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.