I wrote a book! It was terrible. The book is not terrible. Writing a book, holy crap, that’s a lot. It has a kick ass cover:
Yes indeed that’s Dragula season 3 winner Landon Cider, I used to go see him perform in LA.
Its about drag! Theatrical gender-bending! Doing weird stuff onstage! Curse words!
More specifically its about how we talk about and analyze drag and how that just doesn’t cut it because of how diverse and broad the genre is. I get into stuff people don’t automatically think of when they hear the word drag—women performing femme acts, butch acts that aren’t male impersonations, sexless mythical characters created by civil rights groups—and explain why these acts are doing the same work as other drag acts. I also look at more conventional drag like variety and vaudevillian male impersonation to demonstrate how our conventional understanding of drag leads to oversimplifying their methods and impacts.
TL;DR: Drag is complicated! Our words and analysis have to be complicated too! Drag is cooler than we think because its weirder than we think!
You can also check my celebrity endorsements (well, academic endorsements, they’re celebrities to me!) and book synopsis and maybe buy one (or ask your university library to purchase one for their stacks) from Amazon and Indiana University Press!
When a student told me FX was making a soapy drama about 1980s Ballroom culture, I was not here for it. Then I heard Ryan Murphy was overseeing the project. The last White gay person who crafted a commercial Ballroom narrative—Paris is Burning director Jennie Livingston—got dragged for a directorial vision that reduced Ballroom from a complex community ritual to a dazzling neoliberal spectacle for White masses. There’s certainly no consensus about whether Livingston done right or wrong, my point is that making an accurate, holistic representation of Ballroom that is also uplifting and respectful is hard, especially when outsiders are involved.
Good news: Pose fucking nails it. I don’t mean everything is totally accurate. I question the time frame for some of the voguing (vogue is broken up by Old and New Way, and some moves are pretty New Way). I’m also leery of how often “realness” reflects a contemporary usage popularized by RuPaul’s Drag Racerather than the more traditional ballroom meaning of heteronormative passability. But every time I watch Pose, I thank the writers, directors, producers, and actors for delivering nuanced narratives and storylines that avoid hackneyed tropes without looking away from hard realities. I also love how Ballroom is represented with skill, aplomb, and respectful historical accuracy. Here’s how Pose does Ballroom representation well.
1. Paris easter eggs. Released in 1990, the documentary Paris is Burning was the only real ballroom text for decades. And the people in that film—especially their statements, lewks, jokes, and ball work—have become pop culture touchstones. Even if you don’t know the documentary, I promise you’ve heard some of the lines, especially if you’ve ever watched RuPaul’s Drag Race. Pose season 2 has some v satisfying call backs to Paris. For example, the ep. 8 scene of Angel and Blanca dancing down the beach looks very much like Carmen and Brooke Xtravagena doing the same:
Angel’s ep. 2 entry into the modeling world visually and narratively parallels Octavia St. Laurent’s experience at the Eileen Ford model agency cattle-call search. Damon booking a European tour with Malcolm McLaren echoes Willie Ninja’s mention of dancing for Malcolm McLaren. Even the two young homeless teens palling around outside a Ball in ep. 10 evoke the unnamed young teens Livingston interviewed.
2. IN ADDITION to these Paris touchstones, Pose extends its connection by referencing non-filmed aspects of the people in the documentary. This is most poignant in ep. 3 where Electra and Co. “cocoon” a White businessman who accidentally died at Electra’s BDSM establishment. The drastic steps they take to wrap and pack his body in a trunk (which Electra will keep for the rest of her life) is framed as safer than trusting the police or the criminal justice system. Just in case some watchers are not up on their Paris lore, Pose explicitly telegraphs the connection by ending with a quote from Dorian Corey, one of the most iconic figures in Paris Is Burning, and known for offering a complex and empathetic narrative voice that levels out Livingston’s depiction of Ballroom life as triumph and flash. If you research anything about Paris, you will immediately find articles about Corey’s death or, more specifically, what was found in Corey’s closet (you know what’s coming): a partially mummified body in the fetal position wrapped in naugahyde (just like on Pose). The estimate is that this body had been with Corey at least 20 years. While details are hazy, two common beliefs are that Corey shot a home invader or an abusive lover in self-defense. Corey clearly made the decision that it was safer to live with this body forever than go to the police and trust the criminal justice system. The Pose episode ends with Electra ruminating about the emotional and physical responsibility she now carries, but never does the show question the ethics of her final decision. Like Corey, we are asked to remember the unbearably unjust price a person such as Electra would pay for doing what society would consider “the right thing.”
3. Pose also fills in important details that Paris has been critiqued for dropping. The only real reference to Ballroom history in Paris is Corey’s mention of how Balls grew from 1950s and 1960s drag queen pageants. But in Pose ep. 1, when the girls discuss the history of Balls, Electra says “Crystal LaBeija lost one too many titles to White girls.” The founder and first mother of the House of LaBeija, Crystal, developed the House and Ball scene as an alternative to the White-dominated drag queen pageants she participated in and hated. There’s a old documentary called The Queen (1968), which is a rather dull depiction of drag queen contestants in the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest. The jewel of this film comes during the last few minutes: Crystal, who placed fourth, lets us know that she has FUCKING HAD IT with the racist beauty standards and winner selection process.
So what does Crystal do about it? Oh just heads the formation of Ballroom as an alt performance scene for queer Black and Brown people. In the next episode of Pose, when Electra tries to recruit Tess for her House of Wintour, Tess responds “ain’t no White girls in Ballroom.” While there were White people in Ballroom (Corey was one), this statement reinforces the previous allusion to Crystal. In short, Pose communicates how Ballroom is designed as a space for people who are not only marginalized by dominant culture, but by White queer culture as well.
Its also worth noting that in ep. 2 Pray Tell makes sure the children “know your history” by explaining how Paris DuPree invented voguing. You might not realize that Paris is Burning is named after Paris DuPree, and specifically a Ball Paris hosted called Paris is Burning. You might not know this because Livingston fails to name or identify Paris in the film, or make the explicit connection between the name of the film and Paris’s Ball. Don’t be shocked but Livingston’s omissions didn’t sit well with Paris. Its poignant, then, that Pose not only names Paris, but makes Paris visible within the history and lore of Ballroom.
4. Pose deals with real Ballroom people and shit. The ep. 10 storyline touches on how the Ball management structure (Electra, Lulu, and Angel reference the MCs–also called Commentators–and the judging panel) is dominated by men, and how there is a circumscribed amount of “femme queen” categories.
a) Let me first draw your attention to the aforementioned judging panel. Plz note the judge in the center—the one that hands out all the trophies.
That’s just José FUCKING Xtravaganza, a legendary ballroom performer. You might know José from his feature in Icona Pop’s “Up All Night” music video, which recreates a Ball event. Or maybe if you’re deep in like me, you can spot his 3-second cameo in Paris is Burning—he’s one of the teen voguers. Or maybe you know his story because its Damon and Ricky’s dream: José became a backup dancer for Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour.
b) Let me now draw your attention to the issues discussed, because they’re real fucking Ballroom issues. In his excellent ethnography Butch Queens Up in Pumps (2013), Marlon Bailey discusses how Houses might be governed by mothers but fathers often occupy more authoritative positions within the national ballroom structure. Moreover, virtually all MCs/Commentators are men, and, due to the lack of “women, butch, and femme queen” Ball categories, women, butches, and transgender people (WBT) had to create a separate micro Ball scene in the mid 2000s (224).
c) Let me finally draw your attention to how Pray Tell and the other masculine commentators address this gender issue: they all do drag. Maybe this seems like a quick fix, but the plot trajectory actually allows Pose to show one more more layer of Ballroom; while Ballroom scenes this season focus on realness, voguing, and house competitions, there’s a popular category called Butch Queens Up in Drags (Paris DuPree was actually a competitor in this category, as was another legendary House Mother, Pepper LaBeija).
Behold Paris
The Pose Commentators say they want to perform as “butch queen up in drags first time at a Ball.” I don’t know if this subcategory always happens, but its a documented Ball category shown in Paris is Burning. Including this category in the Pose storyline helps us to see how truly multifarious Ballroom is.
I love drag. I wrote a book about it. And I love to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race because it’s fun and queer and dazzling and fun. And queer.
My all time fav Bianca Del Rio front and center
But not all queer and fun things are perfect, and Drag Race—like RuPaul herself—is no exception. There’s been the issue with RuPaul not fully welcoming trans performers or drag kings on the show. There’s been the issue with how more popular queens (the ones that do the best) are predominately White. There’s been the issue with how Drag Race tends to takes ritualistic and creative elements from underground and minority drag culture without credit, often transforming them into products that are both spectacle-like and devoid of their full cultural meaning (thanks bell hooks for the ritual vs spectacle framing!)
