Fifth post, now with 100% more music!

One of the things I really wanted to do in my playlist was to stress that you can put a critical eye on anything. Sometimes the most seemingly frivolous things - like pop music - have the most to say about our culture and what we really think about gender.

The first two songs in my playlist definitely function in a set, and illustrate perfectly the point that bell hooks makes in Being a Boy. Even though the Cobra Starship cover of I Kissed A Girl uses the same backing track and the same lyrical inspiration, somehow a song about sexual discovery and transgression becomes a song about violence and aggression. The undercurrent of sexual potentiality is there, but it's been reformatted, "gettin' all the honeys in the club excited", has reimagined male homoeroticism as yet another ploy to win female affection. Both performers have primarily heterosexual histories and self identities, but even if we did not know that it would have been implicit in the songs- Both of them are not about being comfortable with one's sexual identity, but rather center around the anxieties and dangers of transgressing on well established borders.

The second set of songs, Panic at the Disco's Lying is the most fun a Girl can have without taking her clothes off (a quotation from a book, but definitely not without significant meaning) and Paramore's Misery Business, are less focused on transgression, but place just as much emphasis on adolescent sexuality. I find it very odd that in both songs the antagonist is female, despite the fact that Hayley Williams of Paramore is not only a female vocalist, but also writes the lyrics for her band. It puts the focus on something that Pipher brings up in Reviving Ophelia, this troubling inability for teenaged girls (Hayley Williams was 17 when the album was written) to find stability within themselves, and as an extension, to empathize with others. It also shows clearly how women, when functioning inside the patriarchy, can be just as brutally effective as men in enforcing the so-called "women's role".

The reason I include Mindless Self Indulgence's Get It Up have less to do with the actual song itself (although it is one of my favourites by them) but rather to use it and its production as a starting point to talk about the band itself and the music industry as a whole. MSI is composed of 4 people, and unlike most bands where the "token girl" is in a relatively unimportant role, the girls in MSI (Lyn-Z on bass and Kitty on drums) compose the entire rhythm section, which in a band that produces primarily dance music is very important. And what's more, in this particular song the guest vocals are rendered by Jimmy (the lead singer)'s wife, Chantal Claret, who is herself the lead singer of a band called Morningwood. There is no presumption that a woman is "only" going to show up to deliver guest vox, or is going to be the "cute one" who stands in front of a bunch of guys who know how to play their instruments and sing. Not that those aren't completely legitimate art forms, and any female involvement in the music industry is honestly a move in the right direction, given how traditionally male-dominated music in general and the rock scene in specific have been. But it's really heartening to see a band that functions on an egalitarian basis, for whom the girls are necessary, vital members, and a husband and wife can sing a rollicking good dance song about his inability to get it up.

Personally, I think it's a step in the right direction.

Blog the Fourth

In The F-Word Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about how young women come to feel neglected and devalued by the social structures that currently rule the electoral and academic landscapes. There is a definite current that stigmatizes "gendered" interest in the academy, despite the progress that bell hooks talks about in Feminism is for Everybody, where "gendered" interest means taking an interest in what women do. There are any number of classes in the Women's Studies department that could be useful to me, not least of which the one that I took last semester, Body Image vs. Reality. My focus has always been more on Cultural Studies with a specific focus on Film, but here at OU my "gendered" understanding of those issues means that the Women's Studies department has been the best fit for me.

One of the issues I have is that the academy really appeals to me, especially as Cultural Studies grows into its own field on a post-graduate level, and I would very much love to one day pursue post-graduate studies in Cultural Studies with a specific focus on gender and sexual identity, because those are the issues that are most pressing and important to me. But in a lot of ways I feel as if it is just as important to do as bell suggests and to be some of the change I seek in encouraging strong feminist (or humanist, if you will) expression in other more readily accessible art forms than academic writing.

I feel that while it is very important to be able to pick apart the hierarchies of oppression and have a theoretical basis to understand institutional factors that artificially legitimize prejudice, it's also important to have strong figures who children can look up to and emulate, that teenagers can identify with, because while a fifteen year old might not have access to scholarly works in cultural or gender studies, they can (and do) find solace in, for instance, rock stars that are willing to put themselves out there by being "other" than the norm. And there are all sorts of reasons why it's safer and more acceptable for those rock stars to push the limits of gender and sexuality than it is for your average high schooler, but having icons is an important step in the very long road to acceptance, and it's one of the things I feel really strongly that I can actually make a meaningful contribution to.

