Speaking of periodization and time, here's a corporate interpretation thereof.
"Fashion flies away, style remains. Mexx. Style is Timeless."
Photo taken in downtown Vancouver with my trusty old-school cell phone. Notice the artful glare on the window.
The slogan is an eerily apt gloss on the way we talk about literary aesthetics now. What's the difference between a "fashion" ("Amygism"?) and a style ("period style"; "avant-garde")? "Fashion" is understood as, by definition, arbitrary and nonhistorical (that is, not consequential for history), even though recent modernist studies have paid a lot of attention to fashion (the clothing kind). Style, on the other hand, is something that influences what will come after, and therefore persists through history.
That's not, of course, to say that it's "timeless" (or, as the sign would have it, "Timeless"). For literary critics, style is historical; for Mexx, style transcends time and counteracts its force. Message: buy our clothes; you will never need to get rid of them because they transcend time.
It's another glorious morning on the Berkeley-Oakland border. On today's schedule: dissertating and grading. Just like every other day!
I've realized that this blog has gotten awfully earnest, and that it's been a while since I posted a hilarious photo of my environs (à la inappropriate Keats). I've actually been in hot pursuit of this photo for months, ever since I saw this ad on the side of an AC Transit bus. I'm pretty slow on the draw with my cell phone camera, so for a long time, every time I saw the ad the bus would pull away before I could snap the photo.
I finally managed it recently by lingering in the crosswalk to slow the bus down. Yes, I am that devoted, because it is basically teen Melanctha, and it's ingenious. Voilà:
The ad is for a teen dating violence hotline, one that looks like an admirable initiative, actually. You can see how it has "Melanctha" all over it. "HOW DO YOU KNOW?" reads the copy, which, of course, is the question in "Melanctha." The fake dialogue given to the teens even mimicks the question ping-pong between Melanctha and Jeff, the indefinite deferral of knowledge:
Teen Jeff: WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
Teen Melanctha: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHAT DO I MEAN?
Why you ask me that, Jeff Campbell, when you know already what I am always saying to you?
The pop psychology subtext of this ad might be that miscommunication causes relationship problems ("drama"). But the ad explicitly makes the relationship into an epistemological problem, "how do you know?" -- the problem of other minds, conducing to language's capacity to create a naturalist (in the Zola sense) closed system ending in a spiral toward violence.
Dial down your drama, people. Do it for Gertrude Stein.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing—which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power. (8)
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1973. London: Allen Lane, 1977. Print.
I have long wanted to post a photograph of this. It's Boalt Hall School of Law, festooned with an odd quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
When I think ... of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past – figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life.
A Victorian medievalism subtends these interesting metaphors. The law is represented as feminine, and a weaver, a feminine-coded occupation. (The Bayeux tapestry is actually embroidered.) The law weaves a history, like the one represented in the Bayeux tapestry; in this sense the law is an observer and a recorder.
Calling the tapestry a "web" evokes, at least for me, the Lady of Shalott, who is bound to see the world only through a mirror, and weave the reflected images into her tapestry.
And moving through a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear. [...] But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights
The reflected images are only "shadows" of course, hence removed from reality and "dim" like the images that Holmes describes. Curiously, Holmes makes much of that dimness; he mentions it twice. No matter how "might[y]" this princess, her web is by definition dim; the law is explicitly a recorder of shadows, and retired from the world. Tennyson focuses on the weaver:
But in her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights, For often through the silent nights A funeral, with plumes and lights And music, went to Camelot; Or when the Moon was overhead, Came two young lovers lately wed. "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott.
[...]
She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott.
Holmes, on the other hand, cares more about the tapestry. There's no question for him of whether Princess Law likes weaving under a curse. Still, the "dim" occupation doesn't make the law sound any too jolly.
Notice, too, how "princess" is not a political label here, even when the princess is "might[y]." "Princess" is a bizarre term to use for the law in a democracy, since it at least superficially recalls monarchic law, but here "princess" is clearly only code for "classy woman constrained to weave forever in a tower." She is "might[y]," but not politically or even artistically mighty. It is a mere reflection, and thus mere fallen mimesis, calling on a whole discourse of women's reproductive work, as contrasted with masculine creation. Her weaving is not even excellently mimetic; it is "dim" and difficult to decipher because it is "symbolic." Her might as a weaver seems to lie in quantity; the tapestry goes on "eternally."