So I watched and coded seven seasons of Drag Race and then I wrote an article about how Drag Race uses “realness,” a term taken from ballroom culture. Ballroom is a performance scene designed and maintained mainly by poor queer people of Color. Check Paris is Burning for dets, or better yet the amazing Butch Queens up in Pumpsby Marlon Bailey, or the already legendary FX series Pose). In the ballroom scene, realness names a very specific form of performance (appearing cisgender and heterosexual within the schema of class and race denoted by the category). It’s a term that speaks to the lived experiences of ballroom members within our heteronormative, capitalistic, White-centered world, and it’s also a term that identifies a form of agency ballroom members deploy to blend and thus protect themselves in hostile public areas.
On Drag Race, realness is none of those things. Its a piece of candy, a term that’s fun to say and identifies the fabulousness or success or outlandishness or cleverness of a particular lewk. Queens speak of doing “baby bear realness” (s7, ep6) when their outfit successfully makes them look like they were mauled to death, or “skunk Cinderella realness” (s6, ep7) to note the fierceness of their stripy-hair-and-ballroom-dress ensemble. Oh I got others:
Alien robotic venereal disease realness (s9, ep9)
Dead dog realness (s6, ep7)
X-men weird angel devil realness (s9, ep4)
Punk unicorn realness (s8, ep3)
eskimo style yeti ski fish realness (s10, ep4)
That’s my mama realness (s8, ep8)
Carnival pregnancy realness (s4, ep10)
real lion taming realness (s5, ep2)
Helen Keller drowning realness (no idea) (s5, ep1)
Realness is a bit of fun on Drag Race. But also Drag Race is a mass commercial product and rating powerhouse. And when the show uses realness with the frequency it does (in about 62% the episodes in a given season), its appropriating something from a minority subculture without credit, then commodifying it into a sellable product sans the meaning that’s so significant to the community that created the term.
I love Drag Race, maybe you do too. But if we continue to love it, we’ll have to do so with our eyes wide open. Check my article, “RuPaul Realness: The Neoliberal Resignifcation of Ballroom Discourse” here in Social Semiotics if you or your university has access to Taylor & Francis journal publications, or contact me personally if you don’t.
And remember, if you can’t love [analyzing things that are entertaining to] yourself, how in the hell you gonna [be critical of when people] love anything else.
Gird yourselves for (yet another) rant about my best frenemy, the Young Adult adventure novel. As you may remember from my least popularblogposts, I read YA literature for fun. The kind where a young female protagonist lives in a fantasy or dystopic world and goes on some sort of physically taxing adventure. You know, your standard Hunger Games or Divergent fare. I like these books mainly because I like the heroine: she’s strong and clever and brave and talented. She’s a survivor and generally the adventure she goes on helps her friends or family, often also her town or kingdom.
yes I’m back with this shit again
YA books with this type of heroine seem pretty feminist-leaning, but they’re not always. A good amount of the time, the feministy heroine is plunked into a storyline that subtly normalizes racist and sexist cultural standards, and gives a pass to patriarchal gender relations. Only she doesn’t know it, and I suspect neither do the authors. (I hope) most people don’t create media with the intent of replicating the shittier parts of our cultural system. But what ends up happening is that the awesome heroine–a figure that is highly identifiable and consumable to many young adult women–accepts, responds to, and does pretty well in this kinda messed up world.
We in the feminist media studies biz spend a great deal of time illuminating how media producers create seemingly great media that roundabout perpetuates racist, sexist, and heterosexist ideologies. Laura Mulvey described how women’s bodies are positioned in films (for instance, every Hitchcock film) as sex objects to be desired and consumed by both the male protagonist and the audience that gazes at her through the point-of-view of the male protagonist. bell hooks analyzed how Paris is Burning director Jennie Livingston took an important cultural ritual in the lives of poor queer people of Color and presented it as an entertaining spectacle that White audiences laughed at. In both cases, well-intentioned content creators ultimately created a sexist and racist product because they were not careful with how they crafted their media world.
Alison Bechdel developed a simple rubric for gauging if a film creates a relevant context for women. Does the film have 1) two or more women; 2) that talk to each other; 3) about things other than a man. This test does not evaluate if the film is good, progressive, or feminist. It simply highlights the world of the film in regards to women characters and their holistic value to the plot.
I’ve started my own checklist for the YA novel with a female protagonist. It doesn’t identify if the book is good or even if its feminist. It only evaluates if the world under the heroine’s coat of shiny female empowerment perpetuates sexism, racism, or oppressive heterosexual gender roles.
Ok, the heroine is cool as fuck but…
1) Are there other women around too, or is the heroine mainly surrounded by male figures that are unique and complex like her? If there are other women, are they mainly a) evil queens; b) calculating mothers; c) vapid social climbers; or d) false friends/betrayers? Follow up:did the protagonist have a really great female friend who died or left, conveniently leaving her in need of a new essential partnership?
2) Speaking of the male love interest… Does he sometimes override the heroine’s own self-determination for reasons he feels are valid but she has told him are not? Is he at one point extremely physically or verbally cruel but frames it as something he must do to keep her away from worse danger? When she is in a situation of power over him, does he find ways to carve out power by withholding affection or abandoning her? Does she assume these actions are not because he is a dick but because she is not desirable or has made some type of capital relationship mistake?
3) Does the heroine gets some kind of makeover (in discord with her overall character) and her body is then marked by the male love interest, male friends, or others though stares or comments about her beauty? Does this serve to imply she is more beautiful in feminine trappings than in the clothing/hairstyles she wears for hero tasks?
4) Is there a part where the heroine’s emotional weakness rather than her physical strength and talent becomes the focus? Is that emotional weakness framed as a marker of her realizing “real feelings” for the male love interest? Does he momentarily engage and then withdraw affection in ways that encourage this emotional disorder?
5) Is the heroine’s age clearly articulated as 16 or 17 [under the legal age of consent for the majority of the book’s readership] but the male love interest is ambiguously older or described as a mature adult male? Does this adult male love interest sometimes get really mad and punch the wall close to the teenage heroine’s head or body?
6) Are the sex scenes riddled with creepy phrases such as “he took her mouth” or he “desired to bed her” or whatever other things might seem old timey sexy but enforce his sexual dominance? Is the sexual content triggered by him lecturing/yelling at her for “bad” behavior, or soothing her about some body or emotional insecurity that she could have worked through on her own timeline but that he pushes her to disclose or deal with at his lead?
7) Is rape, sexual assault, or disempowering forms of sex work/prostitution brought up as a threat to the heroine’s physicality or honor but never addressed in terms of how sexual domination is a persistent means of dehumanizing and controlling all women? In other words, is sexual assault a scary shadow used to show the heroine’s ultimate bravery and strength, or is it something the heroine understands is a cultural method of gender oppression that must be dealt with on a larger scale?
8) The heroine probably takes on a masculine or men’s job, skill, or social position. Is she able to do so because everyone feels these gender rules are arbitrary and many women are of a like mind, or is it because she is unique and awesome among women and can do something other women don’t want to or just won’t?
9) And just so we’re not dirtbags ourselves, let’s note if the heroine is described with White features like red hair and pale skin. Oh she is, I’m so surprised. Ok, are all the other main characters described with similar features/skin/hair for no clear geographical reason? Is the only description of someone not White a minor character or group, and are they described as having “golden brown” skin?
I read Young Adult books. I know. It started with the Hunger Games, which is completely legit. I moved into Divergent and they made that into movies [now TV movies, sorry Shailene Woodley] so that was ok. Then suddenly I was purchasing anything that was YA and written as a series and set in a different world and had a female protagonist that goes on adventures. Many of these books are not really that good. But I have my reasons for reading them, reasons connected to what a student once wrote on a class evaluation: “everything we talk about in class is negative.” I teach social sciences, so we analyze society. Society often sucks. Even when we talk about cool things like America’s Next Top Model, I make them identify and explain how the show perpetuates racist and neoliberal ideologies. I know. But media awareness is an important skill. You can love what you love but you must always love with your eyes open.
