juliathinksaboutpop

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Week 11: Yas, This Is How to Be a Person.

In shameful solidarity with the three straight white male podcast hosts of Reply All, I, a non-straight non-white female, was also ignorant to the origins of words like ‘yas queen’, ‘shade’, and Madonna’s inspiration behind ‘Vogue’ until I watched the documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) this year, despite having casually joined my flatmate while she watched episode after episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. 

I’m quite sure I picked it up from a very-straight and slightly-offensive male friend, who wouldn’t stop shouting it. It wasn’t an unusual term. I thought, at first, that it was a play on our Malay language, where ‘yes’ was ‘ya’, and then, when I noticed it blowing up globally on the internet, I just chalked it up as hyped viral lingo and that the added ‘queen’ was a sign of female empowerment. It just all seemed far below the strange-things-trending-on-the-internet threshold. 

Then, when the queens on RuPaul were using them, I thought, of course, who would be more adept with the language of excitement than people dedicated to putting on a show? 

Then, I watched Paris Is Burning.

At the start of the second segment, Alex B., Alex G., and PJ try to explain what ‘yas’ is and it goes like this: 

PJ: It’s just like, an emphatic– 

ALEX GOLDMAN: Yeah, it’s just like– 

PJ: Yeah. 

ALEX GOLDMAN: –yes. 

PJ: Yasss! 

- #69 ‘Disappeared’, Reply All, https://gimletmedia.com/episode/69-disappeared/

I’m not sure if they meant it to come off this way but you can hear and see the English vocabulary gradually falling short of an accurate definition of the term. In the end, the best way to explain the word ‘yas’, as PJ does, is to just perform it with the gusto it’s meant to signify. Analogously, almost the same can be said these days about notions of gender. An annoying running-joke amongst me and my millennial friends recently is to reduce every established standard that allows life to run in an orderly fashion to a synthetic construct, which means it’s vulnerable to rational attack. E.g. ‘What even is time?’; ‘Monogamy is a social construct’; ‘There’s no such thing as masculinity.’ Knowing, they are serious topics for discourse, we rarely take it any further. But, if we are being serious, there very well might not be any such a clear concept of gender. 

Jose Xtravaganza, a guest during the episode and former ball participant, said of the experience: 

All the time and energy they put into these things just to go there and get a–acknowledged, t- a- for someone to tell me, “Oh, yes, you are fabulous.” That’s it, that’s all you get. 

- #69 ‘Disappeared’

The objective, as he words it, is to be acknowledged for being ‘fabulous’, because whether the performance is about masculinity, femininity, or limbs flying around during Vogueing, it first and foremost must be an entertaining, believable, and thus, fabulous performance. If someone were to ask me to explain masculinity, my first recourse would be to vague adjectives (gruff, simple), actions (speaks with a low-pitch, walks a certain way), or the way one dresses (trousers, and never above his knees). But my very best option would be to point to a real manly-man and use his version of masculinity as a benchmark, because just like ‘yas’ is best grasped when performed, as Judith Butler suggests, gender seems most legible when its “acts gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause” (Judith Butler, ‘Bodily Inscription, Performative Subversions’, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), p. 136). Watching the traits I’ve mentioned being demonstrated by a whole body, there is an effective sense that they all cohere, somehow, that there is an essential order that translates to inevitable gender-specific gestures, but rather than view this cohesion as a sign an of an internal origin, we should leave the gestures on the surface of the body, and understand that the sense of cohesion produced is merely, rather, the delight of a very fabulous performance. 

Another practice of the ball culture that reveals the performativity of social identification is the existence of ‘houses’. 

 PJ: So, houses were like families, but like non-biological families. … And the people in the House would actually take care of you. Like, you had a place to sleep if you needed it, you had food–Jose actually got an allowance from his House. The House even had people who were like, the mother of the House and the father of the House. 

- #69 ‘Disappeared’

PJ expresses intrigue at how conventional the structure is in a ‘house’. It’s another example of how a basic social unit, such as the nuclear family, with its subsequent parental figures (one female and one male) and dependent children are merely external templates that can be imposed on any group of people, despite their relation to one another. This goes as far to suggest that there is no biological essence to family bonding. The key to a successful family, according to Jose’s anecdotes, is performing the different acts of taking care of each other.

Though pretty depressing, It’s no wonder that a term like ‘yas’, that has its roots in a culture that subverted any essence or origin of identity can travel through most other cultures almost completely unhinged from its history. But as awareness is slowly raised, let’s hope that the fact that we can all shout ‘yas’ be a platform to explore the thrill of performance in the politics of identity. 

[juliathinksaboutpop]

Week 10: Pretty Queer for a Pretty Girl

The way I grew up watching TV, which was and still is quite basic, the most important queer girls were always pretty girly-girls (or as I later learned was known as ‘femme’) and I have to admit that those characters gave me a pretty gender-normative idea of what same-sex female relationships look like. Let’s enjoy a wide array of examples. 

