Marginally Yours

Shakespearean women and archetypes

2011-10-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

As I was reading Anna Jameson's Shakespeare's Heroines: Characteristics of Women Moral, Poetical, and Historical, I was struck by the similarities between that 1832 text and Diane Dreher's 1980 book Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare. Both books organize women into strict archetypes that, while they make studying for endeavors like this one easier, also erase a certain degree of variance and complexity that limits the gender roles the texts seek to examine. Jameson's earlier text is much more bardolotrous than Dreher's--in the introduction to the second edition, Jameson notes that she re-inserted quoted passages she thought extraneous to the first edition due to the emotional response they would elicit in readers who "recognized and loved them as they would dear, domestic faces." To sacrifice narrative and critical concision for the readers' emotion in this case is to say that Shakespeare as an author creates characters that we are to know rather than to analyze, that he understands the universal human experience (I'm ventriloquizing here--I don't think such a thing exists) in ways we cannot do ourselves.

This attitude towards authorial timelessness both does and does not apply to Shakespeare's women in Jameson's text. She identifies four types of female characters in Shakespeare: Characters of Intellect, Characters of Passion and Imagination, Characters of the Affections, and Historical Characters. I'll return to the first three momentarily, but the last category seems particularly strange. Though Shakespeare himself is allowed to transcend his existence as a historical person of a specific place and time, the characters he based on living women are not, despite being from many different times and places (Cleopatra, Margaret of Anjou, and Lady Macbeth are examples). This double standard seems to give Shakespeare an almost godlike power while erasing the complex humanity of the women discussed. Indeed Jameson repeatedly refers to Shakespeare as "our author," a phrase which carries connotations of divine auctoritas.

The three other character types, while also broadly drawn, don't seem as blatantly hypocritical in their viewpoints. Portia and Beatrice are two examples of Characters of Intellect, and in her discussions of them, Jameson notes that it is often difficult for women to be considered smart in male arenas (Portia at trial) and that some types of female intelligence seem to be about ultimately submitting to male authority (Beatrice is the only one who can verbally spar with Benedick, but such a show of independence is to lead to normative patriarchal marriage). The fact that Jameson makes a criticism similar to Mary Wollstonecraft's in discussing ideological prejudices built into modes of educating women makes me a bit more willing to listen to her.

The Characters of Passion and Imagination, not coincidentally, are mostly Shakespeare's younger girls: Juliet, Perdita, and Miranda are among them. This section is where Jameson is most obviously a writer of her time. There are numerous addresses to the reader as "dear," "gentle," and "kind," as well as lots of interjections of "O!" and "Hark!" when Jameson gets to a particularly romantic or exciting bit of one of the girls' stories. As I was reading this section, I noticed that Jameson's attitude toward these girls mirrors my own as a younger person, as well as that of most of my students whose only previous experiences with Shakespeare have being in either high school classes or personal reading. Juliet and Miranda are lovers trapped by circumstances and their journeys are fraught and romantic. While this view is an entertaining one, it overlooks both the youthful ignorance and the social machinations that contribute to those characters' situations. I'm not sure where this commonality in view point comes from, whether it's somehow natural to read female characters as a woman as vessels for vicarious experience, or whether this view is transmitted without attribution early in our educations, much like A.C. Bradley's readings of Shakespeare.

Older tragic and semi-tragic heroines make up the Characters of the Affections (Desdemona, Cordelia, and Hermione among them). They are women who we are to pity because they seem to meet ends they do not deserve. It is here where Jameson is most pro-feminist, even as she assumes a natural propensity for empathy in her female reader. She repeatedly says that these women are forsaken by male power systems that, though they purport to exist for the women's protection, actually serve to oppress them without letting them defend themselves (Lear's misunderstanding of Cordelia's answer to who loves him most, Desdemona's answer of "Nobody, I myself" at the end of the play, and Hermione's unfair trial).

And now, Amazons!

2011-10-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty positive I'm going to get a prelims question about Amazons, so I'm going to use this space to work out how I would answer that. I read Kathryn Schwarz's book Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance, and the main thrust of her argument is that, while the academic party line about Amazons has always been that they represent a militant alternative to femininity, the way in which these women are presented in literature almost always includes them occupying a role typically coded as traditionally feminine (wife, mother, person that is concerned with beauty standards, etc.), thereby making their feminine position more complicated than popular belief would suggest.

The primary texts on my reading list that deal with Amazons are Spenser's Faerie Queene and Fletcher and Massinger's The Sea Voyage. FQ's Amazon is Radigund. She's actually queen of a tribe of Amazons, and the poem sets her up as a foil for its other female warrior, Britomart, Knight of Chastitie and hero of Book III. The poem seems to delight in have women fight inverses of themselves (Una and Duessa and Britomart and Malecasta are other examples of this) in order to prove how thin the line between appropriate and inappropriate femininity is. This also makes me think of Virginia Woolf's comments on how patriarchal literature triumphs when female characters hate each other. In addition to both being women warriors, Britomart and Radigund pass as men in various ways. Britomart's gender is ambiguous when she is dressed in armor and other trappings of knighthood (this is why Malecasta must "feel if any member move[s]"), and Radigund defies physical femininity because of the myth of Amazons removing one or both of their breasts in order to be better bow hunters. For this reason, they are linked and one must defeat the other. When they fight," they hackt and hewd their privy parts...as if such use they hated." The poem makes the point of saying that these women are wounding each other genitally, and of comparing the spots of blood to the menstrual cycle--these women are not fulfilling their roles as they should, and this is reflected easily in how they treat their physical bodies. Britomart's potential for transgressing gender norms is undercut later, however, when she defeats Radigund and only rules the Amazons long enough for the men to arrive and the appropriate order of patriarchy to be established. Indeed, her entire quest of knighthood is actually a quest for heteronormative marriage, as her ultimate goal is to marry Artegall. Like Shakespeare's Viola and Rosalind, Britomart's crossdressing is not the rebellion it seems to be.

Schwarz reads Britomart's role in FQ as within the Lacanian mirror stage (she doesn't perform a Lacanian reading of the character; she uses the mirror stage as a jumping off point). When Britomart sees Artegall in the magic mirror, Schwarz says, she sees an object of agency and "takes on the armor of alienating identity in order to obtain what she desires." This fits within the path of the mirror stage Lacan articulates, but unlike the Lacanian model, the individual agency Britomart seeks is within someone else, not herself. In this way, Radigund also acts as a similar agency-filled mirror. In order to become one with the image of the first, Britomart must defeat the second.

Though Schwarz does not cover The Sea Voyage, I think her mirror theory could work there as well, though in a slightly different way. The play covers activities on two islands: One inhabited by Portuguese Amazons, and one recently occupied by British fortune hunters. The men who are looking for gold left England because, being younger sons, they needed to find a way to survive outside of the system of primogeniture. Thus, their masculinity is doubly threatened by the Amazons' sexual appetites since it was already challenged by their home country. The foreign mirrors the familiar. The islands also mirror each other. One is dominated by men, the other by women female. One is bare, and the other is rich in food. The Amazonian women have a sexual appetite that mirrors the English men's appetite for gold, and the play does not shy away from depicting this brazen female sexuality. In one scene, Clarinda dominates Albert and talks of riding him like a horse. The play is also interesting due to its depiction of the female homosocial. In addition to being sexually frank about their exploits when they are talking together, the women make a deal with the men that they will have sex with them in order to continue their tribe, and that they will keep any female children that result and leave the male ones with their fathers. This is yet another mirror--like their fathers, some of these children will be without their families in satisfaction of strict gender roles.

Tottel's Miscellany, A Disease of Virgins, Macbeth, and Shakespeare after Mass Media

2011-09-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

This is crazy long. Sorry.

Tottel's Miscellany (actually titled Songes and Sonettes) was originally published by Richard Tottel in 1557 and is the first published anthology of English poetry. It was incredibly popular and went through many printings, a few of which changed the composition of the book considerably, which has contributed to its being overlooked as a usual inclusion to the period's typically studied poetic canon. The book contains poems by Wyatt, Surrey, and a number of "uncertaine authors." While some of the poems do follow Gascoigne's prescription for the "sonnet" (Fourteen lines broken into three quatrains and a couplet with an ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme--what would come to be called the English sonnet), most of them do not.

Helen King's A Disease of Virgins: greensickness, chlorosis, and the problems of puberty uses period and current medical knowledge to explain and disprove myths about greensickness, a Renaissance disease attributed to virgins whose cure was thought to be marriage followed soon after by pregnancy. Though physician Johannes Lange's 1554 description of the disease as "peculiar to virgins" was largely accepted, King argues that this attribution had less to do with the disease's actual characteristics and more to do with a social desire to both medicalize and prescribe femininity (I'm using the word "medicalize" as Rich does in Of Woman Born in order to describe how the female bodily experience is somehow distanced from the woman's physical body through medical procedures). King also notes that using "greensickness" first and "chlorosis" second in the title of her book both privileges the popular over the clinical as well as shows the close diagnostic link between those two categories in the Renaissance. Other important points:

Greensickness and the humors - linked to being hyper-sanguine and thought to have a strong connection with the onset of menstruation. When you're greensick, you're too much of a woman (Galen thought that this disease would cause menstrual blood to force itself out of as many pores as possible. I think the French feminists just found their new superpower of choice!).
Greensickness and food - Chlorosis was later diagnosed as a type of anemia, the cure for which is a diet heavy in iron, which means eating foods like fragrant dark greens and red meat. These foods are heavy and not feminine. In this way, greensickness has a relative in anorexia nervosa (See my post on Unbearable Weight for more).
The progression of greensickness - While first thought to be a digestive disease as the previous note suggests, it becomes strongly tied to virginity with Lange's letter in 1554, which argues that virginity blocks the flow of blood and must be removed (broken hymen, blood on sheets, from marriage to pregnancy, greensickness is cured).
Greensickness and Shakespeare - King mentions the disease's widespread literary uses. Were I to be asked to discuss its presence in Shakespeare's plays (I'm sure I will be), I would point to Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. In the first, Polonius--who I love to hate--calls Ophelia "a green girl." He is literally referring to her inexperience in the ways of romance while trying to learn more about her relationship with Hamlet, but his clear desire for her to be an appropriate woman so he may rise socially makes me think "green" can also be read as "greensick" there. In the second, soldiers refer to the drunk Lepidus as greensick as a way to say that Cleopatra is feminizing (read: ruining) Rome with her ladylike Egyptian influence. In a play that sets up binaries to ultimately question them, I think that's significant.

Macbeth is the second play I'm teaching in my current course on Women in Shakespeare, and I've really enjoyed going through it with my students. It's an excellent text through which to explore how female agency and female embodiment conflict, and that has been a throughline of our discussion of the play thus far. Like Richard III, women are either wives or witches, and there is a since that the former inevitably become the latter. Other than the witches, the only women who figure (semi-?) prominently are Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff. The first instructs her husband to school his face to hide his heart (like Gertrude, she "knows seems"), and the majority of my students see her as the guilty party even though her husband commits the physical acts of murder, because she spurs on the idea of those actions. We've talked a lot about the play's many uses of the word "do," and whether thinking is action or not. For them, thinking seems to be doing more than doing is doing. I've been wondering how this relates to the Cartesian mind/body split, with which Susan Bordo begins her discussion of how the female body becomes culturally subordinate. My students' model reverses this association, making the mind female and the body male, thereby aligning with the standard active male/passive female dichotomy, with a side of "woman as duplicity" thrown in. I tend to agree more with Janet Adelman, who says that both lady Macbeth's fear and her power stem from the way she treats maternity. She knows motherhood and its social position (" I have given suck..."), but she is also savvy enough to recognize that that position and its accompanying feminine norms limit her agency (breasts filled with gall, ripping the hypothetical babe's gums from her breast and bashing in its head in order to be able to commit murder).Though Adelman sees social subversion in this ability to discern and use norms to her advantage and I do also, I'm not sure I agree 100%. I do think Lady Macbeth has a power that men around her cannot comprehend (a power that Cixous or Irigaray would respect for its incomprehensibility, even as they would likely not approve of her negative invocation of bodily fluids), I think the subversion of this power is limited because she enacts it by enforcing an extremely rigid (no pun intended, I swear) masculinity on her husband. She tells him to be a man a lot, saying that he is "too full of the milk of human kindness" and that she must inject her spirit into his ear in order to win him to her point of view. That second thing literally means she wants to convince him by talking to him, but when "spirit" and milk appear just a couple of lines apart, I don't think I'm entirely remiss in reading "spirit" as "semen" as well. Not entirely. Shades of the other meaning are there, at least.

The witches also bend gender, what with their beards and their appearing not of the world. Notably, none of these women have autonomous first names (something that Lady Macbeth's Daughter, the YA adaptation I'm reading for the dissertation immediately remedies in its quest for a female community with both agency and autonomy), so while they play with gender in some ways, they reflect strict patriarchy in others. That brings me to Lady Macduff. She too wishes her husband would man up and protect their child instead of fleeing to England, and she laments her gendered response to the situation in the following passage:

Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defense,
To say I have done no harm?

Like Banquo's description of the witches, she is in the world without saying she is of it. She also mimics their comments on the lack of logic to action in their society--"to do harm is often laudable, / to do good sometime accounted dangerous folly" sounds an awful lot like "fair is foul and foul is fair." While it's easy to see how Lady Macbeth's comments on embodiment and her famous "out, out damned spot" speech, with its spell-like commands, link her to the witches, Lady Macduff's passage above proves that even fairly normal, less power-hungry wives are doomed to go the way of the sorceress eventually. This dichotomy with no way out is mirrored in the Ophelia/Gertrude madonna/whore split: the former only avoids the latter's fate (being "a breeder of sinners" in an "enseamed bed") by killing herself. Though some would say this lack of female choices is lessened in Shakespeare's comedies, I would disagree (See my posts on The Roaring Girl and Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedies for more on that).

Other topics to discuss in Macbeth: The female role in fate(weird=wyrd=weyard), Why young boys in Shakespeare fare almost as badly as young girls in the character development department

Richard Burt's Shakespeare After Mass Media is a collection of essays (Burt is editor) that aims to discuss the ways "mass media" (what Doug Lanier calls "popular culture"--and with similar Marxist caveats in place) changes Shakespeare as cultural currency. The essays feel well-written and collaborative with the exception of Burt's introduction, which coins the distasteful word "Shlockspeare" for such cultural enterprise. Like Lanier's book, this one touches on all sorts of appropriations (I'm using the loaded term rather than the more neutral "adaptation" here because Burt's book seems to be about "culture wars" whereas Lanier's focus is more general and for a less specialized audience), from Klingon Hamlet to Broadway to the ever-present Branagh. I liked Lanier's book better from a teaching standpoint, but Burt's was more entertaining for me personally. I particularly enjoyed the essay on Branagh's films and British nationhood, which argues that the actor/director's Renaissance Films production company, pretentiously named as it may be, did a great deal to reclaim Britain's place in a list of powerhouses of cultural influence by " making the manners that revitalized Shakespeare for a postmodern audience," and then had the difficult job of defending those manners from everyone who came after. Another favorite was Fran Teague's article (and I'm not just saying that because I've studied with her, I promise, though my teaching persona owes a great deal to hers) on Shakespeare on Broadway, which examines how low and high culture oscillate in such musicals as Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story concurrently with art common to misunderstood cultural groups (jazz, camp and drag, etc.).

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

2011-09-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

I read the 10th anniversary edition of Adrienne Rich's 1976 work, and I am shocked (perhaps at this point in my reading list, I shouldn't be; I feel like I say some version of this in every entry now) at how much worse several problems she names are now, thirty-five years later. I'll get back to that later in the post, but first I'd like to discuss the book's title and style of composition, since I think those are what distinguishes it from other books that try to do the same thing. Rich (as the book's title lays out) talks about two kinds of motherhood: the bodily (more-or-less), essential experience, and the medicalized, (more-or-less) socially constructed institution. I say more-or-less here because Rich makes a point in many of the notes that revise the second edition to correct broad assumptions, most of which are based in her own euro-American, cis-gendered, heterosexual experience. Because this is a text that combines theory with experience, and because i realize that i have to struggle to reconcile the privilege i receive as a white, educated, cis, heterosexual woman with the prejudice I feel being a woman in a patriarchal society and a woman with a disability in an often ableist society, I really appreciated both that Rich wasn't shy about discussing the ways the multiple identities we wear as people intersect and the fact that she made sure to acknowledge her own privilege the second time around. A lot of authors of second editions spend a lot of time criticizing their detractors (I'm looking at you, Judith Butler!), so it was refreshing for me to see Rich engage in some mea culpa. No one is the same ten years after a project. Perspectives change. That's life. EDIT: I'm thinking back, wondering if I've noticed male theorists doing this, and how I'd react if I did. I'm not sure I'd like it, or know what to do. Perhaps I myself am stereotyping female expression...

It is this invocation of personal experiences that really gives weight and gravitas to the book, I think. Stats and studies about PPD read less drily when their mise en page is interrupted by Rich's own journal entries recounting playdates in which, with their toddlers toddling in an adjacent room, young mothers discuss the news coverage of a local woman's infanticide, how they connect to her rage, revel in it, and feel ashamed, all at once. Susan Bordo takes a similar tack in Unbearable Weight, which also resonated with me a great deal.

