Category Archives: Blog Posts

Reconstructing Masculinity

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I found Katz’s article “Reconstructing Masculinity” to be very interesting in its navigation of gender binaries and issues arising from the intersection (and conflation) of sex and gender. What struck me particularly about this was how the MVP program Katz describes can be seen almost entirely in terms of reframing, renaming, rebranding, or more strongly (as the article’s title puts it), reconstructing.

One main goal is the reframing of violence against women as an issue for everyone, not just women. Another that is part of the MVP program is the rebranding the man as potential bystander rather than potential assaulter. The whole program is framed as trying to discourage passivity, not as trying to discourage the individual athletes from enacting violence towards women. These two goals exemplify two different approaches to gender: the first seems to encourage movement away from understanding violence along lines of gender binary, while the second works within the ‘male’ category to change the way in which men relate to the female ‘other’.

The fact is, though, the problem of violence is gendered, as Katz notes that around 90% of perpetrators are male, regardless of the gender of the victim. Thus, while the gender binary is frustrating to me, I see the value in Katz’s all-male workshops when men can talking about issues of violence in gender-segregated contexts, and which allows participants to “deconstruct the monolithic image of masculinity the media have presented to them” (165).

It is this deconstruction which I think is the most important part of this project, for the issue of abuse goes far beyond the physical actions involved, but is connected to the attitudes of masculinity that place women in a position of inferiority. …Though it might be more accurate to say that (hegemonic) masculinity places femininity as inferior, where femininity is understood from this masculine perspective as including both women and gay men.

A reforming of masculine identity to rely less on defining itself in opposition to the feminine would help break down the binary understanding of socially-enacted gender (and possibly sexuality too, as masculinity and heterosexuality are so often conflated) and could have implications for the way in which people of different gender identities interact.

Victims of Lead

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Mel Chen’s chapter “Lead’s Racial Matters” in Animacity looks at race and narratives of globalization and contagion in the context of the 2007 recall of Chinese-made toys, the paint on which contained high levels of lead.  One aspect of this exploration that I find  particularly interesting is the ways in which this ‘crisis’ with its international implications actually impacted racial discourses within the United States.

Chen mentions two layers or two types of racialization that this panic inspired. The first is the framing of lead as “Chinese” through continued association of the potentially dangerous toys with China as a population and geographic space. The second is the instance where focus shifted within the US from the black American child as victim to the white American child as victim.

In the decades leading up to the events of 2007 , lead paint appeared in the context of health concerns with old buildings, where class and race intersected in such a way that resulted in lead poisoning disproportionately affecting African American children.

However, with the lead toy crisis, the physical appearance of the victim shifts. The Child at risk of harm from Chinese-made toys is white, middle class, and often male. (This child is even seen as heterosexual, Chen argues.)

If this child meant to represent all children, this is problematic in that the chosen image reinforces belief in a white male default, framing him as the “everychild”. On the other hand, if the chosen image reflects that the structures and companies behind such ads and campaigns seek primarily to protect these privileged children (and their privileged parents), this plays into discourses of disposability, wherein certain bodies are devalued.

The black child represents a type of “otherness” within the American racial context, but the introduction of another nation/ethnic group as occurred during the toy crisis takes away the need to grapple with ideas of other within and people can instead focus their energies on the other without. Degrees of “otherness” can be disregarded in favour of a very clear “here”/”there” binary.

Chen talks about this mentality of “here” and “there”. Lead is of “elsewhere” and it should not be “here” in America. The introduction of the “lead toys from China” threat shifted attention away from this internal problem “here” to an issue whose origins are “there”, a process that to a large extent erases the existence of lead within the US.

This paradigm of fundamental separation results in monolithic representation of “here” and “there” that applies also to race within these two conceptual spaces. Thus, despite documented health concerns of previous decades and despite great racial diversity in the United States, the child of the American “here”, the child in need of protection, is White.

Africa and the Orientalist Paradigm

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“…the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” – Edward Said, Orientalism

Reading John Storey’s section on Orientalism in In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture called to mind Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s very tongue-in-cheek piece, “How to Write About Africa”. This essay emphasizes the ubiquity of certain images and ideas in fiction and reportage set in or involving Africa that serve to paint it as “other”.

“Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these.”

Though an example of the Global South rather than the traditional “East”, this example involves the same process of “othering” that characterizes Orientalism. The types of writing to which Wainaina is alluding allow Western readers to construct themselves in relation to “Africa”, in a way that often allows them to imagine themselves in a position of relative superiority.

The fact that the figures of the “The Ancient Wise Man” or “The Starving African” Wainaina describes are familiar to me from books and films and the news media suggests their pervasiveness. That these images are stereotypes is problematic enough, but there is danger particularly in the fact that the Western consumer is permitted, even encouraged, to revel in the sense of “otherness” they evoke to the degree that we have the potential to fetishize certain troubling images.

However, even when the images are not objectively negative, the fact that they exist as tropes to begin with evidences and perpetuates the process of othering. For example, Wainana satirizes the essentialization of Africa:

“Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”

This tendency to forgo imagining complexly and in favour of treating the “other” as a vague monolithic entity is an attribute of Orientalism, one which, in the case of Africa, manifests beyond specific cultural products in the tendency within the general Western context to treat the entire African continent as if it were a single, homogenous country.

According to the Orientalist framework, this version of Africa is created by the West and acts as a tool of superior-self-identity formation for the West. Worryingly, though, the West as fabricator might just believe its own fabrication.

The Language of Representation

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(This post is a response to the online module “Representing Reproduction: Popular and Political Narratives”.)

What struck me most about this exploration of the way in which biopolitics generally and the abortion debate specifically are represented, was that the module – particularly Heather Latimer’s writings – noted that not only is the presence of representation important, but also significant is the means of representation, namely the language and terms used.