Tara & Willow, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003)

Marissa & Alex, The O.C. (2003 - 2007)

Callie & Arizona, Grey’s Anatomy (2005 - ongoing)

Santana & Brittany, Glee (2009 - 2015)

Emily (Playa #1) & her many girlfriends, Pretty Little Liars (2010 - ongoing)

Carmilla & Laura, Carmilla (2014 - 2016)

Amy & Reagan, Faking It (2014 - 2016)

Mary-Louise & Nora, The Vampire Diaries (2009 - 2017)

Clarke & Lexa, The 100 (2014 - ongoing)

 Even when I came across the slightly creepier territory of fantasizing about a pairing in real life, the unrealistic prospects of attractive feminine best friends such as #kaylor or #camren seemed to generate many more Tumlbr fan pages than real-life couples such as Ruby Rose and Jessica Origliasso or Cara Delevingne and St. Vincent. There are possibly other major factors to this situation. It could be that the fantasy fuels the flame, that some have enacted their right to privacy more than others, or maybe it’s that out of everyone, Taylor Swift holds the most public-enchantment. 

But I do think the fact that mainstream popular culture seem to be more open towards femme representation is a factor that quite significantly exists and should be brought to the fore of discussion, because there’s a disjunct that needs to be addressed. It includes the ever important issue of “women like me” on screen and following that, two questions: 

 1) Why can’t mainstream media seem to stray far away from girly-girls? 

2) Why does television pop culture and celebrity pop culture seem so disparate with the femme-butch dynamic? I think the answers for both questions inform each other so let me start by giving some context on the second question. Jamie J. Hagen wrote that 

 If I don’t intentionally come out as a lesbian to the grocery store clerk, a colleague, a waiter, the person riding on the bus next to me, or in any other interaction, the assumption is that I’m interested in attracting and sleeping with men. 

 - Jamie J. Hagen, ‘How to Make Space for a Fierce Femme Future’, The Establishment, https://theestablishment.co/finding-my-way-to-femme-d1469974cd76 

Buzzfeed released a video of questions commonly and mistakenly phrased for the queer community, which included a segment addressing “Who’s the Man?”:

Last I checked, we were both women. 

 - Chris Lam, ‘9 Questions Straight People Need To Answer ASAP’, Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrislam/9-questions-gay-people-have-for-straight-people?utm_term=.prVa8e13k#.aeKo730yL 

From further accounts and my own experiences, I realized that despite the wonders of femme-representation on TV, harmful stereotypes still rang loudly in every day conversation, which prompted more questions: How are these representations being consumed? What perpetuates the stereotypes? The most convenient consumer specimen I had, of course, was myself, so I thought about how I came to denaturalize romantic notions of queer girls with long hair and frilly skirts (other than binge-watching OITNB). It was easy: there weren’t actually many around me in real life or more importantly, not many in real life celebrities. 

Currently, from the top of my head, I can think of Cara Delevingne, Amber Heard, and Stella Maxwell, but for a while, there was really only Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DeRossi, Rosie O’Donnell and… references to Melissa Etheridge? Point is, there didn’t seem to be a wave of femininity in queer female fame. Blame my sheltered upbringing, but I think it’s important to examine anyway the difference between what I was watching as entertainment and what I understood as fact. I realized that the more that real life didn’t corroborate the femme girls on screen, the more those representations became a fantasy, like the CGI on Fast & Furious 7, it was great and a treat for the eyes, but I was slowly inclined to think it wasn’t real. 

I felt like a perpetrator, enjoying these representations for what they’re meant to be, which is most importantly, palatable to a wider audience, which includes a bunch of straight people. This is not to say I don’t think that femmes don’t exist and don’t somehow benefit from these portrayals, but the advantages, I think, are at a tension with the dangers of fetish and fantasy. Talking about female portrayal in general, Susan Douglas, author of Enlightened Sexism, believes female representation in general are stuck swinging between two extremes:

Young women today are pulled between the message that they can do or be anything they want, that the world is their oyster [and that] full female equality has been achieved — and, on the other hand, there is enormous pressure to conform to this hyper-feminine ideal of hotness and beauty.

- Laura Fitzpatrick, ‘The New Sexism’, TIME, http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1972425,00.html

Similar can be said about queer female representation - you can be as gay as you want as long as you’re still pretty girl. For femmes like Hagen to find the validation they deserve on the street, it’s probably time we strike a realistic chord and start queering up not only sexuality but gender representation on screen. 

[juliathinksaboutpop]

Week 9: Sheila Heti and How Should a Person Be Edited?

It doesn’t matter whether they’re from Beverly Hills, New York City, or Atlanta, ‘real housewives’ of every city have come forward to express their disdain for manipulative editing in the pursuit of good reality television. 

