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 …