A New Kind of Heroine

In light of our brief discussion about Disney Princesses yesterday (in regards to Anirban's recent post):

http://www.womenyoushouldknow.net/flatten-heroine-artist-puts-disney-princess-filter-10-real-life-female-role-models/

Just thought I'd pass it along.

Maria and Nadezhda No Long Members of Pussy Riot

I just wanted to post these headlines here in light of yesterday's class discussion.

"Pussy Riot 'principles violated': Former band members back off from released pair"

And the NY Times coverage of the benefit concert that prompted the open letter from the remaining group members:

"Words Spoken and Sung in Service of Freedom: ‘Bringing Human Rights Home’ at Barclays Center"

Cloudy Gender Performativity

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs harnessed an interesting continuity with our work last week in terms of the discussion on ethnicity and performance by placing a heavy emphasis on the performativity of gender. In the work of Sacha Baran Cohen in Ali G we examined the performance of racial stereotypes and their implications, while in Bamboozled the focus was upon, among other elements, the exaggeration inherent in the black-face performances, intersecting history and racial shaping and self-awareness. Performance is a persistent theme in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, where the male protagonist is constantly wearing his (overgrown) lab-coat and performing the role of genius scientist despite his technical shortcomings. The island itself aims to harness tourism and ‘perform’ its best qualities for the external world. But most interestingly, perhaps, is the role of the female protagonist, the intern and budding weather girl who brings forth some particularly salient exposés of gender roles.

The intern is described as ‘peppy’ and ‘eager’ by her older co-workers; however her gender is far from incidental, particularly as she is attached to weather reporting and what has traditionally been perceived as one of the most problematically patriarchal aspects of broadcast news. Weather girls are often charged with the task of making some of the most mundane elements of the news attractive, their famed good looks and perfect smiles particularly working to achieve this. What I found fascinating about her character was her self-awareness and perceived need to downplay her intelligence, particularly when in the presence of the inventor and love interest. She would often catch herself uttering spontaneous analyses of the intricate technology he developed and quickly rectify and obscure this with purposefully simplistic comments. Though this performance of ‘playing dumb’ is not uncommon in female media representations, rarely is it so overtly displayed as a construction – thus leaving room for its deconstruction, as well as a questioning of why this is perceived by the character as a necessary artifice in the first place. Moreover, that this character would be present in an animated film, of all places, serves as a testament to the cultural relevancy and pervasiveness of this trait; animated films have traditionally aimed for a broad audience and courted accessibility above all – though his has naturally shifted slightly in recent years. While it is commendable that the film explores this aspect of the intern, she is not entirely exempt from embracing the very distractedness she purports to avoid; she is easily hypnotized by the cat video the inventor displays while he frantically puts together his machine, and despite all her intelligence she remains the reporter, the passive conveyor of events that observes and describes the inventor’s seemingly magical devices instead of an active agent in their construction and development.

Animated films often tiptoe a weary line when constructing their characters and defining the gender roles they will embody, and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is no different. But perhaps to some extent the fact that the intern’s gendered performance was made visible speaks to a positive irony and self-reflexivity that these characters are garnering that undercuts gender expectations and points to uncomfortable and yet very necessary questions of gendered self-presentation.

Against the Grain and All Over Again: Stereotypes, Unsettlement and Resttlement

In a recent article in The Guardian’s regular art blog, Jonathan Jones, the resident art critic draws attention to the work of contemporary web artists Dillon Boy and Alexsandro Palombo who use images of Disney princesses by subverting them and placing them in very different contexts. Boy claims to draw attention to the commercialization of sexualized culture by re-imagining Disney princesses in the mode of smut magazines. On the other hand Palombo is more concerned with the notions of idealized beauty that Disney propagates and declares war on these representations by depicting them with disabilities. While our in-class viewing of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (not Disney) mildly counters the Disney-princess representations of femininity, this is not the reason why I chose to begin with Jones’ article. Instead, what struck me about Jones’ piece and the works of the two mentioned artists is the reorientation of stereotypes to make a statement—whether these statements are political or hold emancipatory possibilities is yet another question.

