Bedeviling (feminist) protest.

In the She-Devil series, I was intrigued, puzzled and troubled by the intersections of political protest and misogyny, a radical critique of patriarchy, nature and femininity on the one hand; and masochism on the other. And these intersections seem to occur in more ways than one. Virtually every act performed by Ruth and Mary is open to these dualities and duplicities. I feel that the series does a good job of illustrating the ways in which patriarchy constantly casts women in competitive positions. Through a scathing representation of the character of Bobbo, it also demonstrates the ways in which discourses of 'sexual liberation' (and its 'values' of freedom, honesty, its acknowledgment of how desire and marriage did not always overlap) did not dent upon the institution of marriage in anyway, or did very little to challenge prevailing norms of feminine beauty. During the break, we had a conversation about how the appeal (sexual or otherwise) of Bobbo seems inexplicable and yet the women seem to be obsessed with him in one way or another. This points toward the representation of a kind of monolithic British, white masculinity within the series (despite the characters of Garcia and Father Ferguson), and Bobbo seems to stand for this 'type' rather than signifying an individual 'character'. This probably explains why there is no valid alternative to Bobbo - he is all men. It is into him that Father Ferguson will collapse, and so will the surgeons.
While the lead male character seems to be an exploration of a type, the two female characters seem to mirror each other in interesting ways. Both are shown to be agents of distinct kinds of cultural reproduction - Mary (sitting in her ivory tower) writes romance novels, while Ruth is the entrepreneurial hand behind Vista-Rose which 'frees' women from domesticity. However, both these enterprises are haunted by ideological ambivalences. Mary's representations of beauty, romance and love are both the products of an insulated life shaped by her own 'desirability', as well as themselves the commercial forces that sustain that world of ideals. Ruth's commercial agency on the other hand, in its actual dealings, is shown to 'free' women through experience and disillusionment by first placing them within exploitative situations. This movement of a kind of doubleness culminates in the killing off of an isolated Mary in a kind of a mythic storm, and her resurrection through Ruth's surgical mimesis of her. However, this completion of 'revenge' (and feminist protest) by becoming the Other remains deeply problematic. It seems to be a strategy of protest that articulates itself by an unflinching and perverse obedience to the patriarchal injunction of 'beauty' imposed upon women. And in doing this it seems to signal a shift of power to the woman after she has violently managed to inhabit the norm (in a way that is reminiscent of Madonna - and her 'power' to manipulate/monopolize the male gaze), and the husband is rendered a castrated spectator.

Plastic fantastic?

I think it’s safe to say that most of us turned our heads away from the projection at some point or another during last Friday’s screening of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. There were quite a few grotesques up there, not least of which was Ruth’s first extra-marital lover -- of whom I was reminded as I read over the word “secreting” in the Russo chapter. Ew. That. Stye. A rather public, icky-looking disease is one of the few things I can think of that seems to count against a man as much as female bodily taboos such as age and obesity (and warts) do. (I should think, with the outpouring of pregnancy films (Knocked Up, Waitress, Juno) wherein the female protagonist is represented as a hottie throughout, that the pregnant female body is less a taboo [although, yes, the prospect of late-term sex is certainly cause for caution on the part of Seth Rogen’s character in Knocked Up].)
The issue I had the most difficulty parsing in The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil was the plastic surgery. I couldn’t tell if I was for or against.
Bordo says that women who try to conform to the limitations of popular femininity “are anything but the masters of their own lives.”
And yet … Unlike Mellencamp, who saw Bobbo as Ruth’s excuse to obtain her desired object, “the classical body of Mary Fisher,” I viewed Ruth’s twisted transformation as an assertion of total mastery over Mary Fisher and herself. (Psh -- she didn’t want Bobbo.) In this way, I suppose my reading suggests I’m more sympathetic to Radner’s ideas on plastic surgery. She compares that particular process of changing one’s body through pain -- of becoming both product and producer -- to working out, something I was waiting for Morse do in her essay on exercise, “Artemis Aging,” but no joy. (I consistently thought of the muscular, oft-maligned body of present-day Madonna while reading “Artemis.” How times have changed.)
What none of the authors seemed to address in talking about exercise is the role that simple body chemistry plays. Can it be that the only reason we work out is for one gaze or another? For control of excess? That’s oversimplifying. Maybe that’s why you start, but that “good feeling” Fonda talks about having after she works out is probably more than control of her body. Surely it also has something to do with the release of endorphins, which are similar to opiates in nature, and increased serotonin levels?
Finally, briefly, totally unrelated: Is it just me or did the whole Vista Rose thing seem like a wink at Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls?

Janice Dickinson: our Diana Vreeland

For some reason (actually many reasons that I won't get into), the "Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" is constantly playing on loop at my house. The show is chock full of "chaos" "drama" and "disorder" (one bulimic model is caught with cheesecake under her bed!). In the season finale of this season, Janice's son tries to bring plus size models into the house. Janice freaks out. This clip from "The Soup" really points to a lot of the issues that are highlighted in our readings. But the clip doesn't do justice to how shocking and disturbing the actual episode is. Janice is incredibly explicit about her hate of "plus" and actually cries and insults these women. One of the plus size models tries to give her a hug, Janice tells her to "go on a diet," when the woman explains that she lost 100 pounds, Janice tells her to lose more.

On the Today Show, Janice declared her position as anti-plus size, saying, "America may be plus-size, but fashion isn't." And ends the show with, "a shout-out to the girl's in the gym, keep up the good work on the tread-mill!"

What a role model. My question is, are we supposed to want to have that face?

Rich and Skinny

I've never seen a retailer embrace the notion of lifestyle branding quite like the denim company "Rich and Skinny." The name speaks for itself (the actual jeans on the other hand, I would argue, come in lovely colors but are awful and hardly qualify as "denim"). It's cheeky, sure. Ironic even. The brand name appropriates our collective obsessions, exagerrates them and sells them right back to us. All in good fun - consumer capitalism's self-reflexive and lucrative cultural commentary. Got it.
But then there's the brand's website (linked to post title)... The "Rich and Skinny" ongoing movie invites the viewer to peek in on an ongoing narrative drama, crafted to resemble a reality show (The Hills anyone?). A slew of characters enter the poolside scene, dramatize, and exit, all in denim, all in the name of SoCal-style fashion. I'm not sure what to make of this except that it's sort of nauseating and sort of brilliant. Take a look (pay attention to the background narration as well and make sure to turn the sound on).

Surgery as Transgressive Tactic of the Grotesque? (Reading/Screening Response)

In her analysis of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Mellencamp presents surgical alteration as both a manifestation of biological and social practice, constructions of the body are inherently produced through social conditioning and are never static.(296) Her discussion of Ruth’s physical/surgical transformation only goes so far as to equate this behavior with the masquerade, seemingly unable to negotiate the negative reactions to the final segment of the miniseries. A reengagement with the Berry might produce a viable way to interact with some of these limitations. Berry discussed the performative transgression inherent in imposture, the making-over process revealing the often naturalized labor behind the production of upper class style. How can we extend this idea to account for the potentially libratory effects of examining the surgical production of femininity? The extensive process of Ruth’s “make-over” is extensively chronicled through multiple consultations and surgeries, the intermediary recovery periods are revelatory in their depiction of the excessively manipulated (mangled?) facial tissue and bone structure. It is important to consider the process not as a mystification of the production of the classical body but as one that accounts for the often grotesque labor involved, femininity as the result of socially/physically constructed codes of beauty.

