It has long been recognized that if only something could be done in psychology remotely comparable to what has been achieved in physics, practical consequences might be expected even more remarkable than any that the engineer can contrive. The first positive steps in the science of the mind have been slow in coming, but already they are beginning to change man’s whole outlook. I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry, 1926
Gottschall argues that literary criticism is in crisis, and that its hope for salvation is – surprise! – science. It's not just that literary critics should "embrace" science, as the article's subtitle suggests -- a vague suggestion, in any case; who in literary criticism is honestly against science?
No, Gottschall, has something better in mind -- do science!
"In some cases," he writes, "it's possible to use scientific methods to question cherished tenets of modern literary theory." Now, there are very few actual tenets of modern literary theory, so this ought to be interesting.
Gottschall:
Consider the question of the "beauty myth": Most literary scholars believe that the huge emphasis our culture places on women's beauty is driven by a beauty myth, a suite of attitudes that maximizes female anxiety about appearance in order, ultimately, to maintain male dominance.
I'm puzzled by Gottschall's failure to cite the source of the term "beauty myth," Naomi Wolf's 1990 book The Beauty Myth. Perhaps he elided the source because if he were to cite it, he would have to admit that Naomi Wolf is not a literary critic, and The Beauty Myth is not a work of literary criticism. Wolf has a bachelor's degree in English, just like half the people you know.
But even leaving that aside, in what sense is the beauty myth a tenet of literary theory? Literary theory is, by definition, a body of theories about literature. So what does the beauty myth have to do with literary theory at all?
Answer: zilch.
Unfazed by the irrelevance of his example, Gottschall goes on.
It's easy to find evidence for this idea in our culture's poems, plays, and fairy tales: As one scholar after another has documented, Western literature is rife with sexist-seeming beauty imagery.
Sexist-seeming, please note. It is not sexist to treat women as decorative objects because, Gottschall is going to tell us, science says so.
Gottschall:
Scholars tend to take this evidence as proof that Western culture is unusually sexist.
Actually, scholars do not do that. Going through literary works to find sexist ideology (which abounds) and saying, “Aha! Western culture is unusually sexist! More sexist than most cultures!” is not a literary enterprise. For a literary critic, Gottschall seems alarmingly unaware of what it is that we actually do. I challenge Gottschall to come up with some citations of “scholars” (plural) who have said this. Not Naomi Wolf: actual literary critics.
And note, too, that Gottschall needs the conclusion that his straw-critics have drawn to be that Western culture (already a problematic term) is unusually sexist, because it’s that unusually that he’s going to use Science! to undermine:
But is this really the case? In a study to be published in the next issue of the journal Human Nature, my colleagues and I addressed this question by collecting and analyzing descriptions of physical attractiveness in thousands of folktales from all around the globe. What we found was that female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness. That six-to-one ratio held up in Western literature and also across scores of traditional societies. So literary scholars have been absolutely right about the intense stress on women's beauty in Western literature, but quite wrong to conclude that this beauty myth says something unique about Western culture. Its ultimate roots apparently lie not in the properties of any specific culture, but in something deeper in human nature.
So what Gottschall claims to be establishing is that Western culture (a monolithic, unexamined term) is not more fixated on women's physical objecthood than are other cultures. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation, there.
He goes on to conclude that objectifying women comes from "human nature" (another extra-special unexamined term). Because obviously, there are exactly two possible sources for the beauty myth: “Western culture” and “human nature.” Way to use reason, there.
(Of course, considering that the written record that Gottschall uses as his corpus has been controlled by men for centuries, "human nature" winds up meaning "male nature." Again.)
Gottschall provides several other examples, each providing a banal “scientific” result refuting a straw-man version of some belief (supposedly) widely held in the humanities, smirkily holding scientific methods up as infallible and, moreover, always appropriate.
Here’s the thing about calls for the humanities to “embrace science.” They aren’t anywhere near new. It’s not just that, as Gottschall acknowledges, C.P. Snow was asking humanists and scientists to talk to one another in the 50’s.
In fact, the call for the humanities to emulate the sciences came in with the New Criticism, the influential movement that shaped the modern English department, well before Snow started getting cranky. It’s rooted in nineteenth century positivism as reinterpreted by the modernists, that sense that Science! can do anything!