Powers of Horror and Shakespeare and Popular Culture

2011-09-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

So I didn't really get Powers of Horror. I understand that the abject is a position between subject and object, and that confronting that you exist in such a social space is a scary thing. I get that Kristeva is responding to Freud and Lacan's views of woman-as-lack, and that she's against collective identity politics within broader feminism. That's really all I've got. After Cixous, Clement, and Wittig, Kristeva was a big letdown for me. I feel like she was taking all of the emotion in the other French feminists' work and covering it up with unnecessary theoretical jargon. Blah. I don't want to talk about that on my exams, and will try not to.

On to more adaptation theory. I really love Doug Lanier's Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. If I teach my course on Shakespeare and adaptation again, I'm definitely assigning excerpts. I f the course were a specialized Senior seminar, I'd assign the whole thing. He condenses years of trends and scholarly debates into 167 readable, engaging pages that still manage to both highlight important theoretical cruxes (Is popular culture really "of the people"? Why are the anti-Stratfordian debates important? Is "Shakespop" about how we see Shakespeare--and what/who is that?--or about how Shakespeare sees us?) and use specific examples to try to explore those questions. As a teacher, I really like the sections in which he puts on a Marxist hat and questions the goals of the culture industry's uses of Shakespeare. His section on The Compleat Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) is a particularly good example of what we use Shakespeare for and why. In this play, a bardolatrous academic extolling the virtues of proper Shakespeare morphs into a televangelist, this history plays are one long football game, and (my favorite bit) Titus Andronicus is a cooking show. Lanier says that such a critique shows us "what Shakespeare looks like when it is stripped down to its main points" as well as how we feel popular culture allows us to place ourselves within texts we would not have personal access to otherwise. He also covers fan fiction, YA lit, porn, and other genres I'm particularly interested in as "Shakespop" (his term) due to the ways the blend high and low cultures.

The Lesbian Body

2011-09-13T13:00:00.001-07:00

More French feminism, y'all. Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body is a series of poems in which she seeks to articulate bodily experience from a lesbian perspective, often invoking images of the Amazon tribe to represent what Adrienne Rich and others have called the life of the "woman-identified woman." The poems in this volume are rich and lovely, and I noticed two important things about the way they are written. First, Wittig never uses the word "I" unquestioningly. She wrote the poems in French, and instead of writing "je" ("I"), she writes "j/e" in order to express what she sees as the naturally occurring fragmentation and multiplicity of femininity. This linguistic choice seems to me to be a visual representation of the philosophy Irigaray articulates in "This Sex Which Is Not One": Though psychoanalytic critics like Freud and Lacan have said that woman's multiplicity or doubleness (her "know[ing] seems," as in Hamlet's accusation of Gertrude) is bad and a mark of her inferiority, we as women should joy in our double selves because they give us complexities that patriarchal society fears and does not understand. These complexities belong to us and us alone, and therefore should be respected and nourished, not shamed and hidden.

The second thing I noticed is thematic. Wittig expresses a joy in the bodily similar to that of Cixous, Clement, and Irigaray, but hers is different in that it is much more visceral. Cixous tries to get messy with her loud, self-interrupting exhortations to "Write!" and her many liquid metaphors of overflowing words and writing with milk ("The Laugh of the Medusa," "Sorties"), but Wittig surpasses her easily. She takes common romanticisms like the desire to get closer to one's lover by crawling under her skin and literalizing them in her poems, peeling back her lover's dermis, exposing vessels and globules of fat inch by inch, and worshiping those parts in an empowering series of blazons that seem anti-Petrarchan in their emphasis on the wholeness of the tiny parts that makes up this beloved woman. If anybody out there is looking for some feminist romance (and you all should be), give The Lesbian Body a read.

The Newly Born Woman

2011-09-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

Time for a round-up of French feminist texts. First I read Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement's The Newly-Born Woman. It is divided into three sections: The first, by Clement and titled "The Guilty One," examines the two female types--the sorceress and the hysteric--and explores links between them. The link between the sorceress and the hysteric, according to Clement, is that they are "women suffering for women"(4). As in the other texts I read this week, both Clement and Cixous see something in the feminine that is foreign and incomprehensible to those outside of it, and they say that this lack of understanding is what makes women social transgressors. Instead of punishing women for these transgressions (Cf. Freud, Lacan), The French feminists I read this week agree that women should own the things the patriarchal hegemony sees as wrong ir outside their system, should rejoice in them. Clement uses the metaphor of the tarantella (a "spider dance" usually performed by women that is "a monster that brings healing" and a "madness that cures") to describe this process. Cixous echoes this thought in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." The last thing that I want to discuss from this section is that Clement says that women's stories, while thematically repetitive (as in the link of the persecution of the sorceress and the hysteric), cannot be seen as ahistorical. We must instead theorize what the sociopolitical changes behind similar feminine diseases (greensickness in Helen King, hysteria in Freud/Lacan, anorexia in Bordo) can tell us about how those societies construct women through diagnoses.

The second part of the book is Cixous' "Sorties," which she begins with a list of binary oppositions like sun/moon, good/evil, white/black, noting that all of them can be replaced with the corresponding male/female, where male is privileged and female marginalized. In this vein, she famously refers to women as "the dark continent," saying, " It is still unexplored only because we have been made to believe it is too dark to be unexplored." The sanity of femininity is all about one's standpoint. My favorite part of the essay discusses what it's like to read as woman (Cixous is well-known for her descriptions of ecriture feminine, or woman's writing). She speaks of the frustration of having to pick and choose traits to emulate from male-created female characters: " I could never be Ariadne, but I longed to be Dido, but she was too passive." This is why, as she says in "The Laugh of the Medusa," "woman must write woman, and man, man."

The third and final part of the book is titled "Exchange," and it is literally a conversation between Clement and Cixous in which the discuss their differing views of what ecriture feminine can and should be. Seeing feminist scholars include readers in such a conversation was so refreshing to me, a real counterpoint to the antagonism patriarchal society (both in literature and in life) seems to often pin to female homosocial relationships. This book has been one of the most enjoyable experiences of my prelims prep thus far.

A Winter's Tale

2011-09-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

I've never liked A Winter's Tale. It infuriates me the same way Othello does, in that there would be no problems if this man who is jealous for no reason at all would just talk to his wife and listen to what she says. I understand that were that to happen, there would be no plot. I'm willing to give Othello a pass and see it as a rich commentary on the impossibility of communication across genders, though, and I just can't do that with A Winter's Tale, for several reasons:

Genre - This is a tragicomedy that supposedly transitions from tragedy to comedy when A MAN GETS BRUTALLY MAULED BY A BEAR (If you've heard the famous phrase "Exit, pursued by a bear," this is where it comes from). I do not agree that this is the height of hilarity. I am much more willing to admit that the play is at its funniest during scenes when Jacobean nobility's hypocritical fondness for the pastoral is poked fun at.
Chronology - I'm no stickler for the Neoclassical Unities, but the only reason at all that sixteen years need to pass is for small children to grow into marriageable teenagers. Even if it wasn't based on something Robert Greene already wrote, it'd be horribly telegraphed and obvious. I know it's pastoral and fantasy and all that, but COME ON.
Gender (obviously) - SO MANY PROBLEMS HERE. Hermione is imprisoned even though she's truthful the whole time, but Leontes is allowed to change the rules of her trial whenever he wants. Paulina is the only person in the whole play willing to call Leontes on his nonsense, and she gets rewarded with disgrace at court and a dead husband (see note on bear above). When she gets remarried at the end, it's to Camillo, who is basically just standing there and also a liar and a spy. Not my kind of happy ending, no siree. That's not even talking about the whole Hermione-as-a-statue plot, which is obviously problematic from a feminist perspective. How does Leontes finally recognize he was a jerk to his wife? He LITERALLY objectifies her. Gross. I also have issues with the fact that Perdita radiates natural high-class vibes or something. How is that a thing?

I do not like this play. Blurgh. Tomorrow, I will be smart and formal again, maybe.

Richard III

2011-09-04T13:42:00.001-07:00

There are three major angles from which I need to consider this play, given my current research interests:

Historically - This play completes the tetralogy begun with Henry VI parts 1-3. It is important for me and other Tudor scholars because it lays out the historical beginnings of Tudor rule through the defeat of Richard III by Henry Tudor (who will become Henry VII, marry Elizabeth of York, and give birth to Henry VIII) at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
On Gendered Lines - Like most of the histories, there's not a huge female presence here. Most notably, there's Margaret of Anjou, who is grafted into this play anachronistically (at this point in history, she's already dead) mostly so she can shout really awesome curses at people. The best of these is not in this play, but in 3H6 (the "molehill speech" wherein Margaret captures the usurping York and mocks his pretensions for ruling by placing a paper crown on his head). The other notable woman in the play is Lady Anne, who marries Richard after he has killed her husband and father-in-law ("Was ever woman in this humor woo'd? / Was ever woman in this humor won?," Richard wonders.). While Richard seems to think that Anne is weak and unaware that he is marrying her to broker power, I'm not so sure she's that naive. The last interesting thing about women in this play is that they're either witches or wives (or in the case of Lady Elizabeth, wives who become witches upon the death of their husbands). That's a troubling dichotomy, but one that makes a bit of sense given the history plays' subject matter: nation-building power within a largely patriarchal society.
In terms of childhood: The princes in the tower are Shakespeare's best-written young boys (we get adolescent princes and courtiers who have to reform, like Prince Hal, Orlando, Romeo, etc., but very few little boys that deal with similar pressures). It seems like most of what I read about them treats their death a priori (they're like Ophelia in that way...hmm), but I think that that isn't giving enough credit to the fact that they can participate in Richard's linguistic games, that they are aware of the political machinations going on around them. They are the only characters who are able to respond quickly to Richard's word games.

The Dialectic of Sex and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

2011-08-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

Despite writing almost two centuries apart, both Wollstonecraft and Firestone begin at the same assumption: Women are thought to be naturally inferior to men, and this is a problem. Firestone (like deBeauvoir before her) sees this inferiority as stemming from the physical, so she calls for a revolution that centers on disconnecting women from their biological obligations, childbearing chief among them. She advocates for cybernetics, babies born in labs, and socialized health and childcare, among other things. She follows a Marxist mode of thinking that says progress cannot be achieved without an overthrow of current ideologies. Indeed, she criticizes Marx and Engles for what she sees as their merely tokenizing inclusion of women within their economic theories. While I think Firestone (like all true radicals) is a bit too idealistic, I do think she makes valid points about how women are sometimes oppressed by their own bodies. I'm definitely a supporter of childcare in businesses, as well as the addition of paternity leave to the traditional maternity option (something Firestone doesn't directly mention, but would almost certainly support due to its removal of the maternal body from mandatory direct childcare responsibilities).

Wollstonecraft zeroes in on education as both the root of and the solution to the problem of supposedly naturally occurring female inferiority. There are a few passages of her work that really struck me:

"Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of property, will obtain for them the protection of a man...( excerpt from Kolmar and Bartowski 64). My grandmother used to say to me "The man may be the head of the family, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head whichever way she wants." I thought it was funny as a kid (and in a different way later after she passed away, when I heard it repeated in the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding), but coming to feminism made me consider how the ways women are taught to gain power in relationships can actually keep them subordinate by playing into gender stereotypes. I love that Wollstonecraft goes straight to social construction in 1792. There is nothing new under the sun, indeed.
"The most perfect education [will]... enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. Cf. EM conduct books, the phenomenon of greensickness (or later, hysteria, or even later, anorexia/bullemia). Elizabeth I was only able to learn "unfeminine" virtues because of her class position. Sadly, the view of feminine education Wollstonecraft decries is gaining ground again in conservative religious communities through the Stay-at-Home Daughters movement.
"In the education of women, the cultivation of understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment" (65). In EME, this is true for most all women except some lucky high-class ones (Elizabeth, Lady Mary Wroth, etc.)

The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi

2011-08-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

I had never read John Webster's The White Devil before reading it for my exams. I have one other play by him on my list, The Duchess of Malfi, which I read way back in an undergrad Ren. Drama course, so I'm excited to revisit that now that I have more knowledge about the drama of the period. All this is to say that I was laboring under some preconceptions about Webster and his work that I have now revised a bit. Chief among them is that Webster is all about doom and gloom--T.S. Eliot famously wrote a poem in which he characterized Webster as "see[ing] the skull beneath the skin" when he crafted characters. This is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete. As far as revenge tragedians go, Webster isn't morose just to be morose. It's clear that the violence, double-crossing, and death in his work isn't just about titillation, but about the fact that actions have consequences, and that evil grows evil just as good grows good. He also seems to me to suggest that evil is naturally occurring in people, but that may be my own Calvinism coloring my reading.

The White Devil is the story of an affair between Brachiano, a duke, and Vittoria, a woman who is initially married to one of his courtiers. In order to be with her, Brachiano conspires with some of his followers to kill his wife and Vittoria's husband. What's most interesting to me is the way these murders occur. Brachiano knows his wife kisses a portrait of him every night before she goes to sleep, so he gets someone to poison it. She kisses it and falls over dead. Likewise, he knows Vittorio's husband is a bit of a show-off, so he has his henchmen set up a test of strength that ends with a broken neck. Ultimately, both parties are killed by their adherence to traditional gender roles.

As the play progresses, Vittoria begins to see how her society constructs confining gender roles for her to which Brachiano does not have to comply. As she is being tried for adultery, she mentions that he pursued her, and that she was pressured into a relationship with him by her social climbing brothers (there's some SERIOUS homosocial commodification of women in this play; there are a handful of conversations where two or more men alone in a room discuss how they can best use Vittoria for their own gain). She tells the judge that prosecuting her would be forcing someone to submerge themselves in water and blaming them when they drowned. She knows how her world works, that as a woman, she has few choices available to her. Despite her awareness of social machinations, she and Brachiano are eventually killed by Lodovico, who Brachiano banishes at the beginning of the play. Male power is what's important; women are at best, unfortunate casualties of male agendas, and at worst, temptresses (or devils) who set those dastardly agendas in motion.

The Duchess of Malfi also considers how female power looks when male homosocial power is hegemonic, but in a slightly different way. We also get a woman with two brothers in this play. The titular Duchess is not on very good terms with the Cardinal and Ferdinand, due to the fact that they want to control her estate and she wants to liver her own life. In keeping with this desire, she secretly marries Antonio, her steward, whom she loves despite his low station. Their relationship is discovered by Bosola, her master of horse, who suspects that she may be a) involved with Antonio and b)pregnant and feeds her apricots to see if she will go into labor. She does, and the two are eventually banished with their children. Like in The White Devil, there are many conversations in which Ferdinand and The Cardinal (sometimes together and sometimes with another man) discuss ways to manipulate the Duchess to serve their own agendas. Also like in The White Devil, the slur of choice for an unruly woman is "whore," despite the fact that the Duchess marries Antonio by (an entirely legal, though private) handfasting. Because she doesn't do what the other men in her life want her to and instead exercises power that is individually hers, she's a whore. Her brothers eventually kill both her and her husband, leaving their son to become heir against the wishes of his father (who knows all too well the corruption within the Italian government). This ending seems a bit positive, but also suggests that uncontrollable cycles are continuing.

The Second Sex, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Metamorphoses

2011-08-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir's landmark exploration of how women are made, not born, lays the foundation for Judith Butler's affirmations that both sex and gender are socially constructed. I've already paraphrased the book's most famous statement, and indeed I am most familiar with the "Childhood" and "Womanhood" sections of the book in which de Beauvoir's chief endeavor is to interrogate what would come to be standard psychoanalytic viewpoints on gender, most of which boil down to women's physical states contributing to their natural psychological inferiority. This connection likely contributes to her desire to disconnect women's social roles from their physical bodies, a desire which is countered by the later work of theorists like Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray. One thing that she agrees with Freud and others on that is actually an important holdover from sixteenth-century anatomy is the fact that children are effectively genderless up to a certain age, that manhood is the default (normative) resulting gender, and that womanhood deviates from that masculine norm. While psychoanalysts think that this has to do with women's own recognition of their physical inferiority as contained in unconscious revelation (penis envy, Electra complex, etc.), deBeauvoir says these notions are not biologically natural at all. Rather, she maintains that they are constructed by a patriarchal hegemony that insists on their essentialism in order to leave the notions unquestioned. These themes are established in Galenic anatomy, and Susan Bordo argues very effectively that they hold strong in the twenty-first century in narratives of anorexic women, who read female secondary-sex characteristics as weakness. That common thread is both sad and interesting to me.

Twelfth Night and As You Like It - I've been hearing for years that these two plays are the same play, and while I had acknowledged their obvious commonalities (female characters cross-dressing, pastoral escapism, marriage endings, plucky woman sidekicks) I always felt that the two differed in tone in that the former was more social serious and the later was much more grounded in the pastoral tradition, what with Orlando's bad poetry on the trees and the homosocial, courtly love flavor Ganymede brings to the mix. While I still think that difference exists, I am no longer convinced that it is an important one, mostly because I have read Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl next to those plays now. Moll Cutpurse is so much more transgressive and progressive than both Viola and Rosalind for several reasons. First, she doesn't cross-dress to pass as a man; she does so in order to take advantage of the freedoms afforded the wearers of men's clothes. her visible femininity is still apparent, so she openly criticizes ways that gender is socially constructed, unlike Rosalind and Viola, whose ultimate goals are heteronormative marriage. Second, Moll recognizes how marriage can trap women, and that the social mobility it may afford them is possible not worth its cost when she says things like (paraphrasing here) marriage is just a swapping of places wherein a maiden trades one head for a worse one. For me, this statement negates the supposedly transgressive ending of Twelfth Night in which Orsino asks "Cesario" to remain in men's clothes for their wedding; at that point, what could have been about female empowerment is now about male sexual fantasy.