This recognition of the “body becoming” is aligned with Russo’s discussion of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body as a site of “insurgency, and not merely withdrawal” as “carnival refuses to surrender the critical and cultural tools of the dominant class”.(218) How can we then consider the plastic surgery as a tactic of this insurgency through its denaturalizing of the cultural construction of the classic body? How can Ruth’s surgery be seen as the ultimate performative masquerade meant to criticize the masculine investment in demure femininity and exact some kind of revenge?

Bordo examines how the need for manipulation and control of the female body is often a symptom of the masculine, historical “fear of women as ‘too much’”. (163) Ruth is coded as the site of visual and aural excess throughout the miniseries. She, both pre and post surgery incarnations, enacts the codes of the grotesque body in different ways, a body that is both “protruding” and “extending”(her roles as unsatisfied wife, business owner, masochistic seductress) but also “secreting” and “open” (her role as societal/surgical experimentation).(Russo, 219)

Bridal Party Plastic Surgery

I really don't think there's much to say....

Too Thin for TV?

Just wanted to remind you of this issue of US Weekly that came out a little bit ago, given this week's topic...

MakeoverGate Part 23448859

Apparently, the Out of the Closet thrift store that gives its proceeds to the AIDS Healthcare foundation didn't take too kindly to Anchorage, Alaska's identically-named consignment shop - the shop of choice for one Gov. Sarah Palin.

Follow-up on Palin's Makover

I saw this today after reading Tara's post from Maureen Dowd the other day. I thought I would share.

Dame Hotness: Mirren at 63

I remembered hearing about this a while ago and thought it was particularly appropriate for this week, considering the prohibitive nature of female aging that Mellencamp discusses. Here Helen Mirren is touted as the sexy 63 year old, the tone of the article is at times hard to decipher, seeming to state that we(meaning heterosexual younger men) should be able to desire older women, but the unspoken contingencies of that assertion are somewhat clear (if she is a hot older woman, etc.). Mellencamp's "chronology disavowl" seems to be at work here. Mirren can be 63 years of age, as long as she does not look the part according to patriarchal sexual standards (note the panoply of anti-aging advertisements surrounding the article, hmmm). Mirren's iconicity does seem to stem in part from the visual construction of her often uninhibited sexuality (Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; Calendar Girls; and especially her role as DCI Jane Tennison in the BBC's Prime Suspect).

I think Dame Helen will be hot no matter what she does (personal bias perhaps but hey, I dare you to prove me wrong)

More on the Palin "Makeover"

Maybe I'll run for VP and finally get that pricey makeover....

Carnival and Desiring Bodies (Reading Response)

Discussions of dangerously unruly bodies, the carnivalesque and the body’s simultaneous bearing of both transgression and regulation seemed to me a logical extension of Jackie Stacey’s piece Star Gazing. Specifically, Bordo’s sometimes over-determined and dogmatic examination of eating disorders and women’s near compulsory disciplining of the body has everything to do with the activation of desire that Stacey was so concerned with. Considering the traditional construction of woman as forever tied to the body (I’m thinking of Bordo’s “heavy bear” here) and the almost logical sexual objectification this invites, suppression or disciplining of the body is suppression of desire. For Stacey, the denial of desire is of course a strategy of larger frameworks of subordination, crippling further resistance. The solution seems to be a reclaiming of the female body. Rather than distancing itself from the oppressive sexual labor traditionally associated with the female body, this discourse takes measures to own it instead. Speaking of the rationalizations deployed in slenderness practices, Bordo uses terms like “newfound freedom” and “empowerment,” which seem to resonate with liberal feminist discourses. I’m wondering to what an extent the liberal feminist principles of “agency” and “personal empowerment” can be seen as (distorted) catalysts of the disciplining practices Bordo analyzes.
To return to desire though, for Stacey, that temporary activation was possible in the fashion show. Mary Russo’s discussion of “female grotesques” and carnivalesque bodies can be seen as an extension of the same theory. The obvious reference here is to the productive spectacle laden in carnival. It is the privileging of play and performativity for their transgressive potential, as opposed to traditional struggle. Now, I have no intention of resurrecting Bakhtin’s nostalgic celebration of carnival and the “festive critique” (although, admittedly, his giddy excitement about the matter can be happily contagious), but it seems that despite carnival’s temporal inconsequence, its status as licensed event, as sanctioned transgression, the very fact that a woman’s body is “dangerous” inside the space of carnival can offer some subversive redemption. Russo says that women’s bodies “in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive – dangerous, and in danger” (217). The notion that woman’s position outside of carnival informs her “dangerous” subjectivity inside seems to be the very thing that redeems the otherwise purely escapist and rather conservative practice. Here, spectacle can be overtly political and transformative.

Well, why can't I be a French Maid?

I saw this and just had to post it up, seeing as how we are less than a week from Halloween. Y'all can be the judge about how this fits into our continual discussions of the masquerade, now in its most literal (and perhaps insidious?) form. Here masquerade is precisely the "playful" (multiple formations of the term possible here) engagement with certain codes of fantasy and femininity, whether they are naturalized or not remains to be seen. The writer(s) just barely manage to squeeze in a slight nod to the gendered hypocrisy of policing Halloween costumes near the end (hope they don't break their arms patting themselves on the back).

As a side note though, some part of me cringes at the thought of 8-10 year old girls in french maid outfits.

I love Shopgirl. The film and the novella. I can’t help it. If you’ve never seen or read it, it’s about an insular artist, Mirabelle (Claire Danes), who works as a glove salesgirl at a high-end department store in LA. There she meets Ray (Steve Martin), a wealthy logician in the computer industry who wants to date her without the complication of, um, love. Jason Schwartzman plays a poor, boyish designer who’s into Mirabelle but really needs to get his ducks in a row.

Our discussion of shopgirls and class transformation inspired me to give the film another look. The film has been described by some as a kind of Pygmalion, but I think that’s somewhat misleading. In the film, Mirabelle works at Saks, a magical site where a financially challenged young woman such as herself can stare mockingly at reality TV stars, engage people from far-away lands, and be noticed by rich dudes.

Mirabelle has a classy, vintage-y look that she achieves, as Martin describes in his book, by mixing recycled clothing with Saks’s sale items (on top of which she can add her employee discount). As she dates Ray, he gives her presents which she mistakes for signs of emotional closeness. Many of these presents are clothing, and though Mirabelle’s essential sense of style remains the same -- lots of ‘40s and ‘50s style dresses, often floral -- one notices that the cuts of her costumes seem more updated and well-tailored.

No Henry Higgins, Ray appreciates Mirabelle’s fashion sense and never directs where her clothes should come from or how they should look, with the exception of one trip to Armani (Steve Martin’s Givenchy, you might say).

It is never overtly stated, but I think it could be argued that the confidence Mirabelle has in her new, expensive, better-fitting clothes (Danes, perfectly cast for this role, has a long angular body that reads as gawky, not anorexic) and the sense of self-worth she derived from having someone buy them for her, outlast her relationship with Ray and give her the guts to ditch her glove-counter job for a gig at an art gallery -- another site interestingly positioned in the film for inter-class mingling.

mimetic desire

I posted previously about the possibilities of disarticulating the production of "femininity" (conceived of as performative) from its ostensible raison d'etre, the male gaze.  Naomi Wolff, in "The Beauty Myth," broached one possibility of such a disconnect between femininity and the male gaze, when she argues that women's magazines say that such-and-such is the "look" that men are going for, when the truth of the matter (says Wolff) is that it is the advertisers who want to sell their products who are promoting that particular "look."