But as it turns out, science can’t do everything, which is why literary studies exist, with separate disciplinary methods. Moreover, science and its methods aren’t infallible – nor are they static. When you use computational methods to analyze style, your results are only going to be as good as your algorithm, and your algorithm is ultimately limited by what the writer of the algorithm can conceive.* Science fucks up all the time; that’s the nature of experiment. Good scientists acknowledge the limits of their research, measure their error bars, and reflect on their methods.
People with a poor understanding of how the sciences and literary studies work and an ignorance of those disciplines’ histories write articles in the Boston Globe proclaiming that literary studies should remodel itself after the sciences.
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*I am not, by the way, against the use of computational methods in the humanities. In fact, I find what I've learned about them interesting and would like to learn more. I am, on the other hand, thoroughly against bullshit articles with heroic narratives about computational methods valiantly revealing the truth that hundreds of doddering old professors refuse! to! see!
Daily Cal: Budget Cuts Note: this article is attributed to Kea, but it was drafted by a coalition of grad students and signed by a large bloc of grad students and faculty, as well as some officers of the English Undergraduate Association. Also, we don't know who wrote the crummy headline.
The Coalition of English Graduate Students, University of California, Berkeley For Immediate Release: May 14, 2008 Contact: Snehal Shingavi sshingav@berkeley.edu 510-484-5242
UC Berkeley Hamstrung By Budget Cuts: Ability to Provide Required Courses to Undergraduates Severely Affected
(Berkeley, CA) -- Statewide cuts to the budget of the University of California will have an immediate impact upon UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students. After a decade of incremental budget cuts, the university has very little ‘fat’ left to trim. As a result, vital areas of the university will now be affected, depleting the ability of core departments to provide basic instruction.
The impact of the cuts will be felt as early as this coming spring, when the English department alone may be forced to deny entry into required Reading & Composition classes, known as R&Cs, to as many as 300 undergraduates. R&C classes are already difficult to get into.
“The classes fill up lightning-fast because almost every student needs to complete the R&C requirement,” Ahmed Owainati, a Computer Science undergraduate, commented. “The only solution is to dedicate your Phase One enrollment to getting that coveted slot, despite the many other lower division requirements one might have, and even then nothing is guaranteed. I completed my first class in Fall '06, and did not get into the second until three semesters later in Spring '08, despite spending each Phase One in between trying to get into some R1B class.”
Although no clear information is available yet as to the total reduction in the number of R&C classes across the university, it is likely that some Class of 2009 seniors will be unable to graduate from the university as a result.
Christine Chang, a third year double major in Molecular & Cell Biology and Public Health, recounted her difficulties in completing the R&C requirement:
“Trying to enroll in a Reading & Composition course was a struggle,” she said. “After failing to receive a spot in an R1A class in the first semester I attempted to sign up, I was able to secure one in my second round, at the cost of a class I needed for my major. This semester I finally took my R1B. In the first few weeks, 40 students were crowded into a small classroom in hopes of getting a spot; many had to sit on the floor. Approving the proposed budget cuts would mean that the UC will be requiring a class and simultaneously further hindering students from taking it.”
The impact of these cuts upon UC Berkeley’s English department is severe. The university has been forced to deny teaching appointments to graduate students and lecturers, which it relies upon to teach lower level English and foreign language classes. Now tied as the top graduate program in the country with Harvard and Yale, according to US News and World Report, the department may be forced to reduce support to its graduate students.
Students who rely upon teaching appointments for fee remission, health insurance, child-care, and access to research facilities will lose these basic services. Students who have already passed their qualifying exams may be forced to withdraw from the program.
Hillary Gravendyk, the recent recipient of the UC Berkeley Teaching Effectiveness Award and an English Department Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award, said, “While I’m honored to have the University acknowledge me for my commitment to teaching, I’m frustrated and saddened that the proposed budget cuts would remove the opportunity for me to continue teaching at Berkeley for even one more semester. I rely on teaching for fee remissions and financial support; without that support my ability to even complete the PhD could be compromised. It is ironic to be congratulated for teaching excellence by the same administration that is making it impossible for me to continue teaching.”
