Hilarious!

Check this out! I haven't laughed so hard in ages!

Fat is the New Skinny? I think not.

"Statistically, half of us must be homelier than average, but the ideology of self-esteem insists that 100% of us are attractive. Somebody is lying." (Aoki, 15).

I am really tired of Dove. I hate their campaign for real beauty. I think it's ridiculous. Like much lazy feminist theorizing, the crux of its argument centers on the idea that contemporary beauty ideals are exclusionary and unrealistic. Let's look at the first bit - exclusionary. If any of these feminists/Dove advertising executives were to grab a dictionary, they would find that an ideal is "a standard of perfection or excellence". Not everything can be perfect or excellent. Perfection and excellence exist as comparative concepts as does beauty. So if we were all perfect, perfection would cease to exist. My body is not the ideal and I have no problem with that. My body is not supposed to be the ideal. Why are we so mad that we are not being defined as idyllic? Are we all flaming narcissists?

(As a side note, I realize that the point here for many feminists is that this "tyranny of slenderness" (a phrase so overused I would classify it as a cliche) justifies the continued imposition of disciplining mechanisms of bodily control (Bartky). But, is that not precisely what Dove is selling - products to be used by women to alter/maintain their physical appearance?)

What really piques my derision is the ever-so-common invocation of eating disorders to justify the absolute necessity of women loving their bodies regardless of aesthetic standards. These tragic women, we are told, are so blindly obedient to the whims of the culture industry's call for size 0s that they have starved themselves into martyrdom. Quick, let's all revel in our beauty before we too contract eating disorders! I find it interesting and endlessly frustrating that feminist analysis so often thoughtlessly appropriates the bodies of other women to rage against the unfair treatment and judgment of their own bodies. It is also interesting that this line of criticism persists even as obesity rates continue to rise.

Also interesting and rather suspicious is the fact that the one group of people this overly inclusive new image of beauty excludes is those who meet the apparently unrealistic ideal - skinny people and supermodels. Perhaps this can be chalked up to our discomfort with the fact that their existence provides the undeniable proof that the “unrealistic” ideal is absolutely realistic – there it is.

I say to hell with the liberating potential of plus sizes. It is nothing more than theoretically indefensible bullshit. Plus, none of us actually believe the “we are all beautiful” propaganda no matter how hard we try. If we did, the rhetoric would disappear as it would have outlived its usefulness. So why (or perhaps more importantly, how) do we hold on to these notions of universal beauty when mere seconds of critical thought would reveal them to be total crap?

Aoki, Doug. "You Look Beautiful Just the Way You Are (But If I Looked Like You I'd Want to Kill Myself)"

Bartky, Sandra. "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power."

A Necessary Sacrifice

I don't think I love my kitten enough to give up masturbation.

Contradictions and Juxtapositions

White calls attention to both the endless, repetitive flow of television that works to knit all of its products into a seemingly unified whole, and the contradictions and juxtapositions embodied across different programs, within different programs and within commercials. Contradictory messages are simply accepted and absorbed into the larger flow of television and their incompatibility goes unrecognized. Susan Bordo examines this phenomenon in relation to advertising directed at women. She notes that “with a flip of the page or barely a pause between commercials, images of luscious foods and the rhetoric of craving and desire are replaced by advertisements for grapefruit diets, low-calorie recipes and exercise equipment (Bordo 199). As a result “bulimia emerges as a characteristic modern personality construction” as we are commanded to both indulge in endless consumption and employ self-control in denying desires (Bordo 201). Bordo notes that, in consumer capitalism, this same tension exists as individuals are required to both consume endlessly and deny desires to consume in order to produce. She further notes that of key importance to the continuation of the capitalist system is the masking of this contradiction, which is accomplished through advertising that demands we can ‘have it all’. Thus, as is seen in this magazine cover, we find images of slender women combined with headlines urging us to “lose 9lbs. this week” next to images of rich desserts. Perhaps due to the an endless and ever-increasing acceleration of images combined with a lack of distance, we lack the “heightened presence of mind” necessary to pick up on the obvious contradiction. There is no reflection, no “significant crystallization” allowing for the revelation of the obvious tensions embodied in such advertising.

Bordo, Susan. (1995). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.

White, Mimi. Ideological Analysis and Television

Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Try as we might...