In many ways Disney’s depiction of what Jones calls “ brainless slender-waisted mannequins that little girls all over the world are being offered as an ideal” reflects Angela McRobbie’s discomfort with consumer culture’s appropriation of what she terms “sites of girlhood.” However, what struck me about Boy’s “Dirtyland” series is its hollow overturning of stereotypes—the artist quotes, “Sex sells remember. I simply used the pure, untainted characters of Walt Disney to convey that message!” 

Although the artist reorients the setting of these characters, does he necessarily overturn any gender stereotypes? The Dirtlyland images after all are produced for commercial profit. Palombo’s work on the other hand makes a much more direct statement—“ Have you ever seen a disabled protagonist in a Disney movie? You sure don't because disability doesn't match Disney' s standards!” 

His images are much less stylized, flatter and less aesthetically seductive…but it is perhaps exactly because of this that the artist succeeds in making a much more politically charged critique of representation than Boy. Though Jones clubs the work of the two artists together in his article, they are perhaps operating at completely different levels. Does merely pointing towards the sexualization of seemingly “innocent” forms of representation do anything more than singing the old tunes to a new beat?

Perhaps a similar set of questions motivate my reception of the two screenings. Both Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and the third episode of Orange is the New Black make some kind of point about gendered stereotyping. However, Cloudy merely makes a token mention of the issue in the figure of the “weathergirl,” Samantha Sparks. Cloudy’s mention of Samantha’s shame at her “geekiness” which is seen to be in direct opposition to her sense of girlhood is ultimately subsumed within “the pursuit of happiness” through consumption. In doing so, its treatment of the gender issue actually recalls Dyer’s idea of the establishment of hegemony through stereotypes. Samantha’s overturning of the gendered stereotype within the narrative is contained within the allowable limits of deviation from the mean. 

On the other hand, Orange’s use of stereotypes is much more unsettling due to its inclusion of a transgendered character, Sophia Burset. The fact that Burset’s character is played by Laverene Cox, an actual transgendered person perhaps lends a tinge of legitimacy to the representation. Elsewhere, Cox has been vocal about the possibility of addressing a major discrepancy in discussions about trans people in terms of everyday practices of discrimination through the show (“The preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people […] And then we don't get to really deal with the real lived experiences.”) 

I cannot comment on how much Orange does that in terms of the whole show (I have just seen this one episode) and maybe its representations remain problematic in many ways. But its treatment of the transgendered person within this episode at least, is more nuanced than Cloudy’s quiet resettlement of stereotypes. Ultimately, in Cloudy the stereotype is never unsettled—it is only replaced (Samantha mutters a few geeky words, ties up her hair, wears her glasses). Perhaps the lesson in this distinction is this—maybe it is not as important as what the songs of liberation are, but who is singing them and how they are sung.

On stereotyping

The readings by Dyer, Modlesky, and McRobbie and the screening of Orange is the New Black and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs give good elements to start a conversation about sexuality and its portrayal in the media, but they also take us back to the discussion of race and ethnicity, and the stereotyping that occurs for these classifications, adding to the equation a social class factor.

In the screening of Orange is the new Black, we can see the differentiations between prisiones in a jail. The differences are marked not only by their race, but also by their sexual orientation, and in occasions, by both. We see the clear stereotyping of a white female that seems to be helpless in an unknown environment, not only because of the fact that they are imprisoned, but also because she has to socialize with women from different racial, economic, and sexual backgrounds. Something very significative during this episode is when the white woman is told that she will be soon relocated to a jail where all the white women are.

In the meantime, she has to deal with the presumably "old-lady-Latina-witch" who seems to have some kind of ancient magic and for which she is respected. The low class afroamerican women who are "used" to the toughness of jail, the homosexual women who is physically butchy and mentally crazy. And of course, the white male characters of the police, who abuse their power to get sexual favors from the convicts in exchange of "luxury" items like cigarets. Finally, we have the secondary characters of the family of the main character. High class white women who try to continue with their lives.