Last and most important is the issue of class in all three plays. Maria and Celia have their own plats, but they mostly serve as comic relief, diversions from the slightly more serious entanglements of their social betters. They are not given the opportunities to move up in rank that Rosalind and Viola are. Indeed, in Maria's case, class positions are so stringent and internalized that she cruelly mocks Malvolio's social-climbing efforts. On the contrary, the three merchant mistresses in The Roaring Girl, while they do occupy secondary plots, also offer a more nuanced vision of how constructions of class and gender overlap, as well as being aware of how they can use those constructions to their advantage. This is most evident in Mistress Gallipot's affair with Laxton.

Ovid's Metamorphoses - I actually read this a while back, along with Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. I waited to post because I was a little overwhelmed with all the raping. In addition to that motif, Metamorphoses also shares themes of Petrarchan inversion and miscommunication with those two poems. What struck me the most was the matter-of-fact was that rape is discussed in Ovid, as if it is a fact of life. In many cases, the god rapist (usually Jupiter, though Hades does this too) tells his female conquest that she is lucky to be raped by someone of such a high station. There's also not a lot of moral judgement present in the text, though that's true with most of its events.

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Part Two

2011-08-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

"Taken together, the feminist critiques of gendered representations and of the politics of the material body can also be seen as an extended argument against the notion that the body is a purely biological or natural form" (33). This is where Bordo's tendency toward analysis of cultural artifacts like ads comes in really handy. It's easier for people--especially those new to critical thinking--to see sex or gender or race as social constructions once they can see how human-created culture informs our self-perception. In this way, she builds on both deBeauvoir and Butler.
"Many feminists remain agnostic or ambivalent about the role of biology and sexual 'difference,' justifiably fearful of ideas that seem to assert an unalterable female nature, they are nonetheless concerned that too exclusive an emphasis on culture will obscure a powerful, and potentially culturally transformative, aspects of women's experience (36). I like that Bordo advocates for a middle way here. I've often felt that to create an essentialist/constructionist binary is to neglect real people and how they live their lives. As I've said before, I think Butlerian performativity bridges a similar gap.
"These elements point to culture--working not only through ideology and images, but through the organization of the family, the construction of personality, the training of perception--as not only contributory but productive of eating disorders. A parallel exists in the formation of female hysteria" (50). Not only is it incredibly interesting that Bordo links anorexia with hysteria, but its also a very intelligent move on her part to say that such feminine diseases work to reinscribe gender norms by conforming to traditional roles. Were I to go back further to my period of study, I think I could say the same for greensickness.
"The current terms of the abortion debate--as a contest between fetal claims to personhood and women's right to choose--are limited and misleading. In the context of my analysis...the current battle over reproductive control emerges as an assault on the personhood of women" (72). I'm not entirely sure how the mode she sets up here is less of a limiting binary than the one she wants to break down, but I do think she's right. Galenic anatomy sees women as baby containers--any woman will do; it's the male-contributed form that's important--and recent pro-life "victories" like when a fetus "testified" in an Ohio court to prove its heartbeat suggest a similar idea, as do horrific prison conditions that force women to give birth while shackled to tables.
" [Anorexic] Cherry Boone O'Neal speaks explicitly of her fear of womanhood. If only she could stay thin, says yet another, 'I would never have to deal with having a woman's body; like Peter Pan I could stay a child forever.' The choice of Peter Pan is telling here--what she means is stay a boy forever (155). This idea that children are the same regardless of gender and that womanliness dirties things up is true in the English Renaissance as well.
"Women must develop a totally other-oriented emotional economy. In this economy, the control of female appetite for food is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule of governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger--for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification--be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be limited (170). This is the entire point of the fighting in The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed.

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Part One

2011-08-02T12:56:00.001-07:00

Susan Bordo's landmark text of feminist body theory begins with the gendering of the Cartesian mind/body split, saying that society in general associates the (privileged) mind with the male sphere and the (marginalized) body with the female one. This tracks with the work of body-centered French feminists like Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray. From there, she covers a number of things that affect the way we view female bodies, such as plastic surgery, advertisements, psychoanalysis, food, eating disorders, and "postfeminist" thought. This book has informed my own work a great deal, and it's as readable a collection of feminist theory as I've ever come across. I use Bordo's excerpts and ideas a great deal in my own lower-level classes, particularly her stuff on advertising analysis. Because of all these things, I don't think it would be feasible or appropriate to summarize her very readable, incredibly personal, anecdotal book the way I have some of the others on my reading list. Instead, I'm going to offer ten passages I love from Unbearable Weight, along with my responses to them. For now, the first three:

On shopping for bedding for her young daughter: "The designated boy's room is all in primary colors, the bedspread dotted with bats, balls, and catching mitts. The caption reads: 'I play so many sports that it's hard to pick my favorite.' Sounds like my daughter. On the opposite page, the girl's room is pictured, a pastel planetary design. The caption reads: 'I like stars because they are shiny.' That too sounds like my daughter. But Pottery Barn doesn't think a child can inhabit both worlds. If their catalogues were as segregated and stereotyped racially as they are by gender, people would boycott."YES. Stuff like this is why I frame my composition classes around cultural literacy, why we do things like examine arguments of pop songs and television commercials. These social constructions are fed to us so frequently and from so young an age that they become universals. Children should be able to do both "boy stuff" and "girl stuff" if they want. I'm also troubled by the active male/passive female binary in these ads, as well as the correspondingly gendered function/fashion split.
Responding to author Sharon Lamb, who says that young girls in heavy makeup and revealing clothes are " silly and adorable, sexy and marvelous all at once," that they are "playing out male fantasies, but without risk": "22 to 29 percent of rapes against girls occur when they are eleven or younger. We might like to think that these rapes are the work of deranged madmen, so disconnected from reality as to be oblivious to the culture around them...The reality is, however, that these girls are much more likely to be raped by friends and family than by strangers, and that very few men, whether strangers or acquaintances, are unaffected by having a visual culture of nymphets prancing before their eyes, exuding a sexual knowledge and experience that they don't really have. Feminists used to call this 'rape culture.' We never hear that phrase anymore, do we?" I agree with Bordo's criticisms of Lamb, but some of this feels a tad close to victim blaming in that it doesn't hold rapists as responsible (or as explicitly responsible) as I think it should. As for the "rape culture" thing, that is an ever-present term in young feminist circles nowadays; I suspect we have Bordo to thank for its return to prominence.
"The extremes to which the anoretic takes the denial of appetite (that is, to the point of starvation) suggest the dualistic nature of her construction of reality; either she transcends body totally, becoming pure 'male' will, or she capitulates utterly to the degraded female body and its disgusting hungers. She sees no other possibilities, no middle ground" (8) It shocks me how much this sounds like the 16th and 17thc views on the female body that Lisa Jardine talks about. Hunger, whether it be physical or sexual, is a complex place for female power. The more things change...

Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Part Two

2011-08-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Chapter Two - The Double Bind of a Renaissance Education and Reformed Religion

Jardine says that the Reformation brought with it " a triad of 'liberating' possibilities for women: Protestantism, humanism, and marital partnership" (38). These are not actually liberating, she says, because they create a "double bind" due to their existing within the patriarchal structure.
As long as a woman uses her intelligence or partial autonomy to illuminate that of her husband, she is an asset. If she uses those things for independent means, she is scorned and her education acts as a patina for her natural female baseness (cf. Duchess of Malfi, the sonnets to the Dark Lady).
We must read deeply and with a grain of salt so that we do not see the Renaissance as either totally misogynist or totally liberating (39).

The three supposedly liberating changes are not liberating because:

marital partnership - Jardine says that the viewpoint that give and take in marriage in necessary supposes the natural inferiority of women. I'm not sure I agree here. I think I know what she's getting at (the need for centralization necessitates preexisting marginalization), but I think this may be an oversimplification, especially given her previous caution to the reader of immediately equating past periods with chauvinism. Her textual justifications: Aristotelian/Galenic anatomy, Proverbs 31
Protestantism - "The woman's freedom to think and act for herself is carefully contained within a freshly romanticized picture of the family" (49). The Reformation closed the doors of the independent, female homosocial community that was the convent, while at the same time making women's only real security come from the nuclear family. Additionally, letting women participate in heterogeneous theological communities created the idea that women are the keepers of the moral code--one stereotype gives way to an opposing, but no less oppressive, one.
Education - Liberal humanist education as mostly available to high-class women, because who else has the time to devote to learning? Education as a means of transcending natural womanhood (see Roger Ascham's comments about Elizabeth - "[She learned] purity, chasteness, and modesty of language to become more than a woman").

Chapter Three - "I am the Duchess of Malfi still": Wealth, Inheritance, and the Spectre of Strong Women

The chapter's big question: How do strong women of Jacobean Drama relate to their real life counterparts, who were "constrained by an ideology of duty and obedience" (68)?
What makes these women strong, according to Jardine? "Passion, sensuality, courage, cunning, and ambition" (68).
These strong women (Beatrice Joanna in The Changeling, Vittoria in The White Devil, the titular Duchess of Malfi) exist in male worlds written by male playwrights. Jardine says the plays make us accept male views of women. As a feminist historicist myself, I have to quibble with that. Make us? Want us to, perhaps, but not make us. Each reader possesses her/his own interpretive lens affected by a multitude of variables.
Jardine makes the point that one big way women like the ones listed above (and their real counterparts) got power was by intruding upon the male inheritance system (entailment) as needed. Sometimes a "tail male" was forsaken for a "tail general" in order to prevent division of land or entailment to a distant relative (85).
Something I thought was very interesting about this chapter was Jardine's suggestion that the closet scene in Hamlet owes its sexual undertones (or overtones, if you're Mel Gibson) to the fact that Hamlet looks at Gertrude's relationship with Claudius as a possible roadblock to his inheriting ruling power. If Claudius or Claudius' future offspring with Gertrude rules Denmark, Hamlet cannot. This wasn't something I had considered before, but it does go in line with readings that apply the play's instability to the Tudor succession crisis (despite the fact that Denmark was not ruled by primogeniture when the play is set) (92).

Chapter Four: Shrewd or Shrewish? When the Disorderly Woman has her Head

"The scolding woman traditionally represents the irrational and uncontrollable in even the best-ordered male life" (103).
In their own times, scolds were brutally punished (bridles, ducking stools, etc.) and often tried as witches, but they appeal to our 21st. c. sensibilities. We don't want to think of them as socially complex, but instead as harbingers of a better age (104).
Wives are instructed to control their tongues (see James 3:1-18), but sometimes that was their only weapon. Woman's vocal power is illusory because it threatens disorder without freeing her from the responsibilities of the female sphere (106-7).
Domination gets bigger in Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra -- shrews on a global stage! (114)
The female tongue is also a sexual instrument, and can have power like a penis (see jokes by both Petruccios in Shrew and Tamer) (121).

Chapter Five - Dress Codes, Sumptuary Laws, and "Natural" Order

Dress above one's station was unlawful (148).
Sumptuary laws also reflect the commercial threat of globalization (150)
Women's fashion as a drain on their husbands--one reason why Petruchio has Kate step on her cap (also jokes about (maiden)heads and headship there) (152).
Fashion in The Roaring Girl: Feathers, breeches, and tobacco (the things the merchant women sell and Moll buys) all flew in the face of sumptuary pamphleteers, and its comments on fashion (from the prologue on) make the play act as an intersection of "all society's nervousness where relations between men and women were concerned" (159-61).

Chapter Six - The Saving Stereotypes of Female Heroism

Depictions of Elizabeth portray anxiety about women in power (169)
Cult of Elizabeth - even though she was old, she still got painted up and fawned over and called Gloriana and Cynthia. Her power became a courtly joke (173).

"Shakespeare as the Girl's Friend"

2011-07-23T12:22:00.000-07:00

The tradition of using shorter, bowdlerized versions of Shakespearean plots as didactic tools for children is a long one, but one that does not reach its apex until the Victorian period. Katherine Prince details how children's periodicals helped construct rigidly gendered identities in this period: identities that encouraged “embracing adventure, exploration, and conquest for boys [and] self-sacrificing daughterhood—and eventually motherhood—for girls” (153). This gendering was made evident in the titles of the periodicals themselves, the most prominent of them being The Boy's Own Paper and The Girl's Own Paper. The latter published a special issue, The Girl's Own Shakespeare, in 1888. In addition to several short stories with Juliet, Ophelia, and other Shakespearean girls as protagonists, the issue reprinted an essay by Mary Cowden Clarke originally published the previous year entitled “Shakespeare as the Girl's Friend.” In it, Clarke extols Shakespeare as not only a great moral teacher, but also as a confidant whose understanding of a young girl's troubles extends beyond the boundaries of time:

To the young girl...Shakespeare's vital precepts and models render him essentially a helping friend. To her he comes instructively and aidingly; in his page she may find warning, guidance, kindliest monition, and wisest counsel. Through his feminine portraits she may see, as in a faithful glass, vivid pictures of what she has to evitate, or what she has to imitate, in order to become a worthy and admirable woman. Her sex is set before her, limned with utmost fidelity, painted in genuinest colors, for her to study and copy from or vary from, in accordance with what she feels or learns to be supremest harmonious effect in self amelioration of character. (Clarke 562)

The use of the word “essentially” in the first line of this passage suggests that for young girls, the deepest, most natural use of Shakespearean drama is not for entertainment or social commentary, but as a “helping friend” who serves a varied didactic function. I say that that function is varied because the advice described seems to come from both positive (“guidance” and wisest council”) and negative examples (“warning” and “kindliest monition”). The variance of tone lessens considerably when the division of power within the passage is examined, however. The repeated use of superlative adjectives (“kindliest,” “wisest,” “utmost,” “genuinest,” etc.) seems to paint Shakespeare as the pinnacle of wisdom from which the girl in question has everything to learn. Furthermore, the small amount of autonomy she possesses during this molding of self (“to study and copy from or vary from in accordance with what she feels or learns”) is immediately undermined within the space of one sentence whose ultimate goal is “self amelioration of character,” suggesting that the young girl's essential self is somehow bad or wrong and needs to be ameliorated in favor of a more acceptable femininity, a femininity best not only described, but created, by a man.

Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare

2011-07-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Preface: Lisa Jardine acknowledges that she wrote this book before feminist historicism was either widely published or labeled as an academic discipline, that she feels she owes a great deal to conversations with other feminist EM critics like Carol Neely and Coppelia Kahn, and that were she to undertake the book now, it would look quite different due to advances in the field. I was heartened by both her call for a community of feminist critics and her view of her work and the broader field of feminist historicism as ever-evolving. Sometimes I feel like critics are slow to realize the need for both of those things due to built-in academic prejudices that still privilege the model of the universally applicable individual genius.

Introduction: Jardine pinpoints trends in feminist scholarship of Shakespeare:

1. Shakespeare "held a mirror up to nature" in terms of the types of women he wrote. He does not privilege one social viewpoint over another, and his characters are varied in scope and type.

2. Shakespeare was a chauvinistic playwright from a chauvinistic society. There are two forms of this view, "non- aggressive" and "aggressive."

Non- aggressive: WS did his best not to be sexist, but was limited by the views and mores of his society.
Aggressive: WS was an obvious sexist. The author proceeds to point out instances of sexism in the plays and poems.

Jardine says that both of these views are too simplistic and, ultimately, presentist to accurately represent the scope of feminist historical scholarship. I agree. The first is too close to Bardolatry for my tastes, and the second seems too pat and easy, especially without being accompanied by some kind of examination of other documents of the period.

Chapter One - " As boys and women are for the most part cattle of the same color: Female Roles and Elizabethan Eroticism"

Jardine starts by debunking a myth that most high schools (mine included) are probably responsible for propagating: the fact that boys were playing female parts was not something EM audiences noticed; it was like scenery to them. I agree that this seems absurd, especially given the number of jokes about the practice in EM dramas (Cleopatra's line about "pip-squeak boys [putting her] i'th' posture of a whore," that joke about Helen of Troy in Faustus, and tons more).

She then discusses how crossdressing in theatres related to both sumptuary laws and anti-theatrical pamphlets, finishing the chapter by differentiating between two types of cross-dressing roles: those that are about the maleness of the boy actor, and those that are about the femaleness of the woman character as embodies by boys for titillation of audiences. As You Like It's Rosalind is one example of the former, and the bulk of Jardine's discussion of the latter centers around Portia and Jessica from The Merchant of Venice. She points out the number of instances in both plays where gender is poked fun at and questioned (Rosalind's taking of the name Ganymede and all of its homosexual/homosocial implications in the wooing lessons that follow; Portia's blushing and stammering in men's clothes before her triumphant speech). I had never really though about how the same stage practice reads differently in those plays, so that was interesting to think about.