Although I really, really hope that one day I can teach an Introduction to Cultural Studies class for a bunch of freshmen, because that, too, is a way to reshape the world.

Blog the Third

One of the things that really strikes me about Iron Jawed Angels is the pervasive and almost invisible undercurrent of class and privilege in the movie. Until our attention is called to it, as in the scenes with the working women and Ida B. Wells, we are unaware of the fact that the protagonists are situated in an incredibly privileged station. And even when we are faced with women of a lower social standing or a different race, it's very clear who we're supposed to identify with. There's never a question that Alice Paul is the heroine that we should aspire to be like, but at the same time, as bell hooks does an excellent job of pointing out, she is the benefit of a number of privileges that others (and we ourselves, as students at the University of Oklahoma) do not have.

It also strikes me as odd that one of the recurring themes of the movie is her flirtation with Patrick Dempsey's character, which is recurringly structured as a ploy for her to leverage his affection for her to political gain. While there might be a grain of truth to that depiction, it also smacks of the classic trope that women use their "feminine wiles" to entrap men to do their bidding, which I would like to believe is something that the screenwriters were above doing. Even in feminist cinema - and this mini series is undoubtedly that, being directed by a woman and with a majority of the writing staff female in a overwhelmingly male dominated industry - there is so much institutionalized and ingrained heterosexism that you must be very careful about the assumptions you make when watching a film.

An even more egregious offender than Iron Jawed Angels is Twilight, which had by far and away one of the most female dominated production crews of any mainstream movie I have seen in recent memory, but was almost a gag reel of sexist tropes and stereotypes of young female identity. It was hard not to read it as a farce, they were so obvious. But at the same time I'm forced to realize that most of those things are invisible to the film's target audience, and it gives me rage. (I just saw it on Free Movie Friday, and I am still completely taken aback that people are able to take Twilight as anything other than the conservative propaganda that it so obviously is. Aaaaaah.)

Blog the Second

It's really funny that we read McIntosh's Unpacking this week, since it is something that I've discussed many times in online discussions of privilege. The thing that always frustrates me about the piece is that it seems so obvious to me to take what she says about race and apply it to other aspects of your life, like class, gender, and sexuality, but inevitably (it seems to me) the people who would benefit most from that kind of examination are the people least likely to actually do so. In the third chapter of The F-Word Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about how this generation is the most accepting of queer (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and other non-conforming people in my parlance, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered in hers) people and issues, and while I know intellectually that that is true everywhere, from where I sit here in Oklahoma it very often doesn't feel that way at all.

It feels like we are still trying for the same level of acceptance here that they hit in the 80's in, say, San Francisco, and that's really frustrating. The oddest part about that for me was that my friend Amadi, who I've often talked about these issues with, very much identifies herself as a third wave feminist, as well as a woman of color and a fellow cripple, someone with health problems that significantly affect her ability to function normally in society. When we talk it isn't as a young woman gaining counsel from an older, wiser mentor, but rather as friends and fellow-fighters in an incredibly inhospitable world. She grew up the daughter of Christian missionaries and eventually converted to Orthodox Judaism to marry her husband, but I have very few friends I would say are as strongly feminist as she is.

And part of that is, I think, because she was forced by her position in life, on the axes of class, race, and sexuality, to confront the iniquities of modern American culture. As a woman of color who graduated from Columbia Law she did not have the luxury of not questioning her social status, and as a bisexual woman who willingly joined a deeply traditional faith and bore five children of her own she could not avoid dissecting the influences that led her to make those decisions, because they weren't the easy, obvious ones to make. And it's important to me, and to frame my friendship with her, to note that the third wave is just as important to her as it is to me, and that we see it in much the same way: the meeting place of the gay rights movement (important to both of us on deeply personal levels), the feminist movement, the struggles of women of color to find agency in an overwhelmingly white society, and the ongoing and ever-pressing class inequalities in this country.

I don't think third wave feminism will die until all women are free to do and be what they want. Be it have absolute control over their reproductive freedoms without fear of repraisal, film a sexual activity for the joy of doing it whether they're getting paid or not, make a lifelong commitment to the partner that they choose that is recognized and supported by the government and the church of their choice, or not even be a woman at all, but rather cast off the archaic bounds of the genders "man" and "woman", "boy" and "girl". Until that happens, the third wave is going to keep lapping at the shores of the status quo. (And how deliciously wrong does that sound?)