All this is to say: what a strange thing to quote on the front of a law school.
The sign reads, "Got the flu? Take necessary steps to prevent it!"
Thanks for that helpful tip, Temescal Walgreens. I think I'll buy twelve bottles of Clorox to wantonly spray everywhere. Doubtless this will help prevent the flu that I already have.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Sociological Images has posted some images of black people being used as "props for white femininity," something I posted on regarding the James/Bündchen Vogue cover a while ago.
Lisa writes, "Dude, we are so not making this stuff up." To which I can only add:
I recently re-read a chapter from Mary Anne Doane’s Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis, in which Doane tries to tease out some of the complex relationships between articulations of race and gender in cultural history.
In particular, she explores the way that the sexuality of white women has been figured in terms of race; the "pure" (racially pure, sexually pure) white woman is the figure against which the black man is constructed as a violent, hypersexual taint, as seen in the rhetoric of racist organizations in the nineteenth century (and continuing to today) and thoroughly played up in D.W. Griffith's famous Birth of a Nation, a landmark in film technique and in deeply horrifying racist propaganda all at once.
At the same time, white female sexuality is also seen as profoundly unstable, the "weak link" in civilization, so that the white woman is prone to "falling" (like Eve) and becoming a "fallen woman" whose sexual "impurity" translates into a kind of racial "impurity." The white woman, in other words, exists (culturally speaking) in the madonna/whore binary, and the "whore" half of that binary is mapped onto blackness. Meanwhile, the black woman is the invisible term, erased from the cultural map by the black man/white woman complex of social anxieties. As Doane observes,
Just as Africa was considered to be the continent without a history, European femininity represented a pure presence and timelessness (whose psychical history was held, by Freud, to be largely inaccessible). The trope, however, reduces and over-simplifies the extremely complex relations between racial and sexual difference articulated by the colonialist enterprise. For that enterprise required as a crucially significant element the presence of the black woman (who is relegated to non-existence by the trope)." (212)
All this recently in my mind, I was completely shocked to run across this Vogue cover on the internet:
A quick google revealed that I was by no means the first to notice the cultural contexts evoked by the cover (here, here, here, here...)
As usual, any time a historically oppressed group is publicly subjected to further oppression, a bunch of astonishing people have to crawl out of the woodwork to inform the world that there is no problem, because they "just don't see" the racism in the photo, because after all they are "colorblind" and the world would be perfect if everyone would be as blind as they are and stop complaining about racist images.
It is true that you pretty much have to invoke the imagery of blindness to get away with claiming that the photo above is not racist, although as I'll elaborate, it's not as straightforward as the press is making it out to be.
In the photo, the basketball player LeBron James is enormous, but not standing up quite straight. Instead, he is hunched forward, his right arm dangling, notionally to dribble a basketball but effectively striking an ape-like pose, his right hand reaching nearly to his knee. (And let us face it; they probably photoshopped that ball in.)
His mouth is wide open in a growl (other bloggers are taking it as a matter of course that basketball players growl as part of their job; I will have to take their word for it).
His clothes are short, revealing bare limbs and evoking nakedness; apart from that they are entirely black -- athletic wear, as many have observed, but in no way his actual athletic uniform (research in the form of googling "Cleveland Cavaliers" reveals that the players wear uniforms that carry, you know, the team logo).
In James's left arm, model Gisele Bündchen leans sideways at a crazy angle, her body barely supported by her feet, her head leaning away, her fair hair blown up behind her. Her odd angle evokes helplessness; our casual experience of physics tell us that she would be sprawled on the floor were it not for James's arm around her. Her clingy, sleeveless dress reveals the contours of her limbs.
The composition of the shot -- the coloring of the models (especially James's clothes and Bündchen's hair), their poses, their positions in the frame, James's growl -- thoroughly evokes the iconic image of King Kong clutching a screaming Fay Wray, from Merion C. Cooper's 1933 film King Kong.
Except for one thing.
Bündchen is smiling. She looks happy.