Making Sex and The Roaring Girl

2011-07-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

Since my last post dealt with Butlerian gender performativity, I wanted the next few texts I read to explore that concept in order to enable me to compare and contract how the theory is expressed in both primary and secondary texts. For some background about the social construction of gender in the Early Modern period, I went to Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud (1990). In his chapter on Early Modern anatomical thought, he first establishes that the British Renaissance was a renaissance of classical modes and thinkers, and that the thinker who influenced Early Modern anatomy the most was Galen. Galen offers the one-sex model of anatomy.The Galenic model says that male and female genitals are the same except for their orientation: male ones go down and female ones go up. Women are "inverted men" (Laqueur 89). Otherwise, they're the same. This is important when discussing social construction of gender in EM England for several reasons. First, by calling women "inverted men," Galen establishes a male default from which femaleness is a deviation. Second, there being one primary sex does not suggest a binary model the way most of us think of gender (There's male and there's female and they're opposites and that's it), but instead provides an opportunity for that inversion to change (and indeed there are stories of women getting so overheated that their genitals spontaneously popped out, making them men), creating less of a gender binary and more of a gender continuum. This tracks with how people thought about men and women in the period not just theoretically, but practically. When young children were born, both boys and girls lived at home with the women of the house, and children of both sexes wore shifts (think long nightgowns). Men mostly occupied the public sphere, and young boys joined this sphere through school, apprenticeship, or service to a monarch around the age of six or seven. The physical marker of this social change was called "breeching"--when boys wore pants, or breeches, for the first time. These clothes were an easily visible physical representation of a social transition. Before this happens, boys are considered closer to women in their makeup because of clothing--all of which was considered an outward representation of an inward state, as evidenced by the seriousness with which sumptuary laws(laws governing who could wear what fabrics or styles and who could not) were taken. Boys were also considered to be closer in physical makeup to women due their residence in the domestic sphere( as in As You Like It: "As boys and women are, for the most part, cattle of [the same] color"(3.2). Hanging around women too much was considered a feminizing force (see the complaints from the Roman soldiers about Cleopatra's effects on Antony is Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra). Gender was scary in the EM period because it was visibly and socially malleable even as religious and scientific sources said it was natural and stable.

Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl (ca. 1610) is a play that points out just how scary this malleability can be, and how wide the social implications of that malleability can spread. It is a fictionalization of real-life cross-dressing thief Mary Frith, who is Moll Cutpurse in the play--"Moll" being shorthand for prostitute and "Cutpurse" referring to the fact that her method of choice for her thievery involves cutting her victims' pursestrings with a large sword. In the beginning of the play, young lover Sebastian is telling his beloved Mary (who is also "a moll" though not the "mad Moll" of the play's title, and the link between the name Mary and prostitution suggests the need for the virgin/whore dichotomy to stabilize gender) that his father has canceled their betrothal because he is now dissatisfied with her 5000 pound dowry and thinks she is a social climber. In order to distract his father from the fact that he still loves Mary and is seeing her in secret, Sebastian says he is in love with Moll Cutpurse, which makes his father devise a plan to break up their (nonexistent) union, thereby enabling Sebastian to see Mary undetected. Though Moll does not desire to enter into the institution of marriage herself because she thinks it "is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head and has a worse one in th'place," she supports and participate in the plan to rejoin the lovers, enabling them to marry by convincing Sir Alexander (Sebastian's father) that she has run off with Sebastian, causing Alexander to say that he'd like anyone but Moll to marry his son, which allows Mary to enter into her union with Sebastian as originally planned. I think that quote is so great because, in one pithy statement, she attacks the commercialization of women, the importance of virginity to a woman's worth, and the church's role in patriarchy.

The thing that seems to differentiate this play from a number of cross-dressing comedies of the period like As You Like It or Twelfth Night (or even Book III of Spenser's Faerie Queene, though that's not a comedy) is that Moll cross-dresses because she knows men's clothes endow those who wear them with social power. This is in keeping with the way Butler says gender formulations should be questioned. The play's great number of fashion metaphors, the first of which appears in Middleton's epistle to the audience, shows this. She doesn't do it in service of her own desire to enter into traditional marriage, as Rosalind, Viola, and Britomart do. She wears pants, yes, but she doesn't try to pass as a man. By wearing pants but also doing nothing to physically disguise her womanhood, she confuses the people around her by being two things at once, or "not all man and not all woman" as Sir Alexander says. This destabilizes the stringent ways such people think about gender. At the play's end, Sir Alexander respects Moll and admits that public opinion about people can be wrong, so Moll is able to affect real change.

I think The Roaring Girl is a better protofeminist play than As You Like It or Twelfth Night for another reason as well: the way it exposes constructions not only of gender, but also of class. In embodying traditional pastoral escapism in their cross-dressing adventures, both Rosalind and Viola play at being of a different class. By the time their plays end, though, they are both married to men with high social stations. Everything is stable and playtime is over. These two plays could be said to explore class through Celia or Maria, but both those women are limited by their class positions. They don't get to move around to different social positions, they just tag along while Rosalind and Viola slum it. Conversely, the three merchant ladies in The Roaring Girl have their own plots that work to question the stability of class and the way it overlaps with the stability of gender, as in the fabricated affair between Mistress Gallipot and Laxton.

Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter

2011-07-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

Judith Butler's biggest contribution to the field of gender theory is without a doubt her definition(s) of performativity. She first introduced this term in 1990's Gender Trouble, when she began to assert that feminism's central reliance on the category of "woman" was problematic because it relied on the established school of thought that maintained though gender was socially constructed, sex was biological(11). Butler disagrees, saying that both categories are the result of social construction, but also that it's more complicated than that. Things we consider as fixed categories may have carried different connotations not much earlier in our history, like pink for girls and blue for boys.In the Victorian period, the color associations were actually reversed, as blue was considered calm amd pink was considered a lighter, age-appropriate version of the masculine red. Because of this arbitrariness, Butler says identity politics should be abandoned in favor of politics that ask where sex and gender come from (21). That's the first chapter.

The second chapter critiques the notion of patriarchy, with its primary argument being that notions on which we depend in order to say that patriarchy is a norm against which feminism should rebel (such as Levi-Straussian kinship theory and Freudian Oedipalism) are also social concontructions, and by using their oppositional structures as a jumping off point for feminist response (in establishing either woman-dominant or separatist communities), we as feminists are unknowingly accepting presuppositions with which we disagree. The third chapter deals with the political implications of the work of Wittig and Kristeva. I'll discuss this chapter when I deal with The Lesbian Body (Wittig) and Powers of Horror (Kristeva), both on my prelims list. The last chapter questions whether gender-neutral pronouns (ze, zir, etc.) might be a way out of the problems Butler sees with conflation of sex and gender.

Then, in 1993's Bodies that Matter, she had this to say on the subject of how sex and gender are constructed:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. (95)

In saying that performance of gender is a conscious act that appears or becomes naturalized through repetition, Butler bridges the theoretical gap between feminists who claim gender is wholly socially constructed (cf. deBeauvoir's The Second Sex--"One is not born a woman, but becomes one.") and those who rely more on the existence of the innate and the bodily to determine femininity (cf. Irigaray and Cixous). In making performativity about simultaneous consciousness and reiteration, Butler seems to suggest that seeing social construction and biological essentialism as binarily opposed concepts is to oversimplify both theories. Instead, she provides a grey area that enriches both sides.

Freud's "Femininity" and Irigaray's "This Sex Which Is Not One"

2011-07-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

In conformity with its peculiar nature, psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a women is -- that would be a task it could scarcely perform -- but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition (Freud, 1933, p. 116).

Freud immediately says that woman is other, both in the quote above and in the introduction to his lecture, when he says that only men think about "the problem of women" because women themselves "are the problem" (114). He then argues against such dichotomous thinking, saying that psychology proves variation of strict gender norms due to the existence of things like motherhood (active caretaking) and manners and social graces which temper male aggression (115). He, like many feminists, actually blames socially constructed ideology for stringent gendered associations: "You have decided in your own minds to make active coincide with masculine and passive with feminine. But I advise you against it. It seems to me to serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge" (115). Despite this seemingly progressive statement, Freud continues to assert the otherness of woman in his insistence that female/female bonds must be subordinated to male/female bonds following puberty, in order for normal psychosexual development to occur (116-7). If the relationship that

is most important for a woman's growth is an oppositional one, it seems to me that binary thinking follows fairly logically behind.

The connection between the importance of the oppositional relationship between father and daughter and the concept of woman as lack comes in the form of the castration complex, which occurs, according to Freud, when girls first observe male genitalia and

[t]hey at once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance too. They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to 'have something like it too,' and fall victim to 'envy for the penis,' which will leave ineradicable traces on their development and the formation of their character and which will not be surmounted in even the most favorable cases without a severe expenditure of psychical energy. (118)

Though the "severe expenditure of psychical energy" described here seems to go along with Freud's claim that female does not necessarily equal passive, I think there's a huge difference between unconscious action and conscious socialized behavior. If that unconscious action to possess a penis can only be accomplished by socially prescribed feminine passivity, then it seems to me that the unconscious action is subordinate and Freud's argument falls apart.

Freud ends by describing both femininity and his knowledge of it as "incomplete and fragmentary," mentioning that though his discussion has centered on " women insofar as their nature has been informed by their sexual function" and that "an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well." An individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well. This says that women, as a group, are not human beings, and that individual women only have some chance of not being completely overcome by their sexuality. UGH.

Irigaray responds to the common psychoanalytic assertion that the feminine exists only insofar as it is a negation of the masculine (this sex which is not one) by saying that in its variance and multiplicity (this sex which is not one), femininity is deeper, richer, and more complex than masculinity. She frames this debate, as Freud does before her, in terms of sexual pleasure. In referring to the psychoanalytic practice of viewing the feminine as a lack, she says that " the vagina is valued for the 'lodging' it offers the male organ" and not on its own terms (cf. Inga Muscio) (1).

She ultimately argues that instead of characterizing female multiplicity as negative (women's eyes "false in rolling"Shakespeare's Sonnet 20, Spenser's Duessa, etc.), we should glory in it, realizing that, unlike male sexuality being located mainly in the phallus, women's entire bodies are erogenous zones and even their genitalia is not only multiple (see also her "Two Lips that Speak Together") but also constantly stimulating itself: "she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation[like men need women or hands], and before there is any way to distinguish [commonly male] activity from [commonly female] passivity (1). Thus, Irigaray sees the possibility of power in the position of the woman in the psychoanalytic model. Fellow French feminist Helene Cixous applies this notion of enjoying female deviation from a male norm to the concept of writing in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa."

Irigaray clarifies that it's not enough to just flip the power binary: [Though] the powers of slaves are not negligible powers, the master is not necessarily well-served. Thus to reverse the relation, especially in the economy of sexuality, does not seem a desirable objective" (6). She concludes the essay by saying that, while consciousness of such patriarchal formations is necessary for liberation, alternative social constructions (like lesbian separatism) could ultimately cause "history to repeat itself" in the form of "phallocratism" if power structures become the ultimate goal (7).

Lacan's "The Mirror Stage" and "The Signification of the Phallus"

2011-07-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

After reading these two essays again, I have noticed a few things about Lacanian theory that I had heard, but that had never really clicked in my head. In "The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I in psychoanalytic experience," Lacan postulates that the point at which a pre-verbal child can first recognize her own image in a mirror is both the beginning of that child's concept of a stable self and "an essential stage of the act of intelligence" (1). This definition of the mirror stage lines up with what I already knew about the theory. What's new to me is how that stage, given that it finds stability in instability by saying that self is self because self is not reflection, falls in line with Deconstructionist theory and semiotics. Deconstructionist semiotics teaches that all language both differs and defers; that we derive meaning from a unit of language both by comparing it to what it it isn't, and by thinking through its connections and mental associations with other words. Example: When I say "dog," you probably think "not cat," but you also (quickly and perhaps unconsciously) think "retriever or shepherd or collie or poodle or etc." "Dog" both differs and defers. Seeing this connection makes me dislike Lacan less, or at least respect the importance of his theoretical contributions more.

The second thing I had heard but never understood is that while most readers of psychoanalysis differentiate heavily between its Freudian and Lacanian iterations, Lacan considered himself a Freudian. This was unclear to me until I began to notice how many references to dream interpretation appear in "The Mirror Stage...". In dreams, Lacan says, we discover how our "fragmented bodies" as delivered to us through our reflections are a vehicle to the wholeness represented by the individual self. We dream of having mangled limbs or growing wings when we analyze the existence of our individual selves and try to separate "true" self from reflected or perceived self (4), and we dream of fortresses and journeys to locked and isolated places when we try to reconcile the true with the perceived (5). He concludes that there is really no difference between truth and perception in terms of the self, as the so-called true self is also filtered through perception(6-7).

It's when I get to "The Signification of the Phallus" that I start to get really upset. Because the phallus is significant (in that it contains signifiers semiotically, but also in that it is considered important, in the more common sense of the word) and woman is lack, "Woman finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love’ (577). Like the child in the mirror, she is because she is not. It gets tricky, though, because for Lacan, woman is the site of the impossible return to the realm of the Real (unity of self and unconscious that only happens pre-birth). The French feminists turn this around and mine power from it. More on that tomorrow when I discuss Irigaray and Freud.

Shepheardes Calendar and Antony and Cleopatra

2011-07-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

I would argue that both Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are about establishing stringent binary oppositions only to dismantle them later, thereby questioning any stability those organizing principles may have possessed. The twelve stories in the Shepheardes Calendar are arranged (as the titles suggests) from January to December, beginning with the hope of Spring's rebirth and ending with the other end of the life cycle: death. Many of these months examine opposing viewpoints or conditions. January begins with Colin Clout, who has just been rejected by his beloved Rosalind, journeying from the country into the town. Now only is the pastoral juxtaposed with the more industrious city, but love is also contradictory in and of itself, as Colin laments that it should "breede both joy and payne, " cursing and blessing his meeting Rosalind by turns (54, 49-51). February opposes youth and age, with the young Cuddie wishing for the frivolity of Spring while the aged Thenot asks him to be patient, saying that the fertility rituals Cuddie wishes for are a young man's game, a silly public display that he is glad to be rid of. Though Cuddie does not heed the warnings he is given at the end of the poem, I get the sense that he acts so not from any failing of character, but becuase hes role in the cycle of life is to be young and kind of stupid. If he did not fulfill this role, the natural order of the Calender would be disrupted. Spenser's deliberately archaic language (a trope he uses to slightly different, more nationalistic effect in The Faerie Queene) helps cement the "It's always been that way, it will always be that way" stasis that the poem both thrives on and confuses.

March, as the beginning of Spring, touches on two boys' stories of romantic knowledge, and things get really interesting in April, when Hobbinol (a shepherd) sings a song of Colin's love of a woman named Eliza who is "Ycald in Scarlot like a mayden Queene / And Ermines white" (lines 58-9, page 73). The colors and fabrics associated with this "mayden Queene" are a not-so- subtle nod to Queen Elizabeth I, thereby placing the Queen at the center of a homosocial triangle created by the two opposing young men. This placement of the Queen within a pastoral motif mirrors many royal parties of the period and glorifies a form that, as it praises the natural, is quite reliant on artifice. May centers on a Protestant/Catholic worship debate that never rally gets settled, and the rest of the poem frames Colin's pursuit of Rosalind various ways, with December causing him to conclude that he is like fruit that fell off the tree before it really had the chance to ripen, since he is old but unlucky in love. Therefore, though the whole poem tries to say that it is youth and love that are compatible, it ultimately contradicts itself, choosing to end the poem by saying that mortality is the only stable fact; all the other rules we make for ourselves are negotiable.

Antony and Cleopatra works to dismantle binaries as well : masculine/feminine, logical/emotional, Roman/Egyptian, and normal/excessive are the big ones, and the play wants us to think that all the words on the left and all the words on the right line up with one another, that Rome is tough and strong and cool-headed and Egypt just wants to get laid and then cry about it. Or at least the play wants us to think that's what it wants to do. At first. Except that Antony cries an awful lot, and Cleopatra is pretty good at getting stuff done in her kingdom, even when she uses some stereotypical feminine wiles to do so. Some of the other soldiers attribute this to Cleopatra's corrupting influence, and then they all get scared of being feminized to the point that when Lepidus gets rip-roaring drunk to celebrate the formation of the Triumvirate, the other men refer to his hangover as greensickness--a form of anemia that Early Modern medicine attributed to virgins, the cure for which was sex ASAP (and preferably sex that resulted in pregnancy). At worst, women are all things negative in the world of the play. At best, they're bargaining chips, as in the case of Antony's marriage of political alliance to Octavia.

Not that this sexism is limited to Romans in the play, or to dudes in general. The moment that Cleopatra hears of Antony's marriage to Octavia, she sends her attendants to gather information about the woman in order to prove that she is more beautiful and younger than Antony's current wife. Even though Cleopatra is often frivolous in similar ways, she dies with dignity, on a throne, refusing to witness her kingdom's downfall. With this ending (and because Antony's death happens much earlier, letting Cleopatra's death occur in Act 5, when tragic climax deaths usually occur), a woman who has embodied Egyptian excess embodies Roman logic and ruling ability. Everything the play relies on for its stability is made unstable in the end.

