viz. - masculinity

Texans Getting Campy

Laura Thain — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 19:33:56 +0000

Hey y'all, in case you haven't heard, we're electing a new Lt. Governor this year here in the great state of Texas. With four Texas Republicans competing for the position, a campaign is taking shape to see who can be the cowboy-iest candidate of 2014. With a fight like that, you might expect to see some campaign ads that border on self-parody. And what, my friends, do you get when sincerity fails? Well, of course, a whole lot of camp!

Incumbent David Dewhurst, who is (for real) a member of the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, released an unusual campaign ad this week. Before we view it, let’s take a look at a more serious cowboy call from contender and current Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples:

Ok, so we’ve got some typical campaign rhetoric going on here with a little bit of cowboy flair, but nothing too unusual. Staples' team shows that our Texan values are threatened by the specter of the Democrats and big government (specifically, the evil Obama and his friend the state of California). And it’s no surprise that the ad finds a way to say “Todd Staples” as many times as possible while showing him practically BURST across a true Texan field on a horse. He’s a cowboy in shining armor. Let’s take this as an example of non-campy cowboy. There’s nothing particularly failed about the sincerity of this campaign video—its effectiveness rests firmly in the success or failure of its polemics. This is a candidate who’s clearly courting Tea Party conservatives and ready to toe the Republican party line, taking no prisoners. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he’s considerably behind the other three candidates in a recent poll.)

But here’s what happens when the cowboy antics get a bit more theatrical: check out a favorite of mine (courtesy of Cate Coleman here in the DWRL), from current US Senator John Cornyn’s 2008 campaign:

The particular kind of camp we see here is determined by the audience:

Image Credit: Screenshots form Cornyn's campaign video

It is the campaign’s attempt to be serious and the utter failure of that seriousness that makes this over-the-top cowboy spectacle campy—and it’s the risk that many conservative appeals to “traditional” Texan-white-rancher-values take.

How, then, might a conservative campaign make the same kind of appeals to individualism and masculinity without resorting to the cowboy cliché? Take a look at Dewhurst’s recent campaign video as a response to that kind of rhetoric:

That’s right, folks. No cowboys. No news coverage. No dark and foreboding shots of Washington or California. Just a simple, sustained (nearly twenty full seconds) demonstration of bodily masculinity. Contrast our TX t-shirt wearing SuperBeard with the California hipster literally fondling a shake weight. Could it be that, unlike John Cornyn’s campaign, Dewhurst is intentionally using camp in his campaign rhetoric?

Image credit: Screenshot from Dewhurst's campaign video

It’s a strange move that I think attempts to accomplish a few goals simultaneously. First, in response to radical right complaints that Dewhurst isn’t “Republican” enough (perhaps because he has on occasion dared to try and cooperate with Texan Democrats in the State Senate), Dewhurst’s campaign produces a video so machismo that you almost can’t help but laugh. The camp seems self-conscious—which we might infer from the heavily stylized camera filter and a variety of other formal elements of the film itself—but it is serious in its implications, that is, that the Texan economy is absolutely tied to strong, hyper-masculine leadership. Bigger is better. Bearded is best.

I dare say the video also makes sincere attempts to appeal to younger voters, although this might represent the limits of the campy aesthetic. The crude, Instagram-like styling of the film (which, upon further scrutiny, is most interesting because it appeals to nostalgia for a time that young people in Texas never experienced outside of The Wonder Years and photo filters) has the most potential, despite its sincere intent, to fail.

Perhaps this lesser-watched Dewhurst video can tell us more about the campaign’s strange appeal to a hipster aesthetic. Watch it and see if you think Texas is ready to “walk down the aisle” with Lt. Governor Dewhurst all over again:

Does it remind you, too, of a Royal Tenenbaums style narration? What do you think of Dewhurst's campaign rhetoric?

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!

Kiss and Cry: The Problem of Portraying Masculinity in Men’s Figure Skating

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:48:22 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olymics website

I’ve loved watching figure skating since I was a kid enjoying the movie The Cutting Edge. This meant that I used my free time last night watching the men’s figure skating short programs. My attention was drawn not only by free time, but also by the extensive press coverage given to the American figure skater Johnny Weir in the last month, especially related to his decision to wear fake fur to the Olympics after PETA threatened to protest him.

Weir’s position within the Olympics and within figure skating discourse is incredibly interesting. While he has a wide and vocal fanbase who enjoy his flashy costumes and artistry, much of the discussions surrounding Weir have to do with how Weir’s flamboyance is either good or bad for men’s skating. (Stephen Colbert, for example, alluded to Weir’s “crippling dependence on fabulousness.”) The commentary provided by Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic over his short program yesterday was fairly coded as they drew attention to his “pink tassel” and how “controversial” he is, but the controversy seems to only be whether or not Weir’s fey appearance makes men’s skating look gay—and thus, bad.