The University of California, responding to Governor Schwarzenegger’s statewide budget cuts, has mandated a 10% reduction to the Temporary Academic Salaries budget, used to pay for Graduate Student instruction and assistant lecturer positions. Across UC Berkeley’s campus, the same fiscal crisis will result in the widespread dismissal of lecturers. Departments that are particularly hard-hit include the prestigious English department, East Asian Languages and Cultures, French, German, and others.
Ian Duncan, Chair of the English Department at UC Berkeley, summed up the implications of the situation. “The projected cuts to the TAS budget pose a serious threat to our ability to sustain our PhD program in the long run. Most of our graduate students enter the program with the expectation that they will be able to support themselves with at least four years of teaching, since we are not able to provide the five-year fellowship packages offered by our peer-institution competitors (all of them wealthy private universities, such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford). At risk, in short, is nothing less than the core mission of the top-ranked English Department at the top-ranked public university in the country.”
My alma mater claims to be building the library of the future.
I have many fond memories of the Reg, and I do love the idea of all onsite storage, but some details of the plan worry me.
For instance:
Housed within the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library will be a state-of-the-art conservation and preservation facility, a special collections service area, a grand reading room and the capacity for 3.5 million volumes of print material, which will be contained in a high-density, automated shelving system.
The system, which requires one-seventh of the space of regular stacks, will serve materials for use in real time. When a request is made for material stored in the system, it will be retrieved within minutes by a crane — unlike off-site storage facilities, where it may take days to receive requested material.
Yeah, you read that right: a CRANE.
And that worries me. Can a crane be as soft and gentle with a book as it should be? And can a crane read titles and call numbers?
Say what you want about offsite facilities -- at least they have people staffing it. What's the likelihood that a crane will actually pull the book you need? I can't count how many times I've found books on Poe and Twain among the Beowulf editions because somebody misshelved PS books as PR. Everyone knows that actually finding a book in a library involves a little shelf-scanning. And I don't believe for a minute that the crane will ensure perfect shelving; machines are easily confused.
I also thought that part of the point of keeping books onsite was to enable browsing. I don't really see how ultra-compact shelving will even allow, much less promote, browsing.
I really do hope this works out, especially since I find the idea of the library of the future! awesome. I just hope it involves actually getting the books you need.
Every once in a blue moon, some morbid curiosity impels me to check my Sitemeter in order to peer at the Google search strings.
My friends, I did so today, and now my eyes are bleeding.
I post a lot on children's and YA fiction, because it's an interest of mine, and because my thoughts on children's lit are not quite so tender and fragile as my thoughts on Stein. But what did I ever do to deserve search strings like this?
- "the perilous gard book notes" - "two princesses of bamarre study guide" - "Jennifer L. Holm study guide" - "House of Dies Drear cliff notes"
That is right. Civilization is in ruin.
Because apparently people cannot even read CHILDREN'S FICTION without searching for Cliffs Notes anymore. (I'll admit that The House of Dies Drear is a little trippy and complex in some unexpected ways, but still: these books are written for ten-year-olds.)
If my searchers are reading these books for school, chances are they are not very old themselves. So their reading abilities may be only somewhat sub par. But then, it also means that grade schoolers now troll the web for ways to cheat on assignments. This makes me miserable.
So, although I have said it before, I will say it again for any extremely young fry who may have just typed "boston jane study guide" into their browsers:
When you are asked to read something, and you find that reading hard, it is not acceptable to go read something easier instead.
Doing so is analogous to consuming some futuristic food-pellet that reproduces all the nutrients of an apple instead of eating an apple. The futuristic food pellet might get you somewhere, but it doesn't reproduce the experience of eating an apple.
If you are having trouble understanding the reading, there are many strategies that will help you understand, and will make you a better reader too:
-Re-read. -Read more slowly. -Ask a real live person for help with understanding specific passages. -Discuss the book with your friends.
Looking up digests on the web will not make you a better reader. Reading canned, simplified analyses written (in the case of Cliffs Notes and other such excrescences) by total hacks will not make you a more critical thinker.
My first inkling of how bad budget cuts are going to be was the emails that started going around about the cuts in East Asian language funding. Because foreign language classes are taught by lowly lecturers and GSIs, they're the first classes to be cut, and the EALC department has impressively mobilized to protest the cuts to their budget.
