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.