Her pose is unstable, and she certainly looks helpless, as if she might fall, but hers is not the stricken backwards arc to which Wray's unfortunate spine was subjected. (Of course, Bündchen's unfortunate spine is subjected to her shoes. Perhaps Annie Leibovitz felt that this was enough.)
It looks more like Bündchen is playing with weight and balance (in a "roses, roses, we all fall down" kind of way) than that she's been grabbed by a giant ape. And although her head is tilted back, her eyes are directed back down at the viewer.
Her fair hair, though evocative of Wray's, is not falling abjectly, a visual indication of what would happen to Wray if King Kong were to drop her; rather, Bundchen's hair defies gravity, billowing up behind her as if to insist on the contrived quality of the photo.
After all, the shot is clearly taken indoors; her hair could not be windblown without a fan and/or enormous amounts of environmentally unsound chemicals. (Ironically, perhaps Wray's hair in the film should be more windblown, given that she is supposedly outside at a pretty high altitude.) This hair signifies glamor, and specifically all the technologies of contrived glamor that a high-status fashion magazine can marshal for its photo subjects.
Seen in that light, Bündchen's mischievous, playful smile is jarring next to James's dramatic scowl.
What is she so happy about? What is he so angry about? It's as if James is diligently playing King Kong, while Bundchen gleefully breaks character to wave at the camera.
* * * * *
Vogue, of course, is the blind that proudly leads the blind, insisting that the photo has no iconographic context. A Daily Telegrapharticle quotes their position thus:
Patrick O'Connell, a spokesman for Vogue, said the magazine had chosen to "celebrate two superstars at the top of their game" for the cover of the annual "Shape" issue, which also features a series of unusual athlete-and-model combinations inside. "We think LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honoured to have them on the cover," he said.
The insistence is that the photo is not racist because it's not a still of King Kong and Fay Wray, both abject in their own ways; it's a photo of successful basketball star LeBron James and successful fashion star Gisele Bündchen.
But no one ever said that the photograph was the still from King Kong. The fact that the photo subjects are LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen is precisely the point: the photograph both evokes the 1933 still and departs from it.
Here's the photo again:
There is absolutely zero possibility that Annie Leibovitz didn't know what she was doing when she composed this photograph; she is a visual artist, and visual composition is what she does. Of course, Leibovitz's awareness is not the question; even if she were magically unaware of what she was invoking, the objective resemblance remains. The Vogue cover mimics an iconic American image in very clear ways.
At the same time, the photography plays with the icon that it mimics -- and the icon's racist context. As I noted above, Bündchen does not completely keep faith with Wray's character, looking playful, secure, and happy where Wray is terrified and totally without control of her body's relation to its physical environment.
James continues to evoke the "black man = voracious ape-like predator" image, with his near-perfect King Kong imitation, but his stance is alienated and objectified by the image. However fearsome his scowl, he is not scary to Bündchen, who is smiling happily and not even looking at him; if he is a predator, she is not his prey.
But neither is she engaged with him as an equal; as noted above, she does not look at him at all. In fact, both their gazes are directed outward -- James's toward the camera but vaguely off center, Bündchen's deliberately focused on the viewer, despite her tilted-back head. James functions more like a stage prop than a photo subject, since his gaze is met by no one, and his clutching arm is being used by Bündchen more or less like a piece of playground equipment. And though James has the "basketball," his figure is curiously static; it is Bündchen who, thanks to her turbo-fan, appears to be in motion. Though James's enormous figure dominates the field of the photo, it is Bündchen's photo -- Bündchen's Vogue cover.
Of course, it may also be argued that the 1933 still is Wray's scene. Sure, there's a giant ape tromping across the city, but the image does not receive its cultural meaning until we spot the tiny abject white woman in King Kong's hand. Buildings can be destroyed and rebuilt, but racial taint, figured in the violation of the sexualized white woman's bodily sovereignty, is, according to the logic of the film, forever. So even the way that Bündchen seems to be the real subject of the photograph in a way reproduces the dynamics of the 1933 film.
But that's clearly not the only thing going on. Playing on a reconstructed Hollywood stage set, Bündchen is all carefree glamor. The racist specter of the predatory black monster is still there all right; it's just that no one really cares about it any more, least of all the supposedly threatened white woman, who in this case happens to be famous for being one of the most highly paid women in the world -- paid, of course, for renting herself out as a highly sexualized clothes-hanger, still one of the most lucrative professions available to women.