In "Clueless," the idea of a disconnect between what advertisers promote and what "the guys" are looking for, is broached when Tai says that Josh reports that guys prefer college girls to girls in high school because the former wear less make-up.

In "Hamlet," there is much misogynistic talk about women and their make-up, constructing a false face to hide the one that nature gave them.

What exactly is the heterosexual male *stake* in the production of femininity-with-all-the-trimmings, if it is so often talked about (in male circles) in a rhetoric that deplores it, a rhetoric of dishonesty, duplicity, and declension from the "natural"?

Well, you know the idea from Rene Girard (or is it Sedgwick) about the triangular structure of male heterosexual desire, wherein male desire is mimetic: a man desiring a woman is in fact looking out of the corner of his eye at another man who is desiring that same woman: the focus is not on the woman so much as it is on the male rivalry, which is so intense as to libidinally overshadow any professed interest in the woman, who is indeed just a pretext or pawn in the male homosocial game.

It seems that the production of femininity-with-all-the-trimmings, insofar as it does desire to reach a male target audience (and isn't all about aesthetic/tactile/self-expressive play), alludes to or activates such an intensely homosocial context, in which the important thing is not that "I" [hypothetical male] have found a companion or lover, but that the other guys *see* that I have annexed a woman--I make sure that they see me walking around with a woman on my arm, whose femininity should be coded *loudly* so that they don't miss her.

Beauty is recession-resistant??

Here's an article I just saw in the LA Times "Image" section.

My Secret

A few weeks ago in a blog post, Ashley mentioned going on a shopping trip to a store recommended by a fellow student (me) but couldn’t reveal the name or location as she had been sworn to secrecy.

Well, I’ve decided to stop being so greedy and selfish and to share with you all my shopping secret, solution, and savior. The store’s name is Shareen Downtown, and was founded by Shareen Mitchell. I grew up in LA and have been to pretty much every vintage clothing store (and shopping destination) in the greater Los Angeles area, and this is by far the best. You can find anything: from party dresses, to evening gowns, rompers, tweed suits, summer shifts, shoes, hats, and cheap!! Shareen is a crazy person, a fast-talking and philosophizing former model, turned actress, turned nanny, turned vintage clothier. But despite her eccentricities (just sign up for her newsletter and you’ll see exactly what I mean), she has an incredible eye for clothes, and she will tell you if something looks bad or isn’t right for you.

I started buying from Shareen when I was 15 and she had a small booth at the Melrose/Fairfax flea market. And although she has moved on to bigger and better things; she now has two stores, styles celebrities, and has her own line (one of her dresses is called the “jewell” dress, which only signifies the extent of my obsession), she has stayed dedicated to keeping her prices affordable. And in times like these, that really is refreshing.

Wearing vintage clothes has long been my solution to my quantity over quality problem (as I’ve said, most of my clothes cost a dollar, but I don’t know if I’m ready to reveal my dollar sale secrets ) and to the ridiculous prices of new clothes. Plus I find the cuts more interesting and the construction tends to be of a higher quality.

So please go to Shareen’s and enjoy! She just opened a new store in Venice, and I haven’t been there yet. A few words of warning: the “downtown” location is actually in Lincoln Heights in a pretty sketchy warehouse district (but don’t mind the questionable surroundings, the treasure inside is worth it!). Also, no boys allowed. There are no dressing rooms, so be wary if you are particularly modest (I’ve creepily seen quite a few celebrities in the buff), but the atmosphere is really comfortable and everyone oohs and ahhhs over each other's choices. I’ve obviously never gotten over my childhood “dress-up” phase, where simply by putting on a princess dress (actually, for me more like a Scarlett O’Hara crinoline or a Ginger Rogers evening gown) you became a princess. Shareen’s perfectly fills that void for me.

I linked the title of this blog to her website (if you want a taste of what Shareen is like read her blog, which is linked on the site, it's really juicy), and here's an LA Times article on the store: http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/17/image/ig-shareen17

"You are what you drive" (a random post)

Here is the all new 2010 Toyota Prius

2010 Toyota Prius looks like this

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/uptospeed/2008/10/the-2010-toyota.html

As the ultimate “anti-status”-status symbol in our uniquely “you are what you drive” Angeleno car culture, your motor vehicle represents more than just a mechanical device to get you from point A to point B. Here, Toyota’s internal combustion-electric medium “is the message” (borrowing from McLuhan’s phrase) and the hybrid vehicle, particularly the Prius, evokes sentiments of environmentalism, frugality, and political activism with “yuppie appeal.” This new Prius appears the answer the complaints that focused on the car’s lack of aesthetic appeal –it appears more “sporty” with more “aggressive” front facia—changes that reflect a direct response to charges that it’s looks were very “vanilla” and “effeminate.” I’m curious to hear what others have to say about the cultural gendering of automobiles or automobile style—how certain cars get labeled as ‘chick cars’ while other forms of automobile styling is referred to as being masculine.

"Maid in Manhattan" as "progressive text"

It was commented upon in class, I believe, that "Maid in Manhattan" centers Jennifer Lopez at the expense of abjecting other, darker-skinned characters, as though to apologize for putting her in the center to begin with by highlighting her relative "lightness" in contrast to the darker-skinned characters in her orbit.  

Rita Felski however, albeit writing on the novel, gives us a means of potentially giving a text some credit for this move, instead of reflexively indicting it.  She writes: "Rendered as social allegories or assumed unworthy of scrutiny, entire categories of persons--servants, those of non-Western origin, the working class--were long relegated to the status of minor characters in fiction.... In an ingenious argument, however, Alex Woloch proposes that this patent unevenness of novelistic attention, the disproportionate space allotted to major and minor characters, does not blindly acquiesce to prevailing prejudice, but exposes and comments on it.  The effacement or the asymmetrical treatment of persons in fiction, their routine rendering as flat or one-dimensional types, is a means by which the novel registers and reflects on the pervasiveness of social hierarchies" (Rita Felski, "Uses of Literature," Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p. 93).  

While one might indict "Maid in Manhattan" of tokenism, then, one might also view it as a decided improvement upon "Steel Magnolias," in which race is altogether effaced, given no visibility whatsoever.

Consumer Capitalism and the Perpetual Superwoman

The linked article about Diane von Furstenberg's new fashion comic book, linking images of cartoon superwomen with the pursuits of fashion, seems to resonate well with this past week’s readings (especially the one on the lucrative love affair between designer and celebrity). I’m thinking specifically of how imagining the female subject and the thrusts of consumer capitalism seem to coalesce around celebrity and even more so, the celebrity designer and how consumerism sustains the notion of the everyday superwoman. Also interesting that some 3o years (and a million critiques) after wonder woman’s debut, there is still zero hint of irony in pairing “empowerment” with a swimsuit-clad Barbie named “Diva”. One would think the inventor of the wrap dress would know better…

Unrelated spoiler: I still can’t believe Leanne managed to win using all of 2 colors in her entire line!

reading post: Disarticulations

Today's readings go some distance toward disarticulating patriarchy from consumer capitalism.