So, as I write, I am watching my first ever episode of Entourage. I am watching this because I was watching "Without a Trace" and when it ended, I realized I left the remote by the TV and I couldn't be bothered to get up to change the channel. Perhaps A & H are right; I am a passive automaton!

But, no! I will not go placidly into the realm of the drone! I am reading this text critically, and amid the references to women as meat and to the wimpy member of the group as the "bitch" of the crew, who should waltz onto the scene but a female body builder. Apparently the guy with the creepy (and in my opinion, ill-advised) mustache is "banging" her. She makes her exit and "the crew" proceeds to berate their friend for his clear homosexual-esque behaviour; I mean, she's practically a man!

Fen Coles proposes that female body builders represent a double drag. Muscles, gendered masculine and understood as belonging only and appropriately to men, are taken on by women. In so doing, the female body builder exits the realm of gendered intelligibility. But, the gender bending does not end here! In order to redeem herself, and regain the position of subject, the female body builder must subject herself to the ideological practices that constitute femininity, only she must do so in an extreme and exaggerated manner – she must be excessive in her performance of femininity (i.e. breast implants, skimpy bikinis, bleach blonde hair, over-the-top make-up).

The female body builder is a walking contradiction. She presents an excessive representation of femininity in conjunction with an excessive representation of masculinity. Her existence, her appearance, is shocking and tactile, but perhaps ineffective with regards to the exposure of norms, as she is largely passed off, as in Entourage, as a freak, a lesbian, or a hermaphrodite. The audience at large appears to lack the “heightened presence of mind” necessary to lead to any productive or critical reading. This seems true of many of the hyperbolized normative representations we have examined in class (i.e. 50 cent). How productive are hyperbole, excess, and shock effect if the vast majority of audience members simply either reinsert the subversive text back into a dominant narrative, or interpret it within a dominant framework which passes it off as “weird” and therefore not worth further scrutiny?

Coles, Fen. (1999) Feminine Charms and Outrageous Arms. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. New York: Routledge. 445-453.

Let's Talk About Sex!

Alright folks, I have to be honest; I am a bit tired of the polite, non-confrontational, “good point, I agree with you, what an interesting argument” tone that these blogs are tending to take. Don’t get me wrong, I am loving the blogging, but I think we are all a bit too nice. In the spirit of Rhodes and Kipnis, I’m going to attempt to stir things up a bit – to disrupt our tidy conversation with something a bit more guttural, and, I figure, the best way to do that is to dare to get personal, to hit below the belt. So let’s talk about sex.

Significant feminist commentary has been devoted to representations of female sexuality in the media, particularly in pornography (Mackinnon, Dworkin etc.). Much of this work posits that the dominant representations of sexuality found in mass cultural texts are about an eroticization of power, in particular, an eroticization of male domination and female submission. The female body is represented as the vessel by which men gain sexual gratification, and female gratification is achieved by gratifying male sexual desires. Thus women are denied any sexuality that is truly their own. No one escapes this heteronormative sexual formula as, while the genders of the sexual subjects involved in any given sexual encounter may vary, all sexuality is largely understood as involving a power struggle, and it is this power struggle that defines the experience as sexual (i.e. the rape scene from the L Word).

Can sex exist without an element of power? Can our desires escape the ideological tangling of sex, power, domination, and submission? Can we be hailed as sexual subjects without subjecting ourselves to this discourse of sexuality as the eroticization of unequal power relations? If it can be said that sexuality is, in some major way, defined by the eroticization of domination and submission, then would it not be fair to say that sexual assault is nothing more than the basic formula of sex reaching its logical conclusion? Perhaps sexual assault could be interpreted as a real world example of excess. Sexual assault represents a moment in which the ideology of sex as domination spills over its ideological containment and reveals the norm as problematic. “Sexual assault is not about sex, it is about power and control.” But if sex is about power and control as well, then sexual assault is absolutely about sex. Sexual assault simply reveals the ugly truth of sex. Sexual assault is the hyperbolized version of sex. If this is the case, sexual assault will not disappear until we drastically revision sex.

Discuss (Come on! If nothing else, that had to have provoked some strong feelings/opinions…let me have it!)

Here I am World!!!

"And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it" (Cixous 246).

I don't know about you fellow-bloggers, but I feel like I took something Thursday night and it felt really good.