Mary Ann Doane argues that by the 1930s, the figure of the New Woman of the 1920s had made it impossible to maintain the madonna/whore binary stringently enough to invest racial purity in white female sexual purity; white female sexual purity was by now too much in question. I don't really buy it; it's kind of a cheap historical link, and even if maternal melodramas like von Sternberg's 1932 Blonde Venus(1) registered sympathy with the "fallen woman," the madonna/whore binary was still going strong. (It still is, although now our society rewards whore status, up to a point, in order to then indulge in the gleeful and lucrative shaming of said "whore"; see also: Britney.)
Moreover, as Doane herself points, out, the white woman's sexuality is always seen as unstable and capable of reverting to sexual licence/blackness.(2)
What is worth noticing is that there are multiple ways that white female sexuality is used to repudiate blackness on behalf of the white community, not just via the omnipresent Birth of a Nation "black-man-as-raping-ape" stereotype, and these modalities clearly coexist. (King Kong is 1933; Blonde Venus is 1932.) Doane's reading of Blonde Venus is therefore instructive; in the film's "Hot Voodoo" number, Marlene Dietrich appears onstage as a cabaret singer, wearing a gorilla suit to the sound of drums, attended by a chorus of women in blackface decked out as "natives."
In the number, Dietrich removes the gorilla suit to reveal herself as a blonde Venus, white sexualized femininity itself, and a white sexualized femininity that is completely commodified, as her glitzy show outfit indicates. (She even puts on her blonde Venus wig, with two arrows through it, right onstage, covering over her already blonde hair.)
Instead of revealing a fear of the blackness within the white woman -- her proclivity toward sexual licentiousness -- blackness becomes yet another prop for fully commodified white female sexuality. As Doane puts it,
It is as though white femininity were forcefully disengaged from blackness once and for all in the process of commodification of the image of white female sexuality. Such a commodification is already announced by the neon sign flashing "Blonde Venus" which introduces the sequence and slowly dissolves into an image of Dietrich preparing for her act in front of the mirror. Blackness functions here not so much as a term of comparison (as with the Hottentot and the prostitute), but as an erotic accessory to whiteness. The black women (represented by the chorus primarily composed of white women in black face with huge black wigs and shields and spears) becomes the white woman's mise-en-scène. Black masculinity is so fully exhausted representationally by the gorilla costume that the black bartender can only be presented in relation to a stuttering fear produced for comic effect[.] (215)
If the Vogue cover directly invokes the image of King Kong, its logic is closer to that of Blonde Venus; blackness is invoked as spectacle.
Posed like the eminently fake giant ape King Kong, James is not so much exhausted by the gorilla suit as he is standing in for it. He is Bündchen's mise-en-scène, and Bündchen's commodification, already clear from her status as a "supermodel" (remember Vogue's insistence that she's not screaming Fay Wray but a successful model "at the top of [her] game") and emphasized by the contrivedness of her improbable hair, is the point. Blackness does not need to be repudiated by her purity or her performance of helpless white femininity à la Wray, not because real racial harmony has intervened but because the logic of the market, which controls Bündchen, James, and Vogue, obviates any such need: your racial history is meaningless to the parent company, which just wants to sell ad space. If the image recalls King Kong, what of it? "We think LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honoured to have them on the cover."
I suppose it's no surprise that a publication that's devoted to selling luxury goods to wealthy white women by enforcing those women's status as luxury goods chose a cover that focalizes the sexualized-white-woman-as-commodity. I'm rather surprised that they decided to use black masculinity as a prop for it at this late date (although if there is one class of men that is commodified it is surely athletes).
Oh, don't worry, Vogue; this is still completely racist. It's just that you're only getting called out on one of the racist tropes you're exploiting, and on none of the misogynistic ones.
* * * * *
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge-Chapman Hall, 1991.
(1) This film is crazy.
(2) This is why the girl in The Searchers goes from being the object of rescue to the target of murder; she's "gone native." Being raped is equated to sexual impurity, which is equated to racial impurity; hence she is now one of "them." Since, as a white virgin, she was once the bearer of the whole family's racial purity, the ex-Confederate maniac character feels that she and her impurity have to be wiped out.