Another Prelims Update

2011-06-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

Since I last posted, I have read the following:

Shakespeare's Pericles (1607/8) - I have a feeling I'm going to need to come back to this one, particularly when I get to Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, due chiefly to conflicts between a young woman's filial duty and her view of her spiritual calling. I also see parallels with The Tempest (Dreher says both Marina and Miranda are "redemptive daughters" as are all the daughters in Shakespeare's Romances), though I think Pericles is less of a straightforward romance due to the complications introduced by the incest plots between Antiochus/Thaisa and Pericles/Marina. Other things to consider: Pericles thought to be cowritten with George Wilkins. WS responsible for just over 800 lines, most of those concerning Pericles and Marina. This seems to validate the filial duty connection I'm seeing with some of his other works. Lastly, there's obvious shades of Oedipus, what with taboo sexuality being prophesied and proven unavoidable or fated. Not sure what to do with that, but I think I should know it's there, at any rate.
Shakespeare's Hamlet (1600) - This is the first play I'm teaching in my Women in Shakespeare class in the Fall, so I'm thinking about it on multiple levels. I know I want to point to the publication year and relate that to questions of Elizabethan succession. Indeed, the play begins with a question about identity (Bernardo's "Who's there?" to Francisco upon the changing of the watch), and that unsure tone continues until its body-strewn ending. All the play's characters are trying to figure out their places in a rapidly changing world, and none of them do this very well. Bradley says Ophelia is sheltered and naive, but I think he overstates that case, especially given that she seems to both understand and respond to Hamlet's innuendo prior to The Mousetrap, and because of how frank and accusatory she is after she goes mad, when she passes out flowers. Perhaps she is freed to do so by her madness, but that seems empowering to me. Bradley reads it as wholly tragic, speaking of her eternally surrounded by delicate flowers in the minds of readers. I think he's patronizing. I'll talk about Gertrude when I cover Janet Adelman's book Suffocating Mothers, as well as when I read Lacan and Freud, which should be next week sometime.
Shakespeare's Othello (1603) - Need to mention animal imagery and the importance of storytelling/mysticism in connection with Daileader's discussions of "jungle fever." To contest/explain Bradley's distaste for Emilia, point to her protofeminism, as well as her understanding and use of figurative language (prove she understands Iago and can use his linguistic tools). If Desdemona is "wholly passive" as Bradley claims (and I think she is, mostly because of her response to "Who did this to you?": "Nobody. I myself."), I don't think it's because of her loving nature, but because of a naivete and a wish for escape. He actions are coded and passive because they are feminine and love-related.
Diane Dreher's Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (1986) - Dreher discusses different types of daughters and fathers in Shakespeare's plays. Will edit this to provide more detail in the next few days once I organize my notes better.
A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1905) - Bradley's mode is often called "character criticism," as he refers to the plays' characters as though they were real people, speculating often on their internal motivations and asserting that, while it may be impossible for modern readers to know these motivations for sure, Shakespeare did without a doubt. I'm not sure this is true (couldn't he have been being purposefully ambiguous?), but my biggest bone to pick with Bradley is his tendency to oversimplify the female characters he discusses, even those he admits are important and often improperly read, like Desdemona and Ophelia. I do agree with his assessment of Iago, who he says is a great villain because he's a fantastic observer of people, and that his downfall comes when he , in his desire to know these people and his motivations, does not truly know himself or his own motivations. I think this fits with Iago's refusal to "speak word" at the end of the play because he controls his environment as much as he can in that moment, just as he has all along, but, in the wake of the play's awful violence, all of which is the result of a lack of cross-gendered communication that he put in motion, further silence comes across as childish and petulant, even as Iago himself reads it as the end to a sophisticated master plot.
Eve K. Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) Sedgwick uses the term "homosocial" to refer to same-sex friendships, noting that the line between such relationships and homoerotic or homosexual ones is thin and tenuous. Because of the threat of this overlap, women are often employed as mediators in male homosocial relationships, creating a relational triangle in which it appears the two men are focused on the affections of the woman. Sedgwick argues that such relational formations erase and devalue women while purporting to center and elevate them. Cf. Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man, Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Petrarch's sonnets and the courtly love social structure.
Celia Daileader's Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth (2005) - Daileader coins the term "Othellophilia" to refer to the cultural obsession with romantic or sexual relationships between black men and white women, saying that such a preoccupation stems from a desire to divert attention from the much more historically accurate "slaveholder's secret"--the frequent rape of black female slaves by their white owners. Stereotypes: hypersexuality, exoticism, "jungle fever" as a result of both of the previous stereotypical characteristics.

This brings my total texts read to 16/99. Slowly making progress!

Prelims Reading Update

2011-05-19T12:07:00.000-07:00

I know no one is reading this, but writing it helps me organize some thoughts. Thanks for tolerating this, if anyone is out there. Since I posted two weeks ago, I've planned my courses for summer and fall semesters and read the following:

Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women - I found this to be more clearly focused and more thoroughly researched than Valenti's two earlier offerings (Full Frontal Feminism and He's a Stud, She's a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know), and was encouraged that its last chapter leaves its reader not only with a call to action, but with specific, practical suggestions of how she can work to undermine the double standards invoked by and stemming from "the purity myth." While I do object to Valenti's unwillingness to take religion or its adherents seriously (and her tendency to refer to such a complex, varying system monolithically, as I was copying above), I think a certain amount of questioning how both sacred and secular institutions tie female worth to wholly bodily or physical factors is a healthy thing. The biggest and most interesting point that I took away from the book that I think will inform my reading and research this summer is the fact that the both the impulse to punish women for excess or inappropriate sexuality and the impulse to teach them to "save" and "guard" their virginities at any cost seem to come from the same overemphasis on embodiment.
Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation - Maybe it's because Hutcheon was endeavoring to write down something that had been discussed but not yet codified in academic circles, or maybe it's because I've been working with adaptations and appropriations a long time, but most of this book seemed like common knowledge to me at this point in my career. The most helpful points for me were these: First, there are three main types of adaptations--those that tell (novels, short stories, plays that are read), those that show (plays in performance, films, operas, dances, or musicals), and those that do ("interactive" media like second life, video games, VR, RPGs, or LARPing). Second, those categories are not static and can very easily bleed over into one another because of what Hutcheon calls the "palimpsestuous nature of adaptation." Besides that fabulously descriptive portmanteau, which I love and think is so accurate given the adaptation's simultaneous reliance on and contradiction of preexisting knowledge, I agree that adaptations lend themselves to making traditional forms of receiving information (like plays or novels) more "interactive" due to the back-and-forth that a knowledgeable reader or viewer goes through as she experiences an adaptation. Hutcheon also discusses the tricky notion of the authority of the "source" text (I use quote marks there because she questions the validity as well as the rhetorical aim of this term), and that's something I'll be wrestling with a great deal in my dissertation.
Ben Jonson's Volpone - I made sure to notice instances where traditional readings of the play presented themselves (as city comedy, as animal fable, as morality tale warning against greed), but I was mostly struck by the character of Celia, who eventually gets pimped out to Volpone, who is very rich, by her own husband--who had previously become outraged because he thought Celia was flirting with Volpone of her own volition, which was untrue--because her husband wants Volpone's money at any cost. After he forces her to go to Volpone and she does not want to submit sexually, Volpone attempts to rape her. She's quite literally damned if she does or if she doesn't, as well as used as currency within a male system. This got me thinking about The Purity Myth again in a way I didn't expect to.
Shakespeare's The Tempest - This play is the subject of the only dissertation chapter I've started so far. As you most likely suspect, I'm most interested in the character of Miranda, or more specifically in the typical scholarly response to her, which I feel is reductive at best, and at worst, flawed in a way that is destructive to literary young womanhood. Many critics see her as a wholly passive daughter who submits to her father's will for her life. This view is HUGE with Victorian critics, which are, not coincidentally, the same critics who begin to emphasize the usefulness of Shakespearean heroines as didactic tools young women should follow (see Charles and Mary Lamb, Anna Jameson, and Mary Cowden Clarke). While Miranda is certainly servile and obedient at the play's end (see her chess game with Ferdinand where she says she will call lies truth if it serves him for her to do so), she is defiant and questioning to Prospero from her very first lines at the plays beginning. I'm also interested in the lines in 1.2.351-ff ("Abhorred slave / which any print of goodness will not take..."), which the First Folio attributes to Miranda, but subsequent editors gave to Prospero because she would never say such rough things to Caliban. I tend to agree with recent feminist critics, who say that Caliban, as the character directly below her in the play's hierarchy, is the easiest person over whom she can express any kind of anger and power.
John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed, or The Woman's Prize - I love this play, and I'm super excited to teach it for the first time in the Fall. Though Fletcher wrote it some time around 1609, it wasn't performed until at least 1633, due to bawdy and improper content. It tells the story of Maria, Petruccio's second wife after the death of Katerina. Lots of critics have called it a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew, but it's so much more than that. It critiques women's social roles in a hugely progressive, protofeminist way, and it does so while exhibiting a clear understanding of Shakespeare's own style and common tropes (Examples: Bawdy Maria in Twelfth Night and sex-as-food in Othello). The main ways the play does this are through an emphasis on the female homosocial and that community's appropriation of the language of several typically male spheres, namely the military, higher education, and religious service. In response to Petruchio's physical and sexual deprivation of Kate, Maria, her sister Livia, and the other women of The Tamer Tamed lock him out of his own house by degrees until he ends up in a coffin at the end of the play. As he is being given a taste of his own medicine, the women are joyously separatist, eating rich food, drinking ale, and masturbating. They fight deprivation with excess to the point that, when they realize the men are spying on them, they "dance with their coats tucked up to their bare breeches / And bid the kingdom kiss 'em"--they literally tell the men to kiss their asses, because the women know that voyeurism motivates the men's actions just as much, if not more, than does their anger. The other great thing about this play is that the women work together across class lines, with several country wives joining Maria's ranks. While these women are not given first names, Tamer's class consciousness is still a definite step up from that of Shrew, which literally places class conflict outside of the play, in the Christopher Sly frame narrative. A question I have: The play's introduction says that its subtitle is ironic because women weren't up for public prizes in the period. I don't doubt this, but I think there may be some virginity punning happening there as well, especially given Petronius' (Maria and Livia's father) repeated pleas to he daughters to give in to their husbands. I'm also seeing patron/patriarch in his name, but I may be reaching for that one.
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own - I'll talk more about this in conjunction with Cixous and Clement's The Newly Born Woman. For now, two things that stick out are the question of class and Woolf's seeming anticipation of the academic discipline of Gender Studies. The first is important because according to Woolf, to write, a woman must not only have access to private space, but also to private money. Lower-class women have reduced access to both, if any at all. The second comes up in the section about the imagined Professor von X. This professor wrote a famous book about the inferiority of women and "was laboring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for irritation remained" (31). Woolf not only suggests here, as Cixous does later, that "Woman must write woman," but seems also to say that the academic establishment combines with the patriarchal one in a way that is inherently violent and confrontational. This tone is opposed to the one Woolf herself uses in A Room of One's Own, concerned as she is with supposed trivialities like positive depictions of female/female friendships and descriptions of food and drink.
Shakespeare's Sonnets - I'm most interested in the first third or so of these, the ones chiefly referred to as the sonnets to the young man. I'm thinking a lot about how women are erased in these sonnets, as the speaker implores the young man to immortalize his beauty by having children, paying almost no mind to the woman or women who must suffer through the carrying and birthing and long lying in (a period practice that isolates a pregnant women in a dark , hot room to aid the birthing process according to the required humoral balance (hot and dry to balance out the naturally feminine cold and wet). Sonnet 3 is one of the few to acknowledge the female role in pregnancy, saying that if the object of the speaker's affection were to forgo procreation, he might "unbless some mother / For where is she whose unear'd womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?" Here, the woman in question is present, but still not really acknowledged as a significant part of the process of childbirth. She's just supposed to be grateful to be chosen, because she just supplies the stuff of the baby and the man forms the child (c.f. Galen). More on this with Sedgwick's Between Men.

Prelims Reading: Day One, Part Two

2011-05-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

David Herlihy aims to revise Joan Kelly-Gadol's claim that women did not have a Renaissance primarily by discussing the importance of hagiography to the period. While I agree with his assertions that literary renderings of female saints' lives complicate some of Kelly-Gadol's claims about women's social positions where Christianity is concerned, I can't help but think that he is benefiting from the exponential growth of feminist historicist scholarship in the 1980s and 90s to which she did not have access. Not that that makes him any less correct. It just seems like he's holding her to a slightly unfair standard, as well as painting her findings with a broad brush with statements like "[Kelly Gadol suggests] that this supposedly progressive period did nothing for women" (Herlihy 33). While she does say women are deprived of social and political opportunities that they had previously enjoyed, she makes a point to differentiate between decades and regions. She also points out how women of different classes fared better or worse than one another. To reduce these and other variances to "the period did nothing for women" is to do Kelly-Gadol's clearly painstaking research a disservice.

Herlihy's findings match up to Kelly-Gadol's initially, as he notes that "holy queens and abbesses fad[ed] from the ranks of the blessed in the Middle Ages (43), citing the Gregorian Reform that removed women from "centers of religious authority." But that's all too simple, Herlihy says. It's also necessary to examine the position of such women in families and estates, particularly within systems of kinjship and the passing on of property and wealth (43).

Prelims Reading: Day One

2011-05-03T06:03:00.001-07:00

In an effort to keep track of my thoughts while reading for my Preliminary exams, I want to try to use this space to think through some of the things I am reading. On the docket for today are two classics of criticism in my field, Joan Kelly-Gadol's "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" (1977) and David Herlihy's response, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?: A Reconsideration (1995). Kelly-Gadol posits (in part as a response to statements in Jacob Burkhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which I will be reading later this summer) that gender inequality caused what was a complex series of artistic, scientific and social growths for men in Italy in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries to further the oppression of the women of this same period. She lays out the following criteria "for gauging the relative contraction (or expansion) of the powers of Renaissance women and for determining the quality of their historical experience":

1) the regulation of female sexuality, as compared with male sexuality;

2) women's economic and political roles, (i.e., the kind of work they performed as compared with men, and their access to property, political power, and the education or training necessary for work, property, and power);

3) the cultural roles of women in shaping the outlook of their society, and access to the education and/or institutions necessary for this;

4) ideology about women, in particular the sex-role system displayed or advocated in the symbolic products of the society, its art, literature, and philosophy.

I first read this article about six years ago, during the Fall semester of my Junior year in college. That was the semester I officially decided to become an Early Modernist, and was not long after I began thinking of myself as a feminist scholar. Looking back, it has definitely influenced the trajectory of my work a great deal. When I look at the above list, I can't help but notice that it begins and ends with notions of female sexuality, and that it sees fit to differentiate between the social regulations concerning sexuality and the artistic representations thereof, while formally acknowledging a link between the two. Anyone who has read anything I've ever written can attest to the influence of such a statement on my own ideology.

Kelly-Gadol goes on to note the freedom afforded women in the system of courtly love (contrast to Eve Sedgwick's thoughts in Between Men (1989), in which she asserts that women are socially erased commodities in such a system), citing the example of the female troubador, who "served her lover as a friend, not a master." She also notes that women could own property in feudal societies. The transition out of feudalism into sovereign states removes this power for Italian women, thereby showing how broader social trends are infused with notions of gender differences and create the groundwork for the patriarchal assumptions we hold about historical eras. Lastly, she performs an examination of Castiglione's The Courtier that proves it was central to aestheticizing previously powerful women, making them ornaments in their husbands' courts, patrons of poets who wrote of the goodness of kings at the behest of queens.

That's today's first article. I'll hopefully be back later with a bit on Herlihy's response.

On Feministing's "Faith and Feminism" Series

2010-12-13T11:56:00.000-08:00

I've already spoken on this blog about what I see as Feministing.com's unwillingness to respectfully acknowledge feminists of faith. As such, I was intrigued to notice that the site is beginning a series called Faith & Feminism. The first post in the series is entitled "A Message to Secular Sisters," and is a list of "four common problems that come up when feminists talk about women and religion." I have seen or expressed chagrin at all four in some form, and am optimistic about the site's expression of such statements. It's not the post that bothers me, though I'd like for my religious friends to look at the list of problems and tell me their thoughts. I'm deeply troubled by the comments to the post, most of which take the opportunity to complain about what the post is not rather than appreciate it for the step forward it seeks to make. One commenter laments that atheism will likely not be acknowledged as a religion in the series, while others object to the original author's suggestion that the irrational has something to to offer us both spiritually and politically. There are also some commenters who just want respect for believers, and I'm glad they're speaking up. I haven't stepped into the fray yet myself, because I'm really disappointed in the negativity surrounding what was clearly meant to be an olive branch. Any thoughts, friends?

Quick Hit : Housewives of God

2010-11-15T16:49:00.001-08:00

I was really surprised and interested to see this article in the NYT, which provides a fairly even-handed look at the role of female preachers and teachers within the argument of Christian complementarianism v. Christian egalitarianism. Often, religious columnists seem to take a condescending view of believers (I'm looking at you, Hanna Rosin!), but this piece examines multiple sides of a very complex issue. Any thoughts, friends?

Read-through Blogging, Part Three

2010-08-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia. Ed. Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Chapter Two: "Silence as Femininity?: A Look at Performances of Gender in Theology College Classrooms"

This chapter is by the book's other editor, Allyson Jule, and I found it incredibly illuminating. Jule begins by self-identifying as " an applied feminist linguist-educationalist," saying that she "explore[s] the patters of girls and boys and women and men in various contexts, particularly...classrooms" (35). She follows up this definition of her chosen field by saying that her interest in the way gender shapes language and communication stems from her personal experiences in Catholicism (35).

