Visual Appeal, Rough Draft

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Though feminists made highly visible gains early in the 60s and 70s, the movement foundered somewhere in the 80s and 90s, leading to a “Backlash” culture described in detail by Susan Faludi. Feminism has a fraught relationship with media representations of women, especially comic book heroines, who can represent the best and worst of a given society’s ideas about women. But fixing or changing media representations isn’t always a panacea to sexism, and social gains don’t always change media representations – in a big way, art and society are nearly as sexist as they were in the ’50s.

I began with an image of Marilyn Monroe because she unites ideas about American history, pop culture, and the archetypal woman in the 50s. She also makes a great starting point for feminism of the last 50 years, since she embodies the tension between using one’s glamour for personal advancement and becoming a slave to beauty. From her, I move to a similar starter image in comic book history; Wonder Woman, despite her cosmic power, found a way to get trapped by a man and lost her power; meanwhile, another woman steals him as Wonder Woman strikes a pinup pose. This image obviously implies that Wonder Woman needs to keep a better handle on romance, maybe with less world-saving, but it’s also an image out of time; it’s more likely to infuriate or amuse my audience than convey its original message, which helps evoke the tone of feminist consciousness and frustration with sexism that will serve my point later.

My second image is of a group of women at a feminist rally in the 60s – there are many women, most smiling, holding up banners, providing a point of identification for those familiar with feminist history and a sense of togetherness and solidarity. The comic book cover, featuring a Wonder Woman for a new generation, builds on this sense, but the ridiculous grooviness and now-laughable optimism of the art contributes to a sense of silliness that I hope will translate into futility down the line.

My next pair of images is the famous photograph of the “freedom trash can,” also known as the origin of the bra-burning myth of the second wave. No women actually burned bras; they simply threw them, along with girdles, pantyhose, and makeup, into a trashcan outside the 1968 Miss America pageant. But my audience probably doesn’t know that, so this image will evoke the beginnings of feminist craziness endemic to the late second wave. The comic book cover I paired it with represents the media’s almost immediate return to sexism after their short-lived dalliance with feminism; unlike the previous “new Wonder Woman,” this Wonder Woman is back in the sexualized bondage for which she was so famous in the 50s, being stalked by “The Beauty Hater.” As feminism began its anti-beauty crusade, they lost favor with the media, who preferred glitzier, more marketable damsels in distress to feminist heroes who didn’t convince many boys to buy comics. This pairing of images stimulates dissatisfaction with both 70s feminism and the 70s media industry – one is too idealistic, one frankly exploitative, and the movement isn’t quite getting anywhere anymore.

My next image is of Madonna, the poster girl of the 1980s, ripping lacy lingerie out of her low-slung skirt and mugging at the camera in a tight crop-top that reads “healthy.” This symbolic paradox was as specific to the 80s as bra-burning was to the late 60s and 70s; in the “post-feminist” 80s, embracing one’s sexuality was supposed to be a feminist thing to do. Unfortunately, many women, Madonna not least among them, occasionally crossed the line from healthy self-expression into pandering to the male gaze; it was easy to “accept” your body when this body was the trim, blonde media ideal. This photograph is anything but “healthy,” like the next shot, a play on the iconic Breakfast Club poster. Unlike The Breakfast Club, the Teen Titans had only one female member, and having her take Claire’s supine position instead of Allison’s equal footing with Brian implies that she’s there to be eye candy. The men are hunched or turned slightly away from the camera, but Wonder Woman’s body is on full display for the viewer, implying that that’s all she’s there to do. While this image would pass unnoticed as pastiche if it stood alone, its placement in my presentation creates a sense of feminist degradation – whatever we were doing in the 70s, we’re not doing it any more, and that’s not necessarily progress.