East Asian language classes are being cut by nearly fifty percent, causing the department to restrict enrollment to the College of Letters and Sciences. Students in the business school, the law school, the engineering school, the school of environmental design, etc., are just out of luck -- even though they may very well need to learn Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Over 1500 students who are currently enrolled for East Asian language classes will be turned away from further study in the fall. These are core classes with high demand. The students want to learn, and the lecturers and GSIs need the work.
To their credit, EALC grad students have put together a petition to ask that the funding for these classes be reinstated. I think they've generated a lot of sympathy, and as I'm writing the student petition has almost 2500 signatures (a petition for the general community is located here).
But it's not just EALC's budget cuts. The cuts are to all positions staffed by lecturers and GSIs, and most departments have "service" courses that they teach for the benefit of the university at large.
In the English department, it's the Reading and Composition (R&C) courses, English R1A and R1B. Reading and composition is a requirement for Cal undergrads, and most of them fill it with R1A and R1B courses, in English or in another humanities department.
For as long as I've been here, R&C has been ridiculously overenrolled. The roster is always full, the waitlist is always full, and the first week is always populated by hopeful students, either waitlisters or crashers, hoping through sheer tenacity to get in.
In the past the overenrollment has been a small comfort to grad students -- although everyone feels it's ridiculous that R&C is so understaffed, at least we've felt pretty sure that there was always a demand for sections, and that, up to a point, we would have work, and therefore money to live on, while we worked on our Ph.D.s.
So it comes as kind of a blow that R&C appointments are being cut even further for '08-'09. It's a financial disaster for grad students, of course -- it's not like we get paid enough in the first place to start saving rent money for a rainy fiscal year. But it's completely ridiculous that a required class for undergrads is being cut. These students already hang onto their spots on the roster for dear life. There is no question of switching sections because you prefer another topic: if a student relinquishes her spot in one class, there's little possibility of her getting into another. Further cuts can't be supported.
My worry is that the cap for these classes will be raised in order to accommodate all the students. That means fewer appointments for grad students, and more grading for those that do get it (at the same pay). And when you're teaching a writing class, grading takes a lot of time.
And raising the cap also means a different kind of class setting for the students, a more anonymous setting, one in which it's more possible to fade into the woodwork, because it isn't physically possible for every student to talk at any length in a given class period any more.
In a class in which students are supposed to workshop their papers together, it's in the interests of the instructor to try and generate a friendly and relatively close-knit community. Students should have an idea of who it is that's critiquing their writing, and whose writing they're critiquing themselves. But that's not possible in a class that's too large.
Cutting R&C is a disaster. I hope the undergrads make a big stink, because R&C was already in bad shape, and this will really diminish the quality of undergrad education. It's not clear what will happen yet -- I know the English department is trying to find resources to soften the blow -- but I'm worried.
Oh, please; don’t start this good vs. evil shit. This isn’t Star Wars. People on all ends of the spectrum fuck up. --Sylvia/M
The UC Berkeley Campus Code of Student Conduct defines plagiarism as
the use of intellectual material produced by another person without acknowledging its source.
It includes:
Copying from the writings or works of others into one's academic assignment without attribution, or submitting such work as if it were one's own;
Using the views, opinions,or insights of another without acknowledgement; or
Paraphrasing the characteristic or original phraseology, metaphor, or other literary device of another without proper attribution
The English Department adds:
Unacknowledged use of the words or ideas of others from any medium (print, digital, or otherwise) is plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the appropriation of another's words or ideas without acknowledgement.
The recent controversy over white feminists appropriating the work of feminists of color reminds me of a student I once had who very blatantly plagiarized a good two thirds of a paper.
When I discussed it with em, e claimed that e thoroughly understood the definition of plagiarism outlined above, and that e had also read and agreed with the section on plagiarism that I'd assigned from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers. I put a few questions to the student about it, and e seemed to understand what, in theory, constituted plagiarism.
