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Sex, Death and Breast Cancer: A Pop Cultural Analysis of Pink Ribbon Politics

February 2010

Breast cancer awareness burst into consumer culture around twenty years ago with the birth of the pink ribbon campaign. Since the campaign’s growing popularity, scholars have critiqued “pinkwashing,” a phenomenon that Samantha King defines as “talk and action about women which does not necessarily empower women.” In her article “Cancer Butch,” S. Lochlann Jain argues that despite evidence that cancer is a preventable and communal disease—a “measured sacrifice to economic progress” (509) in a capitalist society—dominant breast cancer narratives fuelled by pink campaigns continue to individualize the illness and depict it as inevitable. Ironically, perhaps cruelly, this capitalist logic lends itself to the commodification of breast cancer culture. King finds that market researchers unanimously hail the disease as a “dream cause” (129) due to its cultural capital vested by signifiers that both produce and are produced by dominant ideologies around motherhood, femininity and heterosexuality.

           In this paper I deploy Jain's work to argue that within this symbolic order, breast cancer poses a threat to normative heterofemininity in a very material way—by (purportedly) unsexing a woman—and this threat underlies the “relentless hyper- and heterosexualization of the disease” (Jain 506) that we see in pinkwashing. Jain writes that, “mastectomy necessarily queers a woman in a homophobic world” (522), arguing that “there is simply no subject position available for cancer butch” (521). I take this idea up to contend that, in its threat to heterofemininity, breast cancer in fact runs the risk of rendering all women “butch.” Thus the battle against death collapses with a battle against butchness—a battle fought with pink. To illustrate these significations, I compare and contrast the breast cancer storylines in two major television network series: Showtime's The L Word and HBO's Sex and the City.  

           While Jain examines both the threatening nature and subversive potential of the cancer butch, for The L Word’s lesbian character Dana Fairbanks, breast cancer is only a source of shame. In the series, Dana represents gay shame. We are introduced to her in the pilot episode as someone who will “pickle in [her] self-loathing homophobia.” Dana begins her career as a pro tennis player in the closet, even ending a relationship because of her fear of being out. Though she eventually comes out and garners tentative acceptance from her Republican parents, shame and insecurity around her sexuality remain prominent in her character profile. When Dana learns that she has breast cancer she descends into unrelenting bitterness and anger: she scowls, recedes, and chases her partner away.

           Throughout her illness, Dana neither tames her cancer with pink nor seeks empowerment or subversion through cancer butch. She prioritizes an urgent mastectomy over the option of reconstructive surgery, though she wears prosthetics; she forgoes the wig, but hides beneath hats, stating that she feels unattractive; and she remedies this neither with feminizing cosmetics nor with the kind of queer subversion that Jain describes when she goes shirtless for a yoga class. Instead, Dana withers away. Significantly, she becomes desexualized; the last time we see her have sex is the tearful tryst the night before her mastectomy. Following chemotherapy, her partner leaves and her ex-partner and best friend, Alice, adopts the role of primary caretaker. Despite their history, however, this time their relationship is platonic. When Alice sees Dana’s naked body for the first time after her mastectomy, she cries and holds her, suggesting that Dana’s body now represents only death and tragedy. Overall, Alice behaves in a motherly fashion and Dana like a child; there is nothing sexy about this cancer queer.

           Because Dana embodies shame and ambivalence, she represents the “abjected subject of bare life” (Jain 515) that wigs and pink lipstick serve to drag back into legitimacy. Without these trappings the breast cancer victim is necessarily queer with her bald head, flattened chest, battle scars, strength and anger. As Jain argues, failure to comply with the imperative to reconstruct femininity reads as aggression (509). In The L Word, Dana embodies this aggression, the stigma, and the terror that the pink ribbon conceals, and, significantly, she dies. Without health and athleticism to legitimize her sexuality, without a husband (as the priest at her funeral laments) to encourage recourse to femininity, Dana and her body can no longer be.

           The story of Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, by contrast, adheres more closely to the survivor narrative promoted by dominant breast cancer culture. A middle-aged, hyper- and heterosexual woman, Samantha lashes out at the prospect of looking like “a sick person.” She buys several expensive wigs, is lucky enough to not need a mastectomy, and proclaims that she will, “kick cancer and that red carpet’s ass.” Unfortunately for her, however, chemotherapy incites early menopause and robs her of her sex drive. These changes compel Samantha to reevaluate her life; whereas she previously desired breast implants, she decides that her breasts are “fabulous,” and after a lifetime of promiscuity she braves love and makes a commitment to her partner, Smith. Indeed, one can read Samantha’s story as one of warning. When she asks her doctor why she got breast cancer, he remarks that women who never bear children are at risk for the disease. Samantha becomes irrationally upset in response, stating that she feels like she is being punished for her lifestyle. As she heals, she calms down, accepts her punishment and learns her lesson: she now appreciates both her natural breasts and the man in her life. Perhaps, this suggests, she will soon marry and raise children.

           Dominant breast cancer narratives individualize the cancer experience and so posit its victims as fallen; this is especially true for women, as Jain argues, for whom disability or dis-ease of any kind is never honorable. The question thus becomes whether the victim will rise again. Samantha Jones persists in her heterofemininity in the face of cancer, remaining attractive and correcting her promiscuous ways to settle down with a man. She literally comes back to life through heterosexuality, as we see when her libido returns in the series finale and she joyfully rides her now-steady boyfriend as the flowers he bought her bloom. Dana Fairbanks, however, isolates herself in a space of impossible being and falls further into the tragic role of the dying queer. Where Samantha overcomes cancer and perversion, Dana, the self-loathing cancer “butch,” succumbs to both. It is significant enough that both Sex and the City and The L Word feature breast cancer storylines. In a cultural climate where breast cancer is as prominent as dieting, the contrasting fates of these two characters point towards the limits of possibility for women and their mortal bodies.  

Works Cited

Bicks, J., Chupack, C., King, M. P. and J. Melfi (Executive Producers). Sex and the City [Television series]. Home Box Office (HBO).

Chaiken, I. and Lam, R. (Executive Producers). The L Word [Television series]. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Jain, S. Lochlann. “Cancer Butch.” Cultural Anthropology 22.4 (2007): 501-538.

King, Samantha. “An All-Consuming Cause: Breast Cancer, Corporate Philanthropy, and the Market for Generosity.” Social Text 19.4 (2001): 115-143.

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Negotiating Femme-inisms: An Examination of the “Problem” with Femme

March 2009

           Maybe The L Word has something to do with it, but there appears to be a recent surge of inquiry into the topic of the femme. The Femme 2006 conference in San  Francisco, California addressed the problem of the demonization of femmes within queer communities. This month, Homofactus Press published a two-volume work entitled Visible: A Femmethology—a work that seems long overdue. These examples point to a growing awareness of the femme as a problem, as femme-identified women emerge from the margins of queer theory and queer communities to proclaim that they are reviled, mocked or, at best, invisible. Encompassing everyone from the “butch/femme” femme to the otherwise femme-y dyke, I use “femme” to describe any self-identified lesbian whose gender presentation is expressed or read as “feminine”.

           An overview of the literature around the femme summarizes the problem: not recognized as queer, femmes find themselves invisible to the (already-elusive) lesbian community and often excluded from it. The conflation of gender-normative appearance or aesthetics with heterosexuality results in femmes being misread as heterosexual, proving frustrating and disempowering for various personal and political reasons. The femme becomes, ironically, doubly-queer, an Other within the queer community itself for not ascribing to queer gender norms (a surprisingly non-oxymoronic concept), and an anomaly to the straight world, dependent as it is on certain signifiers to “make sense” of queerness. Whereas the history of violence committed against butch or otherwise gender-queer women has been documented, reclaimed, and deconstructed to the aims of lesbian rights and identity formation, femmes remain absent from queer, and feminist, history and theory.

           Much of the existing literature describes the problem as one of internalized misogyny. Feminism and lesbian culture, it is said, unknowingly reproduce patriarchal values by disavowing and dismissing female femininity as a construct necessarily bound up in heterosexuality and oppression. To illustrate the point, many writers note that within gay male culture, gender-normative men in no way challenge the queerness or the politics of gay men as a group. Like women in a man’s world, these authors state, femmes in a lesbian world—one that privileges female masculinity as its own status quo—struggle to be seen, taken seriously, and valued.  

           In my paper, I will summarize these ideas and follow their implications to further probe the question: what makes the femme enigmatic? I will first examine the role of recognition in identity movements and politics to argue that, as such movements have relied on self-Othering in order to gain recognition as a collective, those who “pass” might destabilize the power in visibility and do so unwillingly, desiring visibility for themselves. Next I will explore how race and class shape what might be seen as the homonormative lesbian—that is, the white, “androgynous,” university-educated, Western, feminist dyke—considering the working-class butch/femme, the black stud/femme, and queer, non-white female femininities. These examples of femme belonging indicate that femme sexuality conflicts with the white, Western, feminist lesbian politics and identity; they might also point to why.  

           Drawing from works by Judith Halberstam, Makeda Silvera, Jasbir K. Puar, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Patchen Markell, Robbin VanNewkirk, Elizabeth Galewski, Sassafras Lowrey, and others, I aim to problematize the notion of lesbian visibility and recognition and to highlight some of the reasons why many femmes feel pissed off, paradoxical, and invisible no matter where they go.

References

Burke, Jennifer Clare, ed. Visible: A Femmethology. Vol. 2. Homofactus Press, 2009.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Galewski, Elizabeth. “‘Playing Up Being a Woman’: Femme Performance and the Potential for Ironic Representation.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 279-302.

---. “Figuring the Feminist Femme.” Women’s Studies in Communication 28 (2005): 183-206.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998.  

Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

Silvera, Makeda. Piece of my Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology. Sister Vision Press, 1991.

VanNewkirk, Robbin. “‘Gee, I didn’t That Vibe from You’: Articulating my Own Version of a Femme Lesbian Existence.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 10 (2006): 73-85.

Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Harvard University Press, 1999.

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PINKWASHING: A critical analysis of the breast cancer movement

December 2008

           While the traditional women’s health activism of the 1960’s and 1970’s often adopted a grassroots approach, contemporary cultures of action accommodate new arenas of social power by making use of consumerism. A prime example of this activist strategy is the breast cancer movement, a cause firmly lodged on the pop cultural stage of North America. Largely dominated by corporate-sponsored fundraising events, the breast cancer movement’s iconic status suggests that the cause might be a case of pinkwashing; that is, “talk and action about women which does not necessarily empower women.” With its billion-dollar, pink ribbon success, the breast cancer movement raises the critical question: are contemporary cultures of action altruistic or simply pinkwashed marketing schemes? 

           In her analysis of the breast cancer movement, Samantha King argues that the cause is born out of corporate philanthropy. According to King, corporate philanthropy emerged as a business strategy in the Reagan-era United  States when corporations became increasingly responsible for social welfare. In order to benefit from this responsibility, corporations sought to make charity profitable for them. Today, King argues, market researchers concur that breast cancer is a “dream cause” (129). As a result, numerous corporations have adopted the pink ribbon as a brand identity. Drawing from ideologies that invest white American motherhood with the utmost social value, the breast cancer cause serves those brands well. As King explains, the disease itself plays a small role in this consumerist movement which openly seeks corporate profit.  

           The case of the Astra Zeneca Health Care Foundation further exemplifies the corporate-motivated nature of the breast cancer movement. Following a cost-benefit analysis of their in-house cancer screening program, the company decided that starting what is now known as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month would ultimately prove profitable for them. While this Awareness Month has raised significant funds for the movement, Astra Zeneca also contributes to the causes of breast cancer by producing carcinogenic pesticides. The corporation’s hypocrisy reveals that “they” do not truly care about the movement for altruistic purposes; as with strategies of corporate philanthropy, the movement exists in a synergetic relationship with a consumerist culture in which profit and consumption come before health.

           The mainstream breast cancer movement ultimately epitomizes pinkwashing; after all, what is empowering about mammograms and pink lipstick? Alternative approaches to the cause do exist, such as Vancouver’s Inspire Health, an organization committed to alternative therapies and a holistic approach to health. These kinds of organizations also provide help for women suffering from other diseases, such as AIDS and lung cancer. The overemphasis on breast cancer in the mainstream movement suggests that the particular disease possesses cultural capital, which some argue arises out of its racial codification as white. The pinkwashing, whitewashing, rampant consumerism and abundant profit surrounding the breast cancer movement thus illustrate how, as a women’s health issue, breast cancer outshines the others with its ties to hegemonic power.  

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Why is ‘medicalization’ an important concept in the study of women’s health issues?

December 2008

“Medicalization” refers to the process whereby non-medical problems become defined and treated as medical problems while medicine, in general, gains authoritative influence over social life discursively, institutionally, and practically. Because women have historically sought physicians’ aid more than men, they are especially susceptible to medicalization; this is evidenced by the host of commonly “known” female “conditions,” such as premenstrual syndrome and menopause. The concept of medicalization is important in the study of women’s health issues because it helps us to examine how medicine, as an institution of disciplinary power, is inextricable from the political structures of oppression. In a patriarchal society where women are subordinated in various and complex ways, the intensive medicalization of women’s lives plays a key role in the process of systematic oppression.

           A historical analysis of the medicalization of women’s lives demonstrates clearly the political implications of medicalization. Several researchers examine European and North American medical literature across the Victorian era and find how, during this period, medicine became increasingly specialized and detailed in its development of gynecology and psychiatry. This development facilitated the widespread diagnosis of hysteria and nymphomania, two “illnesses” defined and treated both psychiatrically and sexually. According to (male) doctors at the time, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth precipitated hysteria in women, who were believed to be inherently frail. Nymphomania, for these experts, was the “inexplicable” expression of female sexual desire through behaviors such as flirting or masturbation. Both illnesses were treated with traumatizing practices ranging from institutionalization to clitoridectomy. Our distance from this era allows us to see how problematic social values informed these “illnesses” and their “treatment;” for the practitioners and patients of the time, however, medical authority obscured the element of political relativism.      

           While diagnoses of hysteria and nymphomania seem outdated, the ongoing medicalization of childbirth reveals how the Victorian roots of medicalization feed contemporary attitudes and approaches to women’s health. Prior to the development of obstetrics and gynecology, childbirth was attended to by the longstanding tradition of female midwifery. This woman-centered approach to childbirth relied on experiential knowledge produced by generations of mothers and midwives, and on the authority of the mother’s body. From the 18th to the 19th century, male doctors in search of new fields of expertise asserted their authority over the domain of childbirth. As they took over, doctors established an approach prioritizing speed, technology and (male) medical authority. By regarding the knowledge of midwifery as mere “old wives’ tales,” and thereby discounting it, these medical experts developed their approach from scratch. Throughout their development they not only harmed women and babies, but they legitimized a medical model of childbirth that renders doctors the “experts,” intervention typical, and women passive. Today, the normalization of hospital births paired with the high rate of C-section deliveries epitomizes the medicalization of childbirth.        

           Through the lens of medicalization, we can critically examine current women’s health issues from the same social and political angle employed in the analysis of childbirth. Pharmaceutical deregulation and the subsequent consumer approach to health arguably serve as the newest engines of medicalization. When Viagra was accidentally discovered, urologists and marketers worked to construct “erectile dysfunction” as a medical disease in order to sell the drug as its cure. The wild success of this case now inspires researchers to find a cure for “female sexual dysfunction,” as “experts” have already defined it. As several feminist scholars argue, the notion of “FSD” both produces and is produced by heteronormative and male-centered definitions of sexual activity and pleasure. Another contemporary “disease” that works to perpetuate heteronormative and sexist values is “infertility.” Capitalized on by reproductive endocrinologists, the construction of infertility assists in the promotion of reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization. Stemming from the assumption that (white, middle-class) women should heterosexually marry and quickly conceive, discourse around IVF reveals the technology’s close relationship to the politics of family and motherhood. The cases of FSD and IVF thus exemplify how medical authority, embedded as it is in a specific sociopolitical matrix, significantly influences women’s experiences of their bodies.    

           The concept of medicalization can problematize the relationship between authority and experience as it exists in many cases, ranging from antidepressants to breast cancer research. More specifically, when we approach the study of women’s health issues with an understanding of medicalization, we can challenge the process whereby authoritative forces create illnesses, and/or define them as such, and consequently mold and cement politically-charged Truths regarding gender and its lived experience.

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Feminist Methodology in Praxis: An Article Review of Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp’s “When the Girls Are Men: Negotiating Gender and Sexual Dynamics in a Study of Drag Queens”

October 2008

Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp’s article “When the Girls are Men: Negotiating Gender and Sexual Dynamics in a Study of Drag Queens” provides a critical discussion about the authors’ research process in the writing of their book Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret. Specifically, Taylor and Rupp reflect on the ways in which the power dynamics of gender and sexuality, both their own and that of the research participants, shaped their research and influenced their methodology. Taylor and Rupp’s discussion results in an example of thoroughly self-reflexive feminist research: while identity and power relations in the research process inevitably create limitations, the researchers’ attention to problematizing gender and sexual dynamics ensures a responsible research outcome that ultimately benefits its participants and the feminist field of study.

           To summarize Taylor and Rupp’s article, the authors begin by reintroducing their research participants, the “801 girls”. The 801 girls are a group of drag queens that perform in Key West, Florida. Taylor and Rupp argue that the drag queens “enact queer theory’s troubling of gender and sexuality” (2120), and explain that their original research angle considered how cultural performances such as those of the 801 girls may be political. The authors then describe their research method, summarized as follows. Taylor and Rupp employed participatory methods to ensure total immersion into the research participants’ social milieu. For example, at one point during the research process they went in double drag (dressed as men dressed as women) (Taylor and Rupp 2122); this form of participation benefits research by invoking empathy within the researcher. Taylor and Rupp conducted both in-depth and short interviews, informal conversations, focus groups with audience members and community members, media analyses of local publications, and performance transcriptions. Although they obtained a diverse sample in terms of sexual identity, ethnicity, race, class and age, Taylor and Rupp limited themselves by containing their research within Key West as they could not conduct follow-up interviews regarding audience members’ attitudes upon returning home from their vacations, for example. The use of multiple methods of data collection, however, is a strength of the research as it allows for a more complex analysis and nuanced results.    

Taylor and Rupp proceed to discuss the negotiation of power throughout the research process, referring to what they call the “leveling process” (2123) whereby research participants exert certain forms of power in order to compensate for their subordination to the researchers’ forms of power. In this case, the researchers’ power resides in their status as academics, their economic status and their ability to interpret and present the drag queens’ stories. The drag queens’ power comes from their maleness and their status as professional performers. Taylor and Rupp also describe how the similarities between them and the drag queens also produce a leveling effect: as they write, “they might be drag queens and we might be professors, but as queer people we are all in the same boat” (2123).

The article’s final section discusses how the authors’ research led to social change. Taylor and Rupp employed two strategies to effect social change: the conduction of focus groups and interviews with audience members and the dissemination of research findings into the community. Throughout this process, the authors explain, dynamic discussion arose and spurred various controversies and debates. Ultimately, exposure and dialogue become an end unto itself; as Taylor and Rupp write, their “research strategy succeeded in fostering dialogue that promotes social change” (2132). The authors conclude by remarking that:

The tensions and contradictions we encountered in the research process were not just problems to be overcome; they also proved to be productive for our thinking about how the drag queens play with and deconstruct gender and sexual categories in their performances and the way this makes gender and sexual fluidity and oppression visible. (Taylor and Rupp 2133)  

           The researchers draw from a feminist research tradition to inform their methodological approach. For Taylor and Rupp, feminist methodology involves a consideration of power dynamics and social change goals (2115) in research and the use of a “plurality of methods” (2116). As they explain, “what is distinctive about feminist methodology is not the use of particular techniques but rather an epistemological understanding of how knowledge is generated, how it is reported, and how it is used” (Taylor and Rupp 2116). The significant aspect of this epistemological consideration that Taylor and Rupp focus on is self-reflexivity about the impact of gender and sexual identity on the research process (2116). Moreover, the authors seek to create social change and to empower their participants through their research, thereby lending a voice to the oppressed: for example, they specifically target the drag queen Sushi’s goal of challenging the way people think (Taylor and Rupp 2132). They also seek to improve the drag queens’ community. Taylor and Rupp’s non-exploitive approach further exemplifies their feminist methodological stance: they remain “sensitive to the economic disparities” (2124) between them and the drag queens, helping them out financially and sharing royalties with Sushi. Finally, Taylor and Rupp’s use of qualitative methods values subjective experience and therefore follows a feminist methodology that challenges the positivist overvaluing of so-called “objective” research.

           As the title of their article indicates, Taylor and Rupp succeed in accounting for the complexities of gender and sexuality and the ways in which they impact research. While as women and lesbians their identity differed from that of the drag queens, at times their differences “eased [their] entrée into [the drag queens’] world” (Taylor and Rupp 2121). As the authors explain, their research succeeded because they remained aware of gender and sexuality and because that awareness actually facilitated and deepened their understanding of “the way the drag queens perform protest in their shows and engage in political oppression in their everyday lives” (Taylor and Rupp 2126). This form of deconstruction within research is crucial for the aims of feminist research.

           Taylor and Rupp’s methodology faces a few limitations, however. Firstly, as they realize, their gender and sexual identity limited their ability to recruit gay men and heterosexual people as research participants, and influenced discussion topics by serving as a “cue” (Taylor and Rupp 2127). In this sense, the researchers, as queer people, were too much “inside”. Secondly, their concept of the leveling out of power dynamics, mentioned earlier, although valid is arbitrary and therefore tricky. When the drag queens did certain things to the researchers, they write, they “accepted these actions as part of a leveling process, even though they also made [them] angry” (Taylor and Rupp 2123). Taylor and Rupp do not problematize whether their academic privilege really “levels out” actions that border on sexual abuse. Finally, despite the researchers’ intention to fully represent the drag queens, they often objectify them because they speak for them; Taylor and Rupp quote the drag queens very infrequently, considering the amount of interview material they possess, and the quotes they do include are simple and illustrative rather than self-explanatory. Thus, the authors inadvertently reproduce the very power dynamic they attempt to assuage. These examples illustrate that notions of power and its negotiations are limited by their subjective configuration.  

           In addition to these methodological concerns, Taylor and Rupp approach their research with feminist values regarding standpoint theory, knowledge production and ethics. In assessing their positionality as researchers, Taylor and Rupp ultimately reside in the research as what Patricia Hill Collins terms the “outsider within”. They “were in so many ways outside [the drag queens’] normal social worlds and for that reason, paradoxically, could participate without too much disruption” (Taylor and Rupp 2122), but their commonality with the drag queens as queer people gave them significant entrance into a space of mutual empathy and understanding. Collins outlines the benefits of “outsider within” research that Taylor and Rupp exemplify in their research.

           Attuned to feminist ethical concerns, the authors honor confidentiality, the participants’ well-being, and values appropriate to their research topic. Taylor and Rupp adhere to mutually agreed upon boundaries for confidentiality (notably, however, these boundaries can blur, as some of their anecdotes illustrate[1]). The researchers value the drag queens’ humanity, as the drag queens express when they state, “it was obvious that [the researchers] liked us” (Taylor and Rupp 2121). When debate following the publication of their book became heated, Taylor and Rupp defended the drag queens. Furthermore, the publicity and discussion that their research generated positively impacted both the drag queens and their community. Finally, the researchers’ queer-positive values render them appropriate for the task at hand. Where their suitability for the project faltered, Taylor and Rupp adequately responded by going in double drag and participating in performances, as discussed above. Ultimately, Taylor and Rupp approach the ethical considerations of their research from a feminist methodological perspective.