My final pair of images are larger and set next to each other rather than in a round; the Time cover, which shows a historical feminist progression similar to mine, ends with Ally McBeal and the question “is feminism dead?” My next image, one of Power Girl instead of Wonder Woman, is supposed to imply the answer “yes.” Though Power Girl shouts “it’s Ok! POWER GIRL is here!” her breasts are the visual center of the cover, as they often are. Power Girl is like all the worst parts of Wonder Woman shoved into a modern blonde package – even within the world of comic book heroines, PG’s breasts are huge and obscenely foregrounded, and the dippy look on her face doesn’t do much to reassure me that she’s bringing something else to the table. Her name, Power Girl, is supposed to evoke empowerment, but this image only makes me depressed and darkly amused because I realize that comic books haven’t come far at all – they’ve hardly moved. We exchanged one pinup for another, and nothing really changed. I chose to use Power Girl instead of a modern Wonder Woman cover to suggest the generational transition that took place in feminism, from the second to the third waves, which was supposed to accomplish so much. As many third wave feminists are realizing, that generational shift has mostly depoliticized the movement, in large part because of our obsession with the media.

My title is split into two clauses, the first appearing before the images and the second appearing after them. By doing this, I hope to underline that even though surface shifts are gestured at, very little about women’s treatment in the media has truly changed. I want to inspire my audience to have less faith in the media’s ability to change hearts and minds. To most of my audience, this depressing sense of unchangeability and lack of progress should serve to make them less focused on correcting the real world by correcting the media – Power Girl clearly isn’t a real improvement on Wonder Woman. Positive media representations of women won’t stop sexism on their own. Only actual women, like those in the photographs from the 60s and 70s, can do that.

photo credits

1950s Wonder Woman panel http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/shapeimage_4.jpg

Freedom trashcan, http://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/those-bra-burning-times-and-just-when-were-they

the New Wonder Woman cover, http://www.comicnoize.com/2010/06/30/those-who-forget-the-past/

Virginia Slims ad, https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiRBG02yIPKIAN9OU83GP92_9y2-E4w52ltEzTEnE0dhZaXT0iKPzhDW0NuSVUXTVC4ginyfWTV2uV6ga_GEq4yyuvXiIXNZ6_oEI4r19h2cSoPBdN-YzEe3zzPbOiuj9RwWMKbn3aogvr/s400/Virginia+Slims+Wonder+Woman.jpg

1970s Wonder Woman cover, http://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/191.gif

Madonna, "Healthy," http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20090144,00.html

1980s Wonder Woman cover, http://superdickery.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=34&Itemid=51&limitstart=32

Time Is Feminism Dead cover, http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/HOQez15_Jepf6Bq7EdoDZw

Power Girl cover, http://adamhughes.deviantart.com/art/Power-Girl-Cover-112944382

Massumi, 1-2

Massumi, ch. 1

So I thought Descartes' Error was impenetrable because of the neuroscience, and I told myself it would get better. I thought Brennan was impenetrable first because she writes like a tool and later because apparently she died before edits, and I told myself it would get better. Now I crack open this Massumi crap and I become more convinced with each passing day that rhetoric needs less to do.

Deleuze and Guattari, who you're familiar with if you read the introduction or if you've ever seen someone incredibly pretentious refer to "becoming-(insert anything here)," had this interesting idea which kind of said that if an idea was complex enough, truly complex, it shouldn't be understandable by the layman. No idea which was accessible to many people was powerful enough to do much of anything; there's a reason we treat our own colds but go to doctors to cure cancer, and why Law & Order:SVU probably does less for rape prevention and litigation than a lobbyist. Big things are too complicated, too powerful, for us; they require expert attention. So, said Deleuze and Guattari, should be the social sciences. They went so far as to intentionally confuse their language, hoping that this would ensure that the only people who could read the work and get anything out of it were smart enough to really access their ideas' power. Intelligent readers weren't going to cherry-pick off the surface and then publish headlines like "SCIENCE PROVES: WOMEN ARE SMARTER THAN MEN."

Actually, the people who ended up using Deleuze and Guattari the most were high school debaters, who cherry-picked interesting phrases and made them mean whatever they wanted. The people who truly wanted to work with the ideas put forth wrote D&G readers that restated everything they'd said, but more clearly and more usefully. This is why Deleuze and Guattari's meritocracy of rhetoric is really damn stupid.