Cixous writes as though she might burst, as though we all might burst, as though every woman is secretly or not so secretly bursting at the seams, aching to release our "unheard-of songs" on an unprepared world. Upon my accidental initiation into the world of feminism two years ago (thank you Mebbie), I remember feeling as though there was suddenly so much that urgently needed to be said and not enough time or words or forums in which to say it. The flood gates had been opened, but I had no idea where the water was going to go. Unfortunately, as time went by, I found no solution to the problem and thus, my insides remained flooded while the world at large remained impeccably dry.

Cixous urges women to write. That never seemed like enough to me, but perhaps it is a necessary first step. Rhodes speaks of the urgency of radical feminist textuality (both of the second wave and contemporarily) in a way that seems to mirror Cixous. We write because someone must! We write because we have to start somewhere! We write in order to take back our corner of the world, to rearticulate that corner as ourselves and thrust that corner into the spotlight, even if only for a moment. It seems endlessly simplistic, but to simply demand the recognition of one’s existence is really powerful.

So cyber world, I AM A FEMINIST AND I AM HERE!

Cixous, Helene. 1981. "The Laugh of the Medusa". In New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 245-264. New York: Schocken Books.

Frustrated!!

So, I’m a little frustrated - no, I’m a lot frustrated. Kipnis calls for a populist intervention to change popular culture. Maybe it’s just because I’m having a bit of a “glass half empty” kind of day, but I’m not really sure what to do with that. How the hell do we change popular culture? Writing on stop signs and cheering in Tory atrium are really neat and they might even make a few people stop for a split second and really think, but in the grand scheme of things, what are these brief moments of refunctioning or dissent really accomplishing? Oppositional antagonistic discourses are always provisional and temporary and partial (insert other postmodern tropes here), but there doesn’t seem to be much that is provisional or partial about mass culture. I know things change and there is uneven development and cracks and fissures etc. etc., but, as far as the big picture goes, I don’t see anything changing. And I don’t see Kipnis coming up with any concrete strategies to help with the whole changing thing.

Postmodernism loves to tear things down, but nothing every gets built back up in any productive way. How do we build anything while at the same time maintaining that everything is provisional? The point, I know, isn’t to build anything permanent, but this leaves me feeling like I’m trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun. I feel like I am running in circles chasing my own tail. I buy it. I get that everything is provisional and changing and temporary and there are only partial truths, but not many people like that idea. Truths are comforting, and, frankly, useful. Theory is really neat and Kipnis is admittedly very clever and maybe even right, but all she presents is the vague notion that we should act rather than just talk and deconstruct. Of course, she says this at the end of twenty-odd pages of deconstructing, in an impressively wordy and academic fashion.

I’m going to bed… maybe the glass will be half full tomorrow.

Politicization or Aestheticization? How's a Girl to Decide?!

aestheticization of politics = BAD/politicization of aesthetics = GOOD

In the context of the examples given in class, I get it. It seems really clear. An obvious line can be drawn between aesthetic representations that are political and those which are dumbing down political issues. But upon considering the issue further, I don't know if it is so very clear. Any aesthetic representation will be informed by an ideological framework and will be produced by an ideological subject(s). Most aesthetic representations seem to be produced in the name of a particular purpose, often a distinctly political purpose; this seems to be the case for artistic endeavours that constitute politicizations of aesthetics and for those which represent aestheticizations of politics. The 9/11 video we watched in class was clearly produced with a political message in mind. I get how it aestheticized politics. But what if we simply changed the verbal message behind the "In Memoriam" video to something more acceptable to us left-wingers - perhaps an indictment of the use of such a horrific event to justify war? Would the movie instantly become a politicization of aesthetics or would it still be an aestheticization of politics? Does the distinction simply depend on what we feel to be the "correct" political message to send? How can we objectively judge this? Can we?

Look Mom! I'm a subject!

I always feel like I got my money's worth when I leave a class hopelessly confused, so shout out to Dr. Tapley who always leaves me hopelessly confused.