           Self-reflexivity is the mark of responsible feminist research; Taylor and Rupp accomplish this in their examination of the research process by considering the many possible ways in which their work could be biased. On the one hand, they should have included more of the participants’ voices to avoid privileging the authority of academic knowledge. Follow-up interviews about the participants’ reactions to the original research and how they thought the process affected the researchers’ results could have accomplished this. Taylor and Rupp allude to the drag queens’ occasional resentment towards them, suggesting that the drag queens may have had things to say that would contradict the authors’ somewhat self-congratulatory tone. That tone is supported, nevertheless, by the fact that Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret succeeded in reminding the queer community of “the wide-ranging significance of drag for gay and lesbian lives and activism” (Taylor and Rupp 2130). This contribution of the original research combined with Taylor and Rupp’s detailed analysis of gender and sex dynamics in identity-influenced research thus adds to our ongoing understanding of the benefits and challenges of feminist research.        

 Works Cited

Collins, P. H. (1999). “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” In S. Hesse-Biber, C. Gilmartin and R. Hydenberg (eds.), Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology. Oxford, 155-178.

Taylor, Verta, and Leila J. Rupp. “When the Girls Are Men: Negotiating Gender and Sexual Dynamics in a Study of Drag Queens.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.4 (2005): 2115-2139.

[1] See page 2125

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“All the better to see you with…”- An Analysis of “The Company of Wolves”

July 2008

           In his 1984 film adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story “The Company of Wolves” Neil Jordan paints the archetypal landscape of Western folklore upon the subconscious of the film’s protagonist, a young girl named Rosaleen. Sweating beneath the red lipstick and blush painted on her face, Rosaleen tosses in her bed one afternoon as a nap becomes a nightmarish tale. Her nightmare occurs in a kitschy mockery of a medieval world, a cobwebby forest village like an antiquated set invoking fairy tale imagery; emblems, like gingerbread cookies, toads, apples, serpents and dove-splattered wells, appear throughout the film. Rosaleen stands in for the well-known Little Red Riding Hood with her red cloak, wise granny and wide-eyed fear of wolves.

           Jordan’s allusion to the classic fairy tale toys with various versions of the wolf and introduces a complex female protagonist who destroys the story’s optative certainty by ultimately becoming a wolf herself. The Company of Wolves becomes a garbled manipulation of archetypes—hero, beast, bride, mother, witch—reflective of the collective unconscious that informs the “real” Rosaleen in her subjective experience as a pubescent girl. Marina Warner explains that Carter’s writing reveals “the imagination’s own capacity for protean metamorphosis, which allows it to leap barriers of difference, or at least play with them till they seem to totter and fall” (Granny Bonnets 194). It is this “mercurial slipperiness of identity” (Warner, Granny Bonnets 194) that Rosaleen explores in her nightmare, confronting gender, specifically, and its role in her identity formation. In The Company of Wolves Jordan tampers with various archetypes to convey that, no matter what she does, Rosaleen will be punished for being a woman—either preyed upon, blamed or confined—and must therefore disavow her femaleness; in so doing, however, she inevitably accepts the patriarchal codes that determine the limited ways in which one can be female and thus betrays herself.          

           The first archetype Jordan recreates in his film is that of the big, bad wolf. In its classic form, the wolf “represents male predatoriness” (Hourihan 198). As with the original fairy tale, Carter’s story warns its readers: “If you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you” (111). In other words, this wolf symbolizes the unrepressed, savage, sexual urges of men (Warner, Beautiful Beasts 52) that little girls are taught to understand and fear. Though not visible in Jordan’s film, Carter tells us that the predator’s “genitals are a wolf’s” (113), illustrating the rapist implications of this archetype. The film’s primary werewolf, the “huntsman”, embodies it in some ways. With his trusty needle pointed north, he takes Rosaleen’s basket and mirror and replaces them with his hat, like a seal of ownership in exchange for her maidenhood. In a dramatic—and therefore pivotal—shot, the huntsman tells Rosaleen that he desires “a kiss,” proclaiming the wolf’s predatory intent; when Granny later asks what he has done with her granddaughter, the huntsman replies, “Nothing she didn’t want.” Thus, the wolf here represents the inescapability of male sexual predation.

           The omnipresence of wolves in The Company of Wolves effectively symbolizes the pervasive sense of danger in Rosaleen’s world and subconscious. Indeed her caregivers naturalize the notion; her father speaks of “losing” his daughter to a boy, suggesting that she is property for the taking, and her granny unquestioningly interprets a young boy’s actions in a childish game as sexual assault. Her mother preaches that they “won’t live quiet” until “the beast is dead.” Older and presumably wiser characters convey these attitudes with conviction, and the many wolves of Rosaleen’s nightmare reveal her growing awareness of perpetually-lurking predators threatening her safety.  

           Complicating the stock character of the big, bad wolf, both Jordan and Carter occasionally construct the wolves of their stories as tragic; evading the stigma of pure evil attached to the predator, here the beasts become victims. In “The Company of Wolves” Carter describes the wolves’ sadness and how they cry “as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how” (112). At times, her narrator tells, “the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him” (112). Jordan’s climactic scene between Rosaleen and the werewolf includes a dramatic shift when the supposed victim calls the beasts “poor creatures.” The wolves of The Company of Wolves thus invoke sympathy as well as fear.

           In her chapter “Beautiful Beasts: The Call of the Wild,” Warner argues that this newfound softness for the predator reflects a shift in the values that we as a society accord nature and humanity (63). She explains that whereas nature once symbolized the savage and the evil (58), today it ironically becomes a sinless sanctuary (51) with its wild inhabitants as “healing figure[s]” (55) appeasing the “threat of entropy in nature, brought about by human achievements” (55). Coinciding with this increasing wariness of modern civilization, Warner notes, Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” casts the wolf not as wild beast but as the embodiment of the “deceptions of the city and the men who wield authority in it” (Granny Bonnets 183). Employing the legend of King Kong as example, Warner argues that beast becomes victim when woman is enemy for stunting his libido and domesticating him (Beautiful Beasts 61). The beast then represents the “true” male repressed in a modern consumer culture—another feminized scapegoat—hence the contemporary ambivalence toward the beast evident in The Company of Wolves.

           Jordan’s film explores this contemporary disdain for consumer culture, constructed as feminine, through the misogynistic story of the witch. In a suddenly Victorian setting, powdered men and women in wigs and elaborate costumes feast on a lavish wedding meal in a pink banquet tent. Comically made-up and overindulgent, the drunken aristocrats consume their meal in a grotesque manner, conveyed by the absurdist style of the scene. When the witch surveys the event and turns its members into wolves, circus music accompanies the equally grotesque, absurd and comical transformation yielding wolves in pretty, pink dresses. The farcical scene represents the “feminine” aspects of consumer culture in a most unflattering light; silly, frilly and maddening, the grotesquely ornate Victorians stand for that which has stopped the beast in his tracks. Because Rosaleen dreams that this tent sits before her “real” house, the viewer sees that she somehow belongs to this feminine world, or, at least, has played at it like a game removed from whatever her reality may be.  

           It follows then that Jordan’s wolf occasionally becomes “poor creature,” or what Warner calls “a figure of man, a desiring, aspiring, frustrated, tragic male” (Beautiful Beasts 61) in the face of domesticating, frivolous women. Rosaleen asks the werewolf, “Are you our kind or their kind?” His pathetic response—“My home is nowhere,”—posits him as an abject Other to be pitied in his beastliness. Against a romantic score, Rosaleen calls the werewolf a “gentleman” and succumbs to sympathy for her predator. As Beauty chooses the Beast, so Rosaleen may desire the wolf sexually, if only for a moment (Jordan visually conveys Carter’s sensual imagery as the werewolf strips: his “vellum” [116] skin, his “ripe and dark” [116] nipples). Ultimately, she tames the werewolf, turning him into a whimpering puppy to take under her wing. As Margery Hourihan explains in her discussion of archetypes, all females eventually serve as mothers in the fairy tale (166). Jordan’s climactic scene thus reflects the ambivalent terrain of the wolf archetype that allows the predator pleas for understanding.

           Jordan further examines this ambivalence through the boy who becomes a werewolf. Perhaps a short tale of male puberty, this scene depicts a hairless, forest-dwelling boy who encounters a fancy car driven by a sly Rosaleen. Accepting and applying an ointment from a man inside the car, the boy suddenly grows hair and screams in horror as the forest swallows him whole. The “real” Rosaleen wakes to find this image in her bedroom mirror, as though she feels responsibility for this attack of the “voracious vagina” (Hourihan 191). As products of Rosaleen’s subconscious, these characters demonstrate her internalization of the knowledge that patriarchal society loathes femininity. Furthermore, because she places herself in the Little Red Riding Hood role, the viewer sees that she has begun associating herself with the elusive concept.

           More concretely, The Company of Wolves explores female archetypes that Rosaleen might embody. Firstly, Rosaleen consistently represents the “barely pubescent” (Hourihan 196) virginal bride. In Carter’s words:

Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman’s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month. (113)

In his film, Jordan places Rosaleen’s menses, and what we are to therefore understand as her coming-of-age, at the centre of the story. The entire film is her nightmare and in it she assumes the role of a naïve girl at the cusp of her “sexualization.” She innocently questions female passivity when her granny laments her sister’s death, asking, “Why couldn’t she save herself?” Granny scoffs at Rosaleen’s ignorance, telling her that she is but a child; in other words, girls in this society will grow to learn of their place. When Rosaleen proudly states, “I’d never let a man strike me,” Granny, again, “knowingly” explains that men are “nice as pie until they’ve had their way with you, but once the bloom is gone, oh, the beast comes out.” Granny and others around her naturalize the idea that, shortly, Rosaleen will make a good, virgin bride.

           Hourihan argues that the bride archetype serves the ubiquitous hero as his subordinate (196) and ultimately teaches girls that “all will be well when the prince appears” (198). Passive, submissive and void of agency, brides then serve the aforementioned predator as mere prey. Jordan illustrates this archetypal relationship through the tale of the newlyweds. Here the virginal ingénue in white soon learns that hiding beneath the hairless skin of men lurks a beast poised to attack her as a bride, a mother or a whore. Her first husband tears off his skin to reveal a werewolf, while her second simply beats her for no apparent reason. This scene thus conveys the idea that women should meet men’s needs but remain peripheral lest they overstep their boundaries.

           Slowly internalizing the role of virgin bride, Rosaleen experiences her coming-of-age as shame and self-objectification. Jordan employs recurring images of contamination to highlight the dirtiness that Rosaleen feels for menstruating: spiders on her bible, mice in her dollhouse and maggots in her apple. Here, rodents infest symbols of chastity and childhood. The motif of red blood staining things draws a further parallel between Rosaleen and dirty animals with contamination to be ashamed of.

           As Rosaleen’s shame grows, so does her awareness of herself as a sexual object. The character of the gangly, sniveling “amorous boy” exemplifies the absurdity of male privilege, that a boy like him can pursue the fair Rosaleen and make her feel watched, objectified and consequently aware of her burgeoning “sexuality” before she even understands it on her own terms. Although Rosaleen still mostly rejects the boy, her ambivalent coyness when dealing with him reveals that she has already begun rehearsing this female role; indeed, she goes on to employ it with the werewolf. Jordan thus creates a girl’s nightmare rife with anxiety about “becoming a woman” as seen through the eyes of others—namely, men.

           The second female archetype Jordan examines in The Company of Wolves is that of the mother, who, for Hourihan, represents the inevitable fate of all women in the hero’s realm (166). Mothers in Western folklore serve to nurture the male hero through an oedipal bond (Hourihan 159). Fittingly, fairy tales commonly feature fatherless boys and motherless girls. Hourihan thus concludes that “the relationship most crucial to disrupt and destroy in patriarchy is that between mother and daughter” (202), as this relationship harbors the most potential for female solidarity. In The Company of Wolves, Rosaleen fares better than the archetypal maiden: not only is her mother alive, but the two communicate, enjoy one another’s company, and it is her mother’s instinct that saves her from getting shot by her own father following her transition to she-wolf.

           However, these maternal strides may only mirror our contemporary patriarchy in which women enjoy a modest increase in female solidarity. While Rosaleen’s mother loves and supports her daughter, she also models for her the picture of ideal motherhood: confined to the private sphere in submission to the beast’s domination, as it were. As if to justify her position, she tells her daughter that, “if there’s a beast in men, it meets its match in women, too.” Seemingly content in the private sphere, Rosaleen’s mother guides the viewer through Rosaleen’s domain. Notably, The Company of Wolves takes place either in the domestic space or in the wild, but never in the public sphere. As Hourihan explains, the home, for the hero, is the space between public culture and the chaos of nature (199). Upholding this private space, Rosaleen’s mother states, “Thank god we’re safe indoors.”

           Ultimately, she teaches Rosaleen to expect the same fate. Rosaleen also discovers this independently when, clamoring up a tree, seemingly in an act of freedom, she finds herself more like a kitten trapped in a dead end. Atop the tree she finds a mirror, red lipstick and babies hatching from eggs in a nest. As with the witch rocking her baby’s cradle on a treetop, this image symbolizes the final marker of appropriate femininity and the inevitable destiny of the virgin bride: motherhood.      

           Jordan toys with fairy tale archetypes such as wolf, bride and mother only subtly until the end of the film, when Rosaleen first tells the story of a she-wolf—reminiscent of Carter’s “Wolf-Alice”—then transforms into a wolf herself. This transformation serves as Rosaleen’s catharsis and self-betrayal, or the crux of her nightmare. Throughout The Company of Wolves, Rosaleen encounters various opportunities to identify with the wolf. Unafraid of the forest—the darkness—she first identifies with the wolf following her discovery of the dead-end treetop that is motherhood. The lip-stained Rosaleen does not fear the wolf when he crosses her path; rather, she sees an alternative in him, something to potentially identify with, as symbolized by his similarly blood-stained mouth. Hence, when seeking escape from her fate as wolf’s prey in the climactic scene in granny’s cottage, Rosaleen disavows her femaleness and becomes a wolf.

           Within the nightmare, her new identification temporarily provides Rosaleen relief and release. Using melancholic music and Rosaleen’s soft narration, Jordan constructs the tale of Wolf-Alice as placid and cathartic. Rosaleen strokes the wolf and becomes one with him in what Carter describes as a “savage marriage ceremony” (118). Thus, Rosaleen briefly succumbs to the cathartic irreversibility of her lost virginity. Even the “real life” Rosaleen reveals tiny fangs in the film’s closing shot, baring the immutable wolf within.

           Despite the brief release of sexual “maturity,” Rosaleen’s new identification as wolf necessarily involves a devaluation of self as, in the archetypal universe of her nightmare, the wolf ultimately represents the bad. As Warner argues, the wolf serves as the male counterpart to the witch (Granny Bonnets 181), who personifies the evils of female sexuality. The witch represents castration and chaos, the Pandora’s box to the story of Genesis (Hourihan 177). Although she becomes a wolf, Rosaleen cannot escape her origin as female—Wolf-Alice is still gendered. Thus, her transformation echoes the historical signification by which “metamorphosis out of human shape into another, beastly form, used to express a fall from human grace” (Warner, Beautiful Beasts 56). Indeed, Rosaleen describes Wolf-Alice as “wounded.” “Just a girl…who’d strayed from the path and remembered what she’d found there,” Wolf-Alice comes from the “world below,” a world of sexuality and sin that causes her to stain a white rose red with her tears. Wolf-Alice thus epitomizes shameful, female sexuality by virtue of her very femaleness inhabiting the male territory of the wolf.

           Having merged with the predator, the wolf Rosaleen runs from her parents and follows the pack, at which point the sleeping Rosaleen’s terror builds. Suddenly, the irreversibility of her transformation becomes a tragic loss, unbearably horrific and inescapably real; the wolves pummel across the passageway between the gnarly wild and Rosaleen’s real, domestic childhood space, represented by her scattered toys, through her now-cobwebby house and then penetrate her real bedroom. Marking the height of her terror, this moment entails Rosaleen’s realization that she has become her own enemy and thus betrayed herself.    

           Warner writes that Carter’s “crucial insight is that women…produce themselves as ‘women,’ and that this is often the result of…using what you have to get by. The fairytale transformations of Cinders into princess represent what a girl has to do to stay alive” (Granny Bonnets 195). Navigating the various archetypes woven into The Company of Wolves, Rosaleen undertakes this production of gender until she finds that, as a woman, she will be alive but perpetually punished. Faced with this dilemma, she effectively “dies;” that is, she sheds her efemmeral skin and transforms into a wolf. Unfortunately, in the folkloric world of her dream, this transformation signifies her ultimate surrender to the patriarchal symbolic order in which, for women, no path leads to freedom.

Works Cited

Carter, Angela. “The Company of Wolves.” The Bloody Chamber. Penguin Books, 1979. 110-118.

---. “Wolf-Alice.” The Bloody Chamber. Penguin Books, 1979. 119-126.

The Company of Wolves. Dir. Neil Jordan. Perf. Sarah Patterson, Angela Lansbury, David Warner, and Tusse Silberg. DVD Incorporated Television Company, 1984.

Hourihan, Margery. “The Women.” Deconstructing the Hero: Literary theory and children’s literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 156-202.

Warner, Marina. “Beautiful Beasts: The Call of the Wild.” Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Times. London: Vintage, 1994. 49-63.

---. “Granny Bonnets, Wolves’ Cover.” From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage, 1995. 180-197.

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

Conceding Freedom: The ups and downs of an Iranian mother’s migration to Canada

April 2008

           In a city as multicultural as Vancouver, immigrant issues frequently receive media attention. A recent article by Fiona Anderson in The Vancouver Sun features immigrant success stories alongside 2006 census data released by Statistics Canada. Anderson (2008) reports that immigrants comprise 28.6 percent of British Columbia’s workforce. While the majority of immigrants to Vancouver hail from Asian countries, the number of Iranians migrating to the city has nearly quadrupled since the 1980’s (Swanton, 2005, p. 37). In his examination of Iranian immigrants’ experiences in Vancouver, Dan Swanton (2005) seeks to disrupt the homogenization of Iranian migration (p. 10). Such a quest proves necessary in a political climate fueling widespread animosity against Canadians of Middle-Eastern descent. According to Swanton (2005), in Vancouver these pervasive sentiments manifest in the conflation of violence and criminality with Persian ethnicity (p. 18). Thus, he interprets Iranian migration stories as:

Negotiations of political and economic changes in Iran since 1979, lived through the cultural politics of gender and sexuality, economic necessity and material desires, and patriarchal familial relations as well as the shifting ways in which the Canadian state attempts to regulate its borders through immigration legislation and programs. (Swanton, 2005, p. 5)  

           In response to this agenda and the relative absence of women in Swanton’s sample, I set out to discover how Iranian women and, more specifically, mothers experience the journey of migration from one patriarchal state to another. Beginning my research I asked: How have Persian mothers experienced immigration and integration in Canadian society? What kinds of cultural tensions, contradictions, losses and/or gains have they experienced and how has this altered their family structure? Thirdly, how has race intersected with gender and class to shape their experiences as mothers in a “multicultural” society?

           To find answers to these questions, I interviewed a woman named Arin.[1] Arin immigrated to Vancouver from Tehran, Iran in 2000 along with her husband, Fardin, and her two daughters, Fetneh and Nazboo. Having grown up as “a free person” in pre-revolution Iran, Arin decided to leave her country when she realized its current political regime would not permit her children to live with the same freedom she so cherished in her upbringing. According to Arin, this desire for freedom alone spurred her entire decision to immigrate. As she recounted her experiences for me, three interesting themes arose which I now consider here. Firstly, immigration has reconfigured the gendered nature of Arin and Fardin’s parenting. Secondly, racism continues to shape the experiences of Arin and her family in profound ways. Finally, Arin speaks of the overall shift in meanings attached to “home” and “family” in the absence of extended family in this new space. Thus, Arin’s immigration story reveals how a mother’s search for freedom for her children unsettled any preconceived notions of family structure and security she may have harbored pre-migration.          

 Methodology

 In their introduction to qualitative research methods, Caplan and Caplan (1999) explain that “political philosophies, personal feelings, and a host of other factors can shape the research questions that are asked, the way research is done, and the ways the results are interpreted and then applied in educational, work-place, social and political situations” (p. 109). I thus considered these elements of subjectivity when conducting this qualitative research. Employing the method of in-depth interviewing proved both challenging and rewarding. Arin welcomed me into her home on a rainy evening after her long day at work, and we settled into her living room with tea and cookies. The minute I placed a tape recorder on the couch next to Arin and poised my pen, I felt firsthand the contradictory nature of interviewing; the floor was hers yet I would ultimately walk away with material to be dissected and manipulated for the purposes of research.

Firstly, I question the effects of interviewing Arin in her second language. Especially given the nature of the topic, my understanding of Arin’s experiences would be drastically different had I interviewed her in Farsi, her mother tongue. Arin would likely express herself differently; not only would her ease with Farsi facilitate explanation, but the cultural knowledges underlying her language would inform her story much more profoundly. By conducting this research in Canada’s dominant language, I thus ironically reproduce the very power imbalance that characterizes immigrant relations.

According to Kirby, Greaves and Reid (2006) “a first step in any research endeavor is to understand the current thinking that informs you and locates, or positions, you and the research you want to do” (p. 41). My personal experiences and positionality rendered me both an insider and outsider with respect to Arin. Having grown up in a nuclear, two-parent, heterosexual and middle-class household myself, I personally related to both Arin’s family of origin and her current family. More importantly, as a first-generation Canadian I am deeply invested in and have been shaped by issues of immigration such as discrimination, questions of belongingness, cultural conflicts, and assimilation and integration. My position as an immigrant thus injected the interview process with an unspoken understanding of this particular subjectivity as a marginalized identity. Because of both our age difference and the different ages at which we immigrated (Arin as a middle-aged woman and I as an infant), however, mine and Arin’s experiences differ greatly. Indeed, I related to her more as a mother figure while she likely equated me with her oldest daughter who is, incidentally, a friend of mine.

Age difference further exacerbates my outsider status when paired with the differences in sexuality and race between Arin and I. As a young, unmarried queer woman without children, I fail to personally relate to the experiences of a middle-aged mother in a long-term heterosexual marriage that has undergone such tribulations as parenting and international migration. Considering the topic of parenting in immigration, this difference must be accounted for as my research likely fails to capture the emotional dynamics of the experiences I explain and theorize about. Moreover, despite my empathy as the child of a non-white father and two parents who speak English with accents, the fact that I am white and “Canadian”-sounding casts me as an outsider. Exploring the topic of racism with Arin, our differences in race thus underlie the interview process and influence both Arin’s narration and my research. Ultimately, my status as “outsider within” (Hill Collins, 1991, p. 35) creates both possibilities and limitations along the divide between subjectivity and objectivity.          

Throughout the interview process I learned that active listening is of utmost importance. Arin told me after the interview that my attentiveness made her feel relaxed and comfortable; the transcription reflects this and benefited as Arin generously shared detailed stories about her life with me. Moreover, my active listening alerted me to the fact that the narrator holds the ultimate authority; Arin’s narration produced new ideas and themes that dramatically deviated from what I initially sought out to explore. Through active listening, I was able to analyze the interview on Arin’s terms. While transcribing and analyzing, I also learned that personal bias influences memory to a great degree; the details and facts I uncovered upon close examination of the interview often surprised me as they contrasted my initial perception and subjective memory of Arin’s narration. Thus, recording qualitative data is a necessity.

Given another opportunity to interview Arin, I would ask more spontaneous questions throughout the interview. Overwhelmed with her wealth of information, I hesitated to interrupt Arin or to zero in on points of interest. Although I employed the use of open-ended questions, the interview was ultimately restrained to an extent as I continually returned to my list of questions instead of posing the new questions raised in my mind. Indeed, I later regretted that I did not ask Arin all of the questions that I pondered during the interview.