Writing, though a blunt instrument for communication, is about clarity. Sure, it's about beauty, it's about information, it's about a million things. But it's pretty much about clarity. Good writing is clear as a bell. That doesn't mean all good writing is a bulleted list, but good writing, whatever else it does, gets something across, and the intensity with which we feel that something is a marker of how purely the affect was transmitted. In early school, we know who the good writer in class is because she uses correct grammar. Before maturity, this is one of the best markers of good writing that we have because few writers have settled into the voices that will make more complex subjects easy to write about in the future. The writer with the best grammar, in a class full of people who do not know what verb agreement is, is the clearest -- literally. We can understand her because she writes according to the rules.

Later in life, we know who the good writer is because we know exactly what he's talking about. Now that almost everyone's caught their grammar up to a mutually comprehensible level, clarity turns into word choice, paragraph structure, and more complex rhetorical figures. We know who the good writer is because it doesn't take us ten years to ferret out his point. We know him because he has the skill to transmit even the most complex ideas clearly -- he does not use the complexity of his argument as an excuse to obfuscate. He doesn't think his ideas are so new and different that we don't even have language for them yet; he knows for a fact that we do because he used language when he was thinking about his ideas. Most importantly, he doesn't pretend his argument is more complex than it is by confusing us on purpose (which I suspect is what D&G were after). Maybe he gets creative with metaphor, but these serve his point; literary figures thrown in to give a passage some "color" are distractions, but the good writer knows when and how graphic images may be more helpful to a viewer than a cut-and-dry definition.

Mr. Massumi, I get that your ideas are revolutionary, I really do. But I do not understand a goddamned thing you say. Maybe this is because you use phrases and single words instead of complete sentences, but Toni Morrison does that too and I know what she's talking about. Teresa Brennan, clunky though she was, wrote in complete sentences -- confusion with her came more from her elevated and inconsistent vocabulary, but she set down exactly what she wanted you to take away and for the most part it worked. Massumi is doing something else. I think he might be enjoying himself too much, if that makes any sense. For him, his idea is full of drama, and his language serves that drama; in practice, no one but him can see the drama because no one but him has several advanced degrees in rhetoric. Either he failed to transmit the intensity of his affect or the intensity is specific to him, but either way, he failed in a specific way as a writer.

This whole blog probably makes me a filthy functionalist, but academic writing is terrible and I'm sick of it. I look forward to the three-paragraph version of this information that Dr. Davis will have to translate for us in class, because I'm sure it was interesting.

Brennan and Fiction: the Victorians were a little trashy.

Right now I'm reading Villette, which is one of the novels Charlotte Brontë wrote that no one cares about. It takes place in a French girls' school and so far just seems to be a super gothic take on a very common style of Victorian girls' school novel, where everyone has fun little intrigues and is very attractive and they solve some kind of mystery like Nancy Drew. Instead, Brontë deals with the reality of a girls' school as a viper's nest full of evil teenage bitches embroiled in extensive networks of spies, informants and saboteurs, which is basically how I remember my high school years. (Think of this as the 19th century's Mean Girls; I really like the author's own line about 'the wide difference that lies between the novelist's and the poet's ideal "jeune fille" and the said "jeune fille" as she really is.')

What's interesting about Villette is that it's told from the perspective of a narrator about whom we know quite little and who repeatedly describes herself as calm, collected, uninteresting, dispassionate, and basically totally normal. We don't read the story (or at least, we don't start out reading the story) for Lucy Snowe, the drifting governess and domestic servant through whose perspective we have access to characters with feelings. Snowe is constantly under siege from other's affects, and I'm struck reading the novel how much modern authors emphasize observation of others rather than the direct reception of their affects.

"In an unguarded moment, I chanced to say that, of the two errors; I considered falsehood worse than an occasional lapse in church-attendance. The poor girls were tutored to report in Catholic ears whatever the Protestant teacher said. An edifying consequence ensued. Something--an unseen, an indefinite, a nameless--something stole between myself and these my best pupils: the bouquets continued to be offered, but conversation thence forth became impracticable. As I paced the alleys or sat in the berceau, a girl never came to my right hand but a teacher, as if by magic, appeared at my left. Also, wonderful to relate, Madame's shoes of silence brought her continually to my back, as quick, as noiseless nd unexpected, as some wandering zephyr."