In one instance, Jill Zarin from the Real Housewives of New York City told People Magazine: 

Those words coming out of my mouth don't match the audio track. I was talking to a producer on the side and they put my words in my mouth and I didn't like that. 

- Aaron Parsley, ‘Real Housewives of New York Premiere: Has Jill Zarin Changed?’, People (September 2016), http://people.com/tv/real-housewives-of-new-york-jill-zarin-has-she-changed

For Margaux, the protagonist’s best friend in Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should a Person Be?, being taken out of context in the manner claimed by Zarin is a fear realized. When protagonist, named after the author, attempts to record their conservation, Margaux expresses some serious anxiety about the tape recorder: 

Don’t you know what I fear most is my words floating separate from my body? 

[...]

I don’t know where things end up! Then whatever I happen to say, someone will believe I really said it and meant it? No. No. You there with that tape recorder just looks like my own death. 

- Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?, ( London: Vintage, 2014), p. 60

Later in the book, we come to understand why she feels this way: 

I once had a friend in art school, who I shared a studio with. She ran away to become a Buddhist and to live in a Buddhist colony in Colorado. She had been a painter, too, but when I went to visit her, she was just painting pretty colors on the insides of the temples that only the rich people who had reached the highest spiritual plane could see. 

- Heti, p. 177

I always thought that would never be me. Following Margaux’s train of thought, it seems she believes that once her words are recorded, documented verbatim, that she would be somehow stuck to them, stagnant and lifeless, a false icon, like the Buddha she draws to represent herself, chained to signify a certain zenith of morals and meanings, when her version of how to be a person is being able to constantly be distracted away from being any fixed person – a state of unconscious fluidity that stumbles upon and creates new meanings. When she equates the potential meaning of a plain brick wall over a masterpiece, Margaux suggests to us the importance of the mundane, the opportunity for the kind of valuable distraction to happen. Through her script and e-mail formats, Heti is able to do just that. She shapes a kind of aimless banality that is inspired by reality television, one of which she’s mentioned in a couple of interviews, The Hills.

The Hills (2006 – 2010) was a reality show about a group of girlfriends-ish (most of the time) in Los Angeles who maneuvered through their careers, love lives, and general social scene in front of the camera. Below is a typical strain of conversation in the show:

These seemingly dull talk goes back and forth between the characters when they’re not spewing fiery gossip or fighting with each other, which often seems like their conversation is floating, without real purpose or anchor to their surroundings. To Interview magazine, Heti said of the show:

…I didn't understand the rules. On the first season of The Hills, it was really weird—I mean, by the end it just became silly. But I hadn't seen anything like it, and I didn't understand what was going on. 

- Jackie Linton, ‘Sheila Heti’s Hysterical Realism’, Interview (June 2012), http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/sheila-heti-how-should-a-person-be/#_

Heti embraced this confusion and gave her characters in the novel her interpretation of the reality television treatment. By stitching together different formats side by side, she manages to float conversations above their settings. The script and e-mail forms are shaped as such that there is a spatial disjunct in comparison with dense sections of prose allows for the conversation to isolate itself. Rather than brush off ‘real’ talk as dull, Heti highlights them to put emphasis on the pure linguistic effect humans have on each other. How we transform each other by trading, absorbing, and negotiating each other’s signs and meanings, just like reality television producer’s do with the material their characters give them. Though with an added mediating layer of technology, the editing on reality television seems to be just another form of conversation. And though we don’t always come off the ideal way, and it feels like a part of our soul has been “sould” (Heti, p. 5), giving up an essential part of their friendship as material for artistic commodity doesn’t end up being Sheila’s tragic flaw, because just like The Hills, there will always be another day, another episode in life to say something else, to have another conversation, to figure out a different self with different rules. The bigger sin would be to stop creating, which is why Margaux gets over her fear and pushes Sheila to finish her work. Even though it poses such a question as its title, this novel isn’t a morality play or a step-by-step guidebook. Neither Sheila or Margaux end up being completely right about anything, but as Jon points out at the end, “I don’t think they even know the rules. I think they’re just slamming the ball around.” Mistakes are made. Let’s move on with another conversation.

[juliathinksaboutpop]

Week 8: #SELFIE and the Reality (TV) of It All

She's so short and that dress is so tacky Who wears cheetah?  It's not even summer, why does the DJ keep on playing Summertime Sadness? After we go to the bathroom, can we go smoke a cigarette? I really need one But first, Let me take a selfie - ‘#SELFIE’ (2014), The Chainsmokers 

 The Chainsmokers’ 2014 electronic club hit, ‘#SELFIE’, as the music video also explicitly illustrates, follows the adventures of a girl and her friend at a party, whose shallow concerns (i.e. bitching) cover the topics of other girls, clothes, getting hyped, and smoking. ‘But first’, the girl pauses before announcing she needs to take a selfie, as though sitting above all her vapid issues in that moment is the notion of her own self. 

