viz. - stereotypes

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?

Surface and Appearance in "Accidental Racist," Part 1

Calliope — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:23:37 +0000

Image Credit: Mark Humphrey, AP

The media reacted volubly to Brad Paisley's song "Accidental Racist," a ballad on his newly released "Wheelhouse" album that openly tackles the problem of racism. Staging a dialogue between Paisley and rapper LL Cool J, the song imagines the tense process of "remembering and forgetting" slavery, as one critic put it, from highly stereotyped white and black perspectives. Many voices from the blogosphere last week, including Stewart and Harris from Jezebel and Slate, fumed at the song's presentation of racial history and relations, while others viewed it as simply a provocative song characteristic of Paisley's other work. That it was selected by the NYTimes.com for one of the online "Room for Debate" forums is, perhaps, an indication of how ripe the song's lyrics are for critique and how generative they are of competing rhetorics.

Here I will consider how controversial lyrics from "Accidental Racist" alongside resonant verses from Paisley and other mainstream country artists foreground surfaces and appearances--clothing, physique, and color, for instance--to talk about identity, race, and social perceptions.

Image Credit: www.bet.com

One of the verses from "Accidental Racist" that has caused contention is Cool J's line, "If you don't judge my gold chains / I'll forget the iron chains." Critics object to the implication that white people overlooking a "black" fashion choice is somehow equivalent to black people forgetting about slavery altogether. Setting aside the offensiveness of this equation, I'd just like to point out that the line centers around a clothing accessory and also the suggestion that while such objects can inspire misjudgment and misunderstanding they can also be imbued with meanings that have deep consequences for race relations. I would argue that the song's frequent references to racialized apparel--a white cowboy hat, "invisible white hoods," a Skynyrd t-shirt with a red confederate flag on it, saggy pants, and a do-rag--are not so accidental, and that they fit in with a tendency in Paisley's work to appropriate and explode a certain kind of visual stereotype.

Take for instance, Paisley's tune "Online" from his 2007 album "Fifth Gear." Seemingly just a goofy song about online dating it actually engages with larger questions about anonymity, identity, and personal interaction on the Web, and it does so primarily by parodying the way we enhance our digital appearances.

The song begins with its protagonist enumerating what he calls his "stats," details about his height, weight and livelihood:

I work down at the pizza pit

And I drive an old Hyundai

I still live with my mom and dad

I'm 5'3 and overweight

Despite this profile, which, within the heteronormative frame of the song is represented as hopelessly pathetic, the singer is buoyed by the way he looks online:

'Cause online I'm out in Hollywood

I'm 6'5 and I look damn good

I drive a Maserati

I'm a black belt in Karate

And I love a good glass of wine

The sketch of the subject's "real" appearance and that of his constructed online persona present radically different versions of maleness; the one resembles adolescence and the other independence and success. Yet the descriptions are similar in their form and artificiality; neither evokes an image of a real person but rather two poles of a cartoonish spectrum of male desirability. Thus, beyond the song's main lesson--that people "grow another foot" and "lose a bunch of weight" when they portray themselves online--is the notion that a list of personal "stats," like the sort found on Facebook or used to size up a date, fail to express a person's true identity even though they can help with reinvention, profilerating online a "whole 'nother me."

The basic paradox presented in "Online," that while appearances are only skin deep they have real effects and consequences, also underlies the interplay between appearance and perceptions in "Accidental Racist." Paisley articulates the paradox when he apologizes to the black man he meets behind the Starbucks counter,

When I put on that t-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I'm a Skynyrd fan

The red flag on my chest somehow is like the elephant in the corner of the south

In my next post on this subject, I'll look at Paisley's 2011 song "Camouflage" to further examine his interest in fabric and color and their ideological freight.

Cartooning Crisis - Images After the Japanese Tsunami

Cate Blouke — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Pedro Molina, Managua, Nicaragua "El Nuevo Diario"

Ten days after the cataclysmic 8.9 earthquake in Japan, we have only a small sense of both the immediate and long-term consequences for the country. Political cartoonists world-wide are manipulating the image of the Japanese flag, positioning the crisis as a national tragedy/catastrophe and exploring the aftershocks. The resulting images are interesting for both their visual simplicity and the complex arguments they (inadvertently?) construct.

Addressing the pedagogical implications of images and tragedy, Megan's thoughtful post from Friday opens with another manipulated image of the Japanese flag in which the rising sun has morphed into a tear drop. That image highlights the sorrow of the tragedy - evoking global sympathy for a nation in crisis. Yet from another perspective, the image could also represent a drop of blood - acting as either a memorial for those who died or, theoretically, a call to arms. Though I doubt those are the intended readings, I merely want to point out that even fairly straightforward images can be sites of contestation.

The images above and below strike me as more overtly complex arguments about the disastrous consequences for the nation. In Molina's image, the sun is now a skull, cracked and disintegrating. While the image immediately points toward the massive death toll (8,450 dead and 12,931 missing at the time of writing), it also posits the disaster as crippling (and potentially lethal) for the nation as a whole.

John Sherffius, Colorado, Boulder Daily Camera

Various cartoonists have played with images of fracture and symbolic post-quake cracks, but Sherffius presents a sun severed completely in half. The image posits a rupture, with one half of the nation more grievously effected. Unlike the red teardrop which unifies the nation's grief, Sherffius' image points towards an irrevocable severance.

While the symbolic value of the flag makes it universally recognizable (and superficially simple to read), when cartoonists combine the flag with other "easily recognizable" symbols of Japan, the effects become more opaque.

Damien Glez, Journal du Jeudi, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Several dozen representations of the Japanese flag combined with the radioactive symbol have emerged in the last week, but they are mostly presented as solitary images - either the flag itself or a deserted flagpole. Damien Glez, however, depicts an anxious samurai waiving the flag aloft. The image is troubling for the way in which it suggests a connection between the radiation crisis, military aggression (a warrior in full dress) and surrender (waiving a white flag). In the post-WWII fallout this image might have made more sense, but it seems both anachronistic and insensitive now.

Political cartoons inevitably exploit stereotypes for both simplicity's sake and for comedic value, but many of the cartoons emerging after the tsunami raise questions about our ability to access and comprehend foreign nations. While the Japanese flag and the image of Godzilla are certainly immediately recognizable, if these are the images through which we understand Japan, what does that say about us?

Paul Zanetti, Australia