Finally, my primary methodological concern regarding in-depth interviewing as a means of informing knowledge-production is the matter of appropriating the voice of the Other. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak (2005) concludes that, as long as those complicit in oppression speak for those subjected to oppressive forces, the oppressed do not have a voice. By virtue of authoring this research, however informed by Arin’s detailed narration, I thus speak for Arin. No amount of accuracy in representation absolves this conundrum as the fact remains that research only achieves just that: representation. As I compiled my research, I became acutely aware of the objectifying nature of describing Arin and her experiences in my words. In and of itself the act of quoting, as a process of selection, reflects my subjectivity as much as it reflects Arin’s. Thus, in-depth interviewing as a methodological approach to research only begins to capture the complexities and nuances of human experience that feminist, anti-racist research strives to better serve and understand.    

Conducting qualitative research ultimately involves negotiating its problematic nature. Ethical and epistemological questions aside, however, my in-depth interview with Arin produced an invaluable resource of experiential knowledge about immigration, mothering, racism, family, and the interconnectedness of all of these within the context of the Canadian state.

 Unsettling Gendered Parenting

 The family is a complex social institution, a malleable and flexible institution that variably responds to external and internal pressures. Household arrangements are determined by multiple factors, including material needs, ideological norms, cultural beliefs, and collective and individual interests. (Parreñas, 2001, p. 115)

             Arin’s deep love and admiration of her father became apparent throughout her interview. Raised in a “financially stable” home with a “really comfortable, great family,” Arin remembers her childhood as “just perfect.” Having experienced such a life in a pre-revolution Iran, Arin frequently mentioned her father and the positive model of parenting he provided her for. He filled her upbringing with wisdom and financial stability while Arin’s mother provided domestic care; together, her parents’ traditional, nuclear family structure served as Arin’s ideal home for her childhood of freedom. Following immigration and its life-altering effects, the family Arin went on to create vastly deviated from this model originally sought after.

           “I was the one who actually made all the decisions,” Arin explains. Fardin did not initially agree, but Arin decided that her family would immigrate and how and when they would do it. This contrasts typical gendered decision making in immigrant families (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994, p. 57). However, Arin’s expectations hinged on traditional, Iranian gender roles; “a man is supposed to support all the family, financially, you know, whatever.” Furthermore, following traditional immigration policy, Fardin was the primary applicant with his wife and children listed as dependents. Creese and Dowling (2001) explain that notions of immigration and the migrant woman are rooted in the traditional, nuclear family (p. 6). As they argue, “the very definition of ‘skills’ so central to contemporary immigration policies in [Canada] is embedded in male breadwinner norms and masculine privilege” (Creese & Dowling, 2001, p. 6).

Accepted into Canada because of Fardin’s education as a civil engineer, Arin’s role as decision maker diminished as her husband assumed the responsibility of securing paid employment. Indeed, Arin appears to devalue her role as a secondary breadwinner: although she desired to continue her fashion career in Canada, she feels that Fardin, in his pursuit of an engineering job, “was under pressure a lot…much more pressure than me…All the pressure is on the guy.” Thus, in spite of the fact that Arin shouldered the emotional instability of her husband and two children—“I was there [in Canada] against all of them,” she explains—she upheld the traditional notion she, as the wife, should privilege Fardin’s status as primary breadwinner above her own.

           When Fardin failed to find employment in Canada, the family faced a dramatic split: he moved to the United States to work while Arin remained in Vancouver with the children. As Parreñas (2001) finds, families often become transnational to achieve necessary “goals of accumulating capital” (p. 106) and, in doing so, they “[subvert] modern family norms” (p. 105). With Fardin established in his industry, Arin explains, “everything was just the way he wanted and we wanted, except the part that he was again far from us.” Arin expresses a tension between the financial benefits of Fardin’s employment and the drawbacks of sudden single parenting. “I was alone,” she recalls, “I was working, I was going to school, I had to pick up [Fetneh and Nazboo], giving them rides; everything was on me.” Entering adolescence in a new country and language, Arin’s children required emotional support for which Arin felt solely responsible. “It was hard on me,” she states. Arin’s experiences reflect Parreñas’ (2001) findings of “the struggles undergone by transnational mothers in balancing the emotional and material needs of the children” (p. 86). Indeed, “studies have acknowledged the emotional stress incurred from prolonged separation” (Parreñas, 2001, p. 82); transnational families thus experience various emotional difficulties. After two years of transnational parenting, Arin decided that Fardin should return to Canada. Because he never found employment again, Arin regrets her decision to this day.  

           Parreñas (2001) argues that transnational arrangements lead to the “reconfiguration of the gender division of labor in families” (p. 85). This could be due to the fact that, “in the absence of their husbands, women’s work routines and responsibilities [expand]” (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994, p. 62). For six years following the transnational split, Fardin relentlessly job hunted until finally accepting work in a restaurant kitchen. Meanwhile, Arin secured full-time work at a bank. While this shift clearly reverses the gendered expectations of labor originally upheld by Arin and Fardin, Arin modestly justifies her decision to enter the paid labor force by explaining that she needed a distraction from her emotional turmoil. On the other hand, much like Russian unemployed men in Ashwin and Lytkina’s (2004) study, her husband was “mentally damaged” as a man who could not secure employment in his industry and finally accepted downward mobility.

           The changes Arin experienced mirrors those of Mexican immigrant families in Hondagneu-Sotelo’s study. Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) argues that, “through migration women and men reinterpret normative standards and creatively manipulate the rules of gender. As they do so, understandings about proper gendered behavior are reformulated” (96). These manipulations often result in decreased male dominance (p. 101) and increased benefits for women such as independence, participation in public life, and overall satisfaction (146). Thus, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) states that, although “male migrant labor is produced by patriarchy for the benefit of [state] capital” (p. 188), the conditions faced by immigrant families result in a fluid restructuring of “patriarchal gender relations” (p. 188).

To this day, Arin incredulously laments Fardin’s failure to enter the Canadian engineering industry; this sentiment reveals a discomfort with the gender role reversal that has occurred in her family. Today, Arin’s contribution to her family income surpasses that of Fardin. First as a “single” mother in a transnational family and then as primary breadwinner, Arin’s immigration experiences have drastically reassembled the traditional family structure she had once hoped for.

 Instability in the face of Racism

             Prior to immigration, Fardin suspected he may have difficulties finding employment in spite of his exceptional skill, to which Arin replied, “Canada is the best country in the world…especially because you’re going there because of your education…so when they say ‘yeah, please, you are welcome,’ it means that they can provide a job, right?” Fardin feared that, at forty, his age would deter employers from hiring him. Indeed, his attempts to find work in Canada both prior to and after his time in the United  States proved fruitless. When an Iranian friend told Arin and Fardin that Fardin’s “[non]-Caucasian” name on his resumé was likely the problem, Arin retorted, “No, my god, that’s unbelievable, it can’t be.” But when Fardin changed his name, he was suddenly flooded with responses and interviews. Unfortunately, none of the interviews resulted in a job offer. It was then that Arin first detected racism in Canada.

           Fardin’s experience of deskilling in the Canadian market supports Bauder’s (2003) assertion that “professional associations and the state actively exclude immigrant labor from the most highly desired occupations in order to reserve these occupations for Canadian-born and Canadian-educated workers” (p. 699). According to Bauder (2003), immigrants’ labor-market performance does not reflect their level of education (p. 700), and this process of exclusion “[facilitates] the reproduction of a professional class” (p. 702) based on nation of origin. The constant modification of criteria that valorizes domestic education perpetuates this reproduction (Bauder, 2003, p. 702), along with the manipulation of subjective categories such as “cultural knowledge” that excludes immigrants from professional groups like engineering (Bauder, 2003, p. 703). Faced with these barriers and depleting savings, many immigrants in Bauder’s (2003) study switched careers and accepted work far below their qualifications (p. 708). As with Fardin, such changes result in a dramatic loss of social status (Bauder, 2003, p. 709).    

           In her own workplace, Arin noticed that white employees quickly climbed the corporate ladder while her exemplary performance remained unrewarded. She felt that if she questioned management about their promotion decisions, they would say, “‘Oh, because she’s so talented, she’s so bright, she’s so…’ They never say the truth, right?...They always have the way to show that, oh, they didn’t say any bad thing, they didn’t mean it. That’s why you cannot prove it; it’s just a feeling.” Statistical research validates Arin’s “feeling:” immigrants are less likely to hold “managerial and professional occupations” (Balakrishnan & Hou, 1996, p. 315), are more likely to be credit constrained than non-immigrant families (Worswick, 1999, p. 167), and are found to have a lower average income than non-immigrants (Balakrishnan & Hou, 1996, p. 321).

In addition to management’s racist promotion choices, Arin’s coworkers frequently exhibit racist attitudes towards their customers, masking their frustration under the guise of language barriers. Arin herself experiences her white coworkers’ discomfort with non-English accents and languages when she speaks Farsi with fellow Iranian workers. “We are living in Canada,” the white coworkers joke; according to Arin, however, these jokes veil the fact that, “deep inside, they believe” that immigrants like Arin are not actually Canadian. Creese and Kambere (2002), in their research on African-Canadian women’s experiences with accent discrimination, argue that these women’s “embodied accents form a boundary that excludes them from full citizenship, and is the frequently named cause of disentitlement from jobs, housing, or respectful treatment in public institutions or public spaces” (p. 19).

Despite her company’s anti-discrimination policy, Arin does not feel comfortable reporting racist “jokes” without solid evidence. She believes that management cares about preserving multiculturalism only when it is “bringing money, bringing business…but deep inside, they don’t like it.” Over time, Arin’s acute sensitivity to racist undertones has increased and today she thus concludes that multicultural policies such as those enshrined at her workplace only serve capitalist motivations and fail to eradicate anti-immigrant sentiments harbored by those in power.

Balakrishnan and Hou’s (1996) research produces evidence of income and occupation disparities between non-visible minorities and visible minorities that cannot be explained by controlled variables such as age and language proficiency, and therefore most likely result from racial discrimination (p. 324). Anti-immigrant racism, responsible for Fardin’s experiences with deskilling and Arin’s difficulties with the glass ceiling of her career, has thus directly impacted the financial situation of Arin and her family. “We had better life in Iran,” Arin states, financially speaking. “But now we don’t.” She frequently regrets that she cannot provide her daughters with the material comforts they would have had in Iran, while acknowledging that they obtained religious freedom for the price of a decline in socioeconomic status. While succeeding in her quest for freedom, Arin feels that, due to their financial losses, “everything was damaged, like the whole family.” Thus, the reality of racism integral to immigration experiences proves a most definitive factor in Arin’s current family concerns.    

 Home is where the Family is: Immigration and Loss

             Tension around a state of liminality frequently characterized Arin’s journey through immigration. Before leaving Iran, she underwent three nerve-wracking years of applying then re-applying for immigration which she describes as “the worst time in my life.” The tension of preparing for migration while being uncertain of their ability to do so made Arin feel like a “prisoner” in her own country which, incidentally, she felt was “not [her] home anymore.” Upon arrival, Arin’s children and husband frequently pressured her to return; she promised her children that if they could not cope after six months, they would go back. Fardin also felt that if he could not secure employment, the family should take advantage of their house that remained in Iran. As it became clear that they were, in fact, settling down in Vancouver, her family acquired an ambivalent understanding of home. “I know future is here [in Canada],” Arin’s daughter Fetneh expressed to her, “but still my heart is there [in Iran].” Moreover, Arin began to realize that migration had severed the important ties with their extended family.

           In Iran, Arin’s role as daughter continued to be as prominent as that of mother. Fardin faced deep guilt upon leaving Iran as, with his only brother also abroad, his mother remained alone. Arin’s children frequently lamented the loss of their aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins after immigrating, and Arin herself now expresses regret: “I missed all those days that I could be with my nieces, the way, when they were growing up, the way I could be nice auntie, the way I always dreamed of…And I’m missing all of those parts.” Thus, the loss of extended kinship relations presents a gaping hole in Arin’s family today.

           Seeking a new extended kinship network, Arin encountered a cultural impediment to forming friendships that could replace the relationships so intimately linked with her family in Iran. “I’m not saying—because I do have really good friends, my colleagues, and—that they are not my friends, but it’s just different, it’s just different. I cannot explain it, it’s just different,” Arin states. Cultural differences in standards of reciprocity create rifts in her relationships in Canada, and Arin feels no security in her ability to rely on her new friends for the kind of support needed in extended kinship networks. This may result from what Swanton (2005) terms the “territorializing [of] differences” (p. 18) whereby, despite the formation of cross-cultural friendships, “discourses of irreconcilable difference and ‘undesirability’” (p. 18) posit Iranians as Others who never truly belong in Vancouver.

In his study of Iranian immigrants in Vancouver, Swanton (2005) identifies themes of loss and of Iran as the motherland (p. 23). In their need for belonging, immigrants find themselves displaced, distanced from the motherland while struggling to create a new home for themselves. As Swanton (2005) argues, “ideas of home do not simply refer to collections of inanimate objects, but involve the ways in which we feel homes as ours, through the presence of habits and the effects of spouses, children, parent, companions and so forth” (p. 33). Some immigrant women form new networks and achieve a sense of belonging through community work and organizing (Miedema & Tatsoglou, 2003). Arin, however, has not achieved a new sense of home as comfortable as that she possessed in Iran. Thus, immigration has forced Arin to reconfigure her notion of family and home. Although her immediate family remains intact, the absence of a network to substitute the extended kinship relationships she had in Iran ultimately leaves, in her words, “a huge gap.”

 Conclusion

             Undergoing the tenuous process of migration inevitably alters the structures, dynamics, hopes and realities of families such as Arin’s. As Arin discovered, the sacrifices she has made as a mother unexpectedly produce a string of effects inextricable from one another and profoundly impacting her family; far from the traditional Iranian family model Arin once aspired to, her family following immigration now adapts to changing gender relations, the adversity of racism, and the absence of extended kin. These findings thus reveal that immigrant families, by virtue of journeying into the Canadian state from the outside, most intimately experience how the interlocking structures of the standard North American family and the hierarchy of privilege embedded in Canada’s economy shape individual experiences in the private sphere of their homes.

           Regarding the shifting gender roles in her family, Arin seemed somewhat uncomfortable as she so lamented Fardin’s current employment while failing to praise her own accomplishments. Indeed, Ashwin and Lytkina (2004) find that such challenges to gender normative households can prove unsettling for all family members (p. 199). As they argue, however, “the household is an important sphere in which men could potentially gain a sense of efficacy and identity” (Ashwin & Lytkina, 2004, p. 196). Furthermore, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) found that Mexican immigrant women benefited greatly when flourishing in the public sphere (p. 100). Perhaps future research could further probe the tangible benefits for both men and women who reconfigure gender relations throughout migration and consciously reevaluate their family structure without privileging either the public or private sphere over the other.    

           Another question mark lingering in my mind is the potential for Arin to find relationships or communities that could in fact fill the void left by her extended family. Miedema and Tatsoglou (2003) found that immigrant women in the Maritimes discovered communities through activism, while Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) champions the benefits of immigrant-specific communities (p. 118). In his study of Iranians in Vancouver, Swanton (2005) unfortunately encountered what he describes as “inclusion by virtue of Othering” (p. 19). Thus, future studies ought to examine what kinds of friendships, communities, organizations or groups Vancouver could provide for Iranian families in order to satisfy their need for adequate support networks.

           The research I present here further informs an increasing understanding of the gendered and racialized nature of immigration in Canada. Hopefully this understanding will serve future immigrant families so that they do not feel “tricked…by Canadian immigration policies and labor-market regulations that do not disclose to immigrants prior to their arrival in Canada that their human capital will be devaluated” (Bauder, 2003, p. 713). This understanding might also assist the feminist project of recognizing and serving postmodern family structures, such as the transnational family, that today find themselves largely limited in a patriarchal society. As Arin believes, understanding is the key to change. Referring to all Canadians, Arin states that, “if they learn deep inside to respect and to understand…to understand different cultures, different people, then the world will be paradise. Everywhere would be just great to live.”  

References

 Anderson, F. (2008, March 5). Taiwanese immigrant finds a better life. The Vancouver Sun. Retrieved March 29, 2008, from http://www.canada.com/vancouversun

Ashwin, S., & Lytkina, T. (2004). Men in Crisis in Russia: The Role of Domestic Marginalization. Gender and Society, 18(2), 189-206.

Bauder, H. (2003). “Brain Abuse”, or the Devaluation of Immigrant Labour in Canada. Antipode, 35(4), 699-717.

Caplan, J. B. & Caplan, P. J. (1999). Thinking Critically about Research on Sex and Gender (2nd ed.). New York & Don Mills: Longman.

Creese, G., & Dowling, R. (2001). Gendering Immigration: The Experience of Women in Sydney and Vancouver. Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, 01-04. Vancouver Centre of Excellence.

Creese, G. & Kambere, E. N. (2002). “What Colour is Your English?” Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, 02-20. Vancouver Centre of Excellence.

Hill Collins, P. (1991). Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought. In M. M. Fonow & J. A. Cook (Eds.), Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research (pp. 35-47). Indiana University Press.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (1994). Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press.

Hou, F. & Balakrishnan, T. R. (1996). The Integration of Visible Minorities in Contemporary Canadian Society. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 21(3). 307-326.

Kirby, S. L., Greaves, L. & Reid, C. (2006). Experience Research Social Change: Methods Beyond the Mainstream (2nd ed.). Toronto: Broadview Press.

Parreñas, R. S. (2001). The Transnational Family: A Postindustrial Household Structure with Preindustrial Values. In her Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (pp. 80-115).

Spivak, G. C. (2005). Can the Subaltern Speak? In B. Ashcroft et al. (Eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (pp. 90-91). New York: Routledge.

Swanton, D. (2005). Iranians in Vancouver: ‘Legible People’/Irredeemable Others/Migrant Stories. Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, 05-21. Vancouver Centre of Excellence.

Tastsoglou, E. & Miedema, B. (2003). Immigrant Women and Community Development in the Canadian Maritimes: Outsiders within? Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28(2). 203-234.

Worswick, C. (1999). Credit Constraints and the Labour Supply of Immigrant Families in Canada. The Canadian Journal of Economics, 32(1), 152-170.

 [1] Arin did not want her last name included.

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

Embracing Monstrosity: Acceptance and Rejection in the Fat Acceptance Movement

April 2008

While medical discourse commonly cites obesity as an epidemic, the presence of fat bodies, or fatness, in social space continues to create an uncomfortable identity politics whereby the epidemic is made invisible. As Carla Rice (2007) explains, “size is a social form produced at the intersection of biology, physiology, and culture” (p. 164). Deemed ill via medical discourse, the fat person faces harmful size stereotyping (Rice, 2007, p. 163) while society at large suffers from the ever-anxious state of fat phobia (Rice, 2007, p. 163). Manifested as fat prejudice, this phobia then affects hiring and promotion of fat people, medical misdiagnosis, and, more importantly, the absence of legal jurisdictions protecting against size discrimination (Brown, 2006, p. 248). In response to fat prejudice, organizations such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) petition for a fat acceptance movement akin to social movements like gay liberation. Proponents of fat acceptance state that:

[T]hey don't care what caused them to be fat. They are. They are tired of trying to change themselves. They believe that many of the problems in their lives and in their sexuality are related to accepting one or more of the fat-phobic theories, dieting, obsessing, and rejecting themselves. They want to live, be sexual, attract people who are attracted to them, assert their desires, say ‘no’ if they don't feel attracted, use their bodies for fun, fitness, and pleasure. They want to celebrate their sexuality like other women. (Areton, 2002)    

           Despite this positive mandate and well-developed strategies and practices, however, a recent interview with a prominent fat activist reveals that “eating disorders are the proverbial elephant in the room that most members of the fat acceptance community pretend not to see” (Glen, 2008, p. 42). The anonymous activist decries the silencing and contradictions tainting the fat acceptance movement, describing it as “a community that refuses to complicate itself” (Glen, 2008, p. 43). Such tensions pose a threat to fat acceptance and must therefore be problematized if organizations such as NAAFA truly wish to advance.

           In this paper, I unravel the tensions and contradictions within the fat acceptance movement in attempt to identify the most productive strategies for the cause. Firstly, I examine medical discourse to reveal the construction of fatness as alterable and argue that even fat activists internalize this notion. By comparing fat acceptance research, I then uncover tensions suggestive of this internalization and argue that fat activism necessitates an acknowledgment of embodied fatness. Discussing the theoretical and practical ways in which fatness is subversive, I conclude that fat acceptance finds itself most productive when employing the fat body as its tool.  

           Dominant discourses that construct obesity as an “epidemic” place the blame on the individual, fueling the notion that fatness is an undesirable outcome of individual women’s health choices and is therefore also an alterable state. According to Rice (2007), obesity epidemic discourse supports the pharmaceutical industry and a political economy that employs personal responsibility rhetoric in order to obscure the role that social factors such as racism, sexism and classism play in bearing negatively on women’s health (p. 163). She finds that, “ironically, women’s experiences indicate that anti-fat perceptions and practices may be productive of the very behaviors and bodies that they are attempting to prevent!” (Rice, 2007, p. 171) Nonetheless, medical and moral discourse succeeds in constructing obesity as an illness (Colls, 2006, p. 531).

           A psychological study conducted by Hales, Dishman, Pfeiffer, et al. (2006) exemplifies this construction. The study combines quantitative data with scales measuring depression, self-esteem, body image and physical activity in teenage girls to prove that exercise boosts body image and consequently prevents depression. The researchers do not determine size according to research participants’ self-identification; this authoritative medicalization of size thus produces the notion that “fatness” exists as a measurable reality. The researchers also obscure the complexity of eating disorders by presenting depression and “healthy” weight as mutually exclusive through their research design. Because “healthy” weight and depression can coexist when that weight results from disordered eating, the “healthy/happy/fit” versus “unhealthy/unhappy/fat” binary created here fails to problematize representations of eating disorders. The consequent simplification reproduces the uncontested idea that, simply put, fat is bad.

           Medical discourse also constructs the illness of obesity as an outcome of personal choice. For example, another psychological study, by Wardle, Robb, Johnson, et al. (2004), argues that girls of higher socioeconomic status hold higher standards for bodily thinness and thus more commonly use “healthy” weight control methods than girls of lower socioeconomic status (p. 275). This study thus begins by aligning the “epidemic” of obesity with the lower class. Wardle et al. (2004) conclude that teenage girls of higher socioeconomic status display healthier eating habits, more concern with body weight and a lower threshold for fat acceptance and are thereby less likely to be overweight (p. 280). Not only does such a conclusion reinforce the valuation of thinness, but, like Hales et al.’s research, it obscures the reality of eating disorders by conflating preoccupation with weight loss and fat intolerance with education about good health.

Moreover, this construction occurs in a classist framework whereby higher class girls are thinner, healthier and more educated while lower class girls embody the opposite. Ultimately, medical research represents fatness as an illness to be controlled by attitudes, education and practices in the hands of the individual and at the intersection of already stigmatized social positions. Thus, through a dominant lens, fatness becomes an alterable state.

In a movement that lobbies for the rights and recognition of fat people as a class, the fat body becomes the necessary mark and site of oppression. Because fatness is deemed alterable, however, the fat body becomes an unstable site of identification. Having internalized the construction of fatness as alterable, many fat activists exhibit a tension whereby they reject and deny their bodies. In fat acceptance movements, the focus is supposedly on “accepting your size rather than changing your body to conform to normative bodily ideals” (Colls, 2006, p. 531). However, according to Samantha Murray (2005), “coming out” as fat requires disavowing the fat body and the way it has been lived in the face of dominant discourses (p. 271). She finds that fat pride requires rising above the body and locating identity in the consciousness; to achieve this, however, the fat person must deny that she is her body and in so doing, the “system of judgment remains in tact” (Murray, 2005, p. 271).