This is still readable as a simple bounded communication where Miss Snowe's students observed her and began to treat her differently; but she herself repeatedly notes her reception or refusal of others' affects. She maintains control of her class by refusing their affect of mirth or the one it could trigger in her, anger. By remaining cool and dignified she earns the respect of a few key girls in the front of the room, after which most of the others stop trying to torment her and set to work in a totally different frame of mind. Only one girl continues to try to annoy Miss Snowe, and when Miss Snowe pushes her into a book-closet and locks it for being disruptive, a frisson of approval travels around the room:

"It so happened that this girl, Dolores by name, and a Catalonian by race, was the sort of character at once dreaded and hated by all her associates; the act of summary justice above noted proved popular: there was not one present but, in her heart, liked to see it done.

They were stilled for a moment; then a smile--not a laugh--passed from desk to desk: then--when I had gravely and tranquilly resturned to the estrade, courteously requested silence, and commenced a dictation as if nothing at all had happened--the pens travelled peacefully over the pages, and the remainder of the lesson passed in order and indusutry."

Still, what strikes me most are the passages where Snowe receives others' affects, because this is essentially what she's in the book to do, being a vaguely impoverished 30-something Englishwoman who will not talk about her own past, even in a first-person narrative. In this passage she deals with Madame, the principal of the school:

"Dîtes donc," said Madame sternly, "vous sentez vous réellement trop faible?"

I might have said "Yes," and gone back to nursery obscurity, and there, perhaps, mouldred for the rest of my life; but looking up at Madame, I saw in her countenance a something that made me think twice ere I decided. At that instant she did not wear a woman's aspect, but rather a man's. Power of a particular kind strongly limned itself in all her traits, and that power was not my kind of power: neither sympathy, nor congeniality, nor submission, were the emotions it awakened. I stood--not soothed, nor won, nor overwhelmed. It seemed as if a challenge of strength between opposing gifts was given, and I suddenly felt all the dishonor of my diffidence--all the pusillanimity of my slackness to aspire."

I might be the only one who really digs Victorian literature, but whatever. As I was reading and noticing this stuff about Snowe, I was reminded of another placeholder heroine -- Bella from Twilight. I've never read the series (couldn't stop obsessing over the grammar errors; also killed The Da Vinci Code for me), but based on what I've heard and read about it, Bella has no real personality. She has feelings, but only in response to other people's feelings, and she's kind of left intentionally blank so that we can step into her shoes and stare soulfully at some sparkly vampires, or feel what it might be like to do that.

I think these kind of empty, placeholder-type characters create the opportunity for us to feel the imaginary affects directed at the individual. We have a good impression of what Bella senses, if not always what she thinks about it. We feel her requisite, normal feelings, like confusion and annoyance with her dad; but we receive powerful affects from the supernatural boyfriends in her life, and I've been told much of the novel's appeal is this, its ability to make you feel what Bella is feeling, to feel the affects attributed to her and to belong to the transmission system described in the novel.

I also just finished Anna Karenina, and I experienced something very like that when I was reading. Tolstoy is a verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry wordy guy and he writes epics the likes of which Stephen King can only dream about, but he goes into insane intimate detail about the affects and effects of affects for his characters. Karenina's storyline in the novel is basically just about the contorted, confused feelings of a woman trying to leave her husband, the effects of these feelings on her lover, and the effects of his feelings about her feelings on Anna. The novel is third-person and follows several different tracks, but the reader is invited into the innermost mind of each character, even secondary characters, so that we can feel each affect and see the way they interact in a larger view.

Obviously the mechanics are on different levels, but in terms of the transmission of affect, I think Anna Karenina and Villette are doing for me what Twilight does for many people -- it gives me the ability to feel what a character feels, and to partially enter that character's world. Victorian gothic literature is just a little more acceptable, apparently because the people who complain about the sexual content and coercive affects in Twilight don't read very much. Villette is much more about the competition, manipulation and personal political intrigue between young women, but Anna Karenina is just as vaguely suggestive as Twilight, and when it was published, Anna's adventures served much the same purpose that Bella's do now. Morality had to be served by Anna's suicide at the end of the novel, but otherwise, both works seemed designed in large part to transmit imaginary affects into the reader.

Pathetic Appeal: Final Draft

Link!