Berry, keen to make the point about consumerism's egalitarian potential, references a shift in the early part of the twentieth century from a notion of one's "character" as something organicized and engrained, to a sense of "personality" as performative and of class as a coded representation mimetically reproducible at the fantasy level, at least, of the cinematic screen.

Doane's sloppily monolithic conflation in a 1989 article--her mode of thinking redolent of a conspiracy theorist--of patriarchy with capitalism, making a monolith that univocally bespeaks domination of women, is challenged and "complicated" by Stacey, who pays attention to the cultural specificity of the uptake of "dominant discourses of consumption" by female consumers in a particular era and place.  Whereas Doane had made the subjectivity-effect produced in female spectators-consumers by 1930s Hollywood cinema synonymous with their subjection and self-commodification, relying on a Foucaultian vision of the self as carceral, Stacey clears some space for the agency of female consumers, noting that self-commodification on the blueprint of Hollywood stars could even be perceived as culturally transgressive of feminine decorum in austerity-era Britain.  (We see here the potential of fashion to oscillate, paradoxically, between opposing registers of difference and conformity.)

Stacey notes that the very subjection of women (selling them the means of marketing themselves as objects of exchange) has the unintentional consequence of forging a means of alliance among women along lines of a shared perception of feminine "competencies" and "unwritten rules" of proper femininity.  The esotericism and coterie-quality of feminine shop-talk, baffling to many males, disconnects the identity-group of women from men in the very act of the former's alleged self-commodification in the name of attracting the latter to them.  Such female solidarity, I would go so far (following Stacey), potentially disarticulates the project of femininity, as a production/performance, from the male gaze which is its alleged recipient.  Stacey teases out the sense in which women look at other women as ideals, and the potential homoeroticism that may attend the intense emotionality, the "intimacy" (a recurring word in Stacey's discourse), of such bonding as goes on between star and spectator and between fan and fellow fan.

 

Two Sabrinas

I agree with Kelly that race (and sexuality) is decidedly absent from this week’s readings which were concerned primarily with the social mobility of white, heterosexual women through fashion. Again we are confronted with similar problems that we faced when discussing psychoanalysis, where the white, heterosexual female becomes the universal woman in the binary view of gender difference. What I did find useful about these readings was the differentiation of women in to types that Berry discusses in detail and both Stacey and Studlar allude to. Although separating women out into various types could be seen as yet another way to mask diversity and create generic versions of women, I think what it does draw attention to is that, at least from the 1930s onward, marketing strategies for fashion and beauty culture revolved around the idea that identity (and almost exclusively femininity) was a conscious performance.

Many of the films discussed in this weeks readings, Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina being an excellent reference point, were almost exclusively concerned with class mobility through fashion. I found the areas where this social mobility intersected with European High fashion and American popular culture to be some of the most interesting parts of the discussion. Although I’m not a fashion buff by any means, it’s quite obvious that the big stars still prefer their Versaces and Diors as the mark that they have truly reached the upper class echelon. Berry’s reading of Roberta as the “synthesis between fashion and popular culture,” namely European versus American ideals, Stacey’s nuanced account of British women’s appropriation of Hollywood star fashion and Studlar’s analysis of Audrey Hepburn and Givenchy fashion all explore this intersection of America with the European in terms of social mobility and femininity (69). Studlar’s analysis of Hepburn in Sabrina as “the new standard of feminine beauty as narrow and underdeveloped was not instigated by Givenchy or Hepburn, but Hepburn epitomized this type in movies, where it was a decided contrast to the shapely, buxom norm of female stars” situates her, again, as a type of femininity (162). When Sabrina returns to the Larabee’s literally nothing has changed about her but her clothes, she doesn’t, however, just conform to the fashions of the other upper class ladies of Long Island, but incorporates Givency’s couture fashions as a way to take her youthful, androgynous body and transition to a (new) mature femininity. In comparing Hepburn’s 1954 Sabrina to the disastrous 1995 remake I have to say that fashion was the primary reason for that film’s failure as much as it was the reason for the original’s success. The remake, although still sending Sabrina off to Paris to transition into mature femininity, had her return with simply beautiful clothes, the complication of Hepburn in conjunction with Givenchy typifying a new type of femininity through clothes is not possible in the remake where such an image had been around for 50 years. Fashion as a means to social mobility is thus historically and culturally located.

On a completely unrelated note, many of the articles were concerned with product tie-ins and “soft sell” or product placement in the woman’s film and made the point again and again that women were the prime consumers and thus the target market for much of cinema and advertising. I haven’t done any research on this but the because of the immense popularity of action films, aka The Dark Knight, in the past ~10 years, I think the woman as the primary consumer has been replaced by teenagers as the primary consumer, at least in cinema, spending frivolously their middle class parent’s disposable income. Batman is then the perfect figure to sell all the newest gadgets to this younger consumer that, arguably looking at Apple’s marketing campaign, is less concerned with fashion and more concerned with technology as identity. Ie. the popularity of facebook and myspace. Again, I dovetail to virtual fashion and virtual consumption as the new site of identity.

Madonna vs. David Bowie: Presentation Questions

Sorry for the delay, but here are the questions I offer up from my presentation:

-- Why do Madonna and Bowie go unpunished for their challenges to gender binaries?
-- Are they popular despite or because of these challenges?
-- What are the limiations of the appropriation of androgyny hand-in-hand with maintained popularity, and how do these limitations differ for the male and the female star?

If Sabrina can be seen as a reworking of the Cinderella Story, and Maid in Manhattan as a more contemporaneous reworking of this cultural narrative, then it might be helpful to look at the additions and deletions that the process of making contemporary (and apparently, more 'politically progressive') involved. Merissa is Italian, a (dedicated) single-mother and a (law-obeying) paid worker. The ugly sisters are of course, still around. What also stays is the crucial physical transformation that brings visibility to Merissa (just as it had for Cinderella and Sabrina). And this transformation is associated with a personal narrative of 'rebellion' in each case, the success of which lies in the securing of the affections of the good and rich bachelor. In case of Maid, rebellion is posited against the demands of motherhood, and it seems to include - her trying on Caroline's Dolce & Gabbana attire, her refusing to be a house-cleaner after being fired, and her pursuing a romance with an aspiring senator Chris Marshall. Her rebellion is articulated through the capitalist ethic of 'going up'. However, it's not insignificant that she is the unwilling subject of two of these actions - they are in fact engineered by others. She forcefully expresses only her refusal to being a housecleaner to her mother - and the latter and her choice seem to be the target of this angry repudiation. Some other moments which approximate a political critique are - her fierce and public confrontation with the 'class-prejudiced' receptionist; and her 'frank' (and hackneyed) denunciation of the housing projects in the Bronx in response to Chris' campaign.