    Sonya Brown’s analysis of size acceptance narratives illustrates how some women achieve fat pride by, ironically, denying their fatness. Brown’s (2005) narrators supposedly celebrate fatness by recognizing that “they have already achieved what thinness is supposed to deliver” (p. 247); that is, happiness, confidence, strength of character, etcetera. By maintaining thinness as a reference point, however, these woman proclaim that they are worthy in spite of their bodies. Similarly, Mode, a plus-size magazine promoting fat acceptance, contains relatively thin models and, when asked why, its editors state that “thinner women sell more clothes even in plus-size markets” (Brown, 2005, p. 248). Here we see supposedly proud fat women disliking and hence denying the realities of their bodies.  

  Brown suggests that these women experience an underlying discomfort with their bodies, a sentiment highlighted by the photographs accompanying fat acceptance narratives which conceal the women’s bodies. Similarly, Rachel Colls (2006) describes how a fat woman named Star evaluates her feelings about her body by feeling “normal” in plus-size clothing (p. 542); in other words, Star does not actually wish to be fat. Another woman, Rosa, learns to feel comfortable with her body by choosing styles that she can “wear better” (Colls, 2006, p. 542). According to Murray (2005), these practices that fat women “perform in trying to prevent the negative response to their body…reaffirm and reinforce dominant body ideologies” (p. 274).

Moreover, the denial of their bodies creates a tension, or incongruence, within the woman attempting to be simultaneously fat and proud. Jude, another woman in Colls’ (2006) study, demonstrates this tension: while she expresses the “who cares” attitude of fat acceptance politics, arguing that she should not have to accommodate dominant body standards, she jokes that clothing sizes make her feel abnormal (p. 535). Similarly, Star laughs nervously when asserting that she is a “small” at plus-size stores (Colls, 2006, p. 538). Colls (2006) explains that “the lived realities of being big for Star is evaluating her acceptance of her size and being aware of the emotional consequences of being big and surveyed” (p. 539). Thus, asserting agency in spite of fatness only perpetuates tension in the fat woman who continues to “live from the neck up” (Murray, 2005, p. 271) much like the “closeted” fat woman.

This tension, the fundamental paradox of the fat acceptance movement, can only be resolved when fat women acknowledge that their oppression has shaped their subjectivity; in doing so, the fat acceptance movement can begin to seek liberation stemming from fatness rather than in spite of it. “Deeply ingrained,” Murray (2005) argues, “in most fat women, is the constant slippage back into talking about our bodies as separate entities to our selves; talking about our bodies as mere flesh to be disavowed and overcome before a thinner, purer, and more acceptable self might emerge” (p. 276). A distance from one’s fatness logically follows from the fact that fat girls were once taught that they were fat through symbolic and social exchanges and pre-existing physical environments (Rice, 2007, p. 164).

According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, however, the body as it is read by the external world is the “horizon” through which one becomes a subject; thus, the fat body’s reception always shapes the individual’s subjectivity (Murray, 2005, p. 273). Young fat girls, for instance, commonly contest their negative image by adopting desirable personas such as funny, smart or athletic (Rice, 2007, p. 170); intimately linked with their fatness, these tactics become a part of the self commonly regarded as independent from the body. Thus, as Murray (2005) concludes, fat women cannot simply change their minds about their identities and rise above their fatness because we are not entirely self-authoring; “my body and fat and my self are inextricably bound up in producing and reproducing my identity, which is always already corporeal” (p. 276). It is from this reconnection with the body as it is fat and lived that fat acceptance movements must work from if they are to be free of tension and contradictions and therefore truly liberating.

The societal discomfort created by the consciously fat and proud identity exemplifies the liberating power of a fat acceptance movement that seeks to completely “reconfigure the systems of ‘knowingness’ that [govern] the understanding society has of [fat]” (Murray, 2005, p. 268). In such a movement, the fat female body challenges the very foundations of corporeal oppressions. One manner in which it achieves this is through its “monstrosity:” Colls (2006) argues that the fat body is constructed as monstrous and therefore serves as a “site of disruption” (p. 542). According to Colls (2006, p. 533), the very presence of a monstrous body in space challenges the modern construction of a disembodied subject and reveals that it is never fixed and our bodies are never one. Monstrous bodies challenge the norm not by opposing it but rather by showing us that we are all capable of coming undone and of “leaking” (Colls, 2006, p. 533). Finally, Colls (2006) explains, because the monstrous and the normal are mutually constitutive, monstrous bodies reflect “the fluidity and uncertainty of all corporeal experience” (p. 542).

Fat girls often personally experience and exhibit the function of this monstrosity in elementary school, as seen in Rice’s research on fat women’s childhood experiences. Her respondents’ memories reveal how fatness problematized gender in the social context of elementary school. Fat girls were multiply discriminated against in physical education classes where they failed to perform proper femininity (in their largeness) as well as proper health (in their fatness). As Rice (2007) explains, “fat became a problem for participants because it emerged out of a disordered relationship between big girls’ bodies and social relations that refused to see female physical and social fitness as embodied by anything but a thin, able form” (p. 167). Thus, size, or monstrosity, intersects with ability and gender to reveal how all are constructed in unstable ways. Because of their peers’ inability to perceive them as properly feminine (Rice, 2007, p. 168), fat girls became gender dissidents, thereby exhibiting the disruptive force of the monstrous body.

Although as children fat girls may have experienced this marginalization negatively, when employed as a political tool the monstrous position renders the fat woman the third subject. She is “less than woman” (Hole, 2003, p. 318) in her lack of attractive femininity and simultaneously “more than woman” (Hole, 2003, p. 318): with her large body occupying public space, the fat woman becomes pseudo-male and ultra-female as she is mature, maternal and therefore powerful unlike the nubile girl epitomizing femininity (Hole, 2003, p. 319). As Anne Hole (2003) argues, “if the eye of ‘heterosexual attractiveness’ cannot bear to look at the fat female body, then the fat woman has a chance at identity-formation that is not based on performance and audience” (p. 316). Offering personal opportunities for the fat woman, this freedom from the heterosexual economy also posits the fat woman as a postmodern, fluid subject, or an abject body incorporating all Others (Hole, 2003, p. 316) and thus exceeding the sex/gender binary system.  

This subversive nature of the fat woman becomes a valuable political force when her fatness serves to reveal the performativity of all embodied identities. The British comedy television series French and Saunders exemplifies this ability; the two title fat female comedians, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, enlist their fat bodies as a vehicle for comedy (Hole, 2003, p. 317). By portraying traditionally not-fat characters, French and Saunders’ performances illuminate the daily performances of embodied identities (Hole, 2003, p. 318). Hole (2003) describes a scene in which French and Saunders unsuccessfully mimic a sultry Marilyn Monroe performance bound up in awkward, painful-looking corsets (p. 323). As she explains, this scene serves to reveal that:

[T]he body will always exceed and fail at the performance of femininity. If one or two women cannot achieve this act of “womanliness” then its contingency is exposed. It is in the failure of an “act” that we recognize it is an act. By attempting, and failing, to perform the masquerade of femininity, the fat female body exposes it as performance. (Hole, 2003, p. 323)

Similarly, French and Saunders’ portrayals of male characters demonstrate that fat women’s drag performances effectively illuminate the performativity of masculinity as well (Hole, 2003, p. 326). Thus, the visibility of the fat body serves to scrutinize and deconstruct the very society that has used the privileging of visibility to oppress fat people.

           Ultimately, fat activism must employ fatness as its tool in order to avoid the denial of the fat body that creates tension and perpetuates dominant constructions of the body. This strategy then begs the question: in addition to performance tactics such as those adopted by French and Saunders, how can the fat woman’s actual, lived experiences reconfigure fatness to serve as the site of subversion? Fat activists often turn to sexual expression as a means of reclaiming fatness; heterosexual female members of NAAFA often achieve self-acceptance by meeting male “fat admirers” (Areton, 2002). As a tactic, however, the sexualized fat woman poses the risk of reproducing heterogendered normativity if she becomes a sexual object of male desire. While this can advance fat acceptance on a personal level, such an approach retrains the scrutinizing gaze onto the female body. Thus, the fat body must somehow enter and challenge social space from a place of empowerment.

As with all social justice causes and movements, one should never underestimate the power of “coolness.” As Allyson Mitchell recognized when she founded the fat activist group Pretty Porky and Pissed Off, using cultural production to “cool” certain concepts proves highly effective. Members of Pretty Porky and Pissed Off declared, “we’re going to make being fat a really cool thing that everybody wants to be or thinks is great” (Lichtman, 2004, p. 23). In so doing, fatness becomes “cool” on its own terms rather than within a hegemonic framework that only reinforces ideologies normalizing certain bodies over others. Thus, in order to truly “reclaim” fatness, fat acceptance movements must reconfigure not only the meanings of fatness, but the meanings of social spaces that fat bodies necessarily inhabit.

The unacknowledged prominence of eating disorders within feminist fat acceptance movements speaks to the underlying tension of a cause premised on the body. Because fat acceptance resides in a supposedly alterable body that refuses to be altered, fat activists must assert their embodied subjectivity from the standpoint of fatness. Only by continually challenging the dominant structures that cast the fat body as abject to begin with can the fat acceptance movement and its members truly surpass the ideological and social barriers perpetually ensuring that fat women, out or not, live from the neck up.  

 References

Areton, L. W. (2002). Factors in the sexual satisfaction of obese women in relationships. Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, 5. Retrieved March 4, 2008 from http://www.ejhs.org/volume5/Areton/TOC.htm

Brown, S. (2005). An Obscure Middle Ground: Size acceptance narratives and photographs of “real women”. Feminist Media Studies, 5(2), 246-249.

Colls, R. (2006). Outsize/Outside: Bodily bignesses and the emotional experiences of British women shopping for clothes. Gender, Place and Culture, 13(5), 529-545.

Glen, L. (2008). Big Trouble: Are eating disorders the Lavender Menace of the fat acceptance movement? Bitch, 38, 40-43.

Hales, D. P., Dishman R. K., Pfeiffer, K. A., Felton, G., Saunders, R. et al. (2006). Physical Self-Concept and Self-Esteem Mediate Cross-Sectional Relations of Physical Activity and Sport Participation With Depression Symptoms Among Adolescent Girls. Health Psychology, 25(3), 396-407.

Hole, A. (2003). Performing Identity: Dawn French and the Funny Fat Female Body. Feminist Media Studies, 3(3), 315-328.

Lichtman, C. (2004). Deeply Lez: Allyson Mitchell. Trade, Winter 2004/5, 21-23.

Murray, S. (2005). Doing Politics or Selling Out? Living the Fat Body. Women’s Studies, 34(3/4), 265-277.

Rice, C. (2007). Becoming the “fat girl”: Acquisition of an unfit identity. Women’s Studies International Forum, 30, 158-174.

Wardle, J., Robb, K. A., Johnson, F., Griffith, J. et al. (2004). Socioeconomic Variation in Attitudes to Eating and Weight in Female Adolescents. Health Psychology, 23(3), 275-282.

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

Bisexuality as Paradox

March 2008

As the struggle to propel the LGBQTTI movement continues, the issue of bisexuality still emerges as the nexus of debate around questions of sexuality, identity and politics. The bisexual political movement seeks to fight the pervasive monosexual paradigm (B. Ross, SOCI 369 lecture, February 12, 2008), which restricts sexual identities to the rigid homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy and underlies much discrimination against bisexuals, otherwise known as biphobia. Before the 1980’s, sociologists trivialized the concept of bisexuality or omitted it from their studies of human sexualities altogether (B. Ross, SOCI 369 lecture, February 12, 2008). According to Becki Ross, recent decades have witnessed the emergence of anti-biphobic activism (SOCI 369 lecture, February 12, 2008), pointing to an increased understanding of bisexuality and a willingness to validate bisexual identities within both academia and everyday lived experience. In this paper I seek to examine the discourses and debates surrounding bisexuality, and the ways in which bisexuals formulate, negotiate and live out their identities. I argue that the discursive construction of bisexuality as a paradox creates both limitations and opportunities for bisexuals at both personal and political levels.

Popular perceptions of bisexuality highlight the discomfort felt by many both homosexual and heterosexual. Colloquial synonyms for bisexuality such as “sitting on the fence” and “batting for both teams” reveal assumptions that bisexuals are confused or undecided individuals who are somehow disloyal to a particular group. In an episode of the popular TV show Friends, Phoebe teaches a group of children about alternative sexual identities with a song. “Sometimes women love women,” she sings. “And sometimes men love men. And then there are bisexuals, but some people say they’re just kidding themselves” (“The One After the Superbowl Part 2”). Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City echoes this sentiment when she discovers that her boyfriend is bisexual and states: “I’m not even sure bisexuality exists. I think it’s just a layover on the way to Gaytown” (“Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl”). Queer television characters also express disapproval of bisexuality. An episode of The L Word demonstrates this when Alice, herself a bisexual, witnesses her lesbian friend preparing for a date with a man and proclaims, “Bisexuality is gross. I get it now” (“Losing the Light”).    

These popular sentiments reflect academic and political biphobia and have surfaced in my personal experience. As someone who has identified as bisexual in the past but now prefers the term ‘queer,’ I am interested in the causes and practices of biphobia that render bisexuality such a deeply problematic identity category for so many people. When beginning my research for this paper, my girlfriend asked me what topic I had decided on. I told her I was researching bisexuality and she laughed. The lengthy and emotionally-charged debate that ensued secured my belief that biphobia, spurred by misunderstandings and misrepresentations of bisexuality, manifests in complex and contradictory ways. The articles I have chosen to examine thus expand upon this belief and contribute to an informed understanding of the highly contested identity category that is bisexuality.    

Jonathan Alexander and Karen Yescavage’s article “Bi Media Visibility—The Pleasure and Pain of Chasing Amy: Analyzing Reactions to Blurred Identities and Sexualities” (2001) examines reactions to the 1997 film Chasing Amy. Because the film portrays purportedly bisexual characters in a positive light and engaged in complex relationships, Alexander and Yescavage (2001) argue that it serves as an important popular culture text for the visibility of bisexual identities (p. 118). Although the main character of the film, Alyssa, identifies as gay, she finds herself attracted to the male protagonist over the course of the story. Thus, the authors believe that the film offers a complex portrayal of fluid sexualities, problematizing the rigid gay/straight dichotomy underlying biphobic discourse (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 119).

Given this premise, Alexander and Yescavage (2001) explore their respondents’ various positive and negative reactions in attempt to identify key debates surrounding sexual identity. They divide respondents’ reactions into four broad categories. The first category, “Identification with Bi Female Representation (Excitement)” (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 120), describes those with positive reactions. These respondents felt that Chasing Amy validates their bisexual identity and serves as a “‘coming out’ story about bisexuality” (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 121). The second category of reactions is “Identification with Lesbian Community Representation (Frustration/Anger/Fear?)” (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 121). Here, respondents mostly felt that the film “‘is a humorless, dour, dreary dick-fantasy about the kind of cartoon lipstick lesbian that spoiled gen-X men think will fuck them if they just trim their goatees properly’” (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 122). While some lesbians in this category identified with the hostility sometimes faced by those who sleep with men, they still perceived Chasing Amy in a largely negative light (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 121).

Alexander and Yescavage (2001) then identify respondents who felt as though the film affirmed “fluid sexuality and sexual agency” (p. 124). Exploring the concept of fluid sexuality, the authors found that viewers characterized the sexuality of the film’s characters according to their own sexual fluidity; for example, bisexual respondents were more likely to characterize the ambiguous character Banky as bisexual or queer than were heterosexual respondents (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 127). Finally, Alexander and Yescavage (2001) distinguish reactions of “boredom/bitterness” (p. 127), mostly amongst gay/bi/queer men who felt that Chasing Amy offers a limited and negative snapshot of male sexualities (p. 129). The authors thus conclude that the multiple readings of Chasing Amy, especially within the LGBQ community, reveal the tensions surrounding the formulation of bisexual identities as both a personal validation and a political tool.

Alexander and Yescavage’s study succeeds in accounting for the multiple possible readings of Chasing Amy from a diverse sample in terms of gender and sexual identity. The authors acknowledge the various advantages and disadvantages of bisexual identity politics, allowing their research to raise the following new questions: “Are we fighting to see an identity represented? Or are we fighting for people’s right to love and self determine? And, most provocatively, must the two always be at odds with each other?” (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 132) These concluding questions reflect the various positions and needs of the LGBQ community.

Alexander and Yescavage accomplish their revelatory findings by using open-ended questionnaires that allow respondents to explain their unique perceptions. This qualitative method thus ensures the validity of their findings regarding the complex ways in which people negotiate sexual identity. However, respondents’ feelings and opinions are filtered through the framework of Chasing Amy as a text. The authors fail to account for the limitations of using this film as a queer text; a more nuanced reading of the movie might reveal heterosexist ideologies underlying the script that need to be problematized when attempting to represent bisexuality. One of the authors, with a background in literary and textual analysis (Alexander and Yescavage, 2001, p. 119), certainly could have acknowledged this. Furthermore, because their sample includes no mention of trans people, Alexander and Yescavage contribute to the general invisibility of trans issues in academic and popular discussions of sexuality. The opinions of trans people who identify as bisexual would have lent even more valuable insight into Hollywood representations of bisexuality. Alexander and Yescavage’s study ultimately explicates the ambivalent feelings many people experience towards the concept of bisexuality as well as possibilities for new ways of identifying.  

Christian Klesse’s study “Bisexual Women, Non-Monogamy and Differentialist Anti-Promiscuity Discourses” (2005) examines the experiences of bisexual women in non-monogamous relationships and the challenges they face in a society rife with sexual double standards that render them multiply stigmatized. Seeking to examine discourses, debates and power inequalities surrounding bisexual practices and politics (Klesse, 2005, p. 446), Klesse employs qualitative research methods to inform his research on bisexual women in the United Kingdom.  

Klesse (2005) argues that the hegemonic construction of bisexuality as non-monogamous by necessity, while true for many bisexuals, underlies much anti-bisexual discourse (p. 449). He then explains how anti-promiscuity discourses reflect the social policing of female sexuality, particularly that of queer and non-white women (Klesse, 2005, p. 450). Most women in his study feel that sexual double standards usually do not permeate their bisexual community or affect their personal, sexual lives (Klesse, 2005, p. 451); sometimes, bisexual men treat them as promiscuous sexual objects (Klesse, 2005, p. 452). The women of color Klesse (2005) interviewed generally regard race issues as a personal matter of coming out to their community (p. 453). One woman, however, felt that white lesbian culture in the UK promotes racialized norms for sexual identity that exclude women of color (Klesse, 2005, p. 454), offering a more political view of racialized discourse in the bisexual community. Klesse (2005) argues that “the problem that the bisexual movement in the UK is predominantly white is aggravated by the fact that the readiness to confront issues regarding ethnocentrism and racism is not highly evolved in its cultural spaces” (p. 454).

Klesse then goes on to examine biphobia within the lesbian community, highlighting many key debates stemming from the gay liberation movement about the problematic nature of bisexuality. He finds that lesbians often deploy anti-promiscuity discourse, linked with beliefs that sleeping with bisexuals places them at a higher risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, to discriminate against bisexual women both politically and as potential partners (Klesse, 2005, p. 457). Klesse (2005) concludes that bisexual non-monogamous women employ various strategies to assert their sexual agency in the face of hegemonic discourses that discredit their identity (p. 459). He argues that the “the intersecting discourses constitutive of gendered, classed, racialized and sexual differences” (Klesse, 2005, p. 459) shape the varying degrees of danger that different women face in expressing their sexuality.      

The article’s greatest strength is its contribution to an academic understanding of how discourse specifically impacts lived experience. Moreover, Klesse’s examination of the complex intersecting forms of oppression illustrates how various social factors contribute to the stigmatization of bisexual non-monogamy. One can then employ this knowledge to combat biphobia. Furthermore, because this political struggle relies on the recognition and validation of bisexual identities, Klesse also succeeds in defining bisexuality on the respondents’ terms. Many academics perpetuate stereotypes of bisexuality as ambiguous or confusing by equating the experiences of research participants who do not identify as bisexual with those of self-identified bisexuals. For Klesse (2005), “self-declared identity and conscious references to bisexuality by [his] research partners provide the basis of [his] discussion of bisexuality” (p. 447). This approach positively contributes to bisexuals’ endeavors to politically organize.      

Klesse’s relatively small, mostly white sample is limiting; although he attempts to address issues of racial discrimination, a larger sample of non-white participants would have expanded this topic. Similarly, the study would benefit from a larger sample to further illuminate the diversity of experiences with bisexual non-monogamy.

Finally, although Klesse acknowledges that he researches bisexual non-monogamous men elsewhere, an integration of the knowledge gleaned from that study would prove useful here; because he examines sexual double standards in this article, a comparison with bisexual non-monogamous men’s experiences would further explicate this issue. Nonetheless, Klesse’s study serves as an important source of understanding about the constructions of bisexual non-monogamy that found biphobic discourses and the ways in which these discourses bear negatively on the lives of bisexual non-monogamous women.    

The article “Bisexuals at Midlife: Commitment, Salience, and Identity” (2001), by Douglas Pryor, Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams, discusses a life-course study of bisexual men and women in San Francisco. Following interviews conducted in 1983 and 1988, the authors present their findings about the same respondents’ experiences in 1996. The study seeks to determine the effects of time and aging on the identities, practices and sexualities of bisexuals, accounting for changing social factors such as the AIDS crisis and the queer movement. Pryor, Weinberg and Williams (2001) employ face-to-face in-depth interviews and closed-end questionnaires (p. 185) to examine changes and similarities across time in respondents’ sexual involvement and direction, ties with the bisexual community, and self-identity. Finally, the authors wish to consider some of the limitations of a constructionist approach. According to them, “a focus on flux is a much-needed corrective, but this does not eliminate the need to examine the degree to which sexual-preference identities can exhibit coherence and stability” (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 182).

In regards to sexual involvement, Pryor, Weinberg and Williams (2001) found that sexual activity had decreased for most respondents and that they attributed this decrease to general aging factors such as health problems, menopause, and a decrease in energy (p. 188). Women were more likely to feel less sexually attractive as they aged, while one man found that “as you get older you get status as a ‘daddy’ and younger men find you attractive” (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 190).

Because of decreased sexual activity overall and a common fear of AIDS, respondents had become less bisexually active than in previous years, with half of them currently monosexually active (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 191). Those who now engaged in exclusively heterosexual behavior attributed the change to factors such as decreased exposure to queer communities, pressures to conform to heteronormative expectations of family and “settling down,” and fear of AIDS (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 193). Those who now solely practiced homosexual behavior largely cited the decrease of bisexual communities as a reason for pursuing specifically homosexual relations (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 194). While women found same-sex encounters more difficult to pursue, men found them easier (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 194); conversely, fear of contracting HIV/AIDS from men encouraged both men and women to seek female partners.

Pryor, Weinberg and Williams’ third important finding was the overall decrease in bisexual community involvement. All respondents significantly decreased their involvement for various reasons: respondents settled into monogamous relationships and families, some moved away from urban centers, several bisexual centers closed down, and the young queer movement largely replaced the bisexual movement of the respondents’ generation (Pryor et al., 2001, pp. 196-8). The middle-aged bisexuals admired the young queer movement, believing that it promotes inclusiveness and solidarity (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 197).

Finally, Pryor, Weinberg and Williams (2001) probe the pivotal question of sexual identity and find that four-fifths of the sample still identified as bisexual in mid-life (p. 199). According to the authors, this finding demonstrates that “the bisexual identity can be stable and that people who self-define as bisexual are not necessarily ‘in transition’ toward another sexual preference identity” (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 199). For the most part, respondents felt more secure about their sexual identity as they aged; although many now behaved monosexually, their continuing attraction to both sexes affirmed their bisexuality (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 200). Some respondents now identified as queer, one identified as “intersexed gay,” and some rejected labeling altogether (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 201).  