Since we were assigned to write for our blog audience, I concentrated on the characteristics most of us have in common: we're young, most of us lean left and think of ourselves as politically interested, we respond positively to humor and negatively (or at least unpredictably) to drama. It was difficult for me to find something I thought all of us could do, and in doing so I decided to cut a small segment of my blog population, those who would normally vote Republican (and not for Ron Paul) or who would not be abjectly horrified at the prospect of a Republican President Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, or Sarah Palin. I introduce "the Democrats" as the first group under discussion, because this title allows both inclusion and exclusion from the audience -- we're inside the leftist group, but we don't necessarily consider ourselves those who have failed to organize, since we're young. By both shifting and taking the blame, I can demand support without necessarily making the audience feel too personally guilty. I move through humorous enargeia images of both stereotypical party members, inviting identification with me as an observer of the absurd and repulsion for the idiocy of the other party, but I tried to use a self-deprecating tone in order to keep out of ivory towers and reassure the readers that we're not being arrogant.

I move through the piece with the theme of sabotage, first introducing it as the missing tactic of "fighting dirty," using examples from my life and widening the identification to the "we" first person. I then excuse the audience from decency, to which most liberals immediately gravitate as an ideology, by explaining how it doesn't work because Republicans will only meet us halfway. By convincing the readers to co-opt their shady tactics, but in a cleverer way than they can, and for ultimate justice, I allow the reader to participate in a fantasy of political overthrow, which I reinforce by explaining Republican ideological tactics with metaphors (the American soldier, Joe the Plumber) that liberals will probably instinctively reject, and then by suggesting that Ron Paul is the only sane option, and also that Democratic primary elections won't suffer from our absence. The fantasy is the catharsis that releases our tension with our own party's inactivity and our frustration with the high likelihood of a Republican president in 2012, turning this energy into the James Bond intellectual espionage affect that my readers will need to re-register as Republicans and not feel dirty. I think this radical-seeming tactic can be more appealing than more general ones like donating to the Democratic campaign, especially with a young audience, because it seems bigger and more "real."

Pathetic Appeal: Rough Draft

Link to GoogleDoc

Since we were assigned to write for our blog audience, I concentrated on the characteristics most of us have in common: we're young, most of us lean left and think of ourselves as politically interested, we respond positively to humor and negatively (or at least unpredictably) to drama. It was difficult for me to find something I thought all of us could do, and in doing so I decided to cut a small segment of my blog population, those who would normally vote Republican (and not for Ron Paul) or who would not be abjectly horrified at the prospect of a Republican President Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, or Sarah Palin. I introduce "the Democrats" as the first group under discussion, because this title allows both inclusion and exclusion from the audience -- we're inside the leftist group, but we don't necessarily consider ourselves those who have failed to organize, since we're young. By both shifting and taking the blame, I can demand support without necessarily making the audience feel too personally guilty. I move through humorous enargeia images of both stereotypical party members, inviting identification with me as an observer of the absurd and repulsion for the idiocy of the other party, but I tried to use a self-deprecating tone in order to keep out of ivory towers and reassure the readers that we're not being arrogant.

I move through the piece with the theme of sabotage, first introducing it as the missing tactic of "fighting dirty," using examples from my life and widening the identification to the "we" first person. I then excuse the audience from decency, to which most liberals immediately gravitate as an ideology, by explaining how it doesn't work because Republicans will only meet us halfway. By convincing the readers to co-opt their shady tactics, but in a cleverer way than they can, and for ultimate justice, I allow the reader to participate in a fantasy of political overthrow, which I reinforce by explaining Republican ideological tactics with metaphors (the American soldier, Joe the Plumber) that liberals will probably instinctively reject, and then by suggesting that Ron Paul is the only sane option, and also that Democratic primary elections won't suffer from our absence. The fantasy is the catharsis that releases our tension with our own party's inactivity and our frustration with the high likelihood of a Republican president in 2012, turning this energy into the James Bond intellectual espionage affect that my readers will need to re-register as Republicans and not feel dirty. I think this radical-seeming tactic can be more appealing than more general ones like donating to the Democratic campaign, especially with a young audience, because it seems bigger and more "real."

Advice on pacing problems and flow will be especially welcome, because this sucker is a hot mess!