Anyway, I read Young Adult fantasy series books because sometimes you just can’t read more about Aleppo and the prison industrial complex. Sometimes you just gotta’ read about a 17 year old girl with like magic powers or whatever. This is embarrassing but not really my point. Let me get to my point. Right after this next paragraph. Sarah J. Maas’ Throne of Glass series is one I read. This is a very popular series but Maas is writing for a YA audience (and I guess some college professors too) so the characters can do immature things, and also there are plot holes sometimes, and there is a lot of crying. Lots of people cry. Oh and everyone has magic. And everyone is beautiful. And everyone is either 18 or 500 years old. I just read the newest book, Empire of Storms, because that’s what I do. Everything blew up at the end and I was so pissed that I actually went online to check reviews and see if other readers felt the same.
Here’s where I look like an asshole and the future looks a little brighter. Judging from the profile pictures, I’d wager most of the reviews I read were by teen girls and young women. Were they pissed at the ending like me? Nah, they were pissed at the lack of racial and sexual diversity, and the derisive sexual content. I know.
“This book has no diversity whatsoever. Every single main character is straight and white af [as fuck]. SJM [Sarah J. Maas] has like 50 pov characters between her two series, you’d think some of them would be a little different right? Right? Wrong” (Kimi).
Many criticisms were about how almost all the characters in this book were described as white people. Reviewers had iterations on this basic point: if the author could create a world with witches and fairies and magic, why couldn’t she describe like five of her bazillion main characters as something other than “golden” skinned? Excellent point, young reviewers. Double points for the phrase “straight and white af.”
af
“in her previous books we’ve seen only one woman of color and no gay or lesbian person. Whether the publisher insisted or she herself decided to show ’em all, but EoS [Empire of Storms] is full of queers. And all of them are dead or unimportant and shows up only in one or two sentences. Plus the only bi character romances a woman. So what was that? ‘I have gays and lesbians! Fuck off!’ scream? Diversity for the sake of diversity is a mock. If you don’t feel like developing queer-relationships than stay away from this theme” (Katerina).
Many reviewers noted how only a few marginal characters had queer sexual identities or desires, and only one main character declares a bi-sexual identity but then is specifically put into a heterosexual romance. Double points to this reviewer for shredding fake liberalism: the inclusion of queer characters as a nod to diverse representation but without treating their relationship stories as valuable as heterosexual pairings. Visibility does not necessarily mean progressiveness. Very excellent point, young reviewers.
“I’m not against these [sex] scenes, but also didn’t need them. They didn’t really fit the tone and even felt a bit forced into the story in several places. I actually wish the page time had been spent elsewhere. (So basically, YES, you can skip them and it won’t affect anything). If the sexual content is what’s stopping you from reading this story, the pages in the US hardcover to skip are…” (Cait).
Overwhelmingly, reviewers said the harlequin romance-esque love scenes simply got in the way of the storytelling. I’m still working through why so many books written for a young female audience have these sex scenes, but it’s clearly connected to how the media so often handles young women’s bodies and desires. In our society, young women are told that they should long for the objectifying sexual attentions of men. Of course, young women are punished for being sexual (that includes reading sex scenes), but there is an overarching cultural ideology that says young women want to be sexy and desired because they know these qualities will transform them into socially powerful adults. So I suspect these harlequin romance-esque sex scenes are encoded into young women’s literature because media producers assume their readership identifies with the female protagonists, and thus will want the female protagonists to be highly sexually desired by men, and thus powerful women.
The sex scenes were not “rape romancey” or otherwise sexually humiliating (although I have problems with certain gross verbs and adjectives Maas uses). Many reviewers simply noted that that they added little to the plot and could the author use that space to work more on character development and battle scenes? Double points to this reviewer for actually including the page numbers of the scenes so people can just skip over them.
I spend about three months in my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies class teaching college students how to do this exact type of critical work, and also why it’s important to practice apprehending the complexities of a given social situation, to hone the tools necessary to make educated, layered evaluations. Students can still love America’s Next Top Model, but they never get to watch it again without awareness.
I don’t want to imply that I thought teens and young adults couldn’t come up with these criticisms, only that I was surprised by the sharpness and ease with which so many hit these points in otherwise generally positive book reviews. That is, that they were able to love what they loved but with their eyes open to critical issues of race, sexual orientation, and sexual representation. 2016 was a hard year, and no doubt 2017 will get harder. But my faith in the future has moved up a notch.
The New York Times says we should want a bitch in the White House. Or, a little more specifically (and a little less clickbaity), writing for the New York Times opinion page, Andi Zeisler of Bitch Media proposes embracing the term that’s been so maliciously lobbied against Hillary Clinton. Zeisler’s argument is that Clinton’s called a bitch because she doesn’t put being likable above all else and because she has presidential-level tenacity and ambition. Zeisler evokes Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s 2008 declaration that “bitches get stuff done” and asks “what if that’s not a bad thing”?
I like where Zeisler’s going but, before jumping on the bitch bandwagon, I want to take a little stroll down language, meaning, and reclamation lane.
Most words are what we in the biz call sign systems or sign chains: they communicate complex and extended meanings. Take the term “public bathroom.” In the U.S., a public bathroom probably won’t have a bath but we all know what’s in there and what it’s for. Here’s another one: “9/11.” It’s just two numbers. But for those in the U.S. of a certain age, these two numbers immediately evoke images of death, destruction, fear, loss, and war. The meaning tied into those numbers is much more than just the sum of the numbers themselves. Here’s one more: “feminist.” It characterizes a person who has particular social and institutional views, politics, and goals. And yet when a person is publicly called a feminist, it might have little to do with her political leanings and everything to do with how she is perceived as shrill, unfeminine, opinionated, and man-hating. In other words, a bitch.
Some words are loaded with histories of abuse and degradation. Some words were created for the explicit purpose of dehumanizing and justifying oppression. You know that old kiddy rhyme “sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurts me”? That rhyme is BULLSHIT. Words can absolutely hurt. They can invalidate. They can belittle. And, very significantly, some words are used to incite and justify violence.
Reclamation is the project of taking the shitty part of a particular term and dispersing it, then replacing with more positive stuff. Reclamation has been fairly successful with the term “queer.” Sixty years ago (let’s get real, twenty years ago), queer was not something you could just call people. Or actually you could if you wanted to demean or belittle that person. Today, I teach for a Queer Studies program; in my classroom, the term is not only acceptable, it’s considered more appropriate than some other terms. Queer is now often used to give people respect and humanity, to create inclusion. My 69-year-old mother used to avoid using that term like the fucking plague, and she now proudly tells people her daughter teaches queer theory. Queer shows the power of reclamation.
Now let’s look at the N-word. That’s right, I’m not even gonna write it. That’s because this term has not been successfully reclaimed. Mass inhumanity and violence happened alongside this term and, while some have tried to bend it toward an inclusion and family meaning, it’s not been able to fully shake the filthy legacy. It’s unusable by ethical White people, and still controversial when used by Black people (see Larry Wilmore’s Correspondents Dinner speech).*
I don’t know exactly why some terms have a chance at reclamation and others just don’t. I’m guessing it’s an intricate balance of the histories and legacies poured into the word plus time, distance, and respect. My point is this: reclamation has a ton of potential but isn’t a guaranteed success. Some words never shake free.
Back to the bitch. Zeisler acknowledges that people are never gonna stop calling Clinton a bitch (cause haters, also cause gendered expectations). So Zeisler’s like, cool let’s just fucking reclaim this term then. Let Clinton embrace her bitchness, let the term signal her get-things-done attitude and her ceiling-breaking pathway to the Presidency. Zeisler urges us to frame Clinton as “the bitch America needs.”
I found this by typing “Clinton bitch meme” into Google images. If I can give you one piece of advice today: don’t do this.
Great. Cool. I like it. In theory. But also, bitch is deeply historically and socially situated. It doesn’t just name a tough person who doesn’t fall into gender line, it’s systematically used to invalidate women by dehumanizing them, effectively reducing them to a breeding animal in need of control. Bitch is also frequently used to create an allowable context for violence, rape, and murder against women. That’s why every Law & Order creeper says: “the bitch got what she deserved.”
Not everything is equivalent, but let’s play the equivalent game. If mass publics were systematically calling President Obama a “porch monkey” (yes, I know some did and yes, I know, GROSS), I wonder how many articles would declare that he should embrace and reclaim the term because his Blackness is a strength and a valuable asset to his Presidency. I’m guessing that few people asked President Obama to channel his strength and value through a really disgusting racist term.
There’s power in flipping negatives into positives and simultaneously justifying behavior that doesn’t fall into stratified gender ideals. But I don’t know if we can just flip the script on bitch, or if Clinton should feel obligated to embrace this label as something that empowers her and validates her kick-assness. I’m not sure if bitch can be totally reclaimed, and I’m not totally convinced it should be.
But this is just one bitch’s opinion.