Pryor, Weinberg and Williams (2001) conclude that the identity category of bisexuality is fluid, sex-positive and inclusive, and can be determined by factors such as attraction and not necessarily practice (p. 202). The stability of the bisexual identity over the course of respondents’ lives challenges postmodern, constructionist queer theory; “the respondents did not experience themselves as fragmented or incoherent but rather as being grounded in one body that exists over time” (Pryor et al., 2001, p. 205). This study thus validates the experiences of bisexuals who rely on the label as the truest descriptor of their identities.

The life-course approach of this qualitative research provides much-needed insight on sexual identity formation. Because bisexuals are often perceived as undecided or confused, the study of middle-aged bisexuals who consistently maintain their identities as such proves a valuable source to debunk this myth. Pryor, Weinberg and Williams’ diverse sample of men, women and trans people further informs an in-depth understanding of lived bisexuality.    

           Unfortunately, all participants of this study are white, middle-class people and the authors fail to account for race and class. Because sexuality, gender and age intersect with race and class in inextricable ways, Pryor, Weinberg and Williams could have contributed to understandings of bisexuality more significantly with an exploration of these issues. Finally, the glaring flaw of this study is its sample source; members of a Bisexual Center in 1983, the bisexuals depicted here fail to represent the identity negotiations and experiences of the many bisexuals who remain alone in their identification. A similar life-course study of bisexuals uninvolved with bisexual communities or urban centers would further expand our understanding of bisexual identity politics.

           The findings gleaned from these three studies illustrate how, as a phenomenon, bisexuality finds itself subject to discourses constructing it as a paradox. The paradoxical nature of bisexuality then creates obstacles and opportunities for bisexuals that they negotiate throughout their lived experiences. In The History of Sexuality (1980), Michel Foucault explains how the discursive construction of human sexuality serves as a tool for dominant forces to exercise power over individuals through moral regulation (p. 32). When various religious, medical and moral discourses of the nineteenth century constructed “deviant” sexualities as abnormal and the homosexual as a species, “the machinery of power…established [this whole alien strain] as a raison d’être and a natural order of disorder” (Foucault, 1980, p. 44). The widely accepted heterosexual/homosexual divide existing today reflects the naturalization of these categories of sexuality and reveals the source of confusion surrounding bisexuality.          

           Today we see the pathologization and discrediting of bisexuals operating in a similar fashion to that of the homosexual during the nineteenth century. Klesse’s examination of anti-promiscuity discourse reveals how bisexuals must combat arguments historically used to oppress women and homosexuals. This conundrum raises the question of the power of naming, and whether or not the term ‘bisexual’ helps or hinders the goal of subverting sexual binaries. Alyssa of Chasing Amy never calls herself a bisexual, yet respondents of Alexander and Yescavage’s study identified with her sexual fluidity. Those who did not expressed outrage at her disloyalty to the gay identity. These findings highlight the paradox of bisexuality whereby claiming the identity undermines the goal of sexual fluidity while the failure to name it creates confusion and invisibility.    

           In “Ambiguous Identity in an Unambiguous Sex/Gender Structure: The Case of Bisexual Women” (1996), Amber Ault offers one potential solution to the paradox: queer/nonqueer or bisexual/monosexual divisions, she argues, can “displace the hetero/homo binary” (p. 461). According to Ault (1996), these new configurations might “offer prospects for the redistribution of privilege” (p. 461). Indeed, some middle-aged bisexuals in Pryor, Weinberg and Williams’ study now identified with the more inclusive queer movement. Most respondents, however, continued to claim a bisexual identity. For these men and women, identifying and organizing as bisexuals proved validating and useful both politically and personally. As Klesse acknowledges when he defines bisexuality by the individual’s choice to self-identify, we can no longer question the existence or validity of a sexual identity claimed by so many like those in Pryor, Weinberg and Williams’ article, even as we navigate the many questions and debates surrounding it.

           The research I have presented in this paper raises new questions to probe in future research on bisexuality. The varied responses to the film Chasing Amy described in Alexander and Yescavage’s study led me to wonder how audiences would react to the film had it been about a gay man falling for a straight woman. This hypothetical scenario, paired with the different responses from lesbians, gay men and bisexual women and men, highlights questions of gender intersecting with issues of sexuality. In the same Sex and the City episode mentioned earlier, Carrie remarks, “I did the ‘date the bisexual guy’ thing in college, but in the end, they all ended up with men.” Samantha responds, “So did the bisexual women” (“Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl”). This popular stereotype illustrates gendered assumptions regarding bisexuality. Similarly, Klesse’s research reveals sexual double standards that stigmatize bisexual men and women differently. Pryor, Weinberg and Williams’ study of middle-aged bisexuals challenges these gendered constructions in various ways. Thus, future research might explicitly examine the multiple intersections of gender and sexuality to better understand how both are socially constructed and consequently shape perceptions of bisexuality.  

           None of the articles I have included in my research explicitly deal with issues of race. Although studies of the implications of bisexuality for racialized identities exist, I would further examine this intersection within the context of questions raised by the articles I draw from here. Firstly, I question the reasons for the large absence of non-white respondents from these studies. Secondly, Klesse briefly mentions his respondents’ tendency to read issues of race on a personal, rather than political, level. Given that bisexuality exists as an ambiguous hybrid of a hegemonic dualism, the study of hybrid racial identities as analogous and related to bisexuality might answer important questions regarding race, sexuality and power.

           After a tearful and convoluted discussion, my girlfriend and I finally resolved our dispute. Although we discovered a conceptual common ground on which to make peace, we now jokingly refer to one another as the bisexual and the biphobic lesbian. This tentative resolution mirrors the ambivalent position that bisexuality occupies in theoretical, social and political realms. The very occurrence of our argument, however, suggests that bisexuality will continue to problematize and therefore enrich current understandings of human sexuality by virtue of its paradoxical ambivalence.            

 References

Alexander, J. & Yescavage, K. (2001). Bi Media Visibility—The Pleasure and Pain of Chasing Amy: Analyzing Reactions to Blurred Identities and Sexualities. Journal of Bisexuality, 1(4), 116-135.

Ault, A. (1996). Ambiguous Identity in an Unambiguous Sex/Gender Structure: The case of bisexual women. Sociological Quarterly, 37(3), 449-463.

Bicks, J. (Writer). & Thomas, P. (Director). (2000). Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl. [Television series episode]. In J. Bicks, C. Chupack, M. P. King, & J. Melfi (Executive Producers), Sex and the City. Home Box Office (HBO).

Crane, D. & Kauffman, M. (Writers). & Lembeck, M. (Director). (1996). The One After the Superbowl: Part 2. [Television series episode]. In K. Bright, D. Crane & M. Kauffman (Executive Producers), Friends. Warner Bros. Television.

Foucault, M. (1980). The History of Sexuality, Volume I. New  York: Vintage Books.

Klesse, C. (2005). Bisexual Women, Non-Monogamy and Differentialist Anti-Promiscuity Discourses. Sexualities, 8(4), 445-464.

Pryor, D. W., Weinberg, M. S., & Williams, C. J. (2001). Bisexuals at Midlife: Commitment, Salience, and Identity. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 30(2), 180-208.

Troche, R. (Writer & Director). (2006). Losing the Light. [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken & R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

Lesbian Representation in “The L Word”

December 2007

           Showtime’s television series The L Word centers on a group of girl friends living in Los Angeles. All but one of the women are lesbians; the show is made by, about and, presumably, for lesbians, a concept unprecedented in mainstream television. With complex and varied lesbian representations, the series serves as an important site for lesbian identity-formation. By virtue of being an explicitly and thoroughly lesbian show, The L Word forces its female viewers (and even male viewers in some ways) to reconfigure the psychic process of identification/ objectification. Thus, in spite of some problematic representations in the show, it ultimately disturbs previous understandings of the lesbian gaze, such as that prescribed through a Lacanian perspective rooted in binary notions of sex and gender.

           In many ways The L Word produces problematic representations reflecting the misogynistic pornographic conventions that Annette Kuhn delineates in her article “Lawless Seeing.” Kuhn discusses the “pleasure of power” (272) in voyeurism (whereby the pleasure of looking is one of power as the object cannot see the viewer [272]) that traditionally implicates a male subject and a female object. Kuhn argues that “the photograph speaks to a masculine subject, constructing woman as object” (273); traditionally gazing upon the female through a masculine lens, this vantage point thus constructs “femininity as otherness” (273). The L Word repeatedly adopts this cinematic technique. In the episode “Lifeline”, Shane approaches Cherie’s house in darkness, following her movements in a stalker-like manner while Cherie, well-lit inside her home, remains uncertain about Shane’s approach. This voyeuristic foreplay mimics the objectifying pleasure power described by Kuhn; initially, the femme Cherie represents the female object while the androgynous Shane, sheathed in darkness, represents the male subject hunting his prey. Upon their meeting at Cherie’s front door, and once both established as women engaged in lesbian sex, they both become objects viewed through the windows. The viewer no longer adopts Shane’s perspective and thus assumes the position of a third-party voyeur.

           Similarly, various sex scenes in The L Word are interrupted by a third character: Shane interrupts Carmen and Jenny in “Late, Later, Latent”, and Jenny’s then-fiancé, Tim, walks in on Jenny and Marina in “Lawfully”. Seemingly staged for a spectator and, notably, often a male one, such scenes mimic the feminine “to-be-looked-at-ness” (274) typical of pornography. The L Word exemplifies its incorporation of the male voyeur with its Season Two character Mark, a man who installs hidden cameras in the bedrooms of his lesbian roommates.

In addition to constructing an implicit male voyeur, The L Word encourages the heteronormative male gaze, paradoxically, through its use of camera angles that fragment the female body into bits and pieces, a pornographic convention Kuhn describes as “dehumanizing” (274). According to Kuhn, shots of thrust bosoms, raised buttocks and open legs construct woman as feminine and therefore different (275), and thus “reducible to a sexuality which puts itself on display for a masculine spectator” (276). The L Word’s publicity shots alone epitomize the show’s breast fixation, with all of its characters elegantly and unnaturally clad in plunging necklines. Furthermore, the “V” shape of the open-leg angle proves a popular closing shot for sex scenes, such as those between Shane and Cherie (“Lifeline”), Helena and Dylan (“Late Comer”), and Shane and Carmen (“Life, Loss, Leaving”), to name a few.    

           By insisting on sexual difference (Kuhn, 277) and, by virtue of photographic convention, equating visibility with truth (Kuhn, 275), pornography “as a regime of representation…constructs a social discourse on the nature of human sexuality” (Kuhn, 271). By adopting many pornographic conventions in its sex scenes, The L Word thus reflects this discourse which posits the feminine as object in a subject/ object binary.

According to Laura Mulvey, the psychoanalytic implications of this binary serve to perpetuate the patriarchal order. In a Lacanian reading of the voyeuristic tendencies of cinematic conventions, the two pleasures in looking are scopophilia and narcissistic identification, the former reserved for the female object and the latter for the male subject, or voyeur. Film and television reproduce sex-driven scopophilia through the voyeuristic separation of a glowing screen in darkness (Mulvey, 216). As with the “presubjective moment of image recognition” (Mulvey, 218) in the Lacanian mirror stage, the viewer then conceives of the screen’s image as the ideal ego to identify with. Because film traditionally constructs male characters as voyeurs in the stories themselves, much like The L Word’s Mark, audiences narcissistically identify with males as the “bearer of look” (Mulvey, 219) and females as the “image” (Mulvey, 219). As the image, and therefore the signifiers of sexual difference (as discussed above), females then produce castration anxiety in males, a problem cinematically conquered in one of two ways: either the voyeuristic demystification of the female character or the fetishistic scopophilia of her (Mulvey, 225). The L Word adopts the latter strategy in its pornographic reproduction of the male gaze, discussed above. Furthermore, the show’s problematic opening sequence reduces the characters to dolls: the cast, plasticized and shining with gloss, pose in choppy sequences that mimic the awkward movements of a Barbie doll. This snapshot of The L Word thus promotes a fetishistic playground of pretty lesbians.

Mulvey describes the former strategy for “handling” women as sadistic; the film must investigate, demystify, punish and save the woman (225). Despite the uncontested centrality and complexity of The L Word’s lesbian characters, the show’s storylines create the sensation of an omnipresent, lesbian-hating world to battle. Carmen’s family disowns her when she comes out (“Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way”), Dana’s parents continually struggle with her homosexuality, and Max and Bette repeatedly encounter homophobic characters in the workplace. The episode “Last Dance”, in handling Dana’s death, juxtaposes the Christian, homophobic service provided by Dana’s parents with the illicit memorial that Dana’s friends conduct at a secluded waterfall. At the Christian service, the priest delivers a eulogy in which he muses that, given more time on earth, Dana “would have settled down with a loving partner, someone to care for her, a strong, devoted man, a loving man…” at which point Alice interrupts with, “What are you talking about? Dana was gay” and storms out of the church. Substantive and moving, the latter scene, in which the ladies commemorate Dana’s life and scatter her ashes, suffices to explore Dana’s death. Therefore the first scene, a homophobic tragedy, solely serves the sensation that The L Word zooms in on a lesbian world from outside rather than representing a lesbian world in its own right. The show thus reflects the Lacanian demystification of woman-as-object, illustrating the ways in which this woman-centered show in fact reproduces the patriarchal symbolic order underlying cinematic conventions.

           The L Word’s overrepresentation of femme lesbians further incurs the notion of heteronormative representation. According to Claire Whatling, femmes are traditionally read as the object-choice for masculine-identified butch lesbians and as not “committed” (64) to homosexuality. The L Word promotes this reading with a constant teetering towards heterosexuality: Alice is bisexual, Jenny enters as a straight woman who “becomes” a lesbian (and, along with Shane, suffers from father-related psychological issues) and Tina temporarily “returns” to heterosexuality. Because the equation of lesbian with butch “doubly erase[s]” (Whatling, 60) the lesbian femme, her prominence in The L Word raises an interesting question: does the series serve butch scopophilia or femme narcissism?

           Whatling addresses this issue through her deconstruction of the masculine/ feminine binary which stresses the limitations of psychoanalysis for understanding lesbianism. In a Lacanian reading, women must identify narcissistically “and hence masochistically” (Whatling, 56) with objectified women in film. This stems from the psychological process whereby the male identifies anaclitically with the mother as the Other, lacking what he wishes to possess (the phallus), while the female identifies narcissistically with the mother and thus the self as the Other, or that object which is striven for (Whatling, 37). With lesbian desire, however, the relation is both narcissistic and anaclitic as both oneself and one’s object of desire become the sexual object; “female homosexuality is, in this sense, not a failure of Freudian femininity, but, on the contrary, an excess of it” (Whatling, 43). Thus, psychoanalysis renders lesbianism a logical impossibility. Given this fact, Whatling reflects that “to argue that the cinema allows for a proliferation of lesbian scopic pleasure beyond the rigours of either the narcissistic or the anaclitic is a profoundly banal conclusion to come to” (71). This banality then calls for a more complex reading of lesbian representation and identification, a task that begins with an understanding of the lesbian gaze.

           In their analogy of women’s fashion magazines to pornography, Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley argue that fashion magazines are implicitly lesbian with women as their intended viewer. The vantage point then becomes “a lesbian gaze in which the pleasure of looking is experienced simultaneously with the pleasure of being looked at by a woman” (182), and is thus a uniquely female position without recourse to and in subversion of the male gaze. Free from the constraints of a masculine/ feminine binary, femme lesbians can identify with the butch and the male hero (Whatling, 75), among other characters; essentially, the lesbian viewer re-imagines herself as the subject in unconventional ways. Hence, in response to the previously posed question, “the frame of vision” (Whatling, 74) of any female viewer watching The L Word “remains tied to the economy of the lesbian” (Whatling, 74) and therefore resides beyond binary notions of the male—or masculine— gaze upon the feminine object. Indeed the lesbian gaze introduces a viewing pleasure logically inexplicable through a Lacanian reading.

           Further complicating the male scopophilic reading of lesbian representation, David Loftus’ interviews with heterosexual men who enjoy lesbian pornography reveal that men can in some ways adopt the lesbian gaze. Some men interviewed envision experiencing a female type of sexual pleasure while watching lesbian pornography (56) and some envision being a “gay woman” (58), even the subservient one, a concept that disturbs notions of male dominance in pornography (58). One interviewee states that, in lesbian sexual relations, “a man is not necessary” (Loftus, 59). The transferability of the lesbian gaze suggests that, even with men watching, The L Word becomes solely lesbian terrain. Thus, the lesbian gaze challenges traditional psychoanalytic readings of lesbian representation in The L Word which reduce the show to an ascription to heteronormative codes.      

In deconstructing masculine/ feminine binaries, The L Word in fact engages in bricolage, as Judith Butler’s writings on sex and gender support with various ideas pertinent to a revised understanding of lesbian identification/ objectification. Firstly, in her chapter “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Butler challenges the notion that butch/ femme role playing in lesbian relationships reproduces heterosexual norms, arguing instead that drag and these roles in fact highlight the non-existence of an essential heterosexuality. According to Butler, drag proves that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (21). The character development of The L Word’s Max reflects Butler’s argument. In the episode “Lobsters”, Max enters the series as Moira, Jenny’s stone butch girlfriend from small-town California, and feels rejected by Jenny’s friends from the outset. Having assessed nothing but Moira’s flannel-clad appearance, Carmen and Shane immediately act coldly towards her. Later, Carmen justifies disliking Moira by criticizing her seemingly rigid attitudes towards lesbian roles: Moira tells Carmen and Jenny, “you girls just relax, let us butches unload the truck,” referring to Shane. Carmen, amused and mocking Moira’s assumptions, slaps Shane’s arm and says, “big butch, go unload the truck.” When all of Jenny’s friends discuss the newcomer at a dinner party that night, Carmen more harshly reprimands Moira for her statement, and the ladies proceed to contemplate the pairing. “Maybe she’s Jenny’s type,” Dana muses, to which Alice sarcastically replies, “Because Carmen’s such a stone butch too” (Carmen and Jenny previously dated). Bette then states that Moira “comes from a place where you have to define yourself as either/ or. It’s probably the only language she has to describe herself.” Tina, reverting to the question of Jenny’s choice, wonders why Jenny “would want to role-play like that.” This conversation appears oddly hypocritical: Alice dates both femme and butch women throughout the series, and Carmen and Shane consistently role play, most notably at their entirely heteronormative wedding (“Left Hand of the Goddess”). Interestingly, when Moira begins her transition to Max and appears at a party in fashionable men’s clothing, the ladies warm up to her, gushing that she “looks like a hot guy” (“Lifesize”). Still role-playing but now Los Angeles appropriate, Moira temporarily overcomes her ostracism. Thus, a class issue disguised as a gender issue, the ladies’ initial, hypocritical treatment of Moira highlights the constraints of a gender-binary system.        

Ultimately, The L Word condemns Max for his choice to transition. He becomes a ragingly jealous boyfriend and Jenny leaves him. He then suffers throughout the fourth season as being different and confused, juxtaposed with the lesbian characters secure in their identities. In a pivotal scene during Max’s transition, Kit, a black woman, seemingly emerges as the show’s critical voice. “What if,” she asks Max, “I lived my life feeling white inside, and then the next day I woke up and I could change the color of my skin, the features of my face to become white? Would you encourage me to do that? What’s white inside? What’s male inside? What’s female inside? Why can’t you be the butchest butch in the world and keep your body?” (“Late Comer”) Here Kit challenges the notion that sexuality resides in an essentially sexed body. By condemning Max and trumpeting the emotional failures of his transition, The L Word thus reflects Butler’s argument that “the parodic or imitative effect of gay identities works neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization” (23).

Butler’s semiotic analysis of the lesbian phallus and its ability to deprivilege the dominant order (“Bodies that Matter”) clarifies how lesbian representation such as that of The L Word disrupts and therefore “exposes” the hegemonic imaginary of heterosexual morphology. Butler explains that the psychic subject is internally constituted by the Other and is therefore never self-identical and always disrupted by the Other (“Imitation”, 27). Thus, contrary to a Lacanian reading, as Whatling argues, identification and desire must not be mutually exclusive. “If to identify as a woman is not necessarily to desire a man, and if to desire a woman does not necessarily signal the constituting presence of a masculine identification…then the heterosexual matrix proves to be an imaginary logic that insistently issues forth its own unmanageability” (“Bodies”, 239). Likewise, the privilege of the phallus as signifier is reproduced through a symbolic order in which the phallus “gains [its] privilege through being reiterated” (“Bodies”, 89). In the same way that heterosexuality must constantly repeat performances of itself to justify its essential nature, the connection between signifier and signified frays when women exchange the phallus amongst themselves. As a symbol, the phallus only exists insofar as something represents it; thus, the lesbian phallus deprivileges the masculinist, heterosexist phallus (“Bodies”, 90). Importantly, Butler notes that:

To speak of the lesbian phallus as a possible site of desire is not to refer to an imaginary identification and/or desire that can be measured against a real one; on the contrary, it is simply to promote an alternative imaginary to a hegemonic imaginary and to show, through that assertion, the ways in which the hegemonic imaginary constitutes itself through the naturalization of an exclusionary heterosexual morphology (“Bodies”, 91).    

The very presence of the lesbian phallus then further complicates notions of female objectification/ identification: as with the lesbian gaze, this symbolic process supersedes the dominant order underlying a masculine/ feminine binary and challenges the priority of heterosexuality central to Lacanian theory. As Butler states, origins such as essentialized heterosexuality “only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives” (“Imitation”, 22). This tautological nature of sex and gender binaries thus renders them limited in comparison to the bricolage of the sexual derivative present in The L Word. The “hyperfemmeininity” (Whatling) of the series, paired with the relative marginality of traditional role-playing to the characters’ relationships, ultimately challenges the many, related binaries: butch/ femme, masculine/ feminine, subject/ object. The show’s characters rarely feel compelled to justify their desire; thus, by consistently ignoring the request for an explanation of femmeininity, The L Word denounces the very binary upon which such a concept depends.    

Although many critics of The L Word thoroughly examine the potentially problematic elements discussed earlier, the subversive psychoanalytic approaches that Whatling and Butler adopt allow for the bricolage of sex and gender binaries. Given this reconfiguration of pleasure power, even the show’s pornographic conventions can be re-read in a subversive manner: The L Word includes many more face shots during sex scenes than pornography does, challenging the dehumanizing reading of bits and pieces. Moreover, the third-party “voyeur” created by the camera lens could suggest equality of power between the two lovers, rather than the duplicated object of the male gaze. Such readings, rooted in a lesbian framework, allow for alternative representations of female sexuality. While Foucault might argue that the affirmation of homosexuality is an extension of homophobic discourse (Butler, “Imitation”, 14), and while The L Word can symbolically reproduce the patriarchal order, one needs not consider such notions when reconfigurations of the lesbian gaze subvert heteronormative discourse altogether. Given that only sixteen years ago Butler described lesbian subjects as “abjects…who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the law” (“Imitation”, 20), the recent introduction of complex lesbian subjects in mainstream representation suggests that there is yet much future direction to be taken. At the risk of tokenizing (Season Four simultaneously introduces the show’s first two lesbians of color and the first lesbian with a physical disability), The L Word continues to expand its representations. Perhaps with time, the show and other artistic endeavors will further challenge the cinematic conventions underlying a history of representation that has rendered the lesbian invisible.            

 Works Cited

Butler, Judith, 1993, Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”, Routledge, London and New York.