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olympics website

The problem for men’s figure skating in general seem to be one of branding: while certain parts of the populace associate the sport with effeminacy and dismiss its claims to being a sport, the Team USA wants it to be taken seriously as an athletic competition. Magazines like Entertainment Weekly focus on the costumes, as did the New York Times in their discussion of the Swiss Stéphane Lambiel, who

either forgot to remove his vest before competing or wore something with shoulder pads that suggested Robin Hood joining the N.F.L. There was a Seinfeld puffy shirt thrown in for extra effect. One of the inhouse radio announcers thought he looked like Count Chocula.

In contrast, skaters like Weir defend their athleticism: “I like sparkly things. I like the theatre of figure skating. But in no way does that make me less macho than someone in a muscle shirt and tattoos with grease stains or whatever.” Aleksei Mishin, the coach for the defending gold medalist Yevgeny Plushenko, emphasizes the importance of the quadruple jump to the sport: “Skating without quads is a time before Stojko, before Urmanov. Who is not able to jump it, don’t make fake explanations. It is a shame to skate without quads.” His language of “shame” ties atheticism to manliness in skating: a manly good skater can do the physically demanding jumps, and an effeminate bad skater can’t.

Image Credit: Screenshot from NBC Olymics website

The rivalry between Weir and his American teammate Evan Lysacek, where the former is considered “artistic” and the latter “athletic,” doubles this fight between figure skating’s claims to being a sport and its associations with homosexuality. Michelle Kwan in one video describes Evan as a “stud” and Johnny as “a cross between Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga” to reinforce Evan’s status as the Team USA champion and the medal threat and Johnny’s status as a less “serious” skater.

Image Credit: Screenshot from ESPN website

Yet Evan’s costumes last night were designed by Vera Wang, and the ESPN front page advertises “drama” by pairing the words with Lysacek’s sparkling, feathered image, insisting on the same effeminate connections that the skaters attempt to fight. Perhaps the problem isn’t Johnny Weir or any effeminancy on the part of the sport, but in the minds of individuals who can’t reconcile sport’s traditional homosociality with the masculinity they project onto such figures. This at least is the conclusion drawn by David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum, in an interview on Olympic art with Stephen Colbert:

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Analyzing the costumes of the men’s figure skaters and comparing the militarist look of Stéphane Lambiel with Johnny Weir’s pink tassel and Plushenko’s sequins might help students unpack binaries of masculine/feminine and straight/gay and consider how those definitions are culturally and rhetorically constructed.

Knockout Ads: Sexism and the Super Bowl

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:04:21 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

Since almost everybody else on the Internet is commenting on this year’s Super Bowl ads, I couldn’t resist offering my take. The obvious issue with the Super Bowl ads this year is their fairly blatant sexism.

Whether declaring how men need Dodge Chargers because women emasculate them, or entreating men to “wear the pants,” the Super Bowl commercials addressed themselves to a male audience, as noted by the New York Times:

There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are. That theme recurs in Super Bowl ads because so many of the viewers are men and so many of the products advertised are aimed at them.

Or, as James Poniewozik from Time put it:

Wow, Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

The visuals of the Charger ad in particular, entitled “Man’s Last Stand,” are particularly creepy; the ad features a montage of men staring into the camera, ending on a closeup of one man’s intense eyes before shooting to footage of the car zooming over the landscape as the words “Man’s Last Stand” appear on the screen. The deadpan of most of the men’s expressions doesn’t directly express hostility, but the voice and the script, which dully intones that “I will carry your lip balm. I will watch your vampire TV shows with you,” implies a building hostility that can only be recovered through the car’s fast speeds.

What I find interesting about this, though, is how seemingly tone-deaf these ads are to a potential female audience. According to the Nielsen Company, this year’s Super Bowl reached more than 106 million viewers—it seems obvious that many of these viewers would be women, right? Why would they risk alienating a potential audience, many of whom are the people who go the store to buy the beer that their families will drink while watching Drew Brees and Peyton Manning? (At the Super Bowl party I was at, there were ten women and six men—and while the women weren’t all major football fans, we all watched the ads attentively.)

However, in looking at the most successful of the ads, the Snickers ad “Game” that featured Betty White, the message isn’t dramatically different. Betty White is actually Mike, who is “playing [football] like Betty White out there.” Once Mike eats a Snickers provided to him by an attractive girl, he becomes a young man again, as the tag line assures viewers that “Snickers satisfies.” While Betty White getting tackled in a football game is amusingly incongruous, the basic message of the commercial is still the same: being a man in sporting events is good, and whatever product makes you a “satisfied” man is to the good as well. Maybe the issue with the Super Bowl ads this year wasn’t their sexist content, but rather that the amount of sexism has to be tempered by equal amounts of humor. Women can take a joke, but just not too much of one, so advertisers need to not express their angst about the economy and their lost jobs to avoid knocking out a valuable audience.