*rather than saying “the N-word,” some of my Black students will replace the term with the word “ninja.” I don’t know exactly why this happens, but it’s clever-as-fuck.
Ok, let’s discuss. This is from UK-based Bodyform, a company selling period pads and liners. It’s part of Bodyform’s Red.fit campaign, which is about encouraging women to be active even when menstruating. The commercial is getting a lot of media attention for one overtly expressed reason, and another that’s less clearly articulated but still significant.
#1: it’s a period commercial that shows blood. Usually period commercials represent periods with blue liquid or ice tea or whatever else might be excellent stand-ins for expelled uterine lining. In this commercial, we’re not seeing expelled uterine lining (we know that periods are mainly not blood but expelled uterine lining, right?) but we are seeing bodies expelling a substance similar in color and viscosity (kind of) to periods.
#2: it’s a period commercial where women are doing real active shit rather than just chilling in a white room, or maybe swimming in a white bathing suit, or maybe getting ready for a romantic dinner date with hubby because everyone with periods is a cisgender heterosexual woman. Actually, it’s pretty cool that this commercial positively represents active female bodies and also positively represents the byproducts of that activity: dirt, blood, broken skin.
So these are two things to think about. And here are some other things to think about too.
#3: this is feminist consumerism. What is feminist consumerism you ask, because it sounds amazing!?! Actually, it’s capitalistic manipulation. It’s when a company gets you to buy their product by selling it via feminist or otherwise liberal and progressive messages and images about women. To be clear: the product does not have to align with feminism. The product might actually reinforce sexist ideas, or racist ideas, or limited ideas about gender. But we’re supposed to buy it anyway because of how its marketed. Here’s perpetrator numero uno: Dove sells beauty products. Women are supposed to buy beauty products to feminize themselves, make themselves pleasing to others, alter their bodies to better conform to hegemonic beauty standards. Here’s how Dove sells its beauty products:You’re perfect inside and out, don’t change. Except change how you smell and your natural oils and your wrinkles. Do it with Dove.
Ok, you get the picture. Feminist consumerism is the selling of something that might be entirely unrelated to feminist ideals or goals via words and images that our society associates with feminist ideals and goals.
#4: feminist ideals and goals are popularly depicted with that ol’ post-feminist chestnut “Girl Power.” Girl power women are strong, fit, ass-kickers, and desirably hegemonic too. This might be represented by, say, good looking, thin ciswomen trail-running or surfing or rock climbing. When these women get hurt, what do they do? They get up and continue on without crying or stopping to bandage that nasty head wound.
…except the blood from a gaping head wound.
It is awesome that these women can be physically strong and really good at sports (and apparently medieval knightery as well). But that’s not the only vision of feminism, and it’s actually a pretty privileged version of feminist ideals too.
#5: last but not at all least: that cool-as-fuck background music is “Native Puppy Love” by the cool-as-fuck A Tribe Called Red: three Indigenous individuals who mix native music, often PowWow singing, chanting, and drumming, with dubstep. A Tribe Called Red is cool-as-fuck and you should learn more about them.
A Tribe Called Red is getting some commercial visibility here and I hope some dollars too. Their music is all about Indigenous people using their own local or culture-specific music and performance practices to create new art. Their work is also a means for native people to expose non-native people to native culture, instead of what usually happens, which is White people appropriating, reducing, and commodifying native culture. But also, A Tribe Called Red is not credited in the commercial. And whereas A Tribe Called Red use images in its videos and during shows that highlight native bodies or deconstruct White-created images of native bodies, this song is laid under images of what appear to be non-native women, many of whom are engaging in activities associated with colonization (ballet obv, but also the knight thing is a bit crusadey for me).
Welp, off to colonize brown people.
Conclusion: is this commercial super cool or super problematic? I dunno. It’s using feminist tropes to get me to consume pads. But pads are used for a physical rather than a beatification process, and they’re not really a trendy or super expensive product either. The commercial is associating women’s bodies with blood and dirt and injury, but we aren’t supposed to see this as vile or even unfeminine. The relationship between how we should feel about women doing bloody activities and women with periods is clear: it’s not gross, it’s awesome. But also, am I going to buy this product because I want to be one of those kick-ass, tough-as-nails, bloody, post-feminist ladies with expensive workout clothes and a soundtrack of cool PowWow dubstep as the background to my White cis life? I JUST DON’T FUCKING KNOW.
Every year I get bad evaluations from students who are pissed that I’ve told them “the social sciences doesn’t offer answers, only questions.” Yes, they hate that. What it means is that value doesn’t always reside in the black or the white of a conclusion. There’s value in the ability to see and to name the gray, to understand what you’re consuming and why. Can I tell you to buy or not buy this product? To celebrate or revile it on social media? No. What I can offer you is all those critical thinking synapses we just built. And that’s cool too.
Last week, I realized I didn’t know when the next installment of the Divergent film series, Insurgent, was coming out. Turns out, five months ago. The Saucy Scholar cannot account for this unforgivable lapse in pop culture consumption (actually I can: university faculty position). But I’ve watched it now. Spoiler Alert: it’s terrible. The special effects are hokey, key parts of Tris’ and Four’s inner struggles have been changed, and it’s focused way too much around this weird simulation tube chair thing=>
But the worst part is the romance between Tris and Four. I understand this is a key part of the books and essential to the plot. In the first film, quite a few love scenes were cut out or glossed over. I like to believe this was related to the production choice of aging the male love interest from 18 to 24. In the book, Tris is 16 and Four is 18; in fact, the significance of this two year age gap comes up repeatedly. In the film, Tris is still 16. And whereas Theo James (who plays Four) is actually 28 and is hard pressed to come off as young as 24, Shailene Woodley (who plays Tris) is actually 23 but has NO PROBLEM looking and acting 16. For example, Woodley makes baby bird squeaking sounds when her character is upset. And, in Insurgent, Woodley’s hair is not the angled bob from the book but a choppy boy cut that makes her look even younger… and kind of like a boy band member.So what’s my issue? It’s not that Woodley looks boyish or androgynous with short hair. In fact, I like this slightly aesthetically different version of the female super hero ass-kicker. Yes, she’s white and thin and able-bodied and hegemonically beautiful (I did say slightly). But aside from a few plunging necklines and one scene where her bare back is exposed (apparently, in a post-apocalyptic world, people don’t wear bras under their zip-front vests), Tris is not hyper-feminized in that typical way super heroines ususally are…
You know what’s practical for crime fighting? A pony tail.
Also a plus: if you kind of squint, you could almost read Tris and Four as a male-male couple, or a butch male and someone who presents as genderqueer. By the way, this is actually a resistant media reading technique Nikki Sullivan (2000) calls the “gay gaze”: it’s where you choose to see queer subtext in an overwhelmingly heteronormative piece of media. You know, for spice.
I know you’re gay gazing.
I also don’t have a ideological issue with the romantic pairing of individuals of differing ages. However, I will point out that in our contemporary Western society, age is used (rightly or wrongly) to gauge maturity, competence, and consent. Tris is under 18, and Four is six years older than 18. So this particular eight-year age difference—16 to 24 rather than, say, 30 to 38—does translate to us as socially significant.
So then, what’s my beef? Saucy readers will be unsurprised to learn that it’s the nonchalant way producers construct a 16-year-old female character as the object of adult male sexual desire. As I’ve discussed before, the postfeminist female figure is an independent ass-kicker—smart and competent—and also super sexy. That super sexy quality is easily identified when others (mainly men) sexually desire her. Karin A. Martin and Emily Kazyak (2009) did a study on children’s G-Rated films and noted how female protagonists were ideal characters not only when they were awesome, but also when male characters lusted after them. In a nutshell, women are both valued and valuable when men find them sexy. This is a very heteronormative theory because not all women desire men or are the objects of male desire. But our society is very heteronormative, yo.
So we place value on the sexiness of women, and sexiness can be identified in media when male characters lust after or sexually gaze at female characters. Second piece of the puzzle: this value formula is for youthful female bodies. In this context, I mean young. Very rarely in our media culture are older women labeled sexy, feminine, or beautiful because those particular qualities are tied to youthfulness. Evidence: Amy Schumer’s spot-on “Last Fuckable Day” skit. More evidence: every movie where a male protagonist ends up with a woman played by a female actor half his age. So if beauty is tied to youth, and female worth is tied to sexiness, and sexiness is connoted by male desire, then we’re growing a culture that doesn’t bat an eye when very young women and girls are sexualized. Lolita anyone?