I'm very interested in in her recounting her initial consciousness of gender in religion. She says she always felt acceptance in Catholicism, and her personal proof of this comes from the fact that she and her mother and sister were heard and respected when they intellectually engaged with priests or other men in the faith, as well as from the fact that such men shared in labor traditionally gendered feminine, like cooking and cleaning, when the gatherings that produced their discussions took place. Since my feminist consciousness comes largely from an absence of gender equality in the religion in which I was raised, this view is foreign to me. I agree with her ultimate conclusion that human rights are central to the doctrine of Christianity, but I can't conceive always knowing that. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

After detailing how feminism and Christianity intersect for her personally, Jule gets to the question at the heart of the chapter: "What might gendered patterns of language use mean when they intersect with a religious identity?" (37). She begins by giving a quick overview of feminist linguistics, and she mentions a book that helped me in college, Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place (pub. 1975). Lakoff said that women have linguistic tendencies that are read as passive ( frequent use of qualifiers such as "sort of" and "like," raised inflections that can sound unsure, etc.), and that these tendencies cause men to dominate conversations. After the book was published, a nature/nurture debate regarding these tendencies sprang up, and it's a debate that hasn't stopped in the intervening thirty-five years. Something interesting that Jule does in this section is to interrogate the role of teacher in the classroom power structure. She questions where the line is between open-ended discussion and a lack of guidance, specifically from the perspective of a teacher at a Christian university, who she suggests (and I agree) is obligated more than most to ask students to formulate their own opinions while still offering moral, ethical, and religious direction. That balance is something I'll be thinking about a great deal in the coming months, and I'd welcome advice there as well.

Because I'm still working out my thoughts on Jule's classroom observations on gender and language, that's another post.

Read-through Blogging, Part Two

2010-07-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia. Ed. Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

"Christian Feminist or Feminist Christian: What's Feminism Got to Do with Evangelical Christians?"

The above is the title of the first chapter of the book I'm blogging my way through, and it's written by one of the book's editors, Bettina Tate Pedersen. The chapter begins with a series of "introductory anecdotes" that seem to be meant to situate us as readers within both Pedersen's personal feminism and her personal theology, while the rest of the chapter attempts to tease out the ways those spheres intersect. In the anecdotes, she discusses conversations with a student I know quite well, "the I'm-not-a-feminist-but student" (10). Pedersen notes that this student isn't only present in Christian schools, but thinks that that identity "has a particular significance and currency in [a Christian] context" (10). As someone who uttered this phrase in high school, before the occurrence of a series of what third-wavers have taken to calling "click moments" in college, I feel like I have a foot in both camps of this predicament, and though that should perhaps make me empathetic to such students, I think it just makes me confused about how to communicate with them.

Pedersen says that a similar experience has taught her to be tolerant of such students' evolving consciousnesses, to shove down an impulse to begin preaching at them about the benefits they reap which are direct results from a movement they are unwilling to acknowledge (More women in universities! In big business! In politics!). It calms me greatly to know that this pedagogical give-and-take is a common one. Her discussion of that give-and-take continues when she focuses on the importance of using the word "feminist." She says that most of her students either think feminism is a dead issue or antithetical to "the Christian 'man-as-head' paradigm for relationships" (12). She then lists feminist accomplishments of the recent and not-so-recent past: women outnumber men in colleges, can vote, can dress "for practicality and comfort," have control over their own reproductive processes (14). She goes on to say that "[dismissing] the term or ideology because improved (some what more egalitarian) conditions exist in some measure and in some places, we fail to understand the depth of feminism's critique, and we risk losing sight of the very conditions and manifestations of sexist oppression that a feminist critique has helped us to see" (14).

The greatest thing about that quote for me is the consciousness of other places and viewpoints that it presents. Pedersen acknowledges many waves of mainstream feminism, as well as Womanism and Global Feminism in her chapter. This acknowledgment seems particularly relevant to her religious position to me. As Christians, we're taught that Christ wants us to acknowledge "the least of these" as an act of worship, to look beyond our privilege. If I had to pick a flaw that I think is academic feminism's biggest, it would be that lack of perspective and dialogue between multiple feminisms.

Pedersen ends the chapter by acknowledging that her experiences in Wesleyanism paved the way for the development of her feminist consciousness. Because she sees her religion as primary to her politics in both chronology and importance, she calls herself a Feminist Christian, not a Christian Feminist. This book is the first thorough explanation I've gotten about that linguistic choice, and I'm grateful for it. If anyone reading this identifies as both Christian and Feminist, what do you call yourself, and why?

Read-through Blogging

2010-07-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia. Ed. Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

In an effort to think more about how my politics and my theology should be/are intersecting, I'm reading through the above book. Its chapters cover the personal, the political, and the pedagogical, among other focii, and the fact that others who identify as both religious and feminist seem to be thinking through similar issues that I'm struggling with makes me feel a little better on the whole. For the next few weeks, I'm going to be devoting the blog to a discussion of Jules and Pedersen's book as I read it, most likely a chapter at a time. Feel free to contribute your thoughts in the comments, or to email me at vrfarmer@gmail.com.

Introduction:
The book's epigraph is Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." I'm not sure what this is doing yet, what it says about the book's project as a whole. On one hand, it seems a cry for equality; labels don't matter and we shouldn't use them because the grace of Christ frees us from the restriction that such labels necessitate. That sounds nice. Looking a little deeper, though, what place does such a sentiment have in a book whose very title suggests reconciliation between two seemingly conflicting labels? Why title the book that way if the book is going to say we need to dump the labels through which we define ourselves? Just something I'll be considering.

The introduction proper is a collision of the personal and the political in which Jules and Pedersen recount their own backgrounds and the circumstances that made religion and feminism collide for them, as well as try to make since of the increasing global importance of religion in a post 9/11 world. I really like the inclusion of the personal here; I probably wouldn't have wanted to read the entire book if that dimension wasn't present. I believe that both religion and politics cannot be responsibly practiced without a connection to the personal. A connection to the intellectual or philosophical is also necessary, of course, but for me, the personal came first in both cases, and the rest has developed and is developing as I experience life.

A bit of the introduction that make me think this book is going to be amazing for my political and religious development:

Like others of our time, we grew up surrounded by a stubborn myth at work in Western society: that one's faith undermines one's thought and scholastics, that one cannot believe and think. If one is a 'Christian,' then one must adhere to certain performances of that identity; if one is a 'feminist,' then one cannot have a dynamic religious faith because religious faith is too patriarchal and demeaning to women. To be a woman inside Christianity necessitates the role of submitting, while to be a woman committed to feminist ideals necessitates a role of assertiveness or aggression (5).

WOW. Just wow. That paragraph pretty much sums up every problem I've had from age fourteen to now. I like so much about it. I like that this incompatibility is going to be questioned from multiple angles. I like that the editors are not afraid to employ quote marks in a Poststructuralist way that questions the validity of group labels (or "metanarratives," just so I can exercise my Derridean cred). I really can't wait to dive in to the rest of the book.

My Childhood Obsession, Reclaimed?

2010-06-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me personally have heard me do a lot of complaining recently about artifacts of my childhood, like Rainbow Brite and the Lisa Frank line, being sexualized in order to appeal to today's preteens, raised as they were on Bratz dolls and kiddie thongs. Well, there's one update that I just can't abide, the bendy straw that breaks the pink, sparkly camel's back, and that's the Sweet Valley High reissues.

I, like many women my age, devoured the books, dreaming of a high-school experience filled with convertibles and love triangles. I always knew I was more of an Elizabeth than a Jessica (the former edited the school paper; the latter spent more time chasing boys), and even then I knew there was a bit of a madonna/whore thing going on, but the books were fun and silly and age appropriate. To this day, I still think of The Unicorns (SVH's popular girls, "school royalty") whenever I see a young woman in purple!

They've already been discussed and decried in feminist circles, with former fans citing outrage that Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the novel's protagonists who were once "perfect size sixes" now being "perfect size fours." I agree that the focus on body image and the ever-shrinking perfect teen is certainly alarming, but it seems there might be vindication for SVH fans on the horizon.

Diablo Cody, known for her work on Juno and Jennifer's Body, which I've discussed on this blog, has been tapped to write a film version. She's been quoted describing the film as "the madonna and the whore, running around," and that makes me a little excited, like maybe she can come up with something that gets around all the posturing and the body image nonsense. I dig Cody's quirky lexicon, and I see it as akin to the way girls that I age speak to one another. My friends and I had our own code words; I think that resonates. Needless to say, not everyone is a fan of the project. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing what happens, though.

On Aha! Moments, Stereotypes, and Self-Definition

2010-04-11T14:40:00.000-07:00

A central tenet of my personal teaching philosophy is the importance of cultural awareness. That term means several things for me pedagogically. First, it means opening my students up to views outside of their own and teaching them that they can simultaneously disagree with and respect one another. Though my students are of different socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds (as well as a number of other backgrounds I haven't named, of course), they all seem to enjoy this part of the learning process, after the initial shock of being allowed to "argue" in class wears off. Though I've introduced this spirit of debate differently in the past, I decided to use a "Lunch Menu" activity from my school's archive of teaching material to serve that purpose this semester. My 1102 class is organized around the topic of community dynamics this semester. We'd been talking since the class began about how the urge to define others was actually in some ways, an urge to define the self. They were in the middle of researching papers on stereotypes of global communities as they are represented in popular media, so we'd already spent some time discussing what creates a stereotype and how generalizations breed inaccuracy. As the class began to look at the menus (one meat and potatoes on a disposable plate, one vegetarian on more environmentally friendly tableware) and decide who would choose what (men, women, Democrats, Republicans, those under 40 or over 65, etc.), they mostly agreed. This provided an opportunity to discuss the fact that stereotypes' generality are connected to their wide dissemination. The trend of similar answers continued through questions about political parties and age groups, but ground to a quick halt when the subject of gender was broached. At first, the majority of the students agreed that men would choose the carnivorous option and women the lighter fare. They cited a cultural equation of masculinity with strength that most seemed to find valid. After a few moments of prodding from me, though, a few men in the class dismissed both meals as too feminine, due to the fact that the steak and potato were accompanied by a double martini--apparently a girly choice of alcohol. I then asked them what fictional character was most closely associated with bringing the martini back into vogue in the 1960s, and some students immediately responded, "James Bond." When I questioned whether or not James Bond embodied masculinity, I could see some light bulbs beginning to go on: masculinity could vary! It could exist in different types, manifest itself in various ways!

As discussion moved on, one male student offered the following justification for the equation steak eater=masculine: "If I was on a date with a girl and she ordered that, there wouldn't be a second date!" I didn't have time to decide whether I was offended at his sexism or overjoyed at the opportunity for discussion, or a little of both. Chaos had officially broken out in room 310. Female members of the class were irate, and many of them offered the rejoinder that they would certainly feel feminine even if they ordered a steak, that femininity was complex, that it should ultimately be an issue of self-definition. At that point, I felt the need to point out two things: first, that the male student felt that dating a girl who exhibited what he considered unfeminine traits, even just once, somehow called his own masculinity into question, thereby proving something we'd been discussing all semester long--in defining other people, you ultimately say something about how you define yourself. Second, I felt the need to push against the women in the class's ire a bit. Earlier, almost all of them had agreed that "women" would order the vegetarian meal. Since several of them now expressed an individual desire to order the steak, by their own definition, they were not women. When confronted with this syllogism, several students protested that they had been deliberately asked to stereotype themselves. I acknowledged that was true, and then ended the discussion by asking them to consider how often the circumstances in which they live ask them to stereotype themselves in similar ways.
This is the second way I would like my students to be culturally aware. I feel like getting them to see the ways in which they are connected to and constructed by the world around them, even through small things like the activity described above, can show them that critical thinking is not just for the classroom. It can help them make sense of a larger world that may not respect them as individuals, as much as they are taught that our society values the strength of the individual above all else.

Thoughts, friends?

Why Tina Fey Needs to be My BFF

2010-02-12T10:52:00.000-08:00

I'm so sorry it's been a bazillion years since I last posted. I just had to share the following passage from Tina Fey's recent Vogue interview. Fey is asked about her personal style and responds thusly:

I spend most of my time in my daily life trying to be like a fashion noncombatant. My hands are up! I'm not even trying! That said, to talk about the impact of fashion is really interesting. I think so much of it is tied into feminism. I am a post-baby boomer who has been handed a sort of Spice Girls' version of feminism. We're supposed to be wearing half-shirts and jumping around. And, you know, maybe that's not panning out. But you can tell different generations of women by whether or not they wear that Hillary Clinton blue power suit or the reappropriated Playboy-symbol necklace worn ironically. I think women dress for other women to let them know what their deal is. Because if women were only dressing for men, there would be nothing but Victoria's Secret. There would be no Dior.

How much do I love that she turns a vapid question into an opportunity to criticize equally vapid, commercialized third wave feminist politics? The answer: A WHOLE LOT.

Also, that comment about women dressing for women seems layered and interesting. I totally agree that as women, we tend to see a lot of power in the way we visually represent ourselves, and I agree that we tend to gear that power toward intimidating other women. The last sentence, though, seems to suggest that "dressing for men" can only mean turning yourself into a sexual object, whereas wearing high fashion, like Christian Dior, pays no mind to the male gaze. I think that's a bit too black and white, but I understand her general meaning, I think.

I love that Vogue is running interviews like this now. Thanks, Tina, for showing the world that smart women are totally foxy.

In which I am (almost) as awesome as Shakespeare, or, Take that, Thomas Middleton!

2009-12-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

In the lyric poetry class I'm taking this semester, we've not only had to read and critically analyze poems, we've also had to produce them in order to examine things like form and meter in a more hands-on way. Though I'm by no means a poet, I am especially proud of the last poem I wrote for class, and I wanted to share it with you. The assignment was to take a quatrain from an existing sonnet that we read and expand it into a full, quasi-original sonnet. This is what I came up with.

(The first quatrain is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 93)

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceive'd husband—so love's face
May still seem love to me, though altered new:
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place.

Which ignorance be worse—presuming feign'd
Affection pure, or feigning falsehood right?
Both ask the heart be tightly trained,
And love obscure us from a harsher sight.

If knowledge power is, and dumb be bliss,
Then dumb I'll be, pray gods my lips shut fast!
If thou in secret find another's kiss,
My power's mute, but that our time shall last.

And since the moon cares not for constancy,
I'll just take light from your security.

------------
What do you think? I'll gladly accept suggestions for titles, as I can't think of any.

Quick hit: Girls Investigate Our Views On Media

2009-11-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

This video is the first of four released by the Women's Media Center (WMC). In it, young women discuss the media in their lives, how they feel about it, and whether or not it represents them. They're incredibly socially aware and articulate, much more so than I was at that age. It makes me very happy to see young women express themselves this way. I think I've found the charity I'm donating to next year!

A not-so-Glee-ful experience

2009-11-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

I refuse to stop watching FOX's Glee, and I feel kind of bad about it. Kind of. I've been a fan of Ryan Murphy's offbeat, quasi-stereotypical style since the days of Popular, second on my list of Most Underrated TV Shows Ever (Freaks and Geeks tops that list, in case you were wondering). I think Popular did a great job of relying on stereotypes just enough to let the audience know that it was actually decrying those stereotypes. Glee tries to do the same thing, and so far, fails miserably at it. I really really wanted this show to be awesome. It's a musical, for one thing. In my world, there can never be enough of those. For another, it stars Lea Michele, who blew my mind with her awesomeness in Spring Awakening and is poised to be Broadway's Next Big Thing. While the pilot episode was filled with heart and promise and that transcendent cover of "Don't Stop Believing," the following episodes just keep going more and more into tokenism territory. There's not a woman on the show who's not a self-centered shrew, except for maybe Mercedes, the young black woman who refers to herself as "chocolate" and repeatedly spouts phrases like "Oh no you di'n't!" and "You betta watch yo'self, white girl!", and Tina, the quiet Asian with a secret. But the most complex and compelling characters (and the ones that have me thinking seriously about not watching the show anymore) are Kurt, a gay student who's just come out to his hypermasculine father (played brilliantly by that forgotten treasure of the 90s, Mike O'Malley), and Artie, who is in a wheelchair and was the protagonist of last week's episode, oh-so-originally titled "Wheels."

Kurt is flamboyant, dresses in way too much lame', and idolizes Broadway songstresses. Sure. okay. I expected that from television. It's not the greatest, but whatever. I think the great thing about Kurt's portrayal is his relationship with his father. The give and take of his dealing with Kurt's sexuality is heartwarming and honest, and though he doesn't agree with it, he loves his son enough to go to bat for him when he is discriminated against. They also have real conversations. Kurt frequently reminds me of what Rickie Vasquez might look like if My So-Called Life were a comedy and on the air today. Anyone who has seen that amazing show knows that that is a significant comparison. Here's hoping Kurt's character arcs continue to be complex.

And now to Artie, the reason for this post. There's been a great deal of discussion online regarding last week's episode. Some has been negative, some positive. I agree with a bit of both. I second Bitch Magazine's assertion that the episode contains a fair bit of "crip drag," especially in its closing number, wherein the entire cast performs a wheelchair dance version of "Proud Mary." Get it? "Rollin', Rollin'..." Yeah. They went there. I also agree with this blogger, who says the following about living with a disability:

[Artie's] portrayal as a kid who is frustrated and hampered by his disability yet is doing his best to live with it is such a much more realistic portrayal of what its like to live with a disability than other portrayals where the disabled person is a rude, bitter, sarcastic bastard who uses his disability as an excuse to avoid the real world (I'm looking at you, House), or a plucky, peppy go-getter who barely seems aware of her disability because gosh-darn it, its just a little ole minor inconvenience that doesn't really impact her life. When you have a disability, you are always, always acutely aware of it, and you live in a perpetual state of frustration over it - or so has been my experience. You can't let it stop you, and you just have to work with it as best as you can, but it's something that colors everything you do and every interaction you have with any other person and it is a source of constant frustration.

As someone who has spent every day of her life in a back-and-forth negotiation with physical ability, it really made me happy to see Artie expressing those struggles as well. Even as I lamented the fact that the young man playing him is able-bodied (disabled actors are notoriously unemployed, unless they're Marlee Matlin, and even then the majority of her roles boil down to either "She's so brave!" or "Oh, look, she's actually normal!"), I couldn't help but appreciate the obvious work he'd done to get inside his character's head. I guess I'll stick around to see what happens.