But when I brought up eir own practices, I met with something mindboggling. E freely and cheerfully explained how e had read the Cliffs Notes on the text in question, taken notes on it, including exact phrasing, and plunked things from the aforementioned notes directly into eir paper. These acts were unambiguously plagiarism, even if the words and ideas did take a brief detour through the student's notebook. But the student adamantly denied that e had committed plagiarism.
Finally, after much painful discussion, I realized that it was the word plagiarism that the student could not accept. This student simply felt that plagiarism was something that Evil People did, and that as long as one was not Lord Voldemort, whatever one was doing could not be plagiarism.
A similar thing happens all the time with racism: people who have had the life-long privilege to rarely or never be subjected to ethnic or racial oppression believe that racism is a thing that Evil People engage in, so that joke they told or that comment they made simply couldn't be racist, and dang, lighten up, get a sense of humor! Then we hear that our culture is oppressive to white people because they live in mortal fear of being labeled a racist. Such reasoning presupposes that it is worse to be called a racist than to be called by a racist slur. Because, you know, white people get lynched for being suspected of racism. Really!
My friends, let us call a spade a spade. Plagiarism is plagiarism. Racism is racism. Even if you left your swirly black cloak at home.
I recently read two works of fiction marketed toward girls, Jennifer L. Holm’s Boston Jane: An Adventure and Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre. Both were published in 2001 by Harper Collins. It is my understanding that Boston Jane is a series, and that Levine is working on a sequel to The Two Princesses of Bamarre.
The one thing these two books have in common is embroidery. I am serious; both protagonists are very good at embroidery. But in other respects they’re like night and day.
If you were to guess from the covers which one was the retch-worthily patriarchal of the two, you might have gone with the one that involved princesses. There is a long and shameful history of YA novels that make girls the protagonists primarily insofar as they put on male drag, embroidery and other needlework being a typical and convenient emblem of idle and worthless femininity (Tamora Pierce, I am looking at you).
You might also have thought that, Gail Carson Levine being a Disney sellout, she would surely be the patriarchal hack of the two.
But no.
When I picked up Boston Jane: An Adventure, with the drawing of a spunky girl TM on the cover and the subtitle assuring us of said girl's spunkitude, I almost looked for an American Girls logo somewhere on the book, it was that evocative of the genre.
This should have tipped me off, but didn't, that I was in for a tiresome, awkwardly written tale that pays lip service to politically progressive values while keeping its real goal firmly in its sights, namely: to take a nineteenth century girl and make her stop kissing the patriarchy's rear end in nineteenth century ways in order to have her start kissing the patriarchy's rear in twenty-first century ways.
In the novel, Jane is raised by her father, a surgeon, since her mother has conveniently died in childbirth. Because there is no evil female taint in her life (except for Mrs. Parker, a servant who exists only to make cherry pies year round, since apparently Pennsylvania has an extraordinary cherry season), she grows up a healthy tomboy, spitting, slinging mud, and generally wishing she were Lyra from His Dark Materials. Jane remarks that during this period she thinks herself lucky, which is code for "masculine and therefore good."
Along comes Nellie Olsen Sally Biddle, who mocks Jane for her failure to perform femininity. This is the primal scene, so to speak, and at this point, Jane tells us, her luck runs out. Around the same time, Jane's father takes on a cute apprentice, William Baldt, who plays good cop to Sally's bad cop, gives Jane ribbons, and tells her to go to etiquette school.
Jane is quickly brainwashed by Miss Hepplewhite's Young Ladies’ Academy. Every possible trope is trotted out, including fancy embroidery and the corset, and of course the uselessness of everything that Jane learns at the academy. William approves of her progress and gives her hope that she will not be a social reject forever, while her father expresses scorn that Jane has stopped being interesting and has become useless and feminine.
Father, of course, believes that "you make your own luck," which is his way of saying that you are free to choose masculinity (all that is good and holy) even if you were born with a body that is socially constructed as feminine, and that Jane's oppression is therefore her own damn fault.
We are meant to see, of course, that the dear old patriarch is right and William is a jerk, but his total lack of empathy for Jane's position -- that if she continues to fail to perform femininity, she will be screwed as soon as her father is no longer there to shelter her -- merely reveals that Jane is caught between two misogynists: one who would manipulate her and shame her into performing femininity and rejecting her favorite pursuits, and one who despises all femininity and urgently wishes that Jane were a boy (with the attendant freedom to eschew femininity).