Academic rock star Rosalind Gill (2007) talks about the “deliberate sexualization of children (girls)” and “the ‘girlification’ of adult women” in popular media (151). She argues that the valuation of female youth perpetuates a cultural sentiment that it’s normal for female children to be “desirable sexual icons” (ibid). And while the sexualization of young female bodies happens across race and ethnicity (in fact, to a worse extent for Women of Color), when it happens in Insurgent, it further builds Tris into the ideal female figure: she’s white and thin and able-bodied and hegemonically beautiful, and she has value—as evidenced by this adult male sexual interest in her:
Just your typical 18 year old dude.
Ok, so what’s my point? There are a lot of problems with Insurgent, but I doubt too many will focus on the infantalization and sexualization of the main female character. Why? Because our media has taught us to read older men’s desire for younger female bodies as not just normal, but actually a form of female empowerment. I like this Young Adult trend of centering plots around competent and adventurous young women (Katniss Everdeen is my patronus). But Rosalind Gill astutely warns us “on one hand, young women are hailed through a discourse of ‘can-do girl power,’ yet on the other hand, their bodies are powerfully reinscribed as sexual objects” (163). By portraying Tris as a less-than-adult female while at the same time the object of adult male desire, film producers are reproducing and perpetuating an invisible and insidious cultural trope: female youth is powerful because it’s sexy. Check where empowerment comes from, yo.
*Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.2 (2007). 147-166.
I know that you know that enough has been written and said about Caitlyn Jenner. Lots of it good. Some of it sexist. Some definately thought provoking. But I just read this NYT article and, frankly, I’m pissed off. Please add this “woman=vagina=struggle” argument to my Saucy Shit List, which also includes this Feminist Wire argument about how only fucked up people care more about genitals than “chemistry.” These articles are opposite sides of the same coin: both make exclusionary decisions about what is and is not proper behavior, bodies, feelings. Then they use those ideas to explain why people who don’t feel the same are assholes. This is not cool.
Saucy Shit List Exhibit A: this NYT opinion piece called “What Makes a Woman?”* According to Elinor Burkett, Caitlyn Jenner is big fat FAKER because she expresses her womanhood as high femme. Burkett believes Jenner has reduced being a woman to “nonsense” such as wearing thick mascara and a cleavage-boosting corset, and walking around with nail polish until it chips off. What does make a woman? According to Burkett, its a) a vagina and b) the from-birth systemic oppression of vagina-wielders.
Important Point 1: there would be no such thing as trans if our society didn’t divide bodies into two sex categories, and then limit the every move of those bodies to two restrictive genders. If a body’s sex designation didn’t mean shit about that person’s gender identity, then that person would just do whatever the fuck they wanted and identify however the fuck they wanted and that would be that. But its not. One of two genders is thrust onto our bodies when we’re born.
Actually, while still in utero… enter gender reveal cakes!
That gender is so tightly entwined with our original sex designation that men can’t wear nail polish without getting shit for it, and they can’t use female pronouns and still comfortably identify as men. Woman doesn’t mean vagina. It means having your body inextricably mashed into a bi-gender role.
Important Point 2: Obv gender is a social construction because it can be done by any body (drag queens anyone?). But sex (as in male and female) is also social construction. You heard me. Sure, we all have unique, specific, functioning bodies. But the way we take those bodies and jam them into one of two sex categories is all society. Actually, lots of bodies don’t match up. It’s estimated that 1 in 1000 bodies don’t fit neatly into our bi-sex system. These intersexed bodies have non-binary genital structures, or they don’t have the match among hormones, gonads, and chromosomes we use to determine male or female. Don’t believe me that 1 in 1000 people are intersexed? Let me ask you a question: do you know what everyone’s genitals look like? Everyone in the world? What about everyone’s chromosomes, hormones, and gonads? You test those? And when the people who do see a lot of genitals and do test a lot of genetics—namely the medical community— identify an intersexed child, they do immediate genital surgery and/or pump hormones into the kid, often just weeks after birth. So yes, we make sex.
My dear NYT article, to say vagina=woman is to say that bi-sex social categories are the reality of bodies. Actually, we take lots of different types of bodies and overlay bi-sex onto them. And then we say “now you have a sex designation, do your gender dance!” The social gender dance is, in fact, the way we get to the category of female sex. And Jenner is doing it. Doing it like a boss.
Saucy Shit List Exhibit B: this Feminist Wire College Feminisms piece called “Dating Your Genitals.” Quinn Israel *seems* to take the direct opposite position of Burkett by critiquing those who define their sex, love, or relationship desires according to genitals. The gist is: “in the age of strap-ons, why do genitals matter, and why are certain types of body appearances even important? Those who choose their partners based on this shit (rather than CHEMESTRY) are either slaves to the system or transphobe assholes.”
Ok, this article’s not specifically about Jenner, but it’s a good example of some of the queer activist commentary deriding Jenner for using her money and privilege to present herself as a hegemonic femme white woman. Ie, Jenner is cast as either a slave to the system or an asshole that’s choosing to pass in a way that many trans people can’t, don’t, or won’t.
Important Point 3: If someone really likes flesh-and-blood penis and that’s more important than connection or chemistry or whatever, then fine. If someone has lived their whole life in a sex and gender system and their limited idea about sexuality has become embodied (a part of their identities that actually trigger bodily sensations), then cool. If someone has grown up dreaming about wearing corsets and mascara and nail polish until it chips, then let her do her.
Important Point 4: It bears repeating: Jenner should be able to do whatever the fuck she wants in terms of identity expression. Telling Caitlyn Jenner (or anyone else) how she should or should not/can or cannot do her is the same fucked up shit as our bi-gender and sex culture telling Bruce Jenner he couldn’t wear nail polish till it chipped off, or telling gay people they shouldn’t want to have sex with people who have similar genitals.
My dear Feminist Wire article, your problem shouldn’t be with people wanting a certain type of partner genital makeup or sex act or identity. Just like the problem shouldn’t be with Jenner’s gender choices. Its not identities or expressions or gender or sex or sexuality that’s the problem–its the social structures that rank some of these things over others. Women who exclusively date men with penises are more accepted in our society. Women who put on mascara and a corset and nail polish are more valued in our society. So instead of policing people’s choices, let look for ways to make all partner (or non-partner) choices equally legal and socially valid. And lets look for ways to make Jenner’s high femme equal to those individuals who do not have the desire, money, or access to present themselves in a similar way. And here’s a good place to start: #MyVanityFairCover
* The correct answer is: calling yourself a woman makes you one. The end.
Let me tell you a story. I woke up. I checked Facebook. A friend posted Taylor Swift’s new music video, Bad Blood. I watched it. I went on Twitter. Media-scholar-extraordinaire-turned-Buzzfeed-reporter Anne Helen Petersen posted about Bad Blood. Behold the exchange:
That’s a lot of academic class/pop culture sass packed into 140 characters. So let me take it back a bit. Taylor Swift is one of those “I’m not a feminist oh wait I just learned what feminism is and I’m a feminist” kind of feminists. This is great. We need more feminists defining themselves as feminists (I’m looking at you, Shailene Woodley). In fact, Swift attributes her understanding of feminism and evolution of feminist self-identification to pal Lena Dunham. So what is Bad Blood? It’s a music video full of badass-looking, dangerous-cool fighter women, played by many of Swift’s big Hollywood friends: Cindy Crawford, Mariska Hargitay, Selena Gomez, Jessica Alba. And yes, Lena Dunham.*
To recap: Swift is a woman who has publically minted herself feminist. She makes a video filled with famous powerful women known for playing powerful or feminist characters. All the female characters in the video are cool as fuck and dangerous as hell. BY GOD THIS VIDEO IS FEMINIST. Oh wait, no, its not. It’s a “postfeminist girl power montage of skinny girls who think ass-kicking in high heels and big earrings is not a poor idea.”
Our skin is unprotected from this fire backdrop. But we look amaz
So what does this 140 character Tweet mean exactly? Let’s break it down… 140 character Tweet style!
Postfeminist: 1) There was historical gender inequality but, because of past activism, we no longer need feminism. Needed it, did it, in post world. Yay?
2) Women’s educational and professional barriers are not systemic and so can be overcome with individual hard work. Work harder, ladies!
Girl power: Female empowerment exemplified via independence, self-sufficiency, and physical strength/violence/ass-kicking. Sisterhood here somewhere too
Montage: A film sequence of pretty pictures that speeds up time and is generally without substance.
Skinny girls: Postfeminist woman’s power is tied to the physical ideal: she has a hard body, skinny body, feminine body, light-skinned body. Hairless too:
Ass-kicking in high heels and big earrings: 1) Postfeminist woman’s power is tied to the social ideal: she is sexy, desirable, consumer of $$ products, and has a “cool girl” attitude.