Merissa's playful putting on of the D & G attire (which in effect sets the plot going), is comparable to Audrey Hepburn's donning of haute couture in Sabrina. With the superficial Caroline and her 'over the hill', xenophobic friend as foils, Merissa shows off her natural taste, beauty as well as intelligence. In Gaylyn Studlar's analysis of the deployment of high fashion in women's films and romances in 1950s Hollywood, this successful transformation may invite admiration from the female audience members for 'the heroine's enviable ability to use fashion as a traditional feminine path to social improvement and, of course, romantic happiness'. However, prior to the successful masquerades, Merissa's fellow-maids play the fairy godmother - and transform her into the perfect object of beauty. Of course, none of them could have taken her place - because they are probably not 'exotic', 'mediterranean', but fairly white, young single-mothers with a tongue. Neither are they competitors for the position of manager. There seems to be an over-investment that these women surrounding her seem to make in Merissa, they prance around dreamily in the locker-room, and she lives out the dream. Charlotte Herzog underscores the ways in which fashion and modelling (both, the nature of attire as well as use of the female body) were equated with the offer of commercial sex, in the fashion show film. I feel that these resonances are retained in Merissa's association with fashion in Maid. While her wearing these outfits reveal her 'natural taste', it is also important that she doesn't own them and is not identified with them. The fact that she can't afford these becomes a kind of proof of her 'virtue', while Caroline is tainted by her class position and the film gives her ample opportunity to display her 'dumb blonde dimwittedness'. Thus, underlying this flimsy kind of 'class critique' is a deeper current of misogyny that seems to require no justification.

It might be interesting to look at the ways in which Jennifer Lopez's femininity may be read in contrast to the other prevailing models of femininity. To me, her championing of a different 'ethnic' and 'fuller' body, in opposition to the thin, white female body can be read as being dual in its implications (much like Audrey Hepburn's youthful, flatter, slightly butch look) - as both an 'alternative' body-type as well as a reassertion of the older, sexualized, 'mammary-mad' femininity.

Race as Personality "Genre"? (Reading/Screening Response)

In reference to the Berry chapter, personality can be cultivated through a unique employment of various fashion and styling techniques. The clothing industry’s creation of the “fashion type” translated itself well through Classical Hollywood’s numerous star vehicles promoting a “style conscious consumerism” that encouraged spectatorial emulation. However, when one thinks of these “types” or “genres” of femininity that invariably act as behavioral rubrics that personal specificities must adhere to, the categorical question of race is glaringly invisible. In what ways are racialized femininities expected to conform to or reproduce these dominant “generic” (heterosexual, white, female) codes? Does ethnicity become a personality trait that can be cultivated in certain ways? Granted Berry is engaging a particular configuration of the star system within Classical Hollywood cinema that privileged particular forms of white femininity, but how might we situate performers like Dorothy Dandridge, Carmen Miranda, Anna May Wong, and especially Hattie McDaniel in reference to this idea of generic fashion/style persona, femininity, and class transgression? How do they fit, or do they? Fashion, style, and class becomes deracinated here as these performers are lumped into a discourse of stardom and production/consumption practices that imagine predominantly white, middle class, female spectators. Also, in what ways could these imagined spectators be consuming race as a particular “generic” category of style and personality?

Berry also discusses the ways in which working class female characters transgress class boundaries via modes of performative sociality or “image management”. The act of “passing” performed by the female impostor successfully denaturalizes the social space characterized by elitism and exclusion, the strict sartorial and behavioral codes act as a form of restrictive conditioning. The makeover portion of this image management becomes the site of this possible transgression, however, often the success of this transformation is gauged by the subject’s relative deracination. In thinking about Maid in Manhattan, the character of Marissa can be seen to enact much of Berry’s conceptualization of this kind of class transgression, with all of its implications. Can we think of Marissa’s performance of upper class status as not only a deconstruction of class but also perhaps of whiteness and its constituent performative behaviors?

Stepping outside of the text, it might be productive to examine Jennifer Lopez (her incarnations as J.Lo/JLO), her connections to fashion, stardom and her particular star text, and her strategies of performative authenticity that are meant to possibly diffuse her status as a global/corporate brand (clearly Kate’s post points to the ways in which her iconicity connects to certain formulations of and fascinations with Hollywood spectacle and its reproduction). How has her entry into the upper echelons of the Hollywood elite enforced a form of insidious body politics, resulting in the self-disciplining of Lopez’s body in accordance with white standards of physical beauty (the changing size and configuration of Lopez’s rear end throughout her career was/is a major topic of discussion)?

The J.Lo Grammy Gown

In light of the readings and last week's screening I have been thinking about how I could put the readings on Sabrina and Audrey in dialogue with Maid in Manhattan and Jennifer Lopez.  In preparation for tomorrow's class and discussion about Maid in Manhattan I made myself a timeline of major Jennifer Lopez texts/events.  This dress definitely made my cut of main J.Lo events, and would certainly be on my list of memorable gowns (in my lifetime).  This Versace dress sparked endless comments and parodies, so I am sure that many people remember it, but if you don't, you should take a look...and just imagine Puff Daddy (before he was P.Diddy) on her arm.

Let's jump on the euphemism train to Shit-town!

I wasn’t raised to be ashamed of natural bodily functions. When I discovered that other high-school girls from the Southern Baptist church of my youth were unable to get their bowel movements on in the bathrooms of our day-camp-cabins and mission-trip bunking quarters, I was aghast. For some, it was just a matter of getting to a nearby Wal-Mart water closet, away from the cohort. For others, apparently, the thought of pooping in a bathroom where others might know that they were doing (or had done) doodoo was enough to stop them up for a week. Meanwhile, our gentlemanly counterparts -- if rumor proved true -- were being more creative with their waste than the Marquis de Sade (according to Quills, anyway).

Nothing could be less feminine, it seemed, than taking a shit.

Of course, ads and ladymags have been teaching us to hide our non-goddess-like (but necessary) activities for years. (Keep those tampons hidden, girls!) At least two of Sex and the City’s BFFs confessed to hesitance -- if not downright refusal -- to poop in a boyfriend’s apartment. (I believe “the act” was referred to as some derivation of “the number two.”) Way to reinforce that shame!

While my dear, sweet, teenaged baby sister was buying into the whole “excretion that dare not speak its name” thing, thanks to SATC, I was living with -- at least based on a small informal survey of my friends -- the most extraordinarily well-adjusted fella on earth. Seriously, if it seemed I had spent and extended period of time in the bathroom, he would pop in momentarily to hand me the latest copy of West Elm or some other catalog, holding his nose playfully, exclaiming “Cute!”

TMI? That’s just how much I don’t care. Nor does the hilarious Sarah Haskins, if we are to glean anything from her latest “Target Women” segment for Current TV’s InfoMania, wherein she teases out the various codes for poop in TV advertising aimed at women.

impressions of Audrey Hepburn

I've only watched two Hepburn films, "Sabrina" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's," so perhaps others better versed in her work would like to comment on their impressions of the star. For me, her screen persona, especially in "Breakfast," typifies a notion of the masquerade of femininity as *unconscious* and embedded, and as such toothless as a political tool. Although "Sabrina" is a makeover film and "Breakfast" alludes to the My Fair Lady-like grooming and transformation of Hepburn's character at the hands of a male Hollywood agent, the idea of femininity as socially constructed is "re-naturalized" by Hepburn's characters' effortless appropriation of the props of feminity--as though, literally, she were just "made for them." Her performances seem to lack the "distanciation" that Sarah Berry notes is there in the performances of Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, and Garbo, in gestures that these actresses make that grate against the grain of their characters' diegetic positioning in an ideology of conventional femininity.

and with regard to the gay male "desire to create"...

click the title to read The Gossip's Beth Ditto commenting on size expectations within the fashion industry and the relationship to gay male fashion designers.

10/10 reading response

Many of my frustrated responses to the seemingly irresolvable contradictions I called attention to in the fashion article I posted a couple of hours ago make more sense in light of Bordo's assessment of the fashionable body. The breezy tone of the fashion article can be seen in a similar way as the defense "It's only fashion" functions for Bordo - as a simultaneous affirmation of the free play that fashion provides, and a defense mechanism from cultural critique by way of associating fashion with "women's eternally superficial values" (253). (For what it's worth, when I went to quote Bordo, all I could think of was Michael Kors sing-songily admonishing Santino Rice to "Lighten up, it's just fashion" in ProjRun season two.)