Quick hit: Yay Canada!

2009-11-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

I'm totally loving this article from Canadian newspaper The Star. I really wish that more people thought like that. Even the pro-choice bits don't come on super strong, which I really appreciate, since that's one issue that I struggle to find a position on, as a Christian Feminist Edit: She does call pro-lifers "anti-choice," which is a rhetorical move I don't support at all.. I heard about the new Gail Collins book that the author mentions on NPR as well. It sounds really interesting. Plus, there's a Mad Men reference, so I want to hang out with the author a lot now. Any thoughts on the article?

Let it be, home is me, and you are mine

2009-10-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit obsessed with this song lately. It's called "Home is Me, You are Mine," and it's by Everly, a female singer/songwriter duo that you haven't heard of and should check out. It is tangentially related to this post both in content and because I'm listening to it on repeat as I type this and think you could maybe feel the way I'm feeling right now if you did too. I'm not sure if it's an original song or not, but it's about being in love and being confused by life's twists and turns and trusting that God has a plan in all of it by paying attention to the little signs He sends, like light on the water and the laughter of children. Surface-wise, I'm pretty sure it's about this woman's husband going off to war, but that part doesn't matter as much as the overall moral. Okay, so it sounds really cheesy when I type it out like that, but it's not, I promise. Or maybe it is. If it is, I don't care.

As you know (because the only people that read this are either close friends or my husband), we've recently moved to a new town and I've started teaching at a new school. I've been struggling with why I got into this program, why I got into only this program. I've had some difficult moments with my new students, and this program is just so different from what I'm used to. I was really having a hard time figuring out why God put me here right now. I should probably say "why He put us here," as my husband has his own struggles in this new place, but I don't want to speak for him, so I'll just talk about me.

Until as recently as two years ago, I thought that I wanted to do my own research for a living, that teaching was just a means to and end that I would have to suffer through until I wrote a book, became the next Kathryn Schwarz, got tenure, and proceeded to do whatever I wanted until I retired. I'm still really excited about my personal research interests (posts most likely forthcoming about this semester's projects), but I'm getting to a place where I think teaching should be my main career focus, and settling down at a smaller school seems like the way to go. I've had several realizations that led to this decision.

My job is more than just teaching English.
When I look back on my college experience and the meaningful people in it, I remember those who took an interest in me as an individual, who challenged me to broaden my views of both myself and those around me, and who believed with me that I had something important and valuable to say. That's what I believe I'm supposed to do for my own students. Sure, they need to know how to make subjects and verbs agree, how to properly cite a source. But more than that, they need to learn how to respectfully listen to a classmate whose views differ from their own, to integrate themselves into a classroom community, to gather evidence for their own views, and to have the confidence to change those views if it turns out that that evidence isn't what they thought it was. It's my job to help turn these freshmen into respectful, compassionate critical thinkers, and I feel like I could do better at that at a school where I'm more encouraged to take an interest in students as human beings. I'm not saying that I can't do that where I am. I try to every day. Indeed, I probably have the best chance of doing that, taking into account the enormous size of most other freshman classes at my current University. In fact, one student with whom I've been discussing his problems over the past few weeks told me that he thinks I'm the only teacher he has that knows his name before saying, "Thank you for caring about me." That's why I want to teach, not so I can get my picture on a dustjacket someday (though that would be nice, eventually). I feel like there would be more emphasis on the importance of these personal relationships at a smaller school.

Personal responsibility matters. A moral code matters.
Currently, I teach at 8 a.m. I like teaching early in the morning. I feel fresh and ready at that time, and when I'm done teaching, I still have the whole day ahead of me in which to be (theoretically, at least) productive. That said, I realize that teaching at this time is ocassionally going to require me to wake up a few students. I'm okay with that. Sometimes we even do jumping jacks! I understand them being sleepy sometimes. What I absolutely will not tolerate, though, is the complete disregard for personal responsibility. On any given day, half of my fourteen-member class is tardy. Half! That is absurd. I'm told that the freshman dorms are far away, that the campus buses are slow. I remember dealing with this in my undergrad days. It wasn't fun. But still, I got up earlier. I shoved my way (politely, most days) onto a crowded, smelly bus, and I got to my classes on time, nine days out of ten. If I was more than ten minutes late, I did not go, because that disrupts class and disrupting class is rude. Last week, I had two stuents show up thirty minutes into a seventy-five minute class. I informed them to just not come if this were to happen again, and one of them rolled his eyes at me. The week before, a male student showed up without his shirt. I quickly informed him that that was innappropriate for class, and received a disinterested sigh (the kind that clearly says "Oh, GOD, you're so out of touch!") as he left to retrive his erstwhile clothing. These things should not happen. They show a terrible lack of responsibility on the part of the student. More than that, they should not be tolerated. Schools should not close their eyes to these transgressions, minor as I know they are, because that leads to eye-closing at larger transgressions. I get at least two or three crime bulletins from campus police every week, and I can't help but think that that's because these kids have no one answer to, no one telling them that what they do matters, that what they do affects people other than themselves. I want to cement myself in an environment with an understood, far-reaching code of community, responsibility, and morality.

Literature is a wonderful, beautiful thing, and it has something to give to the world.
As much as I love teaching my students to analyze advertisements and pop songs and the things they absorb every day without realizing the effect those things have on their views and ideologies, I want to also teach them the fun of meeting an unreliable narrator, or the way a well-placed caesura makes your breathing jump the tiniest bit as you read aloud. My current program forbids me to assign more than thirty pages of reading a week, and our FYC program is based on personal narrative the first semester and visual rhetoric the second. I asked in my orientation where the literature was, and was told that teaching poetry and fiction at the freshman level was old school, has gone the way of the close reading or the examination of authorial intent. I understand wanting to teach material that the students will see as relevant to their lives, but if we don't challenge them to look aoutside of themselves for meaning as well, outside of their own cultures, aren't we just cementing a culture of lazy, self-centered students who think that previous generations have nothing to say? It's for this reason that I'm becoming more and more attracted to Humanities programs that draw on the classics of literature, philosophy, and history to help students make sense of their ever-evolving worlds.

Okay, this is getting quite long, and I fear I may explode and reconstitute as Harold Bloom very soon, so I'll stop here. Thoughts, friends?

Megan Fox FAIL

2009-09-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

So Megan Fox admitted that she used to cut herself in a recent Rolling Stone interview. My first thought when I heard this was, "Great, now maybe this serious problem will be acknowledged and some people will get some help as a result." I cut myself a few times in high school in a misguided attempt to overcome depression, and it's something I didn't emotionally deal with or overcome until years later. I think it would've been helpful at the time for me to see someone in a socially-empowered position who had dealt with the same problem. Megan Fox doesn't treat it as a serious problem or one that may need professional help or treatment, though. Instead, she remarks thusly:

Yeah…But I don’t want to elaborate. I would never call myself a cutter. Girls go through different phases when they’re growing up, when they’re miserable and do different things, whether it’s an eating disorder or they dabble in cutting.

.

WOW. Cutting is not a normal teen phase, not something you "dabble in," like ceramics or poetry or acting or volleyball. It's a serious problem, something that many people struggle for years to overcome. I really don't like that she both normalizies and trivializes the issue. Any thoughts, friends?

Rape Prevention that Really Works

2009-09-22T03:59:00.000-07:00

I'm sure that, by now, all of you have heard of the rape allegations and subsequent recanting at Hofstra University. I'm not directly commenting on that, on who I think is right or wrong or lying or telling the truth. As much as I wish I had the time to make this a post about gender politics and the immediacy of victim blaming in America, I have to teach in half an hour and I'm locked out of my building, so intense thinking about that will have to wait. For now, I'd like to direct your attention to this clever inversion of tips to avoid rape. It seems to me that, in traditional schools of thought regarding prevention of sexual assault, there is too much emphasis on prevention by the victim. Don't walk alone; use the buddy system. Don't drink from a container that doesn't have a top you can remove and replace when at a party or bar. Know where exits are at all times. While this advice is smart and helpful, it does seem to place the blame on the victim when an assault or a rape occurs. If you follow these lists and someone assaults you, you must be protecting yourself incorrectly. That's a dangerous road to go down. The list I linked to is clever and very necessary because it drives home the point that rapists rape people, and that we should construct our views on the subject thusly, rather than assuming, as traditional prevention advice does, that victims are raped by rapists. The active verb clearly assigns responsibility as it should be assigned, as well as shows how important words and language can be to political action.

On fangirls and feminism, or, "Sweetheart, this ain't Gender Studies."

2009-09-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

This post was requested by my dear friend Beth, fellow butt-kicking feminist and Supernatural fangirl. If you don't care about the show, you may want to skip this post. I won't be sad, I promise.

For those of you not in the know who decided to stick around, Supernatural is a television show about two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who travel the country in their beautiful 1967 Impala killing ghosts, demons, and other things that go bump in the night. The show is, from its outset, a bit problematic from a feminist perspective. The brothers Winchester become demon hunters by following in the footsteps of their father, who is drawn to the business of hunting after he sees his wife engulfed in flames, pinned to the ceiling of Sam's nursery with her abdomen sliced open. He spends the next two decades learning to track the thing that killed her, and, as a result, the boys are alternately trained in supernatural combat and left to their own devices in a series of seedy motel rooms. While Dean takes their father's edicts as law, Sam yearns for normalcy and, when it's time for him to go to college, says goodbye to his family and their demon hunting ways for good, and says hello to Stanford's pre-law program, where he meets a comely blonde named Jessica and starts working on making his dreams of normalcy come true. That's all well and good until Dean shows up at his and Jessica's apartment in the middle of the night, asking Sam to help him find their father, who appears to be on a demon-hunt gone bad. Against his better judgment, Sam goes with him. The boys don't find their father, but do solve a mystery that he couldn't. They defeat a Woman in White, a spin on the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend who targets unfaithful men by making them pick her up on the side of the road. When they take her to her destination (her creepy, abandoned house), she flirts with them until they give in, then rips out their hearts. Sam and Dean kill her angry spirit by forcing her to confront the ghosts of the children she drowned after finding out her own husband was unfaithful. When she reenters her home, the watery spirits of her children engulf her own airy one, and she's gone. After their victory, Sam and Dean return to Sam and Jessica's place. Sam tells Dean he enjoyed the rush of the hunt and seeing his brother again, but that he needs to get back to his normal life, thanks. No such luck, because Sam finds Jessica pinned to the ceiling with her abdomen slashed, and she bursts into flame, a near-mirror image of what happened to his mother in his infancy, right down to her hairstyle. Sam now understands his father's motivation, and the pilot episode ends with a shot of Sam's duffel bag being thrown into the Impala's truck with its coterie of homemade weapons. We hear (but do not see) Sam say "We've got work to do," before the screen goes black.

Why does this get my feminist panties in a bunch? All of the above happens in the pilot. The catalyst for both sets of parallel action (father and son) is a dead woman, and the first spirit to be killed earns her fate for transgressing her appropriate roles as good mother and submissive wife. These points set up Sam and Dean's very male, very lonely world of muscle cars, hair metal music, and skirtchasing. Okay, so that's mostly Dean, but you get the idea. The boys are virtually alone in their weekly hunting pursuits until Season Two, when they meet the denizens of Harvelle's Roadhouse, a rundown place in Nebraska that seems to cater to a clientele of hunters. The roadhouse is run by Ellen Harvelle, a no-nonsense woman who somehow knows the boys' father, and her equally fierce (though not in the gross Tyra way) daughter, Jo, who longs to escape her mother's watchful eye and get in on the hunt herself. Both women are tough. They can take care of themselves without help from a man and they even best Sam and Dean in a fight. It turns out that John Winchester was there when Jo's dad was killed by a demon, so she has the same sort of familially-connected desire for revenge the boys do. A Jo/Dean romance is hinted at but never pursued, and though she proves herself capable of planning and seeking a hunt in episode 2.6, "No Exit," Dean looks at her as an inexperienced kid. When she suggests his disdain of her hunting is because she's a woman, he condescends, saying, "Sweetheart, this ain't Gender Studies." Jo turns out to be the ticket to the boys' solving the hunt, but only because the serial killer's ghost they're looking for has a particular hankering for petite blondes. Jo acts as bait and saves another woman in the process, but the boys must step in and save HER. We see her a few more times that season, and in her last major appearance, she's nearly raped by a demon-possessed Sam. Problematic and disturbing? Yes. Even more so? She was written off primarily due to negative response from the show's mostly female fanbase who didn't want a woman getting to close to the boys. They would rather all representations of themselves be screaming and helpless, apparently. Bah.

Fast forward to now, the beginning of Season Five. We've seen two more major female characters. One was a manipulative, double-crossing (or triple-crossing?) demon and the other was a mercenary. Both used their sexuality to get what they wanted. Not much to work with in the well-rounded female character department. There's been an interesting new development, though. Now the boys are trying to save the world from the apocolypse and a very upset Lucifer (yeah, that Lucifer...sort of). It turns out that they're the subject of a book series, cleverly titled (you guessed it) Supernatural, whose writer is a prophet from God. Yeah. They went there. This series has a small but rabid fanbase not unlike that of the actual television series. In the most recent episode we met Becky, the books' biggest fan.The author asks her to get a message to the real Sam and Dean. She tears herself away from the wincest fan fiction she's writing, and goes to see the boys. She then fawns, gropes, and generally freaks Sam and Dean out. I'm not sure what to make of this. On one hand, it's nice to see a wink and a nod to some of the more extreme members of a fandom I'm simultaneously a part of and love to hate. On the other hand, Becky seems like the latest addition to a series of poorly characterized women. I know the show has some silly fans. I know I like to get silly when I watch it sometimes. Jared (Padalecki, who plays Sam) and Jensen (Ackles, who plays Dean) are certainly easy on the eyes, and that's enjoyable, but the show is so much more than that. It's scary and funny and clever. It's just kind of sexist, too.

Jo makes another appearance in this week's upcoming episode. I'd love to see her confront Becky, but I doubt that'll happen. I asked Alona Tal, who plays Jo, how she felt about being written off the show and if she'd be back when I met her at a fan convention about two years ago (I meant it when I said I was a fangirl). She admitted that she was miffed about fan treatment of Jo and said tha she too had noticed a lack of a strong female character on the show prior to her tenure. Let's hope she remedies that for all of us this week.

Beth, I hope that satisfies your craving for some feminist discourse about our craziness. Everyone else, if you're interested in catching up, Seasons 1-4 are on DVD and Season 5 airs Thursdays at 9 on the CW. If you still don't care, thanks for reading anyway.

Girls, Gore, and the Female Object

2009-09-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

So I should really be reading Roman lyric poetry right now, but I decided to surf the interwebs a bit while eating my lunch, and now I must write a quick blog post. There's been a fair bit of buzz in circles both filmic and feminist about Jennifer's Body, a new horror film directed by Diablo Cody of Juno fame and written by the fabulous Karyn Kusama, best known for one of my favorite sports films, Girlfight. I can't decide whether I want to see the film or not. I'm leaning towards yes, though, (sorry, husband!), and Michelle Orange raises a few of the reasons why in her NYT article about the film. Before I go there, the trailer is here.

Orange mentions some great issues in the article, the first being the tenuous positions of women in horror films, both as viewers and as actors. I'm not a huge horror fan myself. I get scared very easily, so I usually can't handle the genre very well. have lots of female friends who are into it, though (Hi, Jess and Laurie!), and I'm a good enough feminist pop cultural critic to realize that there's a goldmine there in terms of gender analysis. Though I've read Men, Women and Chainsaws, which Orange cites, I don't agree that the women who kill the killer are completely victorious, due to the fact that they are the objects of the camera's gaze. Our watching these films is, to some extent, about watching (and enjoying watching?) helpless women. Orange also throws in the buzzword "torture porn" to describe films of the Saw and Hostel ilk that seem to capitalize on audiences' desires to see beautiful women struggle. This is where Jennifer's Body comes in.

As the trailer opens, it's all about the female object of the camera's gaze (I should note here the importance of casting Meagan Fox as Jennifer. She seems to be our culture's piece of meat du jour, so maybe this role is an ironic comment?). First, Jennifer is swimming naked toward the viewer, then she's walking down the hall at school, all while keeping the fourth wall broken. Then we're given a universal that hearkens back to the high school hierarchy: "There's one girl that every girl wants to be friends with and every guy would die for." The next few frames exhibit this maxim. Amanda Seyfried is Needy (Oh, I hope this is a diminutive and not her actual name, but I can't find concrete evidence to the contrary), the dorky girl (She has glasses, you guyz!) who wants desperately to be Jennifer's friend. Kyle Gallner is Colin Gray, the emo kid with a crush who literally dies for Jennifer, because, guess what, she's a DEMON. WHO EATS HORNY HIGH SCHOOL BOYS. The rest of the trailer is rife with silly high school sex cliches (a joke about lesbian sex at slumber parties, boyfriend stealing, Jennifer calling an equal opportunity murder "swing[ing] both ways"), but what intrigues me most is the part where Needy tries to tell Jennifer that what she's doing is wrong : "You're killing people!" Jennifer's response? "Noooo, I'm killing boys." This, to me, sets the film up as a seeming reversal of torture porn where men are unempowered objects of the camera's gaze. Now, I'm not at all a proponent of affecting change by merely reversing an existing binary. This film is definitely still problematic, but I think it's an interesting shift. How does killing the killer change if, instead of a woman killing a man (who has social and patriarchal power over her, not to mention physical strength, typically), the battle is between The Hot Girl and The Nerd Girl and therefore becomes one about appropriate femininity and the various ways that role is performed? Any thoughts?