Butler, Judith, 1991, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, Diana Fuss (ed.), Routledge, London and New York, pp. 13-31.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Anders, A. (Director). (2006). Last Dance [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Chaiken, I. (Director). (2006). Left Hand of the Goddess [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Hughes, B. (Director). (2006). Lobsters [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Kaufman, M. (Director). (2006). Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. and Lam, R. (Executive Producers). (2004). The L Word [Television series]. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Minahan, D. (Director). (2005). Life, Loss, Leaving [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Peirce, K. (Director). (2006). Lifeline [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Chaiken, I. (Writer), & Robinson, A. (Director). (2006). Late Comer [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Kuhn, Annette, 1995, “Lawless Seeing”, Gender, Race and Class in Media, Gail Dines and Jean Humez (eds.), Sage Publications, pp. 271-278.

Lewis, Reina and Rolley, Katrina, 1996, “Ad(dressing) the dyke: lesbian looks and lesbians looking”, Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (eds.), Routledge, London and New  York, pp. 178-190.

Loftus, David, 2002, Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond to Pornography, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New  York.

Mulvey, Laura, 1984, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, B. Wallis (ed.), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, pp. 361-373.

Rapp, A. (Writer), & Brock, T. (Director). (2006). Lifesize [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Stenn, D. (Writer), & Goldwyn, T. (Director). (2005). Late, Later, Latent [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Troche, R. (Writer), & Minahan, D. (Director). (2004). Lawfully [Television series episode]. In I. Chaiken and R. Lam (Executive Producers), The L Word. Hollywood: Showtime Networks Inc.

Whatling, Clare, 1997, Screen dreams: Fantasising lesbians in film, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York.

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

The Overrepresentation of Aboriginal Women in the Canadian Criminal Justice System

November 2007

The overrepresentation of Aboriginal people, especially Aboriginal women, in the Canadian criminal justice system is a commonly recognized issue within mainstream knowledge of Canadian society; many Canadian citizens would most likely cite some familiarity with the problem. The issue of criminality correlates with discrimination against First Nations of Canada in general; the United Nations in its 2003 report on the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women states that some of Canada’s primary problem areas are:

[T]he persistent systematic discrimination faced by Aboriginal women in all aspects of their lives; the failure to address in the First Nations Governance Act (under discussion at the time the report was prepared) discriminatory legal provisions under other Acts - e.g. those related to matrimonial property rights, status and band membership questions - that are incompatible with the Convention (“UN Reports”, 5).

It is therefore no surprise that, as a clearly disadvantaged group, Aboriginal Canadian women find themselves socially subjected to the problem of overrepresentation in the prison system. The history of colonialism reveals a pattern of conflict between the federal government’s justice practices and those of Native communities. The United States government, for example, established the Major Crimes Act in 1885 to “[give] federal courts jurisdiction in Indian Country” (Ross, 19) and therefore the “power to punish” (Ross, 19). This shift in power marked the beginning of a cycle of bias: under the Major Crimes Act, Native offenders “[received] harsher treatment than non-Natives charged with the same crimes” (Ross, 19).

           Today, the implications of colonial bias appear as a “crisis in the Canadian criminal justice system” (Landau, 191). From the 1920’s to the 1950’s in Toronto prisons, for example, the presence of Aboriginal women increased exponentially. According to Tammy C. Landau (192), in 2001 the Aboriginal population accounted for 2% of Canada’s adult population, but 17% of admissions to custody; Aboriginal women comprised almost a quarter of female inmates; and Aboriginal women were more likely to be denied parole, to come in contact with police to begin with, and to be victims of crime, especially violent crime.

Formal legislation attempting to remedy this issue, such as section 718.2 (e) of the Criminal Code which requires sentencing judges to “pay particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders” (“R vs. Gladue”, 2), does not suffice to account for judges’ subjective interpretations of cases. In the 1999 British Columbia case R vs. Gladue, for example, a judge failed to discern the guidelines of section 718.2 (e) when he erroneously dismissed the appeal of an accused Aboriginal woman (“R vs. Gladue”, 3). Luana Ross argues that such discrepancies within the criminal justice system exist because a colonial agenda persists today. According to Ross, policies regarding Native people have shifted “from genocide to expulsion, exclusion, and confinement, and later to supposed assimilation—the rhetoric was integration, the reality was confinement and domination” (32). Evidently, the issue of overrepresentation stems from various stages of the criminalization process. The vicious cycle of Aboriginal criminalization, rooted in Canadian colonialism, is perpetuated by Canada’s criminal justice system and thus accounts for the overrepresentation of Aboriginal women in prisons.

Various elements of reserve life and consequent ghettoization increase the probability that members of First Nations will come into contact with the police. Many of those incarcerated originally come from reserves, a context with specific and unique sociological characteristics. Joan Sangster finds that commonalities between incarcerated Aboriginal women include “family dissolution, domestic violence, intense poverty, low levels of education [and] the likelihood of foster care” (40). In regards to domestic violence, Ross identifies a vicious cycle of violence occurring among lower income reserve households. In addition to a propensity towards coping mechanisms such as substance abuse, which render women vulnerable to criminalization (Ross, 99), survivors of violence receive differential treatment in court cases. In the United States for example, lawyers now shy away from using the “battered women’s syndrome” (Ross, 104) argument in defense of their clients as judges have historically deemed the term unfounded, and use of this term by psychologists as evidence has even harmed some cases (Ross, 104). Ross points out that a “criminalization” (105) of abused women has occurred whereby survivors of violence become more vulnerable to incarceration. Moreover, women abused as children are more likely to retaliate and become abusers themselves (Ross, 101), or to be charged for acts of self defense interpreted as criminal (103). The generational retaliation of violence clearly highlights the cyclical nature of this factor of criminalization, a factor that Carol LaPrairie identifies as one of the most important in her research of inner-city Aboriginal women (45).

Various psychological factors of the colonized cultural identity of Aboriginal individuals reared on reserves also account for the vicious cycle of criminalization. Due to the history of European contact with reserves, Sangster argues, recent generations experience a liminal identity; the presence of dominant and therefore hegemonic forces instills a sense of being perpetually “civilized” (57) by mainstream (read: non-Native) society. Experiences with residential schools and social dislocation further exacerbate this sensation (Sangster, 41). Furthermore, interdependency theory suggests that the changing nature of reserve life significantly affects criminalization. John Braithwaite finds that reserves have experienced increased urbanization, the blurring of roles and responsibilities accounting for generational disparities, and decreased interdependency, a significant predictor of criminality as children reared in cultures of high interdependency experience less isolation and are therefore less likely to turn to crime (LaPrairie, 63). What LaPrairie identifies as “pathological shame” (69) further accounts for a propensity towards crime. Due to the marginalization and lack of integration of the Aboriginal population within mainstream society, pathological shame occurs frequently and often contributes to the psychological background of incarcerated individuals (LaPrairie, 69).

These unfortunate circumstances of reserve life, rooted in colonial history and paired with economic obstacles also typical of reserves (Sangster, 40), cause many registered Natives to move to ghettos upon urbanization. LaPrairie argues that the overpolicing of ghettos renders its residents vulnerable to confrontations with the law. “Overpolicing may be a response to social problems in the most marginalized city areas where more appropriate services are unavailable,” she writes. “Unfortunately, however, the end result may be the criminalization of problems such as alcoholism, homelessness, family disputes, etc.” (137). Importantly, Ross states that “individuals do not come to the attention of the criminal justice system solely on the basis of their behavior. The definition of behavior as ‘criminal’ in addition to the course of action taken in response to it, depends upon contextual features” (86) such as those described by LaPrairie, common to ghettos. Thus, individuals already subjected to the unsafe implications of ghetto life become targets for law enforcers who view such areas as problematic. Sangster writes of an exemplary case in which a woman was drunk and incarcerated simply because she was seen, poor and Native (44).

The vicious cycle of criminalization continues when, due to the public nature of ghettoized Aboriginal criminality, Aboriginal women become symbolically represented as inherently criminal. Landau analyzes case files of Aboriginal offenders that, riddled with bias, construct the offenders as having “personal problems” (194) through a “discourse of individual pathology” (194) that links First Nations with criminality. Poverty also renders a plethora of Aboriginal “problems” visible and therefore criminal (Sangster, 42), exacerbating the representation of Aboriginal women as criminal. This representation then contributes to bias in the process of policing. Thus, as a result of various sociological, psychological and historical factors, members of First Nations, especially women, are more likely than non-Native members of Canadian society to even confront the criminal justice system irrespective of actual incidents of criminality.

Once on trial, various factors further disadvantage Aboriginal women and increase the likelihood of incarceration, the severity of punishment, and the susceptibility to repeated crime. Firstly, cultural differences resulting from a neocolonial society such as Canada create a discrepancy between the values of those in power, i.e. the federal government, and those being tried by the criminal justice system, i.e., in this case, Aboriginal women. In Nunavut, for example, the obvious benefits of the Nekaneet First Nation Healing Lodge ceased to hold when policies governing the lodge shifted over time to reflect the federal correctional mentality (Monture-Angus, 3). This form of cultural imposition reflects the history of Canada’s relationship to its First Nations as “legal and moral regulation through incarceration was [historically] an integral component of colonialism” (Sangster, 59); criminal legislation serves to control behavior. The most common charge against Aboriginal women in the 1920’s and 1930’s was “vagrancy” (Sangster, 37), an arbitrary term used to arrest supposed offenders for any visible act deemed vagrant by a police officer. This historical example can be extrapolated to account for the ways in which the history of colonialism holds the Aboriginal population trapped in a vicious cycle of criminality.

Canada’s criminal justice system imposes Eurocentric values on a non-European culture. Patricia Monture-Angus argues that some of the very “foundational ideas of current correctional philosophy is…incompatible with Aboriginal cultures, law and tradition” (4). For example, Ross describes the fundamental difference between the Euro-American hierarchical, vertical system of justice and the Navajo understanding of the law, which deems all participants of society equal and thus does not operate with a dominant determinant of “truth” governing above all else (30). Dominant culture determines the very definition of crime (Sangster, 59): for example, Ojibwa communities in the 1950’s did not view drinking as a crime (Sangster, 52). In addition to determining the definition of crime, dominant culture dictates appropriate methods of punishment, raising the epistemological question of whose form of knowledge benefits whom. Ross explores the implications of dominant definitions of crime for the intersections of race, class and gender, arguing that “women are punished as much for gender-role violations as for illegal behavior” (77): studies have shown that police officers behave more leniently with females who act and appear stereotypically feminine (Ross, 78). And, because working-class, single and non-white women are perceived as less feminine (Ross, 78), the definition of criminality becomes further biased. The fact that “when the crimes are the same, Native women receive longer sentences than white women” (Ross, 89) demonstrates the actual consequences of this bias.

Racist and sexist bias in sentencing also occurs within the psychiatric discourse employed in trials for Aboriginal offenders. Because juries consider behavioral analyses in determining criminality, the cultural bias of the psychiatrists involved in cases significantly affects the assessment of Aboriginal women. Sangster explains that, often, “a woman’s silence, a means of coping with alien surroundings (and, in some cases, related to language differences), [is] read negatively as evidence of a passive personality” (49). This “evidence” can then determine the nature of an offender’s sentence. Similarly, during the rehabilitation stage in the 1950’s, Ojibwa prisoners raised in a culture with a belief in burying problems and moving forward in life failed to please Euro-American therapists who heavily emphasized the confessional nature of psychotherapy in their practices (Sangster, 50). Thus cultural differences again disadvantaged Native individuals within the criminal justice system.      

The invalidity of the classification rating scale that determines whether prisoners are placed in minimum, medium or maximum security when applied to Aboriginal women further highlights the cultural bias present in Canada’s criminal justice system. The classification rating scale uses a number of different predictive items to assess the risk that an offender will pose while incarcerated. Cheryl Marie Webster and Anthony N. Doob argue that the rating scale does not appropriately apply to women, especially Aboriginal women, and that it consequently places these women in higher security prisons than is necessary (397). Their statistical analysis of the rating scale demonstrates that its predictive validity fails when tested for the violence of Aboriginal women whose behavior in prison has been followed up (Webster and Doob, 400). Some of the scale’s items even show a zero or negative correlation with the actual behavior of Aboriginal women (Webster and Doob, 404). These women are thus “being classified according to factors that simply do not predict their behavior” (405).

Monture-Angus explains that risk assessment categories are tautological; the categories fail to predict behavior for Aboriginal women because they predetermine that Aboriginal offenders will score higher on them than non-Natives (5). For example, the scale measures community functioning when colonialism has ensured that Native communities are not fully and healthily functioning, as well as alcoholism, a common occurrence amongst the Aboriginal population (Monture-Angus, 5). Colleen A. Dell and Roger Boe, researching for the Correction Service of Canada, statistically demonstrate that Aboriginal needs and risks are significantly higher than those of non-Aboriginals, and Aboriginal prisoners therefore require different categorization. Despite such published evidence of the invalidity of the classification rating scale, the Correctional Service of Canada has yet to modify it (Webster and Doob, 405). Thus, due to colonially-imposed imbalances of power perpetuated by bias in representation, legislation and sentencing, Aboriginal women find themselves more vulnerable to longer and harsher experiences of incarceration.

The experiences of Aboriginal women in the prison system and the circumstances they face upon release further contribute to the vicious cycle of criminality, positioning them in contexts that lead to re-incarceration and the criminalization of future generations of Natives. In addition to Canadian legislation, rehabilitation programs employed within prisons are also Eurocentric. Furthermore, the programs, when acknowledging the Aboriginal population, tend to homogenize it. Kelly Hannah-Moffat examines how neoliberal ideology constructs current rehabilitation programs and finds that the discourse of “empowerment” founding this construction in fact serves the perpetuation of dominant categories of social normalcy (525). Because a category of “normal” emerges, so does a category of the “other;” this “other” is then criminalized (Hannah-Moffat, 526). Prison workers relegate prisoners who do not comply with procedures to this othered category, a category to which Aboriginal women most frequently belong. As a result, the rehabilitation programs “demonize” (Hannah-Moffat, 526) Aboriginal women. Not only does the demonization lead to stereotyping and therefore the perpetuation of dominant ideology, but demonized prisoners suffer from more “force, involuntary transfers, searches, prolonged segregation in solitary confinement and the transfer of some women to segregated units in men’s maximum security penitentiaries” (Hannah-Moffat, 527).    

Ross demonstrates how rehabilitation programs disadvantage Aboriginal women in various ways. Because of the aforementioned difficulties many Natives face in therapy programs, prison workers force the “problem” prisoners to take drugs that will control their behavior. These drugs often lead to mental breakdowns and depression, which in turn inhibits the prisoners’ ability to function optimally in education programs, thus rendering them “problematic” prisoners once again (Ross, 121). Prison workers significantly contribute to the negative experiences that Native women face while incarcerated in various ways. Racism and sexism on the part of the prison workers largely contribute to the failure of rehabilitation programs for Aboriginal women. For example, one Native woman who, encouraged to apply for college courses through the program, required assistance with her application form was ignored by the prison workers and not handed the telephone with the college called (Ross, 123). When overcoming these obstacles and successfully enrolling, the workers withheld her course materials (Ross, 123). This woman felt that “the prison staff purposely set her up to fail” (Ross, 123). Rehabilitation programs also mirror the gendered division of labor as female prisoners find it much easier to access to sewing classes than other forms of labor (Ross, 124).  

The cultural framework of rehabilitation programs, based on Eurocentric values that exclude Native ways of thinking, reflects the demonization of Aboriginal women and prison workers’ discrimination against them. Because Christianity underlies many of the therapeutic elements of rehabilitation, prisoners practicing Native religions face further oppression within the justice system. Ross argues that the use of Christian morality to “save” criminal, Native women stems from a colonial agenda (136). Native women encounter obstacles to the practicing of their spirituality and are thus denied basic, religious rights (Ross, 138). Prison workers often belittle and underprivilege Aboriginal prisoners’ religious practices through their speech and mannerisms (Ross, 139), again imposing colonial notions of normalcy and negatively affecting the benefits that prisoners could potentially reap from rehabilitation programs.

As a result of seemingly sanctioned, colonially-founded discrimination within the prison system, Aboriginal women experience mistreatment unique to this demonized category for prisoners. Testimonies (Ross, 114-115) reveal that upon incarceration, prison workers cavity search female prisoners, a procedure that often leads to rape. The processes of initiation into the rehabilitation program serve to weaken the prisoners’ emotional state through humiliation, so that they are then “ready” (115) for rehabilitation. Healthcare in rehabilitation programs can further reflect a colonial agenda: the Montana Women’s Correctional Center, for example, during the 1980’s and 1990’s, commissioned doctors to perform hysterectomies on many Aboriginal, female prisoners (Ross, 116). The doctors informed the women that they had uterine cancer or other conditions affecting the reproductive organs and were later disproved by the prisoners themselves (Ross, 117). Multiple testimonies illustrate the mistreatment of Aboriginal women in prisons as prison workers often humiliate and degrade them (Ross, 129). One such testimony reveals the vicious cycle at play within rehabilitation programs that keep Aboriginal women incarcerated for longer periods of time and in higher security prisons than is necessary. A Native woman verbally assaulted a counselor who called her a “slut” (Ross, 130) and was therefore written up and penalized. When confronted by this same counselor, the woman became upset and punched a wall, thus injuring her hand; as a result, prison workers wrote her up for self-mutilation (Ross, 131). These write-ups, clearly administered arbitrarily and often with bias, crucially influence judges’ decisions regarding the continuance of sentences. The negative experiences encountered by Native women in the prison system also contribute to depression and substance abuse, thus, paired with evidence of the limitations these women face in accessing education, they become extremely vulnerable to reentering the very circumstances that led to criminalization when finally exiting the criminal justice system.

The circumstances of reserve life, ghettoization, legislation and sentencing, and rehabilitation programs and prison life clearly produce a perpetual, vicious cycle whereby Aboriginal women find themselves constantly vulnerable to negative encounters with the criminal justice system. The roots of these circumstances clearly stand in Canada’s colonial history of genocide and erasure, a history with implications for current legislation and the sociological circumstances most First Nations communities. One possible solution for the overrepresentation of Aboriginal women in prisons is thus increased self-governance within First Nations. The Royal Commission already recommends increasing steps to self-government (Landau, 193) and Monture-Angus stresses that Aboriginal nations would greatly benefit from independent justice systems (2). LaPrairie states that self government “may assist reserves to become more economically viable, self-sufficient, self-respecting and respected components of the Canadian landscape, while at the same time, promoting the creation of more just and democratic societies” (142). Unfortunately, analyses of criminality tend to ignore the realities of colonialism; some researchers will find that a background of foster care leads to criminality, for example, then fail to consider the significant colonial history of foster care (Landau, 195).  These types of analyses also ignore gender and even appropriate colonial systems.

Evidently, an erasure of colonial issues simply produces glaring questions regarding the overrepresentation of Aboriginal women in prison. When taken into account, however, the history of colonialism sufficiently mirrors the unjust imbalances of treatment and circumstance of an already oppressed group that is subject to the constant and intricate perpetuation of its oppression through institutions of social control such as Canada’s criminal justice system.

References

Dell, Colleen A., and Roger Boe. "An Examination of Aboriginal and Caucasian Women Offender Risk and Needs Factors." Dec. 2000. Correctional Service of Canada. 16 Oct. 2007 <http://64.233.179.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:w-LPRykvkj4J:collection.nlc-bnc.ca/100/200/301/csc-scc/research_report-e/no094/r94_e.pdf+Aboriginal+women+Canada+prison>.

Hannah-Moffat, Kelly. “Prisons that Empower.” The British Journal of Criminology. 40.3(2000): 510.

Landau, Tammy C. “Plus Ça Change? ‘Correcting’ Inuit Inmates in Nunavut, Canada.” Howard Journal of Criminal Justice. 45.2 (2006): 191-207.

LaPrairie, Carol. Examining aboriginal corrections in Canada. Ottawa: Ministry of the Solicitor General, 1996.

Monture-Angus, Patricia. “Women and risk: Aboriginal women, colonialism, and correctional practices.” Canadian Woman Studies. 19.1-2(1999): 24-29.

Pate, Kim. “The jettisoning of juvenile justice?: The story of K.” Canadian Woman Studies. 20.3(2000): 165-166.

Ross, Luana. Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

"R Vs. Gladue." Canadian Legal Information Institute. 23 Apr. 1999. 16 Oct. 2007 <http://www.sfu.ca/crj/fulltext/rvgladue.pdf>.

Sangster, Joan. “Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920-1960.” The Canadian Historical Review. 80.1(1999): 32-60.

"UN Reports on Canada: Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women." For the Record. 2003. For the Record. 16 Oct. 2007 <http://www.hri.ca/fortherecordCanada/vol3/canadacedaw.htm#Report03>.

Webster, Cheryl Marie and Anthony N. Doob. “Classification without Validity or Equity: An Empirical Examination of the Custody Rating Scale for Federally Sentenced Women Offenders in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. 46.4 (2004): 395-421.

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

"Glamour” Critique and Semiotic Analysis

October 2007

The cover of the September 2007 issue of Glamour magazine proclaims, “Look and feel your sexiest at 20, 30, 40,” illustrated by the beaming cover girls Claire Danes, Queen Latifah and Mariska Hargitay. Deliberately diversifying age and race, this cover seems to convey that Glamour signifies “every woman” and therefore most North American females should readily relate to its contents. Upon closer inspection, however, Glamour appears to represent a highly specific social identity, a role with rigid normative boundaries as highlighted in one of the issue’s articles, “Am I Normal?” (244). Through the strategic use of images and advertisements, Glamour creates and reinforces a consumerist identity for its readers that socially constructs them as white, middle-class, heterosexual and pre-menopausal women with an inevitable and insatiable desire for beauty and fashion products to transform their flawed lives.

           To create Glamour readers, and therefore an audience, the magazine constructs a Glamour identity through the visual and written presence of certain bodies represented in certain ways over others. The issue’s images convey racialized representations of normality: 81% of the visible faces across editorial copy and advertisement are white, 14% are black and 5% are North Asian (notably, no other ethnicities appear). In makeup and hair sections, all models are white save the one advertising a blush for “any skin tone” (106). Furthering the privileging of whiteness, several sections emulate a nostalgic, old Hollywood glamour: in “Look at all these party Dos!” (86), for example, an excited reporter’s narration details encounters with the white, celebrity women in ball gowns pictured in the article alongside classic stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Ross (one of two black women in the entire spread).[1] In contrast, both an article about Roshaneh Zafar’s charity work in Pakistan (102) and another about female victims of the Congolese civil war (288), drastically construct non-American, suffering black bodies as the “other.”    

Images and advertisements illustrate the bodies of a Glamour identity, while the text describes the ideological situation of these bodies, primarily through the assumptions made in hailing. According to the text, Glamour women are, in addition to being white, avid consumers perpetually seeking to modify their bodies. Titles hail, “what you’ll wear next” (377), “what we all want now” (106), and apparently the Glamour woman wants material goods as a reward for working her likely corporate job (“Glam cam” asks readers, “Show us your office space!” (84)). Glamour hails, “Free! Free! Free! Best giveaway ever! No, you’re not dreaming…” (74), assuming and therefore creating an audience that inevitably and giddily desires $995 patent leather purses. The Glamour identity is constructed as one with weight “problems;” the September 2007 issue contains “calorie math” (179-194) and exercise tips to beat “muffin-top,” (184) a presumed slang term for abdominal fat. Without knowing the true sizes of its readers’ bodies, however, Glamour illustrates this particular article with a thin model pinching the fat-free skin of her midsection, thus ensuring that any body is indeed “fat” in comparison and therefore in need of the exercises.