“Welcome to the age of digital narcissism,” proclaims an article in The Guardian, “a world of endless ostentation opportunities and unlimited bragging possibilities. Showing-off has never been easier and, ironically, more celebrated” (Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, ’Sharing the (self) love: the rise of the selfie and digital narcissism’, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/mar/13/selfie-social-media-love-digital-narcassism). And it’s arguably true of the times. The Chainsmokers are on record saying that they based their lyrics off real life women they observed in New York City clubs, and as much as I’d like to lambast the gender bias in that statement, it might be more productive for me to give them credit where it’s due. 

Stereogum called the track “a soulless electro-house meme-song” that was “an avatar for everything despicable about modern electronic music” (Chris DeVille, ‘The Chainsmokers Don’t Suck Anymore, I Promise’, Stereogum, http://www.stereogum.com/1861081/the-chainsmokers-dont-suck-anymore-i-promise/franchises/the-week-in-pop/). I agree, in a way, but also maybe, that’s the point – that the song is supposed to evoke a generic reiteration of clubbing night staples such as indistinguishable synth lead song drops and unwisely documenting the experience, many of which are the eponymous selfies. 

Documentation, and in most instances, self-documentation, is the only part of a night out that savors the specifics. Just like the lyrics of ‘#SELFIE’, all the little details of the night, like the cheetah dress and Lana Del Rey, are subjugated by the song’s peak moment of self-portraiture. When digested as a whole piece, the song captures the morning-after when you’re looking through your camera-roll and random selfies can trigger psychedelic snippets of last night or maybe, even, in a parodic valley-girl spoken word that just so happens to fit that indiscrete club beat still thumping through your hangover. Whatever the circumstance, we’re in an age that realizes that even just the face carries all sorts of auxiliary information (a good night out, a healthy social life, a little too much tequila). How generic or specific these details are, with mobile modes of documentation and complementary apps, heavily dependent on how adept we are at portraying ourselves, which has generated a new multilayered image-dimension to self-consciousness. 

As reality television royalty, the Kardashians, have proved, some times, the more generic the problem, the better. The ratings for Keeping up with the Kardashians started moving upwards once relatable domestic problems took the forefront – Kourtney’s pregnancies, Kim’s marriage, Kim’s un-marriage. That’s the hook of tabloid information – people get to judge other people on grounds they can imagine for themselves. For example, pregnancy and marriage are experiences that are not isolated to the Kardashian’s income bracket. A wide array of audiences are able to say with confidence, ‘I could’ve handled that better’ or ‘I totally get that’. Thus, when the one of the Kardashians posts a selfie, it’s no longer just a face, it’s a face that is famous for living a life that any of us could be living, are living, in some cases. So we’ve come to do just that. 

If it’s easier to pay attention to detail when framed within a site of common interest, what better way to communicate with people than using one of the most basic components of physical identity, the face. However, the face is a site of paradox. As much as it is a platform for vanity, it can also be reconfigured as a tool for negotiating notions of voyeurism and agency, community and separation. It’s a site for people to converge and diverge. Not all of us have the E! News funding to display our personal problems globally, but social media apps such as Instagram and Snapchat provide enough curating opportunities to deftly design our own narratives, (I spoke a little more generally about this in my first blogpost.) information that inevitably gives light and is given light by our selfies. In an image-saturated age, the selfie sort of acts as soft gateway into our lives, reminding us that every story starts with a face, that there is a common denominator for us all. At the same time, when the camera is turned unto oneself, it can scream ‘I’m showing you my face and my story the way I want to be seen’ just as loudly as ‘also, I think I’m pretty’. 

When Kris Jenner wrote in her autobiography about the show, “How can I take these fifteen minutes of fame and turn them into thirty?”, (Kris Jenner, Kris Jenner... And All Things Kardashian, (Simon and Schuster, 2011)) the sense of taking exploitation into one’s own hands reminded me of how Derek Conrad Murray believed that selfies or “online self-portraiture” can be seen as “an oppositional desire and enjoyment in oneself as a response to a culture of devaluing and misrepresentation” (Derek Conrad Murray, ‘Notes to self: the visual culture of selfies in the age of social media’, Consumption Markets & Culture, 18 (6), 490-516 (p.512)). Just like the hipster photographers in Murray’s article, Jenner has her own mode and intention of expressing a valuable idea: rather than tell people not to look even though they will, how can I get them to look even harder, to see even better?

[juliathinksaboutpop]

Week 4: Space, Pain, and Breathing in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

Hannah Klein’s online review on full-stop.net of Citizen: An American Lyric begins with a simple observation – ‘Citizen is a slim volume, heavier than it looks’ – which tempts a little more thought. The book isn’t just slim, it is also sparse. Claudia Rankine somewhat surprised me with the amount of space she under-utilized, or rather, as I came to realize, how much space, as a device itself, she has utilized. Surprising because the book isn’t just heavy, its pages are dense, like the material is ready to absorb a Whitman-esque overload of American zeitgeist. But there is no excess of words, description, or transcribed life. Rankine instead formats her text to illustrate the exasperatingly arbitrary but fundamentally social world of racial construct – produced by mediations that take place in the ether. The book largely consists of the weight, the significance, of space.