I also found her discussion of Madonna fascinating, especially when read in conjunction with bell hooks' interpretation of Madonna's videos. I think that considering Madonna's fandoms (which both hooks and Bordo do, Bordo with an eye for young women's views and hooks thinking about drag queens) reveals an interesting collision between Madonna, women's and gay men's bodies, race, gender play, and musical aesthetics that I want to briefly consider.

Bordo, in her final chapter, complicates Judith Butler's notion of the discursive body by arguing that the meaning of the body is contingent on its location and who is watching (i.e. "drag" as abstract concept versus a drag queen in a gay bar or on the Phil Donahue Show). I feel like this conflicts with her reading of "Open Your Heart," in which she dismisses an "abstract" consideration of the video as a "purely formal text" in favor of an assertion that "there is a dominant position in this video, despite the 'ambiguities' it formally contains" (273-4). I don't necessarily disagree with her diagnosis of objectification, but I do think that given her nuanced discussion of the relationship between viewers and bodies in the subsequent chapter, there is something to be said for not limiting the possible range of productive viewer responses - there are gray areas between unqualified celebration and unqualified critique of a cultural object. Here, I think Madonna's fandom comes into play, and Bordo's division of possible responses to the video between "desire for" and "desire to become" Madonna limitingly presumes which gender will make which choice. With regard to the presence of gay men in the fashion industry as well as in Madonna's fandom, I think it may be useful 1) to also consider a "desire to create" and 2) to think about how the "desire for" plays out differently when heterosexual men are underrepresented in Madonna's fandom (i.e. the "real world" viewers of the video). Is the video then still a simple enactment of the male, objectifying gaze? What do we make of the little boy's gender play outside of the theatre (unaddressed by Bordo)? What about the relationship between body policing in Madonna herself and in her gay male and female fandom? What about the correlations in self-critical body attitudes/body image between gay men and straight women, are those related to this discussion?



I'm not necessarily positing the reconsideration of Madonna's fans as a liberatory or "transgressive" option. As bell hooks argues with regard to drag queens of color, the labor to "become" Madonna, or to enact her brand of "Blonde Ambition," often resulted in an even more marginalized position that Madonna herself was quick to reinforce. But it's interesting to see the ways in which she has continued to modify her body and incorporate black culture into her musical aesthetic and music videos. Reading bell hooks and Bordo together, and then watching a latter-day Madonna video like "Hung Up," all of the strands of critique seem to come together, chillingly crystallizing in the collision of the blond-haired, blue-eyed ABBA sample with a futuristic disco beat (itself a genre which traces its origin to New York Black and Latino communities) which broadcasts in (colonizes?) the street corner, the subway, and (visually echoing Like a Prayer's climax) in a hip-hop dance club, where Madonna both co-opts the trendy moves of the street and teaches her own Jazzercise/Tae-bo-esque maneuvers.

readings post: Bordo v. Butler

Is Judith Butler a Bay Area solipsist?  Bordo maps Butler on to a model of the Great White Male Monied Philosopher who is divorced from context and material realities, who can afford to swim in pure discourse at the expense of having to negotiate embodied "experience" day to day (281).  Butler's idea of the parodic enactment of gender as subversive act, according to Bordo, sounds good *in theory.*  Bordo refers to Butler's "linguistic foundationalism," which Bordo implicitly contrasts with her own more "materialist" approach, signaled in tropes such as her phrase, "the grip of culture on the body"; Butler, on the other hand--Bordo implies--would dissolve the materiality of the body into a diaphanous "text."  

Bordo rightly, I think, calls attention to the fact that the body-as-text (Butler's notion) doesn't exist in a vacuum, that such texts require readers, and that readers vary from context to context; that such texts also have authors, and that the authors are not necessarily themselves edified by the "enlightening" texts they display (292-93).  Bordo casts Butler as an academic who, impotently encased in the ivory tower, flatters her ego by fantasizing that her mere "textualism" is equipped to produce material changes "out there."

Certainly, watching a filmic text such as "Orlando" is unlikely to convert the queer-hater (who is unlikely to see the film to begin with) to reconsider their politics.  And given that Butler does, demonstrably, "talk the talk" (what Bordo terms the "power-language" of academic-ese, in which the pretension of an avant-garde "elitism" is fused with the glamour of a fiery politically oppositional stance), Bordo's portrait of Butler is not without justification.

On the side of Butler, however, I offer the following:  Bruzzi notes that "passing" must fail if it is to do any political work; the seams must show.  This was Butler's idea of parody, and it makes logical sense.  I would only venture to add that the political work that Butler envisions may come at a high cost.  I am thinking here of Matthew Shepard, or, more in line with Butler's focus on drag, of the scenario fictionalized in the film "Boys Don't Cry" (1999).  The trauma of a slaying in one's own community has an impact that the experience of watching "Orlando" necessarily lacks.  According to a radio report I heard, masculinist homophobes in the state of Wyoming were galvanized in support of the cause of gay rights by the close-to-home brutality of Shepard's death, which worked on them as a kind of consciousness-raising.  Brutality inscribes the conscience of a community.  Not parody alone, but trauma and martyrdom, may be required to effect political change, which may arise retrospectively in the wake of their devastation.  And even then, the forces of reaction and forgetting are legion. 

 

Palin is a Feminist Hero and Has Wrinkles

I have to apologize in advance: I'm obsessed with Sarah Palin...
So, it looks like the Republicans are a bit peeved that animal-lover Sarah Palin wasn't photoshopped on the most recent cover of Newsweek (apparently Obama got a "halo"... wait, are they saying he isn't holy?). Although, they can't seem to decide what they're more angry about, her upper-lip hair and wrinkles showing or the magazine gentle suggestion that perhaps folksiness has no place in legislation and foreign policy (gasp!). Either way, what's most incindiary is the constant wrapping of all pro-Palin rhetoric in feminism (notice the constant reference to a collective, feminine "we"). Unbelievably, this leaves the non-belligerent, non-fan of Palin (probably Democrat) commentator to rely on the usual post-feminist party line: you're making too much of this. Click the link to witness for yourself (Yes, its a Perez Hilton link. I couldnt find it anywhere else).

"The Enigma of Beauty" by Alexandra Shulman

Here's the final paragraph, which rather un-self-consciously enacts some of the contradictions surrounding beauty culture and beauty consumptions that we're working with in this article as well as in the class as a whole:

To some people's eyes, one will be beautiful perhaps, the others perhaps not. But whatever the case, they have been anointed with whatever collective process it is (magazine covers, advertising campaigns, tabloid comment) that deems them, out of so many lovely girls, to be the faces of the moment. It's all in the eye of the beholder.

One issue for me is, how can someone say with a straight face that "It's all in the eye of the beholder" while still calling attention to "magazine covers" and multi-million dollar "advertising campaigns" meant to train our eyes to recognize "true beauty" (a phrase that Shulman uses several times, which apparently has a great deal to do with being white and slender)?