The Glamour woman, according to the magazine’s assumptions, is heterosexual; articles such as “Men, sex, and love” (209) and “a man’s opinion” on “what’s sexy, what’s scary in bed” (222) exemplify the issue’s erasure of diverse sexualities. The Glamour identity is marriage-bound, highlighted by articles about the imminent married life (228). Finally, once married, Glamour women will “make babies” (192) as the title of a regular section suggests, and embrace the reproductive role through further consumption of maternity fashion (219, 263).    

This deftly constructed Glamour identity ultimately promotes a Western ideology of female “empowerment” through white and middle-class privilege, consumption, and adherence to traditional gendered and sexualized roles as befits patriarchy. Moreover, it conveniently serves the corresponding advertisers’ interests, thus perpetuating the cycle of consumption and desire. Editorial copy strategically coincides with adjacent ads; for example, an Olay skin care ad faces the article “Would you risk your health for clear skin?” (132) and the Health section contains medicalized ads for “stress less” skin products (181) and Botox (185). Similarly, the September 2007 issue’s theme of “How to Look Younger Longer” (194) aggressively promotes a fear of aging integral to the anti-aging product advertisements rampant throughout Glamour.

Not only does the Glamour identity feed the advertisers’ markets, but the magazine’s advertisements in turn guide the reader through an appropriate reading of the magazine itself. The celebratory tone of the issue’s “Life at 20, 30, 40” (253-263) echoes the “pro-aging” rhetoric of Dove’s well-known “true beauty” campaign. Glamour interviews famous women about their secrets for happiness (notably, this selection equates financial success through celebrity with happiness), yet this embracing of wisdom is undercut by blatant anxiety surrounding the task and importance of “looking young” in addition to gaining enlightenment with age. The beauty advertisements weaved through the section thus create a tension in the reader whereby happiness through age and wisdom is not truly achieved until she defies her physical age using the promoted methods. Thus, the ads restore the solidity of the constructed Glamour identity as one preoccupied with appearance, and consequently remind the Glamour reader of her consumerist task.

Similarly, advertisements guide the reader away from a potentially threatening reading of Eve Ensler’s haunting article about the atrocities endured by women in the Congolese civil war (288). Where black bodies become victimized others, Glamour suddenly erases the white, privileged bodies from its adjacent ads. Instead, a bright, colorful picture of Havaiana sandals matches the patterned skirts of the dancing Congolese women (291) and a tub of “bare minerals makeup” dusted on an earthy, brown surface faces a Congolese woman sitting in a bare room (293). Thus, advertisements mitigate the danger of Ensler’s article, rendering invisible the Western whiteness implicit in this African, suffering blackness.

The successful packaging of Glamour-identified readers in conjunction with their corporation-friendly consumption habits, assisted by the interaction between editorial and advertisement copy, results in a pervasive hegemonic compliance with unequal power relations. Readers consent to the inequalities perpetuated by Glamour’s underlying dominant ideology because of the pleasure promised by the magazine through its commodity fetishization. Karl Marx coined this phrase, explaining that “under a capitalist system…commodities come to stand in for relationships” (O’Brien and Szeman, 17). This phenomenon drives Glamour as, through a second order of signification (Van Zoonen, 76), consumption allows a reader to “feel sexy” (152) or “love [her] looks” (130), thus garnering affective value from material goods. Ultimately, the hegemonic power of Glamour magazine resides in its ability to visually represent and commodify a socially dominant identity and to suggest that, if mimicked through appropriate consumptive habits, adopting it results in the pleasure-abundant world of sheer happiness seen in the visible and endlessly smiling women of Glamour.

 Through the use of semiotic analysis, an advertisement on page 397 of the September 2007 issue of Glamour exemplifies the ways in which meaning is produced through structures of signification. The ad, promoting Crystal Light, a diet product in the form of flavored powder to add to water or in already bottled form, is visually simplistic and relatively two-dimensional. Against a bright-yellow background, a woman in an off-the-shoulder, ruffled, short and orange-red dress appears to be captured mid-dance, as she tosses her head and sways her hips. The image crops the woman at nose-level and knee-level, emphasizing her body in the dress. Across the model’s pink-belted waist the words “pump it up” appear in bright blue. Beneath this large text, the slogan reads, “What a little color does for your attitude, Crystal Light does for your water.” A few more lines of text describe the product next to three small images of the drink.

Considering the immediate denotations of the signs present in this ad, or the first order of signification, as described by Van Zoonen (76), the ad conveys lively music. In American slang, “pump it up” commonly refers to the volume of a sound system. Furthermore, the movement in the model’s hair and dress suggests that she is dancing, and the style of the dress itself resembles Mexican clothing, associated with widely appropriated, “hot,” sexualized Latin American dance. The reference to color, paired with the model’s dress and the tropical flavors of the drink (lemon and citrus), denotes summertime; the model wears a color typically promoted in summer fashion, as Glamour readers would recognize, and the fruity flavors hint towards tropical vacation destinations. Moreover, the red, orange and yellow color scheme of this ad identifiably reads as “hot colors”. Finally, the ad denotes success of the product itself; marketed for women attempting to lose weight, the model is appropriately very thin.

Upon further examination, the Crystal Light ad carries connotations through a “second-order signifying system” (Van Zoonen, 76). Significantly, the ad’s model is a black woman. Paired with the Latin denotations, she then becomes a racialized figure representing the generalized exotic in various ways. Her frizzy, loose curls represent a “natural” blackness unlike the dyed, straightened or smoothed hair of black female celebrities in America adhering to a “white bias” (Mercer, 250) for beauty. Furthermore, the outdated and costume-like dress with clashing accessories in complete discordance with the fashion rules prescribed throughout the magazine allude to a reference system of timelessness contained within an exoticized culture (i.e., one could wear this outfit on vacation in Mexico or the Caribbean). Lastly, the model dances, connoting a wild free-spiritedness. The exoticisms and configuration of anachronistic space (a conceptual invention created through the process whereby “geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time” (McClintock, 40)) signified by the ad therefore allude to a system of colonial relations of power.

Van Zoonen describes this system as one in which “imagining the peoples of the colonies as sexually voracious and insatiable legitimized Europe's colonial enterprise as a project of 'civilization' instead of economic exploitation” (80-81). The connotations of the Crystal Light ad mirror such racialized representation, carrying implications for neocolonial relations; the ad’s model herself is commodified as “color.” The slogan reads “what a little color does for your attitude…” when in fact a great deal of color appears on the bright page. The colored background and colored dress frame a woman belonging to a socially prescribed “colored” race. Therefore the “you” to whom the new attitude belongs is posited as not black; “you” can be read as the white Glamour reader, whose whiteness is as invisible as the transparent water that Crystal Light and this colorful woman temporarily fill for fun and flavor. Here, the racialized history of black bodies is reduced to a commodity: flavor (22 to be exact).

In addition to racializing the advertisement’s model, the Crystal Light ad produces sexualized connotations. Annette Kuhn’s discussion of pornography describes the dehumanizing practice whereby the photograph fragments the female subject and reduces her to mere body parts (274). The Crystal Light ad reproduces this pornographic trope: we cannot see the model’s face other than her open mouth, and her torso gains prominence by removing everything below her thighs from sight. Kuhn adds that “pornography is preoccupied with what it regards as the signifiers of sexual difference” (274). Again, this ad mimics pornographic photography: the model’s body position and hyper-feminine clothing accentuate her thighs, curves, and throat. The ad’s slogans run across her pelvis and the elongated, rectangular Crystal Light products cluster on her upper thigh, alluding to phallic penetration. Furthermore, the two-dimensionality of the background and exclusion of the model’s feet renders her position in space unclear: she may not even be vertical. Kuhn argues that the spectacle of female sexuality created by such photographic techniques ensures that “porn places the masculine on the side of the subject, the feminine on the side of the object, of enquiry” (275).    

The interconnected connotative meanings suggested through the advertisement’s signification coincide with the dominant ideology put forth by Glamour magazine. This ideology depends on the otherization inherent in binaries, particularly that of women and people of “color”. Judith Williamson aptly writes:

We are the culture that knows no “other,” and yet can offer myriad others, all of which seem to reflect, as if they were merely surfaces, our own supposed natural and universal qualities. To have something “different” captive in our midst reassures us of the liberality of our own system and provides a way of re-presenting real difference in tamed form…We do not like real Others but need to construct safe ones out of the relics of the Others we have destroyed. (116)

Thus, the signification of this Crystal Light ad allows for a dominant reading that maintains “safe” relations of power and difference. Given the ideology promoted through an advertisement-informed reading of Glamour magazine, this particular advertisement lends itself to the creation of meaning integral to a patriarchal social order that privileges the white, middle-class, heterosexual population.      

References

Kuhn, Annette. (1995). Lawless Seeing. In Gail Dines and Jean Humez (Eds.), Gender,

Race and Class in Media (pp. 271-278). Sage.

Leive, Cynthia, ed. Glamour Sept. 2007.

McClintock, Anne. (1995). The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism. In her

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (pp. 21-

61). New York and London: Routledge.

Mercer, Kobena. (1990). Black Hair/ Style Politics. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. T.

Minh-ha and C. West (Eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (pp. 247-264). New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and M.I.T.

O'Brien, Susie and Imre Szeman. (2004). Popular Culture: A User's Guide. Scarborough:

Nelson.

Van Zoonen, Liesbet. (1994). Feminist Media Studies. Sage.

Williamson, Judith. (1986). Woman is an Island. In Tania Modleski (Ed.), Studies in

Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (pp. 99-118). Bloomington: Indiana UP.

[1] See pages 118, 323-335 for more examples of “classic American” nostalgia

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

The Role of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” in the Women’s Movement

April 2007

“My vagina, my vagina. Well…It wants everything”. Each time that I delivered the final line of “My Angry Vagina”, my body filled with warm breath and tears, as though I were being flooded with the palpable energy of a dark theatre full of women and men supporting and reveling in The Vagina Monologues with all their hearts. For the cast of the 2007 production of the Monologues, the collective empowerment surrounding V-Day inspired pride, self-love, sisterhood and activism which changed each of us in profound ways. The glory of three successful performances of The Vagina Monologues was slightly tainted, however, after the university newspaper published an article chiding this year’s production for its inclusion of a male director. Tensions and divisions amongst cast members debating the matter revealed that beneath the shell of sorority created through the experience, there were fundamental differences between each woman. We were divided by political views, definitions of feminism, and personal experiences.

           The conflict, following an otherwise extraordinarily positive experience, highlights how The Vagina Monologues can be liberating in many different ways. As with the women’s movement, the commonality of “sisterhood” or “womanhood” does not suffice to address the diverse perspectives and needs of women. The reality of this fact complicates the reputation of The Vagina Monologues as a “feminist classic” (Bell and Reverby, 3).

           The Vagina Monologues has undoubtedly been a feminist success with significant contributions to the women’s movement. Written by Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues has served as the center of the V-Day movement since 1998. As described by the movement’s website:

V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls...Through V-Day campaigns, local volunteers and college students produce annual benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues to raise awareness and funds for anti-violence groups within their own communities. In 2006, over 2700 V-Day benefit events are taking place by volunteer activists in the U.S. and around the world, educating millions of people about the reality of violence against women and girls (www.vday.org).

 Ensler’s play has therefore served as a tool for activism, awareness-raising, and empowerment, rendering the Monologues consistent with and beneficial to the women’s movement.                  

The Vagina Monologues follows a tradition of feminist theatre in the women’s movement. Inspired by radical theatre traditions from the 1960’s, feminist theatre seeks “to deepen the commitment of feminists and to win non-feminists to their point of view. Conversion tactics, which begin with consciousness raising, are subtle” (Leavitt, 94). The consciousness-raising ability of feminist theatre was instrumental to the emergence of rape as a feminist issue in the 1970’s; “the process was often described as bringing women out of isolation, making them aware of larger implications of their situation, encouraging them to recognize and interpret it as cultural and political, and working from there for change” (Canning, 153). By the 1990’s, ending violence against women had become a prominent feminist goal, but the success of V-Day and Ensler’s play, from 1998 to 2007, illustrates that feminist theatre is still integral to the development of the women’s movement.    

In this paper, I argue that The Vagina Monologues is an important example of how successful feminist art projects fuel the women’s movement. Furthermore, I will critically examine the play’s limitations from a feminist perspective and the ways in which these problems reflect struggles and key debates surrounding the movement today.

As a feminist play, The Vagina Monologues has been successful at activist and ideological levels. Eve Ensler writes that “in order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered” (Davis and Womack, 140). Ensler’s belief reflects both the goals and outcomes of her play. The V-Day movement, named one of Worth Magazine’s “100 Best Charities” in 2001 (www.vday.org), has made monumental progress in raising money for and awareness about violence against women as a global issue. According to the movement’s website, 81 countries around the world now participate in V-Day, and The Vagina Monologues is performed in multiple languages. Money raised is donated to organizations from grassroots to international and local to global. “In eight years, the V-Day movement has raised over [$30] million” (www.vday.org).  

The many accomplishments of The Vagina Monologues as part of the V-Day movement include “[opening] the first shelters for women in Egypt and Iraq, [sponsoring] annual workshops and three national campaigns in Afghanistan, [and convening] the ‘Confronting Violence’ conference of South Asian women leaders” (www.vday.org). University productions of The Vagina Monologues donate proceeds to local women’s shelters and organizations aimed at dealing with violence against women. As a highly activist project, The Vagina Monologues instigates profound change in this area, rendering the play a key artistic project of the women’s movement today.

In addition to the Monologue’s monetarily activist accomplishments, the play raises awareness about various feminist issues, ironically opening up dialogue about problems addressed by the women’s movement. The Vagina Monologues consists of, predictably, a series of monologues about women’s experiences with their vaginas, based on interviews conducted by Ensler. The monologues explore sexuality, abuse, selfhood, menstruation, masturbation and other “womanly” experiences. The play’s initial shock value originated from the title and content alone; The Vagina Monologues publicly discusses traditionally taboo topics surrounding women’s bodies by bringing important and otherwise intimate experiences to the stage. Davis and Womack argue that “Ensler exploits the play’s performative components to confront her audience with radically different ways of thinking about…the female body in contemporary life” (142). Consequently, as Michele L. Hammers argues, the Monologues challenges the public versus private dichotomy instrumental to an oppressive, patriarchal society (6). By acknowledging topics such as domestic violence in the public sphere, these problems become inextricable from the political structures of society.

Furthermore, Hammers explains that “not only does [The Vagina Monologues] begin to (re)construct the body as properly public, but also [it] begins to construct the body and the lived, everyday experiences with which it is associated as essential to a properly configured public” (16). Eve Ensler argues that simply giving women permission to discuss their vaginas is the first step towards uncovering violence against women (Kranz, 3). Thus, Ensler’s play serves as a challenge to dominant, sexist discourses that maintain women’s experiences—struggles and repressed potential—locked in the private sphere.  

The Vagina Monologues further serves the women’s movement by acting as a catalyst for empowerment at an individual level. As a typically accessible theatre production, the Monologues reaches millions of women and “encourages [them] to alter the way they think and feel about their bodies” (Hammers, 15). An audience member attending the play will see many stories in which a woman gains empowerment through a newfound awareness and appreciation of her body. According to Hammers, the monologue “The Flood” teaches the audience how to overcome feelings of taboo associated with the vagina (8). Similarly, the monologue “Vagina Workshop” “makes an association between the ability to generate orgasms with the more general agency of leading one's life and ‘choosing direction’” (Hammers, 12).

           The witnessing of these stories inspires those attending the performance to seek similar experiences for themselves. Davis and Womack argue that Ensler “empowers us via the [stories] to assume responsibility for our own sexuality and reminds us of our own capacity for initiating and celebrating self-transformation in our lives” (144). Thus, The Vagina Monologues, for many, serves as a personal doorway into the women’s movement. Ultimately, as Bell and Reverby argue, personal empowerment and collective political action are mutually beneficial (19), and The Vagina Monologues fosters this interplay in significant ways.  

           Finally, Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues has successfully opened its doors to different groups of people in accordance with the evolving ideals of the women’s movement. While mainstream media ignored the prominence of transgender murders and relevant issues, The Vagina Monologues embraced this once-silenced group of women; Ensler added a monologue about transgendered women (titled “They Beat the Girl out of My Boy”) to the Monologues in 2003, and 2004 marked the first all-transgendered performance of The Vagina Monologues (Beatty, 2). Furthermore, Ensler’s play invites men to participate in the quest for women’s liberation (Davis and Womack, 147). One male audience member reflects that the Monologues “gets people who ordinarily wouldn’t even think about women’s issues to come to the play and most of them leave with a new understanding and a lot more respect for the experiences of women in our society” (Davis and Womack, 149).

           Through its activism, ideological challenging, community outreach and inclusivity, Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues thus exemplifies the propitious use of feminist theatre as a tool for the women’s movement. Feminist scholarship, however, provides important critique of the play, as it presents certain ideological limitations which reflect conflicts within the women’s movement. The Vagina Monologues supports some essentialist and colonial discourses. Furthermore, despite its activist intentions, scholars question the true nature of the so-called “empowering” effects of the play.  

           Kim Q. Hall describes a negative experience that one woman had watching The Vagina Monologues:

Many of us intersex people and our friends, family members, and allies went to see the play in the past, and came out upset, hurt, angry, and/or in tears, walking through a crowd of women talking to each other about how empowered they felt. We felt invisible, it presented horror stories about genital mutilation occurring in other continents, as if we do not experience them here (7).

 This testimony highlights a problem with Ensler’s play, which, according to Hall, is largely based on “the ability of the normative vagina to appropriate different women's experiences and yet still produce the same story of the ‘normal’ female body as a body with a vagina” (10). By equating “woman” with “vagina,” The Vagina Monologues “[reduces] female identity to a biological essence” (Hammers, 13) and excludes the experiences of women whose oppression stems from this harmfully essentialist claim. The play fails to entirely reconceptualize the definition of and space for “women’s bodies” in society; therefore it perpetuates the problematic biological discourse that the women’s movement seeks to deconstruct.    

This biological essentialism poses further problems. Hammers argues that the play “risks this reduction in the context of larger discourses that continue to treat the female body as shameful or problematically sexualized” (13). Thus, The Vagina Monologues risks defeating its own attempt to restore agency within women’s sexuality. To increase its political and ideological effectiveness and therefore prevent experiences such as that of the abovementioned intersexed woman, the play must further challenge and subvert dominant discourses surrounding sexuality. Hall argues that “in order to effectively resist patriarchal devaluations of vaginas and women, The Vagina Monologues will also have to challenge…the belief that the vagina is an essential part of normal female embodiment” (18). Ultimately, such criticisms of Ensler’s play reflect debates within the women’s movement surrounding the potential advantages and disadvantages of accepting some categorization of “woman.”   

       As an American play representing V-Day globally, The Vagina Monologues also mirrors what critics of the Western women’s movement identify as colonialist discourse. The play is inherently susceptible to this criticism, as Ensler, the white playwright, holds the power to create the identities of the Third World characters in the Monologues through her writing. These identities emerge “as oppressed victims of a despotic patriarchy in need of support and salvation by their more emancipated sisters in the West” (Bell and Reverby, 15). In addition to her picture of Third World women, Ensler’s “Not-So-Happy Fact” about genital mutilation excludes references to occurrences of this practice in North America. Hall argues that “because Ensler’s discussion…presents a West that has moved beyond this practice while the non-Western world is construed as remaining trapped in a more patriarchal past, her account contributes to colonialist conceptions of non-Western women” (5).

           Finally, The Vagina Monologues’ title as a “feminist classic” (Bell and Reverby, 3) is called into question when one examines the actual effects of the play on women; it may not be empowering in the manner most pertinent to the women’s movement. As the foundation of the V-Day movement, Ensler’s play aspires to promote activism against the oppressive structures of patriarchy. Bell and Reverby argue that this goal is overshadowed by the Monologues’ emphasis on sexual liberation. The play includes a “Happy Fact” about the pleasure power of the clitoris which is repeated throughout the performance. Bell and Reverby question whether this is “for improving individual women's sex lives or for helping women make the connection between their failure to know and speak about their bodies and the causes of the constructed ignorance about sexual pleasure and violence” (8); it is most likely the former.

           While the sexual empowerment of women is crucial to the women’s movement, Ensler is criticized for detracting from the play’s activist message. As Bell and Reverby state, “we worry whether the empowerment that comes from a contemporary ‘speak-out’ using Ensler's interpretation of other women's experiences translates into a larger political assault on the structures of oppression throughout the world” (6). Considering this and aforementioned concerns, it is clear that The Vagina Monologues’ usefulness to the women’s movement is variable and complicated by differing feminist agendas.

           These issues clearly demand revisions of the play. Eve Ensler’s addition of “They Beat the Girl out of My Boy” to The Vagina Monologues addresses some of the criticisms that the play is biologically essentialist and exclusive in its definition of womanhood, and therefore demonstrates the self-reflexive and adaptable nature of this feminist project. Perhaps Ensler will continue to make changes to her play in the future so that it can evolve to meet the needs of the women’s movement. Conflict is inevitable, as my experience with The Vagina Monologues demonstrates. In addition to the tensions between cast members that I witnessed following the supposed controversy of a male director, I observed various personal outcomes for the women involved. One woman was inspired to begin working with a local women’s shelter; another discovered masturbation and had her first orgasm; I bridged the gap between two passions, theatre and feminism, and thus gained insight into a valuable tool at my disposal for future activist endeavors within the women’s movement. The experience was therefore empowering in a multitude of ways.

           The diversity of women’s experiences illustrates that feminist scholarship is inextricable from our understanding of feminist art projects such as The Vagina Monologues; maintaining a critical perspective ensures that feminist theatre works with the women’s movement. This is essential for, as this paper has shown, feminist theatre is invaluable to the movement. Any experience with The Vagina Monologues introduces a particular feeling into one’s life; as a Monologues veteran writes, “that feeling follows you around and gently nudges you and says: every day, your vagina deserves to take up space. It deserves to tell its truth” (Howard, 4). The power of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues thus demonstrates how, in the theatre, the women’s movement is alive and electric and therefore capable of sparking profound social change.

 References

Beatty, Christine. "Vagina History." Transgender Tapestry 106 (2004): 29-31.

Bell, Susan E., and Susan M. Reverby. "Vaginal Politics: Tensions and Possibilities in The Vagina Monologues." Women's Studies International Forum 28.5 (2005): 1-25.

Canning, Charlotte. Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 1-271.

Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack. Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 1-198.

Hall, Kim Q. "Queerness, Disability, and the Vagina Monologues." Hypatia 20.1 (2005): 1-23.

Hammers, Michele L. "Talking About "Down There": the Politics of Publicizing the Female Body Through the Vagina Monologues." Women's Studies in Communication 29.2 (2006): 1-22.

Howard, Sheena. "A Dialogue on the Monologue." Herizons 15.3 (2002): 1-4.

Kranz, Rachel. "Going Public." Women's Review of Books 17 (2000): 1-5.

Leavitt, Dinah L. Feminist Theatre Groups. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1980. 1-153.

"V-Day: Until the Violence Stops." VDAY. 2007. V-Day. 1 Apr. 2007 <http://www.vday.org/main.html>.

[womens-studies-degree-blog]

Africanism in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”

March 2007

In her essay “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,” Toni Morrison discusses the concept of Africanism as an understanding of blackness central to American culture. She argues that a constructed Africanist presence exists in American and Eurocentric literature and serves various artistic purposes. Denied an individual history, this Africanist presence manifests itself in the construction of a white American identity: the juxtaposition creates a binary conceptualization of subject. Morrison explains that “Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny” (52). Thus, in literature, the Africanist presence is constructed and employed as a misrepresented Other inextricable from the meaning created by the subject (the white American man).