Space itself exists and functions in a multitude of ways. We can either be within it or outside it. There can be space over, under, in between. It can either overlap, border each other, or emerge mutually exclusive from one another. Modern life, with its variety of identities and belief systems, resembles a diagram I thought I’d left behind in A-Level Math:

An example Venn diagram of ‘Things that are bad’ found on Pinterest

And with the racial microagressions, disavowals, and identity mapping that Rankine details, you can’t help but imagine that this is the complexity into which we have demarcated human being. Trying to extract and resolve any one compartment strains the body and mind – it is ache-inducing, sigh-producing.

To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. (Citizen, p. 59)

The sigh is the pathway to breath; it allows breathing. That’s just self-preservation. No one fabricates that. You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn’t call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind? (Citizen, p.60)

The sigh itself is not the ‘illness’. It is not even a symptom exclusive to racial unfairness. But it is exactly because it is a universal expression of tension and a desire for liberation that the world says, ‘stop that.’ With a ‘moan’, mainly an oral expression, suffering is displaceable unto caricature, in this case, the ‘deer’, a ‘ruminant’ animal who, like those oppressed, have to regurgitate and chew, or rather, process meanings which they have been forced to consume. 

(The possibility that some people might relate to Bambi more than Kate Clark’s art piece, Little Girl, poses a question: Are we unwilling to face that the language we use in daily life, textual or visual, are perversely imbedded with discrimination? I mean, if you feel uneasy with the Clark’s hybrid work, is it because you feel like you’re looking in the mirror?)

VS.

A moan ‘fabricates’ a metaphor and hangs a veil that allows people to renounce culpability or responsibility – ‘that’s not my problem.’ A sigh, however, has less impact with our five senses and more with our most rudimental organs. We do not see or hear a sigh as much as we recognize it through the pulse of our own living, and there is recognition of it as a momentary fissure in stable, healthy breathing, one that exposes a wound – ‘an exhale of an ache’ – and a pain – whether it is anger, shame, guilt etc. – that can be found in everyone.

You both experience this cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture along its suddenly exposed suture. (Citizen, p. 42)

A simulation of ruptured breathing is Rankine’s main rhythmic device. It exists in the microcosm of syntax. When a therapist mistakes a (presumably colored) patient for a potential threat, ‘everything pauses’. The moment ruptures as her apology does: ‘I’m so sorry, so, so sorry.’ It is also present in the macrocosmic structure, wreathing around and mostly after the blocks of prose into which Rankine compartmentalizes most of the poem as well as by the many images she includes that not only creates pause, but transports us into a seemingly different plane of communication. However, maybe, the point is that there is never an independent realm of language or identity.  In terms of perspective, Rankine writes with a preference for a respiratory, inclusive ‘you’ rather than a sensory, possessive ‘I’ to instruct a paradox of experience that at once pulls readers in to participate as the poem’s subjective as well as push them out by highlighting any differences between the readers’ world and the storyworld. At its most successful, Citizen’s ‘you’ will be able to conjure the emotions of a transgression without familiarizing the facts of the event. Pit against the discrimination in the poem, regardless of facial and cultural signifiers, Citizen expects, or hopes, that there is a universal reaction. 

Once a sense of participation has been established, Rankine can complicate the perspective through revisiting popular racially-charged events. Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six, Stop-and-Frisk and the high-profile murders of various African-Americans are all incidents which have received global attention and scrutiny. Everyone wants to talk about the problem, but fewer people want to stake a claim in the problem. In narrating these ‘situation videos’, Rankine does not allow the reader to cop out – at either or corner, you are situated somewhere in the script. During an unspecified Stop-and-Frisk occurrence, the moment of arrest is a tight compartment holding together a network of subjectivities:

I must have been speeding. No, you weren’t speeding. I wasn’t speeding? You didn’t do anything wrong. Then why are you pulling me over? Why am I pulled over? Put your hands where they can be seen. Put your hands in the air. Put your hands up. (Citizen, p. 106)

Who are you? i.e. ‘What ails you?’ Can ‘Put your hands up’ become ‘What up?’

To read this moment is to forgo the role of neutral outsider. In the moments before the rupture, within the prose-box, there is no objective space to escape into a buffer zone. You could be the victimized ‘I’, the policing voice, or somewhere more ambivalent, wishing that you could utter ‘You didn’t do anything wrong’ in a way that could change things. The possibilities aren’t limited to these. Any social, political or cultural difference could modify the type of pain but you are contained within the situation and forced to feel the rupture that was yours from the beginning.