Childbirth, Form, and Androgyny in Shakespeare's Sonnets

2009-08-31T09:09:00.000-07:00

I've read Eve K. Sedgwick's groundbreaking Between Men several times, and Sedgwick's theory of the homosocial, particularly the frequent erasure of women by the structure of the erotic triangle, is something that has influenced some of what has become the academic writing I've most enjoyed producing. Even though I'd read the book (including, of course, the Sonnets chapter) before, I'd never read it next to the sonnets themselves, and I'm still a bit shocked at what I found. The sonnets to the young man have been my favorite since late high school and early college, when I first started really getting into Shakespeare. Back then, I thought they were romantic and forbidden. Now, they seem to be dripping with misogyny, due precisely to that same triangular erasure. I still can't ignore the speaker's urging the young man to procreate (Sonnets 1-17), just as I couldn't when I first read those poems. Now, though, I'm increasingly aware of the role of women in this homosocial plea for procreation. They're, as Sedgwick says, nearly invisible in the poems, which is horrible, given how incredibly present they must be in order for the speaker's plan to be carried out. I just can't get away from the speaker's references to the young man's “form” being reproduced in future offspring. The word is used explicitly in 3.2 and 13.8, but is under the surface in other places, problematically so in Sonnet 11. To my knowledge, this refers to period medical theories adapted from Galenic ones that say that when babies are conceived, the men contribute the physical form, while the women contribute the less important matter (a misreading of the Latin “mater,” or “mother”). I know I originally got this from Laquer's Making Sex, but I don't have a copy in front of me, so I can't give you a page number. The word echoes this meaning in sonnet 3 (“Now is the time that face should form another”), while giving women none of the glory the speaker associates with the young man's future efforts at procreation by saying that the speaker will “unbless some mother” if he doesn't have children. Reproducing the young man's form is the blessing here, according to the speaker. The work of childbirth, or indeed, of child-rearing(confined almost exclusively to the feminine sphere in the period), gets no acknowledgement, and yet the woman is supposed to be blessed because the child she's been given is so beautiful, no thanks to her.
A few of the later sonnets in that section complicate the notion of form and how it is transferred. In sonnet 11, the speaker says that nature “best endowed” the young man with his beauty, and though there is no capital “N,” nature is anthropomorphized. She is also characterized as female. Since other sonnets have equated beauty with form and form as masculine dominion, sonnet 11 seems to say that female (N)ature gives form as well. Is something so godlike androgynous? Lastly, I'm not sure how to take sonnets like 18 and 19, in which the speaker suggests that the young man will be immortal through the poems that the speaker writes, as if textual reproduction is quasi-sexual as well. If that's the case, isn't the presumably male poet supplying both form (meter, poetic structure, etc.) and matter (words, topic-- e.g. Polonius' question to Hamlet in 2.2 : “What is the matter that you read?” and Hamlet's response of “Words, words, words.” ? I'm not so sure this fits with Virginia Woolf's notion of the androgynous mind, but it's certainly interesting, and something I'd love to explore further.

Christianity, Feminism, Submission, and Kyriarchy

2009-08-23T06:38:00.000-07:00

I struggle daily to find a common ground between my feminist political beliefs and my Christianity. I truly believe that these two selves are not at odds with one another, as many would think, and that combining the two, when I do it right, increases the liberating power of each. In that vein, I've been reading feminist theologians lately, and one that I'm trying to make heads or tails of at the moment is Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. She is a theorist in liberation theology with some pretty radical visions for how we define ourselves and explain our relationships, both physical and spiritual. The idea I've been thinking about a great deal lately is "kyriarchy," which the Wisdom Ways Glossary (2001) defines as follows:

Kyriarchy- a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for "lord" or "master" (kyrios) and "to rule or dominate" (archein) which seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination...Kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.

This, in my opinion, is a much more complex and shaded notion than that of patriarchy, which is very dualistic and seems to suggest all men ruling over all women. Many societies and communities don't work that way, but aren't exactly matriarchal either. I'm thinking specifically about the complex historical and current role of many African American women, who have often been expected to simultaneously fill both a dominant single-mother role and the role of a traditionally “submissive” wife (I admit that this is somewhat of a generalization taken from broad trends. I don't mean to offend.), but there are certainly many other examples.

The connection of my discovery of and intrigue concerning kyriarchy and my Christianity is this: I received the book The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace as a wedding present. It purports to contain “a Biblical perspective” on marriage, and, I'll be honest, I expected to hate it. To my surprise, I was deeply moved and convicted, and I've read just short of three chapters so far. It contained none of the unreasonable and sexist dictums to submit that I've often heard (and ridiculed) in the past. Instead, it explained to notion of service to one's husband in a way I can really get behind. The author explains that the relationship between God, husband, and wife is akin to that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All three parts are integral for spiritual growth and well-being; they just occupy different roles. The author also makes it clear that different does not mean hierarchical. Men and women were both made in God's image and are both required to serve Him; they are merely to do so in different ways, and one of the ways a wife can serve God is through loving her husband and putting his needs before her own. Peace doesn't deny male responsibility either, as many critics who label Biblical principles as misogynist often suggest of the proponents of those principles. She states that husbands are to appreciate the work that their wives do for them and see it for what it really is: a dutiful response to a higher spiritual calling that they, as husbands, should be grateful to benefit from. They, too, are to strive to elevate their wives' needs above their own desires. That doesn't seem disempowering or degrading to me at all. On the contrary, it seems like a way for people to acknowledge and appreciate their natural differences while striving to love one another. It seems like the biggest problem in all this is that it's easy to misunderstand what Biblical submission is. It's not worldly submission, not the stuff of invading armies or political coups. Instead, it has to be mutual to work, and just because the acts take different forms does not mean the mutuality does not exist. Given those notions, kyriarchy seems to fit. It also seems to suggest that power is not bad, that it is the misunderstanding of the source and nature of that power (from a Christian standpoint) that has negative results.

While I was pondering all of these things and how they affect me as both a Christian and a feminist, I came across a post on Feministing.com, widely considered the center of the young (secular) feminist blogosphere by many. While I frequently appreciate the site's dseire to make feminism relevant and fun, I find that for all their preaching of respect and tolerance, its members are typically quick to dismiss those to adhere to a religious faith as brainwashed or blind, Christians most of all. The post is entitled “Christianity, Misogyny, and Anger in Oklahoma,” and, in it, its author details her shock after attending a “Southern Baptist church” with several of her friends. I'm not sure what exactly the pastor said in that sermon, or if it was as misogynist and degrading as she recounts. Maybe it was. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and heard misogynist sermons many times as a child, so I'm not denying that that happens or saying that it's right. I think it's another case of humans equating Biblical submission with what we see of worldly submission and thinking that they are achieved by the same means. What really angers me about the post is the authors response when her friends tell her that the message they heard is a common one, one that they had heard and seen enacted by their own mothers. Her response:

This made me profoundly angry not only with the speaker, and other such speakers, but also at my friends. I realize it is wrong to solely blame my friends - that what has created them has been this environment of repression. All the same, they are able to read and think- they can see the outside world of strong, liberated women. They could be these women. Stand up for yourselves! Make your own decisions! Change the world! I only wish I had yelled it before.

Her friends did not say that they agreed with this viewpoint, only that it was a commonly espoused one (or if they did agree, she did not included their statements, which makes me think she's jumping to conclusions). More than that, she mentions “the outside world of strong, liberated women,” as if women who hold religious convictions are somehow under glass, like some holier-than-thou science experiment. She others women she claims to have the deepest concern for, yells at them to stand up for themselves while making no effort to stand up for them herself, to consider their position, to think about the importance of religious conviction and what defying that would mean for someone who holds it in a place of highest importance. That is intolerance, and that proves to me that we need a less black-and-white way to consider how power structures work in our daily lives.

In which I criticize one of my selves and defend another

2009-08-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

I promise that the post I said I would write on HBO's feminist fairy tales is coming soon. It's a lot longer and more involved than I thought it would be, and I'm trying to prepare to teach at a new school right now, so I'm a little busy. It'll be here eventually, though. In the meantime, I'd like to respond to two posts I read on the internet recently. While they are on wildly different topics, they are related, at least given my personal standpoint and overlapping identities, because both posts comment on/define something I identify as and are written by people outside those identifications. I've been thinking a great deal lately about inclusion and exclusion and labels and how those three concepts are so often inextricably linked for us as human beings when we identify or describe ourselves (to ourselves or to others), and these articles caused me to think a bit deeper about how I define myself and what those definitions mean or should mean to me.

The first article is on the website Jewcy.com, which I've been exploring a good bit recently. It's an informative, often quite funny, and sometimes satirical site that seems primarily to endeavor to counter the widespread (mis)conception of Judaism as antiquated, boring, or irrelevant. The article I want to discuss is entitled 10 Things We Can Learn From Evangelical Christians. I was linked to the article from another site, and was originally intrigued by the title, as so often the word "Evangelical" is coded as backward or closed-minded. While I don't like his tone or diction very much at all, I do agree with the majority of the points the author makes. For example, the first thing Aleph cites that Evangelical congregations do well that synagogues should use is free food. It's always made sense to me in terms of ministry to use meeting basic human needs as a gateway to meet the spiritual needs of those who may be afraid of discussing such things outright. Not onlt is it practical, but sharing a meal with someone allows for conversation and relationship-building. If someone is comfortable with me as a person, they'll ideally feel less pressured or like I'm just trying to convert them if I try to open up a spiritual discussion.

While I thought that point and others in the article were spot on, I took issue with others, specifically "Making Denominations Irrelevant" and "Creating New Traditions," and I took issue with these points because I don't think they work within the Evangelical church the way Aleph seems to think they do. In regards to the first, Aleph writes that "[Evangelicals] talk about 'The Church" as if all Christians, regardless if they go to Faith Harvest Ministry or Harvesting Faith Ministry, are a part of one body. While I've certainly heard that phrase used in that way, I don't think that its being used means that Evangelicals don't care about denominations. In my personal experience, the contrary is often true. Fun fact: In my (private, Christian) high school, Baptists and Methodists openly mocked one another and ocassionally wouldn't speak to each other. I've seen that kind of pettiness mostly disappear with the arrival of adulthood, but I think that a lot of Evangelical churches hold in high esteem the social capital or privilege that comes with a certain denomination in any given area.

The "Creating New Traditions" section reads thusly: "This is something that I've seen the Evangelical World do, really well. Ever heard about 'Hell Houses', the Evangelical version of a haunted house which literally scares-the-devil-out-of-you? Or what about Promise Rings and Abstinence Pledges? These are all the new traditions of the Christian faith, and Jews could do the same thing." While I agree with Aleph's implication that new traditions can invigorate worship, I think he's missing a discussion of respect for doctrine. I realize that he may be ill-equipped to discuss Christian doctrine specifically, and that's fine. I just think that his comment as is is severly oversimplified and essentially says new=good.

The second article reflects a trend in the feminist blogosphere that I just can't get behind: polyamory as anti-patriarchal empowerment. I won't speak about it at length here, but I may return to this trend in future posts. In one such article on one of my favorite blogs, Feministe, guest blogger Frau Sally Benz is writing a series of posts about her entry into the "poly" community. The point she makes about monogamy in her most recent post that really irritates me is this:

The problem with many of our contemporary relationships is that we’re meant to be everything to another person: to fulfill all and every need. I see this in parenting, where one couple are supposed to be everything for their children. I see it in relationships that have gone destructive, like mine described above: where I have felt that I had to be everything to another person, and felt continually like I would never ever be enough, that I had to set myself aside in order to be enough. Where I have felt bad for having needs that my SO didn’t know how or didn’t want to fulfill. In poly, there’s no assumption that you ought to fulfill all of someone else’s needs, or that they ought to fulfill all of yours. Those responsibilities, which can weigh so heavily on relationships and on partners, can be shared. And they can be shared in ways that are made explicit, which are negotiated. Which means that women have space to be less self-effacing without feeling like they’re putting the relationship at risk by not being able or willing to fulfill a need or desire. And yes, that negotiation is possible in a mono relationship—and is engaged in, in the ones that work, I think!—it’s just that because poly is unusual, in my experience, people don’t assume they have a right to things, or assume they’re fulfilling your needs based on some pre-defined notion of what a relationship is, as is so clearly defined for mono relationships in almost every love story ever.

While I appreciate her asserting that some people in monogamous relationships are vocal about their needs with their partners (I'd like to think that my husband and I try to be that way with one another, though I'm sure he'd say I need some work in that area), I object to both her assertion that monogamous people look to their partners to meet ALL their needs and her further implication that poly relationships are better because the pressure is less when multiple relationships can spread out the need-meeting. It seems to me that FSB is viewing monogamous people as cut off from the outside world. I don't get all my emotional satisfaction from my husband. I have friends, a family, a job, a religion. All these things contribute to my mood, my joy, my sense of self. Given that the effect she attributes to poly relationships also probably happens to people in monogamous relationships who interact with other people in any kind of meaningful way, polyamory just seems selfish, like an easy way out.

And those are my rants regarding self-definition. Comments are welcome and appreciated.

Childhood, Representation, and the Princess Archetype, Part One

2009-08-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

I have a lovely niece who is turning four at the end of this month. She's smart and kind and silly, and I want her not to lose those things as she grows up. I want her to realize that she can be strong and I want her to cultivate a healthy amount of confidence in herself. I'm sure these are things that most parents and relatives want for their children, and what most women want for the little girls in their lives. This is why I'm a bit wary of her sudden fascination with the Disney Princesses. I was the perfect age right in the middle of the Disney renaissance of the 1990s to have a similar fascination, and I turned out fine, but not without the help of some serious critical thinking, even as a child.

My first memory of what the Disney Princesses meant to me dovetails with my first memory of Barbie and similar dolls: I clearly recall being outraged (and possibly throwing a fit in the middle of a toy store, though I do not encourage children to emulate that particular form of social protest, if only for the benefit of their parents) at the sheer number of blonde toys there were to choose from, while Barbie seemed to have only one brunette “friend.” To add insult to injury, that friend seemed to be brunette only because no one else was, not because brown hair was just a pretty as blonde hair. If that was the case, why was there only one of her? After that moment, whenever I was asked who my favorite princess was—a very popular discussion among elementary school-aged girls at the time—I answered, “Snow White, because she has dark hair like mine.” Even at such a young age, in my own very small way, I recognized the pain of feeling excluded because the most popular toys, the prettiest toys, the toys the other girls thought were the best toys, did not look like me. I also recognized in that moment, though I couldn't pinpoint or define the feeling for many years, the sadness of feeling like a second thought, a token, when someone who looked like me was included. Almost twenty years later, I can't imagine how much harder it would have been to be a little Black girl or a little Latina girl or a host of other underrepresented little girls then, to need to see not just my hair represented as I played, but my entire physical being. I realize that Disney and Mattell have both made a concerted effort in recent years to rectify this problem. Disney films since my childhood have been populated with princesses of various ethnicities and backgrounds, with the first African American princess making her debut in The Princess and the Frog this fall, and the So In Style Collection, a new line of African American Barbie dolls with curlier hair and more realistic facial structure, was recently released.

While I'm thankful for this progress, I do want to make sure that young girls like my niece have alternatives to what I see as the most dangerous pitfall of the princess model: the role of the prince as active savior. While Disney has done work in this area as well (I'm thinking primarily of Mulan, who I near-worshiped as an eleven-year-old, and Kim Possible, who was a high school cheerleader by day and a crime-fighting secret agent by night), I am always on the lookout for something other than the traditional fairy tales from which that corporation has made its millions. That said, I was delighted to stumble upon the HBO series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child. The series is a bit dated (I think the most recent one is from 1999 or so), and occasionally relies on cartoonish racial or ethnic stereotypes, but I believe its heart is in the right place. Its typical format is to tell a traditional fairy tale like Snow White or The Emperor's New Clothes, but to change them up by setting them in a different culture. For example, their Snow White is set in a Native American village, while their Emperor's kingdom is ancient Japan. Several episodes also strive for a deliberately feminist perspective. I'm touched by this desire to both show children of all colors that the stories they love can star heroes and heroines that look like them, and to teach children that the wisdom and morals these tales often deliver can be found in nearly all cultures. I'll examine two episodes from the series that claim to be especially feminist in my next post. For now, I just wanted to air some of my misgivings about how we teach children to view their world. I know there are some fabulous resources to combat how media can harm children in today's world. For example, I've read Packaging Girlhood , and I absolutely adore Amy Poehler's web show Smart Girls at the Party. Do you have more suggestions as to similar books , companies, or initiatives that I should check out? Please share your thoughts and stories in the comments section.

About This Blog

2009-08-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'm going to use this blog to explore and share my thoughts about a number of subjects and causes close to my heart, including but not limited to feminist issues, GLBTQ activism and representation, teen culture in America, and the importance of popular culture as social critique. I would consider most of those notions "marginal" in the context of mainstream America, and since I agree wholeheartedly with the quote above that the best way for marginal groups to escape the margins is to communicate with and speak out for one another, "Marginally Yours" seemed like a great name for this space. In that same vein, I'd love to eventually open this blog up to multiple contributors to create a chorus of voices from the margins, whatever and wherever they may be. So, welcome to my bit of cyberspace. Read, think, comment, and tell your friends!