The fashion writing I have encountered is an interesting, sort of hermetically sealed place, a site of deep, DEEEEEEP earnestness (certainty of power?) masquerading as detachment and breeziness, where people can indulge their fantasies while honing their tendency toward criticism, which is too often turned back toward themselves. It's nearly as impossible and frustrating to critique as Lee Edelman's No Future (in the sense that a critique of its logics seems to be at least somewhat contingent on an acceptance of them), since engaging with it own its terms means that we have to accept as non-preposterous the conflicting premises that 1) "it's all in the eye of the beholder," 2) there is no outside to the system (I'm thinking of the scene with the cerulean sweater in The Devil Wears Prada), and 3) "true beauty" is something that be spoken of earnestly and unironically.

And if we refuse the terms outright, we become [insert theorist from first week of class here].

I know I shouldn't post when my brain starts to hurt. I'm just a little intellectually paralyzed.

Also, the photo of a young Charlotte Rampling in the link totally looks like Helen Hunt. Have you seen Under the Sand with Charlotte Rampling? It's a great movie.

(BTW, I know that the tension between the two poles I just described are a big part of what our class is trying to negotiate, I just had a frustrated moment when I read the article)

(I know I use too many parentheses)

What exactly is she becoming? (Reading Response)

All in one posse, Butler, hooks and Bordo are an interesting extension of the masquerade and wearing womanliness discussion from a few weeks ago. bell hooks’ piece on Madonna seems a good dose of reality to Butler’s notions of gender performance and corporeal transgression, suggesting the frequent fate of transgressive performance in the hands of postmodern formations, with a special shout-out to post-feminism. As much as I think that Butler still offers a perhaps unsurpassable paradigm of gender construction and a most useful notion of performance, leaving slippery but nonetheless real spaces of potential contestation, it’s difficult to read the trio (Butler, hooks, and Bordo) today without some cynicism. In an attempt to be cured, I want to pose the question: What do we do with Butler in an era of sort-of-still-here third-wave feminism and the aggressive onslaught of post-feminism? Katy Perry narrates the soundtrack for commodity lesbianism (Kelly gestured toward this in an earlier post) and the Sex and the City movie is considered a legitimate articulation of feminist principles (not making this up – I have 3 undergrad papers to prove it). Transgression is everywhere and nowhere; it dances mostly in place, reproducing the same old binaries and power differentials, all under the protection of a postmodern everything-is-constructed and therefore everything-is-equally-legitimate ethos. I am admittedly conflating multiple transgressions under one faux umbrella, but I am wondering how (with Butler’s designation of the body as a surface of gender inscription and regulation and therefore also a place where potential ruptures can occur) we can shift the analytic to prevent its constant deployment of heavily gendered, unquestionably heteronormative, spectacular corporeality.
Madonna, who, as Bordo notes most often traffics as something of a postmodern, feminist icon, a woman who wears her transgression fearlessly (I’ll resist the “pit-bull with lipstick” connections here) is a perfect example. I tend to side with hooks here - her transgression is undoubtedly limited, superficial, and in many ways, reproductive of white male centrality. Most importantly, I would argue that its looming danger lies precisely in its claim to transgression, to what Butler would likely call “becoming.” Madonna of course, according to hooks, is hardly becoming, or transforming. Instead, she violently and aggressively co-opts blackness (as only a white woman can, but I’ll return to that) in order to taunt the white male gaze. The obvious implication here, and one that I don’t think hooks explores nearly far enough, is the latent fear of miscegenation she toys with and ultimately reaffirms. Interracial sex, and specifically between black men and white women, is always haunted by what Valerie Smith calls the specter of rape. It’s an interesting, but double-edged sword: she lays bear the performance of femininity, the careful masquerade (why, in Julie Burchill’s words, brunettes have made the best blondes), but does so at the expense of those her own presence “others.” Reading hooks analysis on Madonna, I kept fighting back a familiar Paul Mooney quote: “everybody wants to be black, but don’t nobody want to be black” (you may notice a word has been substituted for my own white liberal comfort).
A corollary notion I want to address is that when thinking about transgressive performance and both gender and racial passing, it’s imperative to acknowledge who is allowed mobility and passing – white women. Again, hooks glosses over this briefly, but I think it’s a significant impediment to the possibilities of transgressive performance.

What Color Are Your Jeans?

"Have you ever looked at your personality in a full-length mirror? This quiz is like an emotional fitting room. Answer a few questions to find out what color jeans look the best on your soul."
--Courtesy of The-N Website



I'm sure you are all curious "what color jeans look best on your soul." Does this mean I should refrain from wearing my favorite gray jeans? Or should I run out and buy myself a light blue pair? Better yet, I should buy a virtual light blue pair for my avatar!

Mammy, Madonna and Orlando

In light of the Bruzzi chapter, bell hooks reading of Madonna and last week’s discussion of Mammy and Gone with the Wind, I wanted to raise a few brief questions/connections. I was struck by the conspicuous absence of race in relationship to Bruzzi’s readings of The Ballad of Little Jo and The Crying Game. Although we noted last week that this is something that is notably absent from our other Bruzzi reading, I found that I was actively cringing through most of this chapter. Bruzzi’s readings of gender transgressions and androgyny are begging for a reading of how race enables gender play, subversion or transgression – the fact that Little Jo is coupled with an Asian man with a “feminine plait” is not unimportant (183). The way in which Tinman’s (unintentional) androgyny is easily (both in the analysis and seemingly in the film) equated to Jo’s (intentional) androgyny and masculine dress speaks to larger issues about intersections between race and gender, which I would love to tease out a bit in class. In many ways bell hooks can function as a foil to Bruzzi’s reading, and bell hooks discusses the ways in which Madonna’s associations with black masculinity allows her to attach herself to black sexuality (and all of its connotations) and also the way in which black females function as a support system (see her textual analysis of “Like a Prayer” on p.162). Thus in the case of Madonna we are able to see both the way in which blackness supports and produces her image, but also how the juxtaposition of Madonna (blonde, white, female) and black men, allows for certain gender transgressions which would not be possible if she were paired with white men. Truth or Dare becomes an interesting text precisely because it explicitly presents some of the messy ways in which race can produce femininity and gender (this work is often rendered invisible).
Lastly, I was wondering how we might be able to align what Bruzzi points out about the servants (p. 195) in Orlando with role of Mammy? Bruzzi reads the “lack of surprise’ as a sign that it is easy to make people accept gendered images. I am not convinced of this conclusion, but I am more interested in the role that lower economic classes play in the production of gender and the maintenance of “respectability.” Given our broad topic for next week, this might also offer a means of conversational segway.

Madonna/Britney Parody

This is the French and Saunders (two insanely talented British comediennes, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders) parody of the Britney/Madonna music video for “Me against the music”. They have countless other classic Madonna parodies, but I just love this one. Apart from it being very charming and hilarious, I think that this makes some points related to the absurdity of the spectacle of “performative lesbianism” and the planned obsolescence of the music industry that makes women compete with each other to maintain their sex appeal. Does gender performance have an age limit?
(The first part is a parody of the Madonna Gap Commercial, the video portion is directly after. Enjoy!)

Like A Boy

This video is just for fun. I actually haven't gotten to this week's readings yet, but I can anticipate a loose connection. Or, the video will at least make for an interesting conversation piece at some point in the semester. This is Ciara's music video for "Like A Boy," which, if I might be frank, is quite possibly the sexiest video ever made. Talk about a messy network of erotic gazes and racialized gender performances, all of which is only further complicated by rumors of Ciara being a lesbian (did she or didn't she 'get her freak on' with Missy Elliot?). Perhaps Reggie Bush's 'innocuating' presence (insofar as he thwarts the possibility of a completely homosocial screen space) was a must for those concerned with her public persona.