           The dynamics of Africanism in American literature carry negative implications. Morrison argues that the valuation process “has led to the popular and academic notion that racism is a “natural,” if irritating, phenomenon” (7). According to Morrison, however, these implications are masked by the naturalized manner in which Africanism appears in literature. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest demonstrates this phenomenon. In the story, a group of shipwrecked Italian noblemen arrive on an island inhabited by Prospero, a former Italian duke possessing magical powers, his daughter, Miranda, and his two servants: Ariel, a spirit, and Caliban, the only remaining native to the island, described as a “savage.” Using his powers, Prospero manipulates events on the island so that, ultimately, he is granted his dukedom once again, Miranda will marry the king’s son, and they will thereby return to Italy.

The Tempest allows for an examination of Africanism in European literature as the character Caliban represents an African people colonized by the European. The relationship between Caliban and Prospero exemplifies the many uses of the Africanist presence in European literary representation. During lines 310-378 of Act I, scene ii of The Tempest, Caliban argues with Prospero and Miranda about his worthiness as an independent human being. Caliban speaks of his native rights to the land, and Prospero and Miranda scold him in return, reminding Caliban that they civilized him. They argue that not only is he ungrateful, but he attempted to rape Miranda, and is therefore unquestionably indebted to the pair as a slave. An examination of this passage through Morrison’s conceptualization of Africanism reveals that, as a character, Caliban is ultimately denied agency and serves primarily to construct the character of Prospero in various ways.

Despite Caliban’s prominence in The Tempest and his extensive speech throughout the text, the character is denied true agency in subtle ways. In the Act I, scene ii passage, Prospero introduces Caliban immediately as a slave. Although he is a “villain” (I,ii,313), Prospero and Miranda discuss, he “does make our fire, fetch in our wood, and serves in offices that profit us” (I,ii,314-16). Caliban is also readily associated with stereotypes surrounding black savagery, as he is accused of raping Miranda (I,ii,350-1). Thus before Caliban even appears he is reduced to a representation of an Africanist bodily schema. In Frantz Fanon’s discussion of bodily schema in “Black Skin, White Masks,” he reflects: “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics” (112). Fanon’s conceptualization of bodily schema illustrates that a black body can serve as nothing more than a site for representation. In this passage of The Tempest, it is evident through Prospero’s introduction that Caliban serves as this site. Therefore his body and, consequently, himself are denied agency.

Shakespeare’s point of view in this passage further evidences the absence of Caliban’s agency. Caliban voices his opinion: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak’st from me” (I,ii,334-335). Nonetheless, the protagonists devalue his opinion through mockery and the power to define Caliban; Prospero and Miranda name him “lying slave” (I,ii,348), “abhorred slave” (I,ii,354) and “hagseed” (I,ii,368), and they decide when he exits and enters. Furthermore, the language spoken by all characters is that of the colonizer, exemplifying the invisibility of Caliban’s history. Thus, despite Caliban’s opinions, the narration does not ultimately belong to the slave character. As Morrison reflects in her analysis of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, “this Africanist presence is permitted speech only to reinforce the slaveholders’ ideology” (28). Denied his agency, Caliban serves this purpose as an Africanist presence.

The character of Caliban also serves the construction of Prospero, the protagonist, through a fundamentally colonial relationship. In her discussion of Africanism, Morrison argues that romantic literature explores European fears and anxieties surrounding the desire for freedom. These anxieties appear in the formation of new colonies such as America or Prospero’s island, as there exists a “terror of human freedom—the thing [the colonizers covet] most of all” (Morrison, 37). Therefore Eurocentric romance employs slave identities as both a site for these conflicts to be played out and an un-free presence to highlight the freedom of the master. In The Tempest, Caliban’s slave status posits Prospero as master.

Prospero appears to need validation as a ruler; he possesses magical powers yet still needs a slave. Anne McClintock argues that the leaders of imperial “discovery” suffer from “the fear of being engulfed by the unknown [which is] projected onto colonized peoples as their determination to devour the intruder whole” (27). Prospero’s words to Caliban exemplify this relation; he spurns, “I have used thee, filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged thee in mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate the honor of my child” (I,ii,348-51). This accusation highlights Prospero’s fear of Caliban’s violence as well as the reassurance of his power over the slave.

In addition to validating Prospero as a master, Caliban’s presence serves to illustrate Prospero as a worthy and superior ruler. Shakespeare employs Prospero’s scolding commands towards Caliban to illustrate his capacity to rule, a masculine quality not effectively revealed through his caring relationship with his daughter. Because only four people inhabit the island, Caliban then serves to convey to the reader that Prospero is a man of great power: as Caliban states when exiting the scene, “I must obey. His art is of such power” (I,ii,375).

Morrison argues that the Africanist presence serves convenient purposes. She states that “it was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity” (44). In this manner, Africanism in Shakespeare’s The Tempest serves to construct and validate both the agency and worthiness of the colonial master. As an Africanist presence, Caliban literally and literarily serves Prospero, the ruler of the island.

References

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles L. Markmann. New York: Grove P, 1967.

McClintock, Anne. "The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism." Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 21-61.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

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Theoretical foundations of feminist research

March 2007

           Feminist research differs from conventional research in many ways, beginning with its theoretical approach. Feminist researchers criticize positivism, which is inherent in most traditional research. Positivist research approaches research questions assuming that there is an objective and real “Truth,” and that this truth must be uncovered by empirical studies that will find “evidence” for these truths. Feminists criticize this notion, stating there is no such thing as an essential truth. According to feminists, knowledge is socially constructed; societal power relations affect even the construction of knowledge, which is normally deemed as uncontestable. Feminist researchers approach research considering hegemonic processes. Thus, the complication of the positivistic notion of Truth is a distinctive element of feminist research.

           In contrast to traditional notions of Truth, which feminists argue have been determined by those in power, feminist researchers raise the epistemological issue of who can know, arguing that women’s knowledge has been excluded from dominant discourses. Therefore feminist research posits women as knowers. Sandra Harding discusses the distinguishing elements of feminist research, arguing that women must be regarded as agents of knowledge. In addition to positing women as knowers, feminists consider the impact of individual positionalities on research. While conventional research may simply regard subjects as subjects, feminist research acknowledges the biases potentially inherent in researchers’ interpretations and in participants’ accounts because of that person’s age, race, class, gender, sexual identity, etc. and his or her consequent experiences, and accounts for these biases in interpretation. Narayan’s discussion of nonwestern feminism examines how these positionalities render the research process more complex, as there are no simplistic understandings of reality. The acknowledgement of biases and complexities is an advantage of feminist research.

           Because positionalities vary, feminist researchers consider women’s experiences and subjectivity. In his discussion of feminist survey research, Smith highlights how feminist research includes more subjectivity by broadening definitions (like “violence against women”), using open-ended questions and multi-dimensional measures in order to avoid excluding certain experiences and subjective understandings of reality in the research design.

           Feminist research employs every type of methodology in order to gain an understanding of a particular phenomenon. It uses both quantitative and qualitative methods, considering the strengths and limitations of each. As Greaves, Wylie et al. state, “the dialectical movement between a systemic and an individual level of understanding experience is crucial…to feminist research” (322).

           Feminist research carries many advantages. Because it challenges the production of knowledge, it also challenges dominant views and understandings of reality that may be oppressive and therefore harmful (e.g., sexism). Furthermore, because it is multi-dimensional, employing both the qualitative and the quantitative, feminist research is more thorough than conventional research and more self-reflexive. This self-reflexivity is essential to research, as it acknowledges the vastness of human error and barriers to understanding. Moreover, feminist research challenges the category “woman,” opening up dialogue about the complexities of experiences within this supposed category.

           The emphasis that feminist research places on subjectivity also benefits its subjects. In Hill-Collins’ discussion of black feminist thought, she argues that validating subjective experiences allows oppressed groups such as black women to resist dehumanization and to reject internalized oppression (an otherwise unapproachable prospect).

           Smith’s discussion of feminist research on violence against women illustrates the various advantages of feminist research over conventional research. Because census research on the issue distributed surveys asking questions implying narrow definitions of violence against women, and the approach assumed that women have a clear understanding of the definitions and would easily offer information about deeply personal and traumatic experiences, results were limited and presented skewed data. Consequently, violence against women was understood as a smaller problem than it truly is. With feminist approaches, a broader understanding was achieved. Smith advocates “the importance of asking questions that allow for the possibility that responses may not fall neatly into survey researcher’s preestablished categories” (121) as an example of an advantage of feminist research.

           Various problems and contradictions arise within feminist research. When studying “women,” researchers might adopt a biological essentialist view in assuming that there is a female way of knowing. Harding’s article challenges this notion, arguing that, again, positionalities must be considered. While feminist research strives to include women where they have traditionally been excluded, simply “adding women” is insufficient. The “category” of woman is as diverse as the category of human, and feminist research must be careful to avoid homogenizing women and equating women with the feminist project.

           Similarly, we must not acknowledge feminist knowledge as more “truthful,” regardless of double vision. Narayan describes double vision as an epistemic advantage of critical insight whereby “the dominated group (for instance, women) must acquire some fluency with [the practices of the dominant groups which govern a society] in order to survive in that society” (265). Narayan examines the problems with this notion, arguing that a person possessing “double vision” may suffer from a lack of fluency in both practices. Thus, the strengths and limitations of feminists’ “double vision” must be considered in order to acknowledge these contradictions of feminist research.

           Feminist research also has the potential problem of granting experiential authority too much value. As Kitzinger argues, no experience is a-theoretical and therefore we must consider the interplay between experience and theory. Ultimately, feminist research might contradict itself by assigning differential valuation to things like women’s experience, when it must remain aware of anti-positivist claim that there is no essential “Truth.”  

CITATIONS MISSING

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No Laughing Matter: Problems with Research on Sex and Gender

February 2007

           The BBC’s international news serves as a popular media outlet catering to the educated, middle-class masses. Its health section, in making science accessible to the layman, reports on studies such as that conducted by Reiss et al. in 2005. “Sex differences in brain activation elicited by humor” (Reiss et al., 2005), conducted at Stanford University, appears in a national scientific journal. Rooted in the scientific method of experimentation, this study offers speculations for the world of neuroscience. Its methodology, however, combined with the BBC’s translation of its results, poses important questions concerning the social production of knowledge. According to Reiss et al.’s study, the results “indicate sex-specific differences in neural responses to humor with implications for sex-based disparities in the integration of cognition and emotion” (2005:1).  In other words, the study claims that males and females process humor differently in the brain, and these processes might account for sex differences in mood-disorders such as depression. The BBC’s “Gender divide in getting the joke” (2005), in turn, claims that Reiss et al.’s research has revealed various areas of the brain which are “more likely to be activated by women” when appreciating humor.

           Reiss et al. find that there is a moderate difference between males’ and females’ humor processing; while females show more activity in certain areas of the brain, the system for processing humor is largely the same across sexes (2005). “Gender divide” reports these findings with greater certainty and emphasis on a distinct “divide” (2005). Citing Reiss et al.’s scientific evidence (brain scans of men and women looking at several cartoons), the news article slightly infers explanations for the findings: if women’s language centers are activated when reading a cartoon, the article reads, women “place a greater emphasis on the language of humor” (“Gender divide”, 2005) and if executive functioning centers are activated, women “[employ] a more analytical approach” (2005) to jokes. These biological explanations echo Reiss et al.’s conclusions of their study. While the scientists do not attempt to explain the differences they encounter, the underlying assumption is that the “truth” of their results would ensure that, biologically, that is simply how men and women’s brains are.

           The exchange between the scientific “certainty” surrounding Reiss et al.’s research and the BBC’s seemingly unbiased report of it for the general population exemplifies what Caplan and Caplan identify as typical issues in sex and gender research (1999). Various methodological errors in Reiss et al.’s study threaten the validity of its claims regarding sex difference. Furthermore, the BBC’s inaccurate representation of these claims in its “Gender divide” article highlights the problematic, dichotomous implications that such reporting holds for the mass production of knowledge.

           The list of methodological flaws in Reiss et al.’s study begins with its very intent. As Caplan and Caplan note, no scientific experiment is truly objective (1999:22). Reiss et al. approach their research with the premise that differences between the sexes certainly exist. “The long trip to Mars or Venus,” they write, “is hardly necessary to see that men and women often perceive the world differently” (Reiss et al., 2005:1). Given this assumption, the researchers ask: what is this difference? Why is it significant? Thus, the scientists already assume that seeking out and explaining differences between the sexes holds some importance. The language used in Reiss et al.’s discussion illustrates this desire for understanding difference: they find that “reward coding provides an attractive model to explain sex differences” (2005:10 [emphasis added]).

           The researchers also bring with them established “theories” on sex brain differences, such as female dominance in left-lateralized regions (i.e., language and emotion processes, as opposed to right visuospatial activity) (Reiss et al., 2005:1). Such assumptions, which may not even be true (Caplan and Caplan, 1999:93), infest the research design with biases regarding the operation of gender in our society. These biases can create a domino effect for how results are ultimately interpreted and, later, represented.

           Another methodological concern appears in the generation of data. Reiss et al.’s research design quantifies various arbitrary and subjective elements, rendering the scientific validity of the study’s results highly questionable. Firstly, the study deals with humor, assuming that funniness is a fixed variable to be tested. The study fails to address the numerous cultural and social considerations to be made regarding the definition of humor, thus posing the risk of experimenter bias. The design does not specify who selected the original cartoons to be rated, and furthermore, employing a small selection of people to rate the cartoons, as the researchers have done (Reiss et al., 2005:3), does not ensure that the definition of “funny” will apply across barriers such as gender, race and class. The style and content of the cartoons could also serve as confounding variables in the experiment, as their supposed “humor” might hold implications for gender stereotypes and expectations.

           Secondly, participants use a 1-to-10 scale to rate the funniness of the cartoons (Reiss et al., 2005:3). Reiss et al. use the subjective ratings to “parametrically covary humor intensity with associated linear changes in blood oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal intensity” (2005:3). This likely skews the data and renders results unreliable: because of differences in how people subjectively interpret their appreciation of humor, quantitative comparisons of subjective ratings with the objective measure of BOLD signal intensity are not valid.

           In addition to Reiss et al.’s experimental design flaws, the size of the sample used nearly negates the entire study: twenty people are tested. Thus, the data can produce very little statistical validity, as any noted differences between ten men and ten women could easily be coincidence. As Caplan and Caplan note, “the larger the sample, the more accurate your results are likely to be” (1999:27).  

           Furthermore, a sample of twenty participants cannot accurately represent the population at large. Reiss et al.’s design suggests a relatively homogenous sample: the people recruited to preliminarily rate the cartoons were “of similar age and background to the subjects” (2005:3). The study provides no information on the age, race, class or sexuality of the participants, a problematic absence as “sexism and racism can combine to result in the suppression—and eventual invisibility—of important information” (Caplan and Caplan, 1999:34). This invisibility of the sample implies that humor is universal, further masking underlying biases and assumptions with which Reiss et al.’s research is fraught.  

           Finally, the desire to prove difference between the sexes resurfaces in Reiss et al.’s discussion of the results, highlighting the presence of the researchers’ biases. Despite the many possible explanations for the data, including aforementioned issues of subjectivity, or insignificance (Reiss et al., 2005:10), Reiss et al. thoroughly speculate on reasons for differences that arose, as though attempting to conclusively explain them (2005:8-10). The scientists include former research on the regions of the brain where females showed greater activity in the present study, explaining that “this small brain region has been implicated in psychological reward, including situations of self-reported happiness, monetary reward receipt, the processing of attractive faces, and cocaine-induced euphoria” (Reiss et al., 2005:8). This seemingly irrelevant statement implies that if females use certain areas of the brain to process humor, they likely use these areas more in general.

           Similarly, as promised in the study’s introduction (Reiss et al., 2005:2), the researchers attempt to apply the results to theories about depression in females. Reiss et al. produce another false inference: “If female dopaminergic systems are more responsive to funny situations, emotionally stressful circumstances may elicit similar limbic sensitivity in the other direction” (2005:10). Caplan and Caplan identify this broad theorizing inadequately supported by data as a common problem in sex and gender research (1999:108). Thus, while a few of Reiss et al.’s theories appear relatively sound, and the “Sex differences” study succeeds in identifying humor processes in the brain, the researchers seem to stretch past the limitations of their methodology on the basis of preconceived notions and biases.

           Scientific “knowledge” such as that produced by Reiss et al.’s study infiltrates the general population’s concepts of truth through mediums like the BBC news. Numerous discrepancies between Reiss et al.’s discussion of their research and the BBC’s report of it illustrate how the mainstream media translates scientific findings in potentially problematic ways. Reiss et al. both hypothesize and conclude that there are significant overlaps in data, i.e., there are many similarities between the ways in which men and women process humor (2005:2;8). Nonetheless, the BBC article explicitly advertises the “divide,” as evident through its title (“Gender divide”, 2005). The article exaggerates the finding of difference, reminiscent of Reiss et al.’s biases: the subtitle reads, “Scientists have uncovered hard evidence of a gender divide when it comes to appreciating humor” (“Gender divide”, 2005).

           This certainty of sex difference underscores the article’s aforementioned exaggeration of sureness. Reiss et al.’s study never claims to have discovered the truth. The discussion admits that “it is also possible that greater female NAcc activity during funny and unfunny events is a nonspecific discrepancy resulting from generally higher female activation” (Reiss et al., 2005:10). Moreover, the study’s background information includes language such as “comprehension is thought to arise” (2), “the prefrontal cortex is likely to” (2), and “the [IFG]…may modulate language comprehension” (2), suggesting that no scientific certainties exist regarding these brain functions. Finally, Reiss et al.’s study explicitly states that “these differences in neural processing appear without behavioral correlate” (2005:10), meaning that any differences the study has found occurs at the level of the brain, irrelevant to the human, social eye. Yet regardless of these uncertainties, irrelevancies and previously discussed methodological limitations (such as sample size), the BBC news article advertises “hard evidence” (“Gender divide”, 2005) about the nature of men and women to the population at large.  

           In addition to the article’s hyperbolic claims of certainty, the differences that the BBC chooses to describe suggest biased reporting and hold implications for the social production of gender roles. Reiss et al.’s conclusion that females employ more executive functioning tools in their humor processing (2005:8) could be reported as a strength potentially indicative of higher intelligence. Despite the study’s extensive discussion of this finding, however, the BBC article devotes one sentence to this idea and focuses instead on the possibility that “women place a greater emphasis on the language of humor” (“Gender divide”, 2005). This statement coincides with the popular notion of female superiority in language abilities. Caplan and Caplan describe the sexist connotation of this assertion: “this arena is often interpreted as an undesirable one, even one deserving of mockery” (1999:89).

           Similarly, the author of the article attempts to expand upon Reiss et al.’s application of the research to the study of depression. The article includes a substantial discussion of the possibility that Reiss et al.’s research helps our understanding of why females are more likely than males to experience depression (“Gender divide”, 2005). The topic of depression appears as a mere speculation in Reiss et al.’s discussion (2005:10), and the last line of the BBC article introduces a doctor who believes that “to extrapolate from this study, and draw conclusions about clinical depression is probably a step too far” (“Gender divide”, 2005). Nonetheless, the news article insists on discussing depression in females at length. This choice shifts the focus from the potential angle of superior activity of females’ brains indicating higher-order processing to one of female disease. The article’s language, in describing women as “sensitive” to emotional stimuli and “vulnerable” to depression (“Gender divide”, 2005), further contributes to this imagery of disordered women.

           The BBC article’s accompanying photograph paints an additional picture. A middle-aged, white man in thickly-framed glasses holding his hands to his head and laughing out loud in amusement rests atop the caption, “Is the male sense of humor less analytical?” (“Gender divide”, 2005). Given that Reiss et al.’s entire discussion examines noteworthy activity in the female brain, whereas males produced no outstanding data, the photograph’s peculiar focus on males, and a certain type of male at that, might serve one purpose: to convey both the true author and true subject of Reiss et al. and the BBC’s claims of knowledge.  

           This news article demonstrates how an internationally renowned and syndicated newspaper can claim a truth for all men and women based on a methodologically-flawed study’s findings of twenty people. With this power, faulty reporting riddled with unconscious biases serves to employ “scientific truth” in the perpetuation of popular assumptions regarding stereotypes and gender dichotomies. Consequently, this hidden interplay between science and the media greatly contributes to the production of popular knowledge.  

           Clearly, the existence of sex differences is a popular claim. Because proving difference is often used for proving that one group is better than the other (Caplan and Caplan, 1999:8), and because one is also likely to assume that “sex differences are biologically based and, therefore, inevitable and unchangeable” (Caplan and Caplan, 1999:3), the “common knowledge” produced by scientific and media processes such as experimentation and journalism therefore carries intricate and dangerous implications for gender relations in our society. 

References

 Caplan, Jeremy B. and Paula J. Caplan. 1999. Thinking Critically about Research on Sex and Gender, 2nd edition. New York: Longman.

2005. “Gender divide in getting the joke.” BBC News, November 8.

           (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4413790.stm)

 Reiss, Allan L., Dean Mobbs, Vinod Menon, Booil Jo, and Eiman Azim. 2005. “Sex differences in brain activation elicited by humor.” Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of  America 102: 16496-16501.

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“Black Skin, White Masks” by Frantz Fanon, themes

February 2007

My first love and significant other for the better part of my adolescence was a black person. I am, for the most part, white. Here in this automatically dichotomous relationship, a pool of caricatural race relations came to surround the two of us as a couple in the eyes of our peers, and this in turn reflected back at us. “Once you go black, you never go back,” they told me, along with their diagnosis of my “jungle fever.” He, on the other hand, admired my “Latinness” but otherwise no issue was made of my race. He once told me that he has never been attracted to black women. Furthermore, his adoring mother delivered showers of compliments from the relatives back home in Trinidad: they love my picture, they love my “porcelain skin.” In my seemingly deracialized and privileged bubble of existence, something about these various anecdotes felt eerily wrong. The reason for these strange occurrences was highlighted the first time he visited me in Kingston and all signs pointed towards one glaring issue: race.

Fanon examines the relationship between the black man and the white woman; the black man seeks access to whiteness through the white woman, he argues. He seeks domination and the privilege of an honorary “whiteness.” He is “attempting to revenge [himself] on a European woman for everything that her ancestors have inflicted on [his] throughout the centuries.” (70) The black man is thus steeped in his historical present, haunted by his ancestral meaning as defined by the color of his skin. This supposition initially seems outdated, and Fanon himself does not propose these ideas as truth. However, these ideas echo certain racial realities in our world. They seem to explain my aforementioned relationship oddities from the mouths of those who see race as a terrifying emblem of our very recent history.    

This view proves to be popular. In “The Negro and Psychopathology,” Fanon explains how, from a Jungian perspective, “in the collective unconscious, black = ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. In other words, he is Negro who is immoral.” (192) There is a sense that society possesses collective understandings of race, and that racism cannot be overcome due to its entanglement with the past. This burrows in individual unconsciouses; Fanon explores the supposed inferiority and dependency complexes and the colonized psyche of the person of color.    

At first glance, these race relations appear inconsistent with and irrelevant to the racial phenomena in my relationship; a colonial past meant nothing for my boyfriend and I, for the way we understood the world as individuals. However, the haunting reflection of the racialized collective unconscious in our present reality suggests that perhaps we are unproductively restrained by the past. Fanon agrees that, yes, we are historicized and racialized subjects however, he asks, how do we proceed to a changed future until we question these race relations rather than allow ourselves to be blindly dictated by them? How do we understand ourselves in the past without speaking only from the past?

Fanon advocates the destruction of racial dichotomies and of the limiting binds to history that simply categorize rather than explain. As he states, “I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.” (229) Thus, we must look to the present, where the so-called collective unconscious becomes incongruent with shifting realities, and we must employ these discrepancies to create a new reality for the future.