Trying to bring it together...

I thought this week's readings forged an interesting dialog as well as counter-point with the film we watched. There was also the sense of a rich polarity between some of the readings. While Leslie Rabine claimed in a post-Foucauldian vein that fashion as a symbolic system 'produces' the feminine self and not merely 'expresses' it; Iris Marion Young tried to stress upon the rich possibilities of the 'abortive' fantasizing that fashion, or a garment as an object engenders in the feminine imagination. My partial dissatisfaction with Young comes from what seems to be a naive celebration of the content of the fashion-generated 'intransitive, playful utopia' and a tokenistic doffing of the hat to feminist studies that has drawn attention to the ways in which the fashion system and garments as material objects are implicated in, as well as obfuscatory of the global neo-imperial late capitalistic economy. I am also interested in the ways in which the political and (pop)feminist valence of fashion and clothes is understood, acknowledged as well as contained within popular culture.

Clueless, seems to assert, through its two primary characters- Cher and Dionne, the idea that fashion, interlinked with a discretely differentiated array of femininities constitute a system of signs that women can manipulate and ace with their psychological, social and sexual acumen. It is the often successful interpretation of not merely other bodies (especially the scene where Cher dismisses the shabby fashion statements of a group of boys in her high school), the girl's location in the position of an evaluator, as well as the girls' acute reading and seeming fulfillment of the gendered expectations of them (by men) that the film seems to celebrate as 'girl power'. Interestingly, the drama is propelled and humor is generated by errors in this act of reading. However, this idea of 'playing at' also posits a notion of an 'inner core' as it were, which fashion and the behavioral codes of femininity can be used to mask and protect. What was most enjoyable in the film, in terms of its critical value was a rich ambivalence that is preserved in the film regarding Cher's motivations. Her preservation of her 'virginity' while generating a very different social perception, could be seen both ways. As, at once, a reassertion of a very conservative ideal of femininity (namely, chastity); but also what might also be seen as a kind of resistant sexual practice in an ethos where women are expected to sexually service men. Thereafter, the film does a double-take on itself, by allowing the character of Tai to mess with the workshop in 'self-improvement' that Cher and Dionne so uncritically try to emancipate her with. Interestingly, the movie doesn't really punish Tai toward the end or dwell on her earlier 'heartbreak', and she is recuperated gleefully into the power-triad.

All the readings also seemed to be concerned with feminist methodologies and academic praxis. Interestingly, Rabine, Morris and Young all feel the need to define themselves and their respective locations, in fairly qualified statements while also stating the claim that their experiences and insights, while being generated by their specific class, race and cultural locations, may also resonate with women in other locations. Meaghan Morris' de Certeau-ian exploration of shopping practices as well as shopping structures reminded me of Cher, Dionne and Tai's use of the mall - not merely for shopping for clothes, but as a site and activity which fosters a particular kind of feminine intimacy (Young). These scenes, in particular the unfortunate incident with Tai (the two boys) as well as the ambiguity of spaces and doubleness of bodies that women have to inhabit (Morris' argument about women's two bodies) so that a woman exerting her sexual independence and deviance, is also prey to sexual predators. I was also thinking of the kinds of practices that women may engage with in relation to commodities and items of fashion in non-western cultural contexts. It would be interesting to see how these critical explorations of shopping and consumption may relate to a film like the Iranian director Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven, in which the little girl's craving for her lost pair of pink shoes also gets linked with an idea of the care of the feminine self, particularly in a cultural context where her gender assigns her to a position of relentless social devaluation. However, there is also a powerful scene in the film where, embarrassed till now for having to where her brother's plaid pair of canvas shoes to school, the girl feels suddenly upbeat and unafraid of being noticed when the teacher praises her for being the only girl wearing the shoes appropriate for physical education. Thinking through practices of consumption in context-specific and historicist ways can help us understand better the ways in which these are both in the grip of and structured by totalizing commercial and ideological forces as well as also always ridden by individual praxis with myriadly subversive potencies.