All these characters follow a clear stereotype that categorizes them. Still, in this particular series, I wonder how much of it is superficial stereotyping and how much of it is just a portrayal of reality. Jail in the United States is mostly populated by the minorities (Afroamerican and Latinos) and the abuse of power is not something new, neither to women's prison nor to American prisons. 

To move on to the screening of Cloudy... The female role of the Weather Girl is something that has always been a stereotype of the good looking woman, being sometimes the looks what sells the character. I think the importance of her role is the fact that she realizes that she doesn't have to seem uneducated or not a nerd in order to be taken into account. She represents the self-acceptance of your likes, even if they are "too nerdy". My worry with this character is that, even though she recognizes in the end that she can be both pretty and nerd, she discovers it thanks to a male role that tells her "it's OK to be nerd". It is a reaction in order to be liked by the opposite sex, who happened to be a nerd. Would her choices had been different in a different situation? 

Queer- Scratching the surface or changing the paint?

After reading this week’s articles on gender and sexuality I found myself somewhat disappointed at the superficial engagement with queer issues. Modleski’s article discusses Kiss of the Spiderwoman, claiming that, “Molina’s exaggeration of the feminine – his simulation of womanhood, derived from emulating film heroines, realizes an ideal of femininity as mas(s)querade: the homosexual ‘queen’ as exemplar of the hyperreal” (51). This idea of Molina’s character made me think of performativity in relation to gender as well as sexuality. It is more than apparent that media constantly reinforces ideas of femininity, womanhood, masculinity, etc. When it comes to the representation of queerness, queer characters are often “hyperreal” functioning not as real people but warped caricatures. “Just think of the line-up—the butch dyke and the camp qwueen, the lesbian vampire and the sadistic queer, the predatory schoolmistress and the neurotic faggot, and all the rest. The amount of hatred, fear, ridicule and disgust packed into those images is unmistakable” (Dyer 297). The historically predominant modes of depicting LGBT representations in media have been nothing more than drastic stereotypes making them less human by inundating them with grotesque amounts of negativity. It is unfortunate that LGBT persons do not have control over the way they are represented in media. What is striking is that in this time of popular consumption of queerness in media is that it is moving in the same way as the popular consumption of feminism. “Companies draw on the language of ‘Girl Power’ as though to bestow on their products a sense of dynamism, modernity and innovation. Such post-feminist strategies allow for the expansion of the ‘teen girl’ global market on the basis of reinvention of the category of youthful womanhood” (McRobbie 533). The adoption of feminist language shifted the way feminism in society has been perceived providing the opportunity to claim that society has moved into a post-feminist era. Currently the way in which LGBT issues have been represented allow companies to move queerness into the same vein as feminism, utilizing queer language to promote consumerism. What happens when the media starts claiming that there is no more homophobia?

Feminine Seduction and the Demise of the Female

This week’s readings provocatively put Modleski’s dismissal of Baudrillard’s concept of feminine seduction up against McRobbie’s retraction of her celebration of supposedly liberated girl culture. To give a brief gloss on Baudrillard’s concept of feminine seduction, since it wasn’t assigned, he characterizes seduction as a determinedly female control over the symbolic order, through which women have traditionally achieved social power through means like fashion, makeup, and flirtation. As I understand it, his notion of feminine seduction, ultimately tied up in processes of consumption (as Modleski points out) finds an apotheosis in the postmodern era, an era of mass seduction in which all of us become self-seducers (i.e. feminized) who take surface pleasures in media objects that relay political messages that we don’t necessarily believe in. This state of affairs, which Baudrillard wrote about in the early 1980s, strikes me of having a great deal of overlap with conceptions of contemporary post-feminism and might hold the key to discovering the potential for politics within such a system.

