1970s. White's series (Portrait of Black Chicago) was part of a program called Documerica, where the Environmental Protection Agency paid photographers to document environmental problems across America. I really like White's photos for how they conveyed everything from emotionally saturating pictures of the Black Muslim community to pictures of abandoned housing in the ghettos to pictures of the lake and skyline. White records narratives of race, which are intertwined with Chicago's political and religious history, but he also gives room to images of people's daily material lives in their environments, such as the initial photo above. I used this photo as part of the Best Practices for Digital images workshop, where we featured images archives that can enrich our teaching and scholarship.

Image Credit: John H. White (1973) Image NWDNS-412-DA-13800

Portrait of Black Chicago for National Archives

It would be an interesting lesson to contrast the images of White, who is by the way a Pulitzer-prize winner now teaching at Columbia, to the Calvin Littlejohn Archive, which is housed here at UT-Austin. The visuality of the Fort Worth, Texas black culture in the 1960's versus Chicago in the 1970's offers a way to understand the contrastive experiences of blacks across the nation, the specificity of lives across cities in the north and south, and across the time of a decade. Note that using the online images from the Calvin Littlejohn archive means you will be looking at the institutional watermark. However, I think the images are still interesting and powerful.You could follow up with a third discussion of contemporary African-American photographic narratives (see video below).

The video was published this February here on the UT-Austin site, along with the article "Photographer Eli Reed discusses being black in America." The video itself is a montage of Eli Reed's photos, along with a conversation between Reed (who has been at UT since 2005), Roxanne Evans, Michael Hurd, and St. Edward's student Adam Semien. For more of Reed's work, look on the Magnum photos site, and on the Digital Journalist blog.To range more of this kind of content, you could look as well at the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery on Africana and Black History

House Bill 282: No Fat Chicks?

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

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

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

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

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

Women in Film

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnic Cleansing in Brooklyn

John Jones — Mon, 28 May 2007 20:01:50 +0000

Jerome Krase at BrooklynSoc.org passed along a photo gallery comparing an artist’s rendering of the Fulton Street Mall in Brooklyn versus the mall itself.

As Dr. Krase puts it,

A New York Post “Exclusive” article by Rich Calder, ‘Mall Wonder,’ (5/21/07: 19) featured a digital rendering of how the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn will look after a $15 Million “facelift.” It looked odd to me, so I took some photos at the Mall the next day. Perhaps they meant “ethnic cleansing,” or what we used to refer to as “Negro Removal” when Urban Renewal was in vogue in the 1960s. FYI: Brooklyn has become a very hot real estate market in recent years and many of the areas which had essentially become part of “Black Brooklyn” from the 1970s onward are now ripe for picking. I walked down the Fulton Mall from beginning to end taking photos and the Person of Color to Person of No-color ratio was the reverse of the artist rendering from the article. One might also consider whether the rendering is advertising as opposed to Neo-Freudian slip.

Here’s a link to the entire gallery at BrooklynSoc.org.