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.