Rupture. Recognition. Rankine spends most of Citizen provoking these two Rs, but does hint at a possibility of a third R – Repair:

Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce—

a truce with the patience of a stethoscope. (Citizen, p. 156)

So if life was really a Venn diagram, there would be a little shaded area where every single set of human intersected and according to Rankine, that would be ‘breath’, but for this intersection ‘to breathe’ or emerge, there must be a ‘truce with the patience of a stethoscope’. 

In pursuit of healing, as the medical metaphor implies, we must be open to identifying each other’s arrhythmias just as Citizen asks ‘What ails you, Dedmon?’ (Citizen, p. 95) of Deryl Dedmon, who beat and ran over James Craig Anderson in a racially-motivated hate crime. The poem does not presume a common cultural experience, but it does bring together victim, transgressor, and bystander in a common experience of pain. and of letting that pain breathe before the inverse happens, as in Dedmon’s case, ‘It [anger] let you go.’ (p. 95)

So, really, what Rankine is telling us is to forget the sets and subsets, to negate the 'What is' (Citizen, p. 152) already. Clear the space. Just listen for the pain.

[juliathinksaboutpop]

Week 3: Race and/as Technology in Jennifer Lopez’s ‘If You Had My Love’

Jennifer Lopez’s music video for ‘If You Had My Love’ (1999), disclaiming first any authority on the history of racial representation on MTV, seems to be an early illustration of the transition in thinking about identity and technology towards identity as technology.

Lopez’s possibly purely digital entity is an example of ways that race and gender, according to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘like media, [are] also a heuristic, a way to understand, to reveal, the world around us.’ (‘Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race’ (2009), Chun)

What I think reveals itself in the way Lopez and technological persona can switch between different styles of dance and outfits, respectively, is the displacement of categories of race and gender from a fixed ontology to the mutable sign, like the Burkean view on language, that more so often obfuscates meaning than they do locate it. What both these artists render ambivalent are questions of control and agency.

In ‘If You Had My Love’, we are given a rough premise in which Lopez is an artistic and sensual figure that you have to access through the Internet who sings, dances, and takes showers. We’re given hints that CSI Investigator Eric Delko (as I will forever recognize him) is using his computer to dictate which camera angles the rest of the world sees and we’re left thinking: Does Lopez know she’s being filmed? Is she a real person? Is this happening in real time or is it pre-recorded? There are never any clear answers and it’s all a little creepy as Eric sits in a dark room, in a manly-man singlet, fidgeting in response to Lopez’s actions.

That’s a good point to run with, though – that although we’re given an idea that Lopez is a digital manifestation under Eric’s command, he and other male consumers, can’t control how their hormones react, or are even subjugated, to images of female sexuality. We end up, in this transaction, with an example of the sort of flip-coin existence of the sign, which, at once, is created and by itself, creates. In fact, the female image of Lopez, in themes bright and white, is the clearer representation than that of her sleazy, almost embarrassed and hiding in darkness, male creator.

Lopez’s message is simple: if patriarchy’s desires has created narrow, but crisp, images of how their ideal female should act, let us take those clear images and own them to our advantage. 

Let us teach our daughters that whatever ways patriarchy has imagined our body to move, those possibilities belong first and foremost to the female

Which, then, shifts control over to women and displaces men as mere mediators (like algorithms) for women to calculate how best to tie a leash with material from their desire.

But is this as clear and effective as we idealize it to be? Should the battle always be about control? Does an emphasis on the body not create ‘a mode of revealing that renders everyone into a set of traits that are stored and transmitted … seen as what allows the human to endure through time as a set of unchanging characteristics?’ Lopez tries to undermine this restriction in the dance breakdown by showing off the way she is multi-faceted, almost omnipotent, with her ability to dance in different styles. The conversation colloquially sounds like: ‘You can tell me to do something, because I can actually already do it.’

That realization is supposed to empower the female – especially those on the colored spectrum – to put on display everything that the female can do and the female can do it all, but the dances shown have roots in Other non-hegemony cultures and Eric is still pressing the buttons, which only goes so far as to say that are fixed ideas of femininity and racial cultures that have merely to be revealed, but not necessarily transcended. Without a scene that exposes the male transgressor (Eric continues to sit dodgily, but safely, in the dark) or further autonomizes the technology of woman and race, it seems that dominated identities are still combating within the map that Eric and a lustful patriarchy have drawn. With an emphasis on power, we risk creating a new map that is just as hegemonizing as the last. Can we escape? How do we begin re-mapping in a way that does not so much involve identity in a tug-of-war of control but, rather, establishes agency by creating mutable lines that allows people to perpetually create new meanings about identity?