As such, I am not sure that I would be as quick as Modleski to dismiss Baudrillard’s politics (no matter how uneasy they might make me feel, especially insofar as they seem to erase women as a distinct identity category). The argument here has less to do with gender, I would suggest, than with a virtualization of culture that takes most experience into the realm of simulation; the realm once reserved for objects like women’s novels and the like. Post-feminism takes feminism into account, but that doesn’t mean that it necessarily contains any feminist politics. As Baudrillard would likely argue, texts like Orange is the New Black are feminine because they contain pleasures that enable “the eternal irony of femininity that supposedly characterizes the masses – ‘the irony of a false fidelity to the law, an ultimately impenetrable simulation of passivity and obedience … which in return annuls the law governing them” (Modleski 52).

One of the problems for me in celebrating a work like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, with its mildly affirmative messages about gender and uniqueness, would be that I tend to broadly think of all cultural production as an attempt to transform audiences, pedagogically, into idealized citizens. We must question what types of citizens a film like this, or like Orange is the New Black, is trying to create. Certainly on some level through texts like these democratic participation is made equivalent to the right to buy (creating the feeling that anyone can become an activist through purchasing). To be a fan of the show is to subscribe to a politics, some cultural theorists might argue. While Meatballs’ narrative obviously performs what might be described as a “girl power” narrative, the film at the same time is really about consumption. A Baudrillardian line of thinking would insist instead that films and shows like these present a pose of being political, when they actually exist to give pleasure. Their affirmative messages allow viewers (regardless of gender) to self-seduce themselves into political passivity. This is how Baudrillard comes to associate femininity with massness and an end of politics. The question must be asked whether this pose of political engagement is a bad thing or not, especially if it contains within it a “simulation of passivity and obedience… which in return annuls the law.”

That being said, where we might look for radical potential in a film like Meatballs lies in Baudrillard’s concept of engulfment (dismissed by Modleski), which suggests that “a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic… You want us to consume – O.K. let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose” (Modleski 53). Meatballs can be understood as modeling a process of engulfment, as it depicts a system of consumers who consume without any recourse to reality. It contains within it a hyperlogic of consumption that results in systemic collapse (of course this collapse is immediately recuperated with a happy ending, but still… food for thought).

Finally, as something of an aside, I want to bring up Dyer’s article on stereotypes. I can’t help but imagine that our discussion in class will bring up the question of neoliberalism and its emphasis on the individual, who exists autonomously, apart from identity groups (“be yourself” is the mantra). If the contemporary moment prizes individuality what political work do stereotypes still perform, especially for those people who might identify as a member of the identity group being stereotyped?

Who Run the World? Beyonce and Consumer Culture's Re-appropriation of Feminism

In response to Angela McRobbie's article "Young Women and Consumer Culture: An Intervention," I want to discuss the relevancy of her point today. McRobbie argues that feminist responses to consumer culture have failed to acknowledge the ways in which feminism has been re-appropriated and popularized to serve corporate power interests. In other words, the language of feminism, rather than serving the purpose of empowering young women and challenging the hegemony of gender subordination, is instead being used by corporate power structures to reinstate those hegemonic ideals of gender, in particular to femininity. McRobbie critiques feminist media and cultural studies for moving away from a focus on power and towards a focus on audience and reception. McRobbie further critiques feminist media and cultural studies for accepting, advocating for and praising, without critique, popular feminist practices within commercial organizations, as the "process of taking feminism into account," without questioning the ways this practice constructs femininity as consumption or considering the relations of power behind this move.