The trouble with Ouiser Boudreaux...

I enjoyed reading Stella Bruzzi's explication of androgyny even though I haven't seen Orlando as yet. It made me wonder about the ways in which one sees figures as well as moments of androgyny in a film like Steel Magnolias. Here I am thinking in particular of the characters of Ouiser Boudreaux and Clairee Belcher and the ways in which they inhabit their bodies as well as adorn them. As much as this film deals with the importance of feminine homosociality, as often an important counterpoint to the family, the space of the beauty parlour (Truvy's) also make the bodily surfaces, their 'realities' and their transformations especially charged ones. Bruzzi's references to the myriad kinds of innovative play with gender codes of embodiment and sexuality by fashion designers in the post-second world war context, in particular, those to Ralph Lauren's designs for Diane Keaton which would heighten femininity through its 'loss', reminded me of the ways in which the character of Ouiser is marked with a kind of androgyny. At one level there seems to be a temporal explanation for her androgyny, whereby, she seems to be rejecting, in an almost militant fashion, the masculine as an object for sexual attraction, as well as the ideal of heterosexual marital bliss, because of her disillusioning experiences with multiple marriages to men. But the way she is represented also seems to evoke one of Bruzzi's formulation of androgyny as an attempted fusion, or bringing together of the masculine and the feminine while retaining both resonances. While she is the one woman who is shown to routinely display some degree of ('unfeminine') physical prowess by having to pull around her gigantic and unruly dog, she is also shown to be using various services offered by Truvy's. Her later, evasively shown coupling with an earlier sweetheart evokes comparisons with the 'reciprocal bonding' of Jo and Tinman in The Ballad of Little Jo, as discussed by Bruzzi. What acts as a further complication is the fact that Ouiser's presence Truvy's also generates comic relief with Annelle bungling each time she has to perform any kind of treatment upon her. The beauty salon as a space in itself, constantly demonstrates visually the 'process' of beauty-creation. The climactic scene of the film however, performs a further reversal which, in my mind, confirms the location of a certain kind of androgyny within the character of Ouiser and troubling the apparently univalent gender identities of some of the others. Following the funeral service for Shelby, M'Lynn's outburst, especially her desire for a violent rejection of the way things have turned out can be read as both a rupturing as well as heightening of her role as the nurturing, adapting mother and model of femininity. This outburst is followed by Clairee's apparent acquiescence to M'Lynn's destructive desire, inviting her to hit Ouiser. This invitation can also be seen as a veiled and channelized expression of lesbian sexual desire. And completing the triad of surprises, is Ouiser's own response with fear at the threat of being actually assaulted. This seems to disturb her representation so far as the 'manly woman'. However, as before, this also becomes the moment of crucial diffusion of melodramatic emotional excess with the use of humor, of which Ouiser is both the butt as well as fond object.
Pam Cook's chapter on the British costume melodrama propelled me to think of the ways in which Gone with the Wind plays with the idea of masquerade as being - necessary to the embodiment of femininity (Scarlett at the beginning of the film) or femininity as always being a put-on. Later in the film, the masquerade of feminine frailty or nonchalance or frigidity becomes crucial for a woman to survive in war-times. The film shows costume as being crucial to this playing at femininity. Costume also takes on the force of a resistant feminine practice that refuses the frugalities and deprivations of the masculinist and disorderly enterprise of war. The film, invoking the distinctions between true selfless femininity ( as embodied by Melanie) and its feigned, begrudging forms (Scarlett), asserting the value of the first, but also offering to the viewer, the pleasure of repeatedly chafing against it, the pleasure of a kind of amorality and desire for survival at any cost through the character of Scarlett. The duality of the viewer's engagement with Scarlett - enjoying her easy self-justifications and opportunism while seeing her penalization as being justified - is reminiscent of the kind of double audience engagement Stella Dallas seemed to elicit.
I also wanted to think about the ways in which the costume dramas can be read when placed in a colonial context. The ones that Cook looks at are necessarily ones which involved fellow imperial-powers and which located the cultural wars within European precincts. I wonder whether her argument that these dramas were less instances of cultural stereotyping, and more interrogations of British national identity during wartime, would sustain an exploration of representations of the colonial other(s) in these films.

Corsets, comics, politics: A reading response

Having just taken in the vice-presidential debate (and an entire pint of Half Baked), I’m going to begin this response somewhat differently than I had anticipated.
Recently, one of Jezebel.com’s contributors returned to a statement, or rather, a state of mind, that had been attributed to her: There is no bad feminism. She brought it up to illustrate why she didn’t like Sarah Palin’s “feminism” -- because Palin, she posited, probably doesn’t really know what that word means in any of its variations, or what it means to her.
Three things stood out to me about this week’s reading: 1) that there seemed to be more focus on what the text or costume maker envisioned, highlighting the separation that can exist between creation and interpretation (which reminded me of something I believe Tara said about her friend who is a costume designer for Mad Men), 2) non-gender-based factors were more readily acknowledged (though sometimes held off; looking at you, Kaplan) and 3) the importance of knowledge in the creation and interpretation of text and clothing is coming to the surface. Kaplan, who was fortunate enough to have a progressive upbringing, was able to take pleasure in books that may or may not be seen by most as silly fantasy. Knowledge gave her the power to make educated decisions, to be active in her pleasure, to create a reactionary reading. (I’m not sure how well her article makes her case against post-feminism, though, which she throws in at the end.) This is the distinction, I think, between all of those “good feminisms” and the thing that Palin bandies around: Understanding.
Self-conscious choices about womanhood (and clothing) -- even seemingly opposing ones -- are what make a character like Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre), from the graphic novel Watchmen, so interesting. I noted in our first session that I was entrenched in an argument with one of my best friends over the redesign of her costume for the film.
Originally, it was something like a black bathing suit with a plunging neckline, with a shimmering long-sleeved mini-dress over. The new interpretation is a skintight latex-y construction, with the same color blocks, and a corset-like piece around her waist I hated this. Years of broken ribs and the mutilation of the female body! Hmph! Then came this week’s Bruzzi chapter, in which she posits that corsets, in fact, could be objects of pain and of pleasure in their heyday. Ooooh. Then that would make perfect sense … because the costume (and the identity of “superhero”) is pushed on the character by her mother, and she has a complex relationship with it beyond that: She is aware that it is impractical, that it restricts her crime-fighting abilities, and yet it is very erotic for her. It could be part of her self-expression, if only in the nineteenth-century sense that Gaines recalls in “Costume and Narrative”: dress as the key to the self. Restrictive clothes can work, as Bruzzi suggests they do for Ada in The Piano, “for and against” women. Looks like my friendly little debate could be emerging from hibernation. Provided the spirited political one between my grandmother and myself ever comes to an end …

Best Film Costume of All Time

This is a list of British In Style Magazine's Top Ten Best Film Costumes of All Time. One can see the fashions range from more overt period costume (Elizabeth) to "costumes" that have infiltrated more mainstream conceptions of high fashion (Atonement). You all can be the judge as to whether these pieces belong or not and why. It might be interesting to look at the blog that accompanies this list--there seems to be some questioning as to the top choice, perhaps a good way to invoke how film fashion/costume's addresses different fantasies.