[juliathinksaboutpop]

Week 2: Race and Figure Skating in Radiolab’s ‘On the Edge’

Kudos to Radiolab for setting the tone right, or, at least, to be pretty reflective of my own assumptions, in introducing the topic of figure skating. Radiolab producer Latif Nasseer’s almost desperate disclaimer, ‘It’s a great story! It doesn’t matter that it’s figure skating,’ is telling of the sport’s elite – almost haughty – scene. To bring figure skating into mainstream conversation is to bring to forefront a relatable issue and either to concur the rest of its particularities to the issue at hand or, if irrelevant, to denounce them i.e. ‘it doesn’t matter.’ I can’t speak for everyone, but my interaction with the sport involves a superficial and vicarious admiration of surreal Eastern European or Central Asian strength and grace while I antithetically sloth around the TV room on a Winter Olympic binge. That, and a limited scope of feel-good Disney Bildungsroman or cheesy rom-coms with pretty, slim, white protagonists:

It also probably doesn’t do much for my cultural grasp that references or interest in figure skating are enacted, from the top of my head, by the go-to stereotype of artistic flare – camp gay men like Mitchell Pritchett (Modern Family) or James Stinson (How I Met Your Mother).

Grace. Flare. Elegance. Strength and precision, but in a ‘feminine’ or, derogatorily, ‘sissy’ way. These are words, ingrained through my consumption, I had already associated with the sport so it wasn’t so surprising to listen that Surya Bonaly’s radical athleticism was not given consideration where it mattered most in competitions. What interested me about her situation was the familiar roping together of a new sense of robustness and the color of her skin. We see it with tennis’s Serena and Venus Williams and gymnastics’ Simone Biles, who have more successfully been symbols of change in their respective fields:

Women have certainly never hit harder and not just on account of improved equipment. They’re stronger, bigger, faster, better trained and pushed above all by the example of the Williams sisters.

-  Michael Kimmelman, ‘How Power Has Transformed Women’s Tennis’, The New York Times

“Just when we thought we were at the physical limit of the sport, then here comes Simone Biles,” the beloved 1984 Olympic all-around champion Mary Lou Retton told a gaggle of reporters at the US Olympic gymnastics team trials this summer. “She’s the best I’ve ever seen.”

- Bryan Armen Graham, ‘The extraordinary Simone Biles, the best athlete in America today’, The Guardian

Though we would like to ideally attribute these as individual feats regardless of race, the link is inevitably raised. Articles such as Zeba Blay’s ‘When We Attack Serena Williams’ Body, It’s Really About Her Blackness’ (The Huffington Post) and Muna Mire’s ‘How the Media Tells Simone Biles’s Story Is Racist’ (Teen Vogue) come to Williams’ and Biles’ defense against racist characterizations by calling the wrongdoings out but in doing so also reduces the discourse about the relationship between blackness and exceptional physique to what bell hooks calls ‘merely a reaction against representations created by white people’ that does not contribute to the real goal of black representation, which involves ‘shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking.’

When Mire writes, ‘The strong implication is: we don’t see black people as human until or unless they are exceptional — and even then we insult them,’ which critiques the status quo, hooks would suggest that we then ask – a question I have no authority to answer – how else should the black community relate to what is exceptional about Biles? Should her, Williams’, and Bonaly’s physical particularity be disavowed or is there a way that this image can be brought into the multifaceted world of ‘perspective’ that will effectively subvert any colonizing stereotypes?

Neither tennis or gymnastics, however, place any or as much significance on artistic and balletic components as figure skating. The Williams sisters and Biles have all gone on to achieve top honors relying on their, at times and unfortunately, caricatured levels of strength. In the case of Surya Bonaly, the dialectic between black athleticism and lilywhite grace was more complicated and produced a greater tension. Her powerful and daring movements stood in starker contrast to the usually near ‘soundless’ on-ice artistry. Sandra Bazic provides useful terms that I appropriate for metaphor. The ideal movement of figure skating, Bazic describes, is ‘circular’ and the way Bonaly was skating, though unmatched in her jumps, was on ‘straight lines’. It is almost too easy to simply villainize the notion of figure skating’s circularity as a symbol of its elitist insularity, which resists any progress forwards towards assimilating more diverse types of skaters, which was seemingly being pioneered by Bonaly’s linear, forward-thinking skill-set. But Bonaly was not the first to attempt her kind of power-heavy routine. The podcast also makes note of Tonya Harding and Elvis Stojko as being part of this new group of stunt skaters. It seemed, however, that the difference in Bonaly’s skin color, which Johnette Howard described as standing so arrestingly in contrast with the white ice, played a part in highlighting what else was different about Bonaly, which placed her blackness, quite arbitrarily, as directly proportional to her Otherness in terms of skating.