As McRobbie writes, "...the process of taking feminism into account is a complex strategy, one which can actually have the effect of 'undoing' feminism, and of actively discouraging its renewal. Popular feminism is celebrated in such a way as to suggest that the politics of feminist struggles are no longer needed" (533). In this way, in lieu of feminism, consumption becomes the voice of "female freedom" for girls and young women. Thus, consumer culture has contributed to the misguided proclamation of a post-feminist society. Gender equality has been achieved, thus feminism is no longer needed. In a way, McRobbie has a point in calling out feminist media and cultural studies scholars. Being too quick to welcome consumer culture's apparent embrace of feminist values, feminist scholars missed the ways in which consumer culture re-appropriates feminist values and disguises consumption as feminism, creating an illusion of power.

I think this still very much applies today and we must continue to call each other out. However, I am more optimistic that McRobbie. On the one hand, I agree with her analysis and call to focus on the power relations behind consumer culture's appropriation of feminism, but on the other, I do feel that popular culture, including consumer culture, can serve as sites of feminist resistance. I think the problem lies in trying to align oneself with one viewpoint or the other, rather than taking both viewpoints into account as viable.

The most relevant and prevalent example I can think of in this discussion, with regards to McRobbie's argument is the discussion around Beyoncé and feminism.

Beyoncé being a boss.

Beyoncé has been dubbed as popular culture's queen of feminism, especially after the release of her surprise album. She is considered the utmost proponent of feminism within popular culture. While other female artists in popular culture like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry denounce feminism, Beyoncé claims it. By claiming feminism, Beyoncé has sparked quite the discussion in both the feminist blogging and academic community. Much of the discussion focuses on whether or not Beyoncé's can truly be called a feminist. There are definitely inherent contradictions in Beyoncé's feminism, however, that does not invalidate the impact her claim of feminism on such a large stage can have for feminist resistance.

I think a good example is her song "Run the World (Girls)."

In this song and video, Beyoncé exemplifies everything that McRobbie discusses. The language of feminism is being used to disguise consumption and create an illusion of power. Beyoncé uses this notion of "girl power" and "girls run the world" to celebrate female freedom. The obvious problem here is that Beyoncé's claim is not true. Girl's certainly do not run the world. The not so obvious problem here is the ways in which this so-called feminist anthem reinforces consumer culture's appropriation of feminism and creates an illusion of female freedom and power through consumption.

While there are definite problems her song, on the other hand, it does send a positive message to young girls everywhere. Girls everywhere look up to Beyoncé and she's telling them that they can be powerful. Beyoncé is aware that gender equality has not been achieved, at least in the sense of socio-economic status. Knowing that she's fully aware of gender inequality, the only other possible reason she could have for this song is to tell girls and young women everywhere that they are powerful enough to run the world as a way to make an impact in the lives.

So while I do believe we must be critical of the ways consumer culture re-appropriates feminism and instrumentalizes it to stage consumption as female freedom, like in Beyoncé's "Run the World (Girls),"as well as calling each other, including Beyoncé, to be more critical in our discussions of such, I also feel that McRobbie ignores the impact these texts can have.

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For any of those interested in reading more on this, a more lengthy and interesting article on Beyoncé can be found on the Bitch Magazine website,

Thinking about Thinking about Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Tania Modleski’s article for this week invokes (and rails against) the common perspective among theorists of mass culture as “feminine” and thus inherently “less” than the more masculine High Art.  As the argument goes, women “lose” themselves in consuming escapist literature and thus cease to be productive, while men read books that make them think, making their pursuit of knowledge constructive.  The real issue with women as consumers, it seems, is not that they are not “thinking”, but that they are not attending to their household duties.  The act of young women reading is particularly offensive to this perspective because they are not learning how to do housework.  Mass culture, by definition, seeks to apply to everyone, and thrives on passive consumption.  It serves merely to entertain, not provoke thought, and thus, by these standards, is a nonproductive pastime.

In thinking about last week’s screening of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and how it possibly relates to notions of sexuality and gender, I arrived at the following.  Reviews of children’s films, particularly animations (the assumption is always that animation is for kids), often come back to the question, “what’s in it for the adults?”  The hallmark of a fantastic children’s film is one that can also be independently enjoyed by an adult audience, as they are better attuned to “get” the jokes and think about the underlying themes of the narrative.  Modleski’s article examines “the way in which mass culture is condemned as a ‘feminised’ culture” by “orthodox” historians, who claim that it is somehow “lesser” because of women’s sentimentalizing effect.  But isn’t children’s entertainment, as in the film we screened, considered inferior by the same criteria? 