2) Impractical crime fighting accoutrement:
Saucy Scholar conclusion: Bad Blood could be worse. And it could be better. See, Bad Blood exemplifies a very surface and superficial understanding of feminism. An ideology that women are empowered when they can ride motorcycles and throw knives, and wear latex outfits and high heels while doing it. This is not feminism. This is postfeminism. Because, sure, Swift is empowered. She’s rich as fuck and famous as fuck and she’s White and skinny and pretty. And yes, she’s called a slut because of her dating practices and people write sexist things about her because her songs are about her personal relationships. But she can overcome this with her money and her celebrity and her hegemonic looks. And all her skinny, pretty, wealthy celebrity friends who populate the video can too.
But this type of postfeminist sensibility doesn’t exemplify and doesn’t even begin to address a range of feminist issues. For example, women who don’t have the socio-economic status to consume products that would allow them to look awesomely cool. Or bodies will never achieve the hard, sexy, light-skinned ideal, not matter what they do. Or the systemic issue of portraying a woman’s sexuality as an object for entertainment and consumption rather than an expression of her own embodied desires.
I don’t think Bad Blood is harming anyone. Actually, I think it’s kind of fun; I’ve watched it like six times (ok, two of those times were to make GIFs). And Swift has taken what is basically a terrible song and made it into a hit. Bravo. But we shouldn’t think of Bad Blood as anything more than those things. It’s not feminist. It’s just some postfeminist eye candy.
And just FYI, if you take my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies class, this is what you’ll encounter during week ten:
* Actually, my favorite part of the video was Lena Dunham: she didn’t appear in uber-feminine dress or makeup, and was only shot from the shoulders up, smoking a cigar.
[Warning: discussion of rape, and–clearly–Game of Thrones spoilers]
If you’re into pop culture and/or social media, then you have been inundated with commentary about what went down on the last episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.” Specifically, producers decided to add a rape scene. Another one. It was the rape of Sansa Stark.
Yea, it’s this motherfucker again.
First the internet blew up with people who were outraged. Then the internet blew up with people who felt this outcry was unfounded because—for once—Game of Thrones handled a rape scene with gravity and respect. This is high praise for a show that’s known for salacious, body-bearing scenes of sexual violence. Rather than actually watching Sansa be raped, we watch Theon Greyjoy as he’s forced to witness the rape of a person akin to his little sister. As I’ve discussed before, this is the better way for media producers to portray scenes of sexual violence against women.
I certainly agree that this rape scene could have been—and has been in the past—handled much worse by HBO. So maybe HBO deserves a cookie. Or maybe it doesn’t.
Internet blow up around Game of Thrones is not new. The murder of Ned Stark. The Red Wedding. Joffrey’s demise. These scenes elicited scores of blogs, posts, and articles. But unlike the scenes I’ve just listed, the Sansa rape didn’t happen in George R.R. Martin’s books. Not with Sansa Stark. Rather, it was Sansa’s childhood friend, Jeyne Poole. Poole is a minor character who—after the murder of Ned Stark—is taken and trained as a sex worker, then passed off as Arya Stark and married to Ramsay Bolton. And yes, the consummation scene is scary and upsetting, largely because of how Theon Greyjoy is forced to play a role in it.
Know how I know all this? I’ve read all the Song of Ice and Fire books that Game of Thrones is based on. Yes, all of them. All the way through. And a lot of fucked up shit happens in these books. Rapes. A lot of rapes. I would guestimate hundreds of rapes. This is a conservative guestimate. Last year I was talking to a female friend who had also read the books and I mentioned how I was haunted by some of the rapes and frequently recalled horrific details. And my friend quickly said, “me too, me too.” This is first to highlight the lingering affect rape and sexual violence scenes can have on women. Second, to point out that there are an almost infinite number of rape scenes that Game of Thrones could have chosen from. But this is now the third—yes third—time producers have created a rape of a major female character in addition to those offered by the books.
So rather than debating how HBO handled the scene, I’d like to consider why the scene was added. As of yet, the Sansa in Martin’s books has not been raped. I find this significant because Martin’s not afraid of writing a rape scene and Sansa’s under constant threat of sexual violence. Yet she has—so far—been able to play the game of thrones in such a way so as to avoid this. HBO’s Game of Thrones took that away. Why? Well, one could argue that it was for coherence and consolidation. The Jeyne-Poole-as-Arya plotline is another piece to add to an already complicated puzzle. Or we could join the ranks of Amanda Marcotte and The Happy Feminist and argue that that it shows the “grotesque realities” of power and war. Or we could side with George R.R. Martin himself, who explains that no one was actually raped because Sansa is a fictional character.
But I think these positions miss an important point. When Martin writes rapes into his books, they bother me. A lot. But when HBO adds more of them, they aren’t being true to the books, and I don’t believe they’re trying to be true to the story or the realities of war and power. I think they’re trying to shock and titillate. They’re trying to get us to watch more.
HBO is not Schindler’s List. Don’t get me wrong, many HBO shows are fantastically complex. But HBO is widely known for attracting viewers with the type of sexualized, gritty, violent content that other networks can’t offer. That’s why on Game of Thrones, Littlefinger tells his diabolically complex and evil stories while prostitutes have sex in the background.
This was literally the least graphic image I could find of this scene.
When HBO shows scenes of human degradation and sexual abuse, its not so we will realize how horrific this all is, and work to change or prevent it in our own culture. These scenes are marketing tools; interesting and beautiful plotlines laced with titillation, violence, horror, and pleasure. And that’s what Sansa’s rape was. HBO took a beloved (at least by me) young female character and did something horrible to her, for ratings. I agree with “Race for the Iron Throne” super expert Steven Attewell that this scene had no larger purpose because it “did nothing to reveal character, or advance the plot, or critique anything about Westerosi society or about our own conceptions of medieval society that hasn’t already been critiqued.” It was done for ratings.
And I get this media game. Because we’re all talking about it, aren’t we? HBO for the win. But rather than creating more of these horror-rape scenes, HBO producers might as well as have just chosen from the litany of rape scenes already built into the story. And if they don’t—if they make new ones—then I have a hard time saying that this is simply fiction, or simply the reality of war, or simply a proper handling of a rape. It’s a way to get audiences to keep coming back. By offering them new and fresh sexual violence against women.
On an unrelated note, Brienne of Tarth is my motherfucking jam
[warning: this post discusses sexual violence, and also has The Fall and Top of the Lake spoilers!]
I just finished The Fall on Netflix. Gillian Anderson’s a kick-ass lead who doesn’t conform to sexual gender norms. Jamie Dornan’s a creepy-handsome Irish serial killer with adorable children (confusing, I know). And there’s a good amount of sexual violence too, of course.
Where there are TV dramas, there are scenes of sexual violence. There’s an entire Law & Order franchise about it. Special Victims Unit is about sexually based offenses, and the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies. These are their stories. Bum-bum.
Could I argue this cultural connection has to do with the dramatic horror of sexual violence?* Sure I could. But I’d like to offer another interpretation. TV dramas with sexual violence are prevelant because they’re sexy. The shows aren’t sexy. The sexual violence is. Media producers make it that way.
Let’s bring in Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding/decoding, shall we? Media producers encode shit into media so that we—the viewers—relate, get excited, desire, and most importantly, continue to watch. In contemporary Western culture, a great way to get us invested in a TV show is to populate it with naked bodies. Thin ones that are muscled, and hairless, and beautiful, and light-skinned, and cisgender, and able-bodied. You know, hegemonic bodies. This is the tactic of all of HBO shows, no?
Exhibit A, B, and C: three people who are likely cold.
This tactic is not new. Burlesque, anyone? Contemporary Burlesque is actually an offshoot of historical U.S. Burlesque, which was an offshoot of U.S. Variety when Variety began transitioning into the family-friendly genre of Vaudeville. Burlesque shows were plays, stories, or a series of tableaus. Did I mention that the predominately White, curvy, women who performed in these shows did so flesh-colored leotards, or in other states of undress? They did. So audiences would get their entertainment, and get their sexy too. And guess what? This method still employed by media producers today!
Exhibit D: an impractical way to wash your vehicle.
Carl’s Jr. commercials say this: “consumer: pay attention to this ad! We will purchase your attention through the presentation of this woman’s idealized body for your sexual consumption. This is our gift to you. Now go buy our garbage food.” Even if we are not sexually attracted to women’s bodies, society hardcore pushes us to see these types of bodies as universally beautiful and sexy. Something to pay attention to. Something to enjoy.