Bonaly played into the hands of this contrast when she protested her loss at the 1994 World Championship – she was the unrefined, hard-headed, ‘defiant’ Other of an otherwise genteel sport. But as another Radiolab producer, Tracie Hunt, comments, it wasn’t an absolutely harmful moment for black representation. She agrees that it was ‘unsportsmanlike’ but that it was also an opportunity for empathy in acknowledgement that ‘racism can make black people crazy’ – a historically created social paranoia and culture of second-guessing everyone’s motives. Hunt’s reaction is an example of a ‘vacillation of emotions’ that Kristen J. Warner calls ‘feeling some type of way’. An analysis of these simultaneous multitude of feelings is a way in which black womanhood can be given ‘perspective’. The black identity, just like any other identity, should exceed ‘traditional binary thinking’ of good and bad representation. Following this line of thinking, I end this post with a few other questions about race and figure skating:

To what degree does the sports community have to exercise racial-blindness or take into account statements such as ‘a trend in gymnastics at this moment … is going towards a technique that opens up new chances to athletes of colour (well-known for power) while penalising the more artistic Eastern European style that allowed Russians and Romanians to dominate the sport for years’ (Daily Mail Reporter, ‘Maybe next time we’ll paint our skin black so we can win’, Daily Mail Online)? Following this, to what extent is figure skating’s circularity actually insular and potentially racist or is it justified in most perspectives in staying faithful to its elite ‘aesthetic’?

How far can physical exceptionalism be negotiated as particular to the black identity?

Is there an immediate responsibility, willingly or not, for black public figures, such as athletes, in representing the black identity and how should they address this? What are the transformative possibilities of Surya Bonaly defying skating regulation because she was ‘just trying to be happy’?

[juliathinksaboutpop]

Week 1: Generalizations in Popular Culture and Literature.

In a third season episode of Orange Is the New Black, inmates, Poussey and Taystee, organize a funeral service for the prison’s library books that were burned in a battle against bedbugs. In a procession Taystee christens ‘The Ultimate Book Return’, here are some memorable quotes:

Poussey Washington: I feel like there’s nothing I could say that couldn’t be better said in, like, a book. But, um, books are made of paper and trees so we thought they should be returned to the trees from whence they came and everything.

Blanca Flores: I like reading more than I like my actual life.

Alongside its comedic ability, there’s a point about literature here that shouldn’t be glossed over. Both Poussey and Blanca eulogize a quality of the text that is superior to real life. In the novel’s narrative capacity, Poussey finds a space that strings words together better than she can and Blanca finds in reading a source of escape from the way she perceives the narrative of her own life has so far ended up. 

David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity, describes our current state of industry as one with a high level of image-consciousness, and, consequently, a high rate of image production - a practice that has seeped into our social culture and made us avid consumers of reflective media sharing platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. Personal branding or the increasingly hackneyed term ‘aesthetic’ is a new technologically supported language that encourages us to carry a meaningful narrative in the way we present ourselves to everyone else whether it’s using a color scheme or some other cohesive artistic choice. 

My sister’s sepia-toned Instagram panel.

Actress, Sophie Turner’s, white bordered Instagram panel.  Almost like these Instagram profiles, what we culturally consume and reproduce becomes a pertinent pastiche in our own narrative because popular culture does not only refer to the object of consumption, but rather, as Stuart Hall posits in Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’: 

The meaning of a cultural symbol is given in part by the social field into which it is incorporated, the practices with which it articulates and is made to resonate. (Hall, p. 449)

In Litchfield correctional facility, consumption privileges are scarce. Commissary products are bottom shelf quality while television is shared and restricted. The only commodity left to give any sense of individual taste are the number of books physically provided by the library - it is the only room that models the outside world’s rainbow array of choice. Through popular book titles, the OITNB characters, as readers, are able to see themselves in context of the free world, and we, as audiences, able to see the characters in reference to ourselves. Within that scope, pop culture references can be seen as a gregarious device - a standard measure of commonality.

However, Dana Spiotta talks about avoiding generic references: ‘It becomes a short hand, a kind of received idea. The naming makes it a generic type rather than a specific human,’ (’A Conversation with Dana Spiotta,’ thislandpress.com, Constance Squires) but as examples from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad hopefully demonstrates, some times, generalizations serve to intensify the specifics. 

Egan explores characters that are interconnected somehow with the music and entertainment industry. The way some famous names are thrown around such as the Paris Review, Cyndi Lauper, and Diet Coke are in pursuit of building a context of a world in which artistic success and its inhabitants are struggling with becoming increasingly dependant on transmitting the right image and how fast and far that transmission can travel. Bennie, a record producer, rarely reacts to music the way he used to and still desires, a way that ‘communed  directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy.’ (p. 31):

Bennie tried to find again the deep contentment he’d felt just a minute ago. But ‘hairball’ had unsettled him. The room felt uncomfortably small. p.32)

Bennie, acting as a representative of an older model of the music industry, sits uneasily in world where a headline can stand in for the dizzying complexity of life and good music, and analogously, that his own being can be reduced to the reference ‘hairball’. We require, in this novel, generic references to intensify the tension with it.