Latimer notes that the language of reproductive representation and discussion has carried over from abortion debates of the 1980s. “Freedom”, “choice”, and “privacy” have been words around which to structure pro-choice advocacy (though Latimer notes their potential to also be employed in denying women abortion rights). Even terms such as “pro-choice” and “pro-life” are similar carryovers and our continued attachment to these specific words facilitates a continued understanding of the debate as consisting of dualistic categories. Such words do not simply play a representational role, but also impact how meaning is structured in these debates.

In addition to the above examples, the instance of language that stood out to me while going through this module was when, in a 1970 radio interview with Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a woman caller speaking about abortion says, “It’s just plain murder”. The word “murder” that she chooses to use carries a complex set of implications. It links abortion to gang shootings or serial killers or other such horrible things with which the word is associated. Not that this woman articulates such connections directly, but her choice of words suggests this broader context of use. The caller’s word choice also says, without her having to verbalize it specifically, that the fetus is a person with the same rights as any other person under the law. On the other side of the debate, the phrase “to terminate a pregnancy” is deliberately implemented in order to shift the focus away from the debate about personhood and the rights of a fetus.

“Murder”, “pregnancy termination”, “the ‘A’ word” – three different references to abortion, each word or phrase carrying its own set of connotations that influence how we understand the issue. As evidenced in this module’s exploration of representation of the abortion debate, language has immense power in structuring meaning.

 

In terms of the teaching format of this module, I appreciated the variety of media used to communicate ideas (videos, journal articles, powerpoint slides, etc.). That said, the main thing that is lacking in this online format is the interaction with fellow students and the in-person discussion that can be generated around these topics, which, for me at least, is an important part of learning and understanding.

Commodity Feminism, Commodity Fetishism

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“Young women of the world, two things are lacking in your life: gender equality and shiny hair.
And we can help you achieve at least one of those things.”

Such is Pantene’s message in this video, part of the company’s #ShineStrong campaign.

This ad is part of a larger trend, termed “Commodity Feminism” by some, which uses (a version of) feminism to market products to women.
Examples are ubiquitous:
Always’ #LikeAGirl.   CoverGirl’s #GirlsCan.   Verizon’s #InspireHerMind.

These campaigns have been accused of propagating a watered-down, de-clawed feminism that agitates little for actual social change.  Impressively, companies convince us that by consuming the product we are supporting the feminist cause.  Also valid is the comment that the “you be you” message of these ads is at odds with the very nature of marketing, which emphasizes a lack or imperfection in order to then provide a product with which to solve this “problem”.

Such critiques certainly have value.  However, these ads also raise interesting questions about understandings of product and commodity.
Though the term Commodity Feminism plays nicely on Marx’s Commodity Fetishism, are there similarities between the latter concept and this advertising trend that forefronts social causes and ideology?

Marx recognizes that an object produced by labour processes gains a “mystical character” and social status unrelated to its use-value as soon as it enters relations of exchange and becomes a commodity.  The result is that, to quote Marx, the “social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.”  The focus shifts from labour to the product as its own entity with its own intrinsic value.

Much contemporary advertising, including the examples mentioned above, engages in obfuscation of the labour and product-ness of the commodity being presented.  Value is instead assigned or implied by linking the commodity to a particular lifestyle, identity or social cause.  Commodity feminism is one example of the addition of an ideological layer that distracts from the origins and nature of the commodity advertised.  Significantly, it also invites the consumer to buy into an ideology – here, feminism – in order to divert attention from the fact that by purchasing the Pantene product advertised, the only ideologies that the consumer is truly supporting are consumerism and capitalism.

Thus both commodity fetishism and commodity feminism are engaged in veiling potentially problematic economic relationships.  Commodity fetishism masks the exploitative relationship between worker and capitalist, focusing on the independent commodity object.  Commodity feminism provides a social-ideological focus in order to obscure the exploitative capitalist relationship that exists between company and consumer.

Benjamin, the Artist and Instagram

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The internet is home to a proliferation of images created and shared by individuals, often featuring themselves. Now some of these appear on the walls of a New York art gallery.
In the exhibit “New Portraits”, artist Richard Prince uses what appears to be a fairly simple formula:

Choose a photograph of a person posted on Instagram.
Add a comment.
Take a screenshot.
Print onto canvas.

Voilà. Art.

Repurposing images is certainly not a new phenomenon in visual art; digital technology and the internet simply enable it on a massive scale.

Writing seventy-four years before the creation of Instagram, Walter Benjamin notes that technical reproduction “can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself”. He recognizes that technological reproduction enables the removal of content from its place of origin and facilitates its dissemination, thus creating the potential for repurposing and new interpretations.

Reaction to Richard Prince’s exhibit has involved, unsurprisingly, visitors taking photographs with Prince’s “New Portraits” and then posting these new layered, mise-en-abyme images on Instagram. The gallery visitor reproduces and repurposes Prince’s gallery piece in the composition of her own photograph, and returns it to the space of the internet.

Benjamin also comments that technological developments allow the popularization of artistic creation whereby the masses themselves become creators, problematizing the distinction between professional artist and the public.
However, in the case of “New Portraits”, despite the dual stages of creation – by Instagram user and by Prince – the distinction between the “artist” and the original photographer remains intact, defined primarily by economics and prestige. As Prince has demonstrated, Instagram photos are (more or less) free for the taking. Conversely, the exhibited photographs – created by Prince as “artist” – are copyrighted and sell for around $40,000 each.

Prince’s art – a product of our age of image reproducibility – repurposes the popular, but its exhibition in a gallery space suggests elevation and “high art” value. The public who view the exhibit are themselves photographers, but their photos are not found in galleries. They are found on Instagram.