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.