Eventually William heads west to make a fortune in timber, for which Father holds him in contempt. William writes letters to Jane and, when she is fifteen, proposes to her. This is repulsive, of course, but it will turn out later that he is a snake for other reasons, so apparently it is okay for this to go under the radar.
Jane talks her father into letting her go to Oregon to marry William, and he finally relents, although he warns Jane that William is an idiot. Of course, father is right about this.
After a two-month delay, Jane sails to Oregon with her Irish servant, Mary. Once Jane has learned a Very Special Lesson About Class from her, Mary kicks the bucket, enabling Jane to Grow.
When Jane gets to Shoalwater Bay, she is horrified to find that William is not there, that the place is thinly populated by crusty pioneer types and a quirky proto-anthropologist, and that she is surrounded by Savage Natives.
She does a fainty-haughty-lady routine, a caricature of the stereotypical silly Victorian lady, and much is made of her total uselessness. She pays a Chinook man to go find William, and meanwhile makes a life for herself. She eventually becomes spunky, and once a Chinook woman named Suis teaches her a Very Special Lesson About Race, Suis kicks the bucket, enabling Jane to Grow.
Jane is very conflicted about Not Being A Proper Lady Anymore, but in the end she rejects William, who is a racist and only wanted to marry Jane so he could get more land anyway, and Finds Herself. The end.
What raises my hackles so much about this book is the way it pats itself on the back for its supposedly conscientious treatment of race, class, and gender.
We are supposed to hate William and love Jane because William wants to put the Americans on reservations, while Jane wants to work and live with them in peace. But we know that actually, the Americans eventually were put on reservations, and that it doesn't matter how many spunky white girls are respectful of native Americans, since they can't vote anyway. And of course, once we have Learned A Lesson from Suis, she dies. We couldn't actually have a strong native woman survive. Why, she might compete with Jane's spunkiness!
Similarly, Mary is there to show that Jane's state as a lady is "useless" (ironically, since nineteenth century conduct manuals for middle class ladies emphasize usefulness -- usefulness to men, of course -- as the pinnacle of a woman's achievement; it is the aristocracy, which does not exist in Philadelphia, that is seen as useless). Once Mary is dead, Jane is free to raid her stash of recipes so she too can become useful. These "lessons" about race and class are here solely for the benefit of the privileged white woman.
And the novel's gender politics are the worst of all, because the novel makes the greatest claims for its gender politics. Mocked at the beginning of every chapter is a different one of Miss Hepplewhite's precepts for gracious middle-class femininity. But there is nothing particularly radical about mocking Victorian standards of middle-class femininity; very few people today think that fiercely adhering to the correct number of petticoats or always exclaiming about what is "proper" are reasonable priorities.
Jane reflects at the end of the novel that Miss Hepplewhite taught her to always perform passive femininity in order to be pleasing to men, but that it doesn't make sense for her to marry William or wear long dresses that restrict her movement. With her recuperated presexual tomboy masculinity, her luck has returned!
Well called? Oh, I think not: for it is not that Jane stops trying to please men at the end of the book, but that she starts to succeed at pleasing the right men (which, of course, includes her father).
Jane's father and the men she meets out west are therefore figures for modernity, but certainly not for women's liberation. Caricaturing Victorian femininity in order to have the protagonist reject it is cheap feminism, especially when it's just a means for Jane to become a spunky-but-nonthreatening woman, aspiring to masculinity (because, as the novel repeatedly assures us, femininity is useless and vapid) while never challenging the order that keeps men in power and defines femininity as worthless.
Sally Biddle, the great enforcer of feminine mores, is always seen as a villain, never a victim, and all sympathetic and competent women except for Jane are killed off. There is no option of real female independence; it's just a matter of figuring out which men to serve (mend their clothes, make them pie, trade your most treasured asset for a canoe so you can financially rescue them, etc.).
Same patriarchy, different dudes, and the fact that they aren't making Jane wear a corset doesn't mean they don't still hold her in disdain for being a woman.
I meant to write about The Two Princesses of Bamarre today, but I think that's enough book-reviewing for now.
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.
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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.
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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.