That was a hell of a class. Not only did I out myself as a misogynist-music lover, I think I might have implied rape makes me feel powerful. So not my intention! But, I have to admit, after a long day of Women's Studies classes full of analyses of oppression and detailing my own subjugation, nothing hits the spot like locking myself in my den, blasting 50 on my computer and singing along at the top of my lungs! What can I say; sometimes a girl needs to feel powerful. That music is powerful. And so I have been thinking about power and empowerment. 50 Cent uses powerful language. He talks about what he does, who he is and, often, what he is going to do to other people. So is power always about who gets to sit in the subject seat and who they get to place in the object seat? Does power necessarily imply that you have power over someone, or are at the least more powerful than someone else? Even as feminists, we feel empowered by our enlightened state of being to the extent that we can recognize others who are not as enlightened as we, and thereby feel more powerful than they. Can I feel powerful without the knowledge that there are other people who are less powerful than I? Basically, what I am wondering is this: if, tomorrow, the world magically became a totally egalitarian place where we were all equals, would we all be equally powerful or would power simply cease to exist as a concept? Is power dependent on the notion that some people have more than others?

An analogous example to better illustrate my point: Dove thinks we should fight for real beauty. Dove thinks we should recognize that everyone is beautiful in their own way. But beauty doesn't work like that. If we were all considered equally beautiful, beauty would no longer exist as a meaningful concept. Nobody would say "wow, you're really beautiful", if all that meant were “wow, you look just like everyone else”. Beauty is a comparative concept. We can only be and feel beautiful by recognizing others who are less or more beautiful. If the above is also true of power - if we can only be empowered by feeling more powerful than others - is empowerment a good thing? Should we really be proud that we feel empowered? Should we really be working so hard to empower ourselves? My head hurts.

White and Adorno and Horkheimer, oh my!

"Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 123). Did anyone else pause and worry that perhaps they accidentally picked up A Brave New World instead of their WST 320 reading? I did. And personally, while popular culture can sometimes seem interminably formulaic and mind-numbing, I am not quite ready to give up hope and resign myself to the category of drone or automaton. Adorno and Horkheimer strip the audience of all agency by insisting that media messages are inevitably received and absorbed unquestioningly and uncritically by a vapid audience. On the other hand, White rightly acknowledges that, while media messages may be encoded with particular aims and in similar ways, these messages inevitably give way to a plurality of understandings as differing subject postions produce different decoding processes.

In thinking about this subjective aspect of culture and cultural judgements in the context of representations of women in media, Sex and the City came to mind. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and admit that this is one of my favourite shows. I realize that its representations of women are hardly all-inclusive or even particularly representative, but I find aspects of it empowering and, frankly, hilarious. In discussing Carrie and her friends with my feminist pals, I have found that my buds either loathed or loved the gals with no inbetween ground. So who's right about the buxom bunch? Is there a "right" way to absorb culture? Can we objectively state that a cultural form is or is not feminist? Can something be at once feminist and anti-feminist depending entirely on subjective understandings of feminism? How far can we stretch this pluarlity of meanings? I certainly do not have the answers, but if any of you do, could you let me know so I can either right off Sex and the City forever or finally feel free to proudly exclaim my love from the rooftops?

A Vision Statement

Having never written a "vision statement" before, I must first warn that I write this rather self-consciously with the worry that it may lack somewhat in vision and abound moreso in general blurriness. Here goes:

I suppose what stood out most for me in today's reading was the idea that the Internet, with its interactive and public format and its potentially egalitarian structure, can and should be appropriated by feminists in order to empower new, diverse and, perhaps, radical, feminist ways of knowing. In addition, it seems hard to miss the fact that text is a powerful medium with the authority to define and legitimize "ways of knowing" and the identities that may produce or follow from such epistemological standpoints. Following from these ideas, I suppose the purpose of my blog is to attempt to write into being my own feminist identity. I hope to bring a degree of authority and legitimacy to my feminism by way of engaging in a textual conversation with other feminisms online.

At the same time, by engaging and responding to links and comments, I hope to connect with the idea that this textual "me" cannot and will not be stable, and to track the changeability of "me". I guess, ultimately, I hope to engage with the idea that texts, and the other online feminisms I will encounter through classmates' blogs, work to produce me as a particular kind of subject/subjectivity and, likewise, my textual self works to produce other individuals' subjectivities. I hope to explore how exactly this process works. (Did that make sense to anyone other than me?)

Does anyone else note a glarring contradiction there? I do, and while I would rather ignore it, I suppose I should engage it by also attempting to explore the tension I feel between my desire to authorize a strong, solid identity through text and the apparent reality that that identity can never be stable.

So, yeah. I bet next week I'm gonna look back at this and be, like, "what the hell was that textual me thinking?"