It is often mindless entertainment that encourages consumption among children, rather than provoking thought.  The fact that great children’s literature, film, and television exists seems to negate all of these arguments in the same way that great women’s literature does.  Without getting overly simplistic, it seems that mass entertainment, in its most basic form, can transcend the boundaries of the lesser simply by making us think.

A Return to Adorno

Following upon last week's readings, which questioned the validity of monolithic racial and ethnic identities, this week's readings further complicates the notion of identity. While the emphasis is on gender and sexuality, the works of Dyer, Modleski and McRobbie also raise questions about the definition of class and its relationship to gender and sexuality.

At the beginning of his survey of stereotyping, Dyer notes that he expands “traditional concept of class to include race, gender and sex caste” (p. 298). This is an interesting acknowledgment that attempts to explain away the critiques about Marxism's failure to address gender and sexuality. By this inclusion, Dyer, in a way, legitimizes the use of Marxist vocabulary and framework for understanding stereotypes. Modleski also mentions Orthodox Marxism's current acceptance of women and other marginalized groups along with the working class as possible agents of resistance, but at the same time depicts Marxism's reproduction of traditional representation of women via her analysis of Kiss of the Spider Woman (p. 48, 50).

However, Marxism's failure to address gender and sexuality is later mirrored by feminism's failure to include consumerism as a parameter for studying hegemony and domination. In that context, McRobbie maps Birmingham School's Gramscian tendencies that treat the popular culture as an area for struggle and resistance against hegemony (p. 536). After revisiting the commodity fetishism wrapped in feminist discourse, McRobbie calls for a return to Adorno's critique of the popular.

McRobbie's analysis explains how women's magazines, Sex and the City and similar magazines/shows targeting younger audiences encourage consumption while creating an illusion of female empowerment. Then, being a woman is defined through consumption and women's freedom is reduced to “freedom to buy.” Resulting identity is problematic not just because consumerism lies at the heart of it, but because that core element is veiled by feminist discourse of liberation. In a way reminiscent of the false consciousness of working classes explored by Marxist critiques, it becomes possible to talk about another form of false consciousness based on popular feminism. McRobbie also mentions how this new identity mostly revolves around white, heterosexual, middle class women (p. 540). While this hegemonic representation prioritizes a certain group of women, consumerism attached to it embraces every woman and encourages consumption regardless of class, race, gender and sex.

With her call for a return to Adorno, McRobbie indirectly addresses the political economy scholars' critique of cultural studies in way. While Gramscian tendencies of Birmingham School paves way to see multiple cultural spheres and accepts the popular as an area for contesting hegemony, political economy underlines that the necessity to sell is present in all spheres. Therefore, the culture of consumption or consumer culture attached to capitalism is the hegemony that needs to be contested and the content of the popular or even the marginalized cultural products are not relevant as long as they circulate in the capitalistic terms.

While her critique of popular feminism cannot be reduced to harsher critiques from the political economy camp, by exploring the transition of the emphasis from Adorno's theories to Gramsci's, McRobbie reminds us the importance of consumption. However, her take on popular feminism can be neither reduced to Adorno's exclusion of the popular as an area for contestation. Adorno's exclusion rather stems from his implicit reproduction of the Age of Enlightenment standards for evaluating art and his acceptance of leadership of a class of vanguards. Through their engagement in avant-garde art, these vanguards are to end the false consciousness of the masses, who are distracted by the popular.

However, McRobbie's critique of the popular feminism has more to do with Adorno's skepticism towards the Culture Industry than his dislike of the popular. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify what a return to Adorno entails in terms of understanding class, gender and sexuality as components of identity.