Wanna know another popular way producers get this product into their shows? Through scenes of sexual violence. These scenes almost always contain a little T&A. Generally, both T and A is connected to a hegemonically beautiful woman. Who is being sexually victimized. In The Fall, the antagonist targets pretty, dark-haired professional women; and part of his crazy is that he cleans and poses them after he kills them. Did I mention that the bodies are cleaned and posed naked? And that we are treated to shot after shot of this naked body? And that when the cops come to collect the corpse, we get more shots of the victim’s naked, femininely posed body?
Want more evidence that our media encourages us to sexually ogle women as they are being or after they have been sexually victimized? At the 85th Oscar Awards, Seth MacFarlane sang “We Saw Your Boobs,” a song listing instances where MacFarlane (and the rest of the world) got to see the breasts of famous and accomplished female actors. Specifically, he lists four—yes four—instances where he got to see breasts during scenes of rape and sexual violence. He sings that these boob shots “made us feel excited and alive.”
There are two more things I wanna say, then I’ll be done. First, you can show the horror and degradation of sexual violence without also showing the naked body of the victim or survivor. Take another Netflix gem, Top of the Lake. In a flashback, we witness the protagonist—played by Elisabeth Moss—being gang raped. The producers could have shown Moss’ clothing being ripped off, revealing her body, her breasts. Moss is pretty popular, and this would have undoubtedly warranted a line in MacFarlane’s boob song. Instead, we see her trying to get away by running into darkness. We hear her screaming. And we watch her boyfriend laying on the ground after being beaten by the rapists, terrified and unable to help her. It’s a horrific scene. Later, we do see Moss’ breasts. In a consensual sex scene with her boyfriend.
Second, when producers create a scene of sexual violence that simultaneously encourages the ogling of the undressed female body, it trivializes sexual violence. It both normalizes these acts as mundane, and disassociates these acts from the actual people who are victimized. Law & Order: SVU used to be my guilty pleasure. Yes, this show is built around the display or description of bodies during and after acts of sexual violence. T&A with your L&O. But I really didn’t think too much about it. But if you follow The Saucy Scholar, you’ll know there was a shooting at my University last year. It was motivated by misogyny and sexual violence. And they made a Law & Order: SVU about it. I haven’t watched an episode since. I’m literally terrified I will accidently run into this episode. You see, I no longer have the privilege of separating this real act of sexual violence from that which is presented to me in my media.
Producers encode fucked up things into our media. Obv. But Stuart Hall also says that viewers can be active in how they decode their media. That is, we can recognize why unclothed female bodies are displayed so often during rape scenes. We can see how this works to desensitize us to the horror of the act, and encourages a rape culture where sexual violence appears to be a commonplace, thus lesser, violation. And we can be disgusted rather than titillated by this media tactic because of our consciousness about how it affects rape culture, and the affect it has on survivors of sexual violence.
*Just FYI, sexual violence absolutely does not include consensual sex acts such those practiced within BDSM.
As The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I settles into its theatrical sovereignty, I’ve been reflecting on how centralized fictional Young Adult (YA) heroines have become to our lexicon of female empowerment. Katniss Everdeen is the quintessential girl role model because we want girls to kick ass and take names! (At least, we want girls to strive to be the ass-kicking and name-taking type.)
I’m quintessential!
Under a heavy-handed cultural push for YA protagonists like Katniss to be female role models, there lies an insidious cultural ideology that goes by the name of postfeminism. In my biz (the teaching students biz and the blogging biz) I spend a lot of time talking about how postfeminism has permeated the female success story, and how it’s a dirty faker: its sexism and sexual objectification wrapped up in the liberalism of girl power. We love Katness because she’s a badass female. We are also invited to love Katniss because she’s a badass female who’s sexually wanted.
It should come as no surprise to you, dear readers, that I am a YA fiction junkie. I’ve read The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Uglies series. Aside from each having been (or rumored to be) the next book-turned-blockbuster franchise, these YA series share a common feature: a scrappy, tenacious, sixteen-year-old girl protagonist who is, ahem, not pretty. Yes, even Katniss.
Suzanne Collins describes Katniss as underdeveloped and malnourished. In Divergent, Veronica Roth characterizes Tris as plain, flat chested, and scrawny. As for Scott Westerfeld’s protagonist Tally, well, he named his book The Uglies.
THIS SHOULD BE AWESOME! In the midst of our culture ranking women’s beauty and sexualizing their bodies at ever-younger ages, it should rock that some of the most popular female characters don’t have beautiful faces or curvy figures. Unattractive-yet-awesome protagonists mean that girls who don’t feel pretty can relate to these characters. Moreover, it enables girls and young women to place value in traits like tenacity, problem solving, and an adventurous spirit. Katniss volunteers to take her sister’s place in the hunger games, Tris chooses to become a Dauntless initiate, and Tally treks through hundreds of miles of backcountry to find her friend. These qualities as not only valuable in the stories, its clear that we should value them.
This should be awesome. But Katniss, Tris, and Tally don’t stay not pretty, they get makeovers. Katniss is stripped of her body hair, her scars are removed, and she’s puffed into a Capital dream. Plain and modest Tris is made to look more Dauntless with some shoulder-baring dress action, dark eyeliner, and untamed hair. I mentioned that Scott Westerfeld named his first book The Uglies. His second book is The Pretties. These makeovers don’t take away from the ass-kicking and name-taking qualities of the characters. In fact, their makeovers make them more awesome because they get noticed a lot more for their badass-ness. But that’s a problem. See, there’s a very popular mainstream belief that women have it all—that is, they have achieved ideal social value and worth—when they kick ass and take names, and they do it while wearing Louboutins.
Lets review postfeminism, shall we? Postfeminism is the idea that we’ve already attained gender equality (hooray?). It goes a little something like this: “if women have the same shot at education and jobs, then they have the same shot at success.” It becomes more complicated when we define what success is. Donald Trump is successful because he’s got power, he’s got money, and he rules the boardroom (at least on TV). The postfeminist woman is successful because she’s got power, she’s got money, she rules the boardroom and, oh yea, she’s super fucking hot. She’s not Hilary Clinton. Don’t get me wrong, Clinton’s got some mad power, but we rarely hear that she’s an ideal female figure.
It’s not the prettification of the YA protagonists that I object to per se, it’s how we are invited to see the makeover as a step in their becoming the whole package of success. Successful women are awesome, they are pretty, and, most importantly, they inspire sexual desire.
…reflects a pervasive postfeminist trope: smart ladies get PhDs; successful ladies get PhDs while bringing the sexy. In contemporary U.S. society, women are valued—and expected to feel self-value—by being sexualized. This is why it’s mandatory that I smile and thank some creep on the street who catcalls at me and tells me I’m pretty: he’s just given me the ultimate compliment.
The badass YA protagonist becomes the real deal of female empowerment and success when her makeover coincides with (better yet triggers) male romantic interest. Pretty Tally gets a Pretty boyfriend. Capital Katniss suddenly becomes the public recipient of Peeta’s (heretofore private) longings. And it’s not until Tris’ makeover that Four feel compelled/at liberty to drunkenly stagger over, press his lips to her ear, and whisper “you look good.” This confront-compliment is creepy on many levels: it’s lobbed at her by a drunk man, an older man, a man who is her teacher, and a man who has power over her future. But rather than reading this interaction as creepy, we’re invited to see it as Tris sees it: a romantic endorsement of her desirability, both sexual and social.
A trope is a recurring media theme that circulates around long enough to infiltrate our reality. One kick-ass female protagonist who gets a makeover and becomes the “the whole package” of sexy, feminine empowerment probably won’t influence girls and young women. But postfeminist messages about female success circulate across books, movies, and TV. This accumulates. So we might notice how Katniss and Tris and Tally are kicking ass and taking names, but we begin not to notice how their strength and cleverness are only precursors to their finished selves, the sexy and sexually desired ones. We don’t want classic Disney Princesses to be role models anymore because they’re unattainably femme and they’re obsessed with male romantic attention. Katniss kicks ass, yes, and and she’s pretty, and she’s the object of two men’s romantic attentions. I heart Katniss Everdeen, I do. But sometimes the liberal characters we pat ourselves on the back for valuing are not as valuable as we want them to be.
*Trigger warning: this post talks about rape culture
**Trigger trigger warning: this one is for those academics who are triggered by trigger warnings
Last week I was yet again teaching about the horrifically termed—and equally horrific concept—of the “rape romance” in popular media. Lets chat, shall we?
The rape romance is an insidious little worm in our popular media. It’s when a woman says no *at first* but then, as her partner becomes ever more sexually insistent, she begins to say yes, yes, yes. The rape romance is premised on the notion that forcing a sexual encounter on a woman incites her desire for the sexual encounter. If you haven’t heard of the term, you’ve already seen it. Gone With the Wind anybody?
Before we open that can of (insidious) worms, lets take it back. Way back. Big timey scholar J. Halberstam claims that the way we understand a woman’s sexuality nowadays is based on the historical practice of arranged marriages. A woman couldn’t choose to marry the person she definitely sexually desired, so best practice was to make her look super sexy (ie sexually desirable) and then teach her that her sexual desire should be triggered in response to the sexual desires of her new husband.
I’m not 100% on board with this arranged marriage history theory because I’m not a historian and, if I were, I might find cross-historical and cross-global blanket statements about arranged marriages a bit suspect. But the big takeaway is Halberstam’s conclusion: nowadays, women are similarly presented as sexy objects to arouse other people’s sexual desires. And we also have a cultural mythos that 1) its natural for the desirer to get “carried away” with a really sexy woman and 2) when sensing the overwhelming desire for her body, the woman will likely get turned on too.
Don’t believe me? Lets go back to Gone with the Wind. Rhett chases after Scarlett and holds her in a kiss she physically tries to shove away. He then declares “this is one night you’re gonna’ turn me on!” lifts her up, and carried her up the stairs amidst her groans of protest and her hands beating at his body. The next day we see Scarlett looking so very happy and so very satisfied. See, her protests were only because she didn’t realize she would be into it. Until Rhett showed her. Forcibly.
But Saucy you say, that movie is way old, that shit doesn’t get made today! Actually, my good friend Steve Attewell wrote this and this about the rape romance that went down last season on Game of Thrones. I won’t go into the detail he brilliantly does, but the bottom line was that show producers had no idea why anyone would see Cersei being forcibly pushed to the ground and having her dress torn off as she verbalized “no” as a rape.
There are a couple really negative ramifications of this pervasive media trope. First, the rape romance is but one example of how women’s beauty, femininity, and sexiness are understood to be part of their bodies (their sex appeal) but not necessarily embodied (not their actual sexual desires). In our society, women are often valued (and are expected to feel valued) by being sexualized and desired. This is why it’s mandatory that I smile and thank some creep on the street who tells me I’m pretty. The Daily Show has a pretty good segment about this, starting at 5:00.
Second—and this one is scary as shit—the rape romance happens in real life ALL THE GODDAMN TIME. Rape romance incidents on TV and in movies are in fact a reflection of our own cultural beliefs that women who say no will eventually warm to the desires of the person who desires her. That is, sometimes a “no” is actually a “yes.”
A few years back, I was having a conversation with a man who was kind to animals, sensitive, well educated, and had been in long term relationships. Mr. Nice Guy assured me that sometimes “women who say no actually mean yes.” He was resolute that, once in a while, the no was a red herring, a woman’s way of trying to come off as not-a-slut. Try as I might—and I did try—I couldn’t convince him otherwise. But let me tell you what I said.
If a woman says no, then you should stop. If she actually meant yes, then it’s too bad she said no, no sex for her, and I guess she’ll know better next time. But apparently when some girls say no, there’s still an outlying chance it could be a yes in disguise. So by acting as if the no was a yes, there’s still a chance sex happens. Because the worst thing in the world is to miss out on sex. Having sex is more important than abiding by what a woman says on that off chance it’s not what she actually meant.
So when people say “some women who say no sometimes actually mean yes,” what they’re really saying is “women are often sexually responsive to the desires of others. If a man demonstrates his desire hard enough, the no might come around to being a very sexy yes and the next morning she’ll be so happy it did, all Scarlett O’Hara-like.” The Rape Romance. See how I brought it all the way back around?
Don’t ever fucking let anyone get away with saying “sometimes women who say no actually mean yes.” #yesallwomen. Amiright?
During a lecture last week, I mentioned how, in an episode of Total Divas, pro-wrestler John Cena uses the word “partner” to reference Brie Bella and Daniel Bryan’s serious relationship. Total Divas is a reality show about women who work as professional WWE wrestlers. A reality show I (kind of) love. My Teaching Assistant threw up his hands and shook his head at me. I teach in the department of Feminist Studies.
Let me explain why I (kind of) love Total Divas, a show that unabashedly packages stereotypically gendered, heterosexual behavior for mass consumption. But first, some introductions: Brie and Nikki Bella (The Bella Twins), a “main event” in the “diva” category (the female division of the WWE).
They are hegemonically feminine (RW Connell defines ‘hegemonic’ gender as the most honored or desired) because they conform to ideal categories of beauty, body size, sexiness, and class-conscious body work (makeup, hair, nails, a boob job for Nikki). To top it off, they have heterosexual love matches with successful male wrestlers: Daniel Bryan and John Cena.
Yes, they’re lady wrestlers, but they are first and foremost LADIES. The show producers (or script writers, or directors) have them do stereotypical, over-the-top “female” things: get in “cat fights” about men and clothes, do yoga and shop for crap they don’t need, have “girls” brunches. The Divas are always made up, hair on point, outfits revealing and sexy. They are Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda, if those women also happened to be professional wrestlers.
But their hegemonically feminine gender presentation is not quite seamless, not quite invisible, not exactly natural. It other words, it comes off a little queer. See, the show-makers can’t fully disappear the fact that these women are PROFESSIONAL WRESTLERS. They are super strong, have big muscles. They wrestle hard, sometimes violently. Their job requires a level of physical prowess that is not generally associated with the “shrinking violet” type. Yea, sometimes we get a femme character that also physically kicks ass (Buffy anyone?), but The Divas don’t just kick ass. They kick ass for a living. So for every two shots of them cat-fighting and brunching, we also see them working hard at the gym, pounding lean protein, body slamming people, and otherwise being fiercely strong. During one “cat fight,” Summer slaps Natalya. The result: Nattie’s nose gets fucked up, because Summer is a fucking pro wrestler.
Let me give you a for instance. Nikki Bella gets a tooth knocked out in the ring (not surprising, she is a professional athlete in a contact sport). But oh gosh and golly, what will her pro-wrestler boyfriend think now that her pretty face is ruined and she looks just terrible and low class?? So she skips away from his attentions, wears bright red lipstick, and demurely covers her mouth when she talks. Tee hee! When she finally tells/shows him about the tooth, his total lack of reaction is only punctuated by a comment about her being a professional athlete in a contact sport.
You might be thinking, “now Saucy, women can be strong AND feminine, why do the two HAVE to be dichotomous?” True, loyal reader, they don’t have to be, but they are built up and idealized like that by our culture. As RW Connell reminds us, a strong body, power, prowess, and violence are classic attributes of hegemonic masculinity.
Nikki Sullivan has a piece called “Queering Popular Culture” where she talks about ways to present popular culture queerly (switch the voice boxes of talking Barbies and GI Joes!), or read pop culture queerly (isn’t it kind of queer that they put nipples on the batman costume?) Queer in this case means twisting how certain identities are seen as normal and natural. Even though The Divas are steeped in femme behavior and looks, the show can’t cut out all the instances of them doing things that are just not very culturally femme.
Their hegemonic femininity has been hastily layered over an alternative type of femininity rooted in their bodies and jobs. And as much as the show tries to downplay this quality, it can’t be entirely concealed. It just looks a little queer.
This test does not evaluate if the film is good, progressive, or feminist. It simply highlights the world of the film in regards to women characters and their holistic value to the plot.
Sarah J. Maas’ Throne of Glass series is one I read. This is a very popular series but Maas is writing for a YA audience (and I guess some college professors too) so the characters can do immature things, and also there are plot holes sometimes, and there is a lot of crying. Lots of people cry. Oh and everyone has magic. And everyone is beautiful. And everyone is either 18 or 500 years old. I just read the newest book, Empire of Storms, because that’s what I do. Everything blew up at the end and I was so pissed that I actually went online to check reviews and see if other readers felt the same.
Usually period commercials represent periods with blue liquid or ice tea or whatever else might be excellent stand-ins for expelled uterine lining. In this commercial, we’re not seeing expelled uterine lining (we know that periods are mainly not blood but expelled uterine lining, right?) but we are seeing bodies expelling a substance similar in color and viscosity (kind of) to periods.
Dove sells beauty products. Women are supposed to buy beauty products to feminize themselves, make themselves pleasing to others, alter their bodies to better conform to hegemonic beauty standards. Here’s how Dove sells its beauty products:
You’re perfect inside and out, don’t change. Except change how you smell and your natural oils and your wrinkles. Do it with Dove.
Meredith Heller 