In which I watch Undercover Boss

So, obviously, I ended up on the couch on a Friday night, beside my mom and my brother, watching Undercover Boss and seething. I don't know how the channel ended up there between The Rick Mercer Report and plans to watch David Fincher's House of Cards on Netflix, but forty-five minutes later I was stuck in CBS's capitalist fantasy, waiting for the inevitable end.

For those of you who are privileged enough to have never seen an episode of Undercover Boss, the basic premise is this: head corporate honcho joins climbs down the ladder to join little people in the trenches for a few days. While on the job -- washing dishes, doing sanitation work, or in tonight's episode, cutting chickens in half at Boston Market -- the bosses learn something about just how difficult it is to do intellectually bereft, physically repetitive, and socially unrewarding work all day, and show off their newfound respect for the worker by bestowing gifts of cash and promotion on the the employees with the most tragic stories and cheeriest demeanors. In this particular episode, three employees received approximately $20,000 each, to which one drive-thru worker responded with an exclamation that God moves in mysterious ways.

Like essentially every other reality television show, Undercover Boss offers emotional payout in the form of providential benevolence. We can all feel good because the single mother going to school part-time on her days off can move up in the company, and the aspiring nurse can quit her second job to learn the break management software and teach it to the regional market leaders. Or at least we can until we think about the other seventy-five employees who are still moving warmed-over green beans around in a stainless steel box to make them look "nice" for the customers. But Undercover Boss bothers me more than shows like American Idol or Say Yes to the Dress because it touches more on the realities of life in the service industry while simultaneously valorizing the enforcement of brand-management affect-policing.

The Boston Market episode makes this particularly evident because it is apparently the only episode in which an employee is fired by the undercover boss. While the self-proclaimed "Kim Kardashian" of Boston Market is an abrasive personality who clearly takes some perverse pleasure in shit-talking the clientele, he is ultimately fired not for expressing these sentiments to a customer (he does not), but to a woman he presumes to be a non-Boston Market diner waitress with aspirations to owning a restaurant. In this context, his catty vitriol re: elderly customers and crying children comes off less as corporate insubordination and more like service-worker solidarity. "It's not mean of me to hate customers," he says at the end of the episode, and while it certainly would be 'mean' to hate any of them as individuals, a generalized resentment of the category of customer on the part of service workers seems almost banal.

But more than the firing of a petty and disgruntled employee, it's the weekly rehashing of the 'boss goes slumming' schtick that really grates. What it makes evident, in the end, is that none of the bosses worked their way up in the company, but were rather outside hires. This gives lie to the opportunities provided, at the end of each episode, to those few selected employees to "move up" in the company. Ultimately, the boss goes back to her job mending Boston Market's failing brand -- a job depicted at the beginning of the show as consisting mostly of tasting chicken and spouting off phrases about better living through fast food -- and the rest of Boston Market's front line employees go back to their dead-end service jobs without a $20,000 reward from corporate for busting their ass while still attending school. The fact is, retail, food service, administrative, and other low-wage jobs are often defined by dead-end career development, unpredictable hours, minimal benefits, and precarious job security. The fantasy that things would be better on the bottom if only those on the top knew just how hard it was strips workplace relations of any political context, relegating the experience of the worker to a simple test of who can be the happiest when the cameras are on.

"Hip is a romantic idea, not a catalogue of facts."

From John Leland's Hip: The History:

 ...hip tells a story of black and white America, and the dance of conflict and curiosity that binds it. In a history often defined by racial clash, hip offers and alternative account of centuries of contact and emulation, of back-and-forth. This line of mutual influence, which we seldom talk about, is not a decorative fillip on the national identity but one of the central, life-giving arteries. Though the line often disappears in daily life -- through segregation, job discrimination and the racial split in any school cafeteria -- it surfaces in popular culture, where Americans collect their fantasies of what they might be. The center of American culture runs through Mark Twain and Louis Armstrong, and it is imposible to imagine either's work without both African and European roots. Born in radically different circumstances and separated by history, they have as much in common with each other as with their peers from what either might call the ancestral homeland. Both are classicists and bluesmen, masters of language, breakers of the rules that would hold them apart. What they have in common is hip.

For better and worse, hip represents a dream of America. At its best it imagines the racial fluidity of pop culture as the real America, the one we are yearning to become. As William Burroughs said, revolution in American begins in books and music, and then waits for political operatives to "implement change after the fact". At its worst, hip glosses over real division and inequity, pretending that the right argot and record collection outweigh the burden of racial history. White hipsters often use their interest in black culture to claim moral high ground, while giving nothing back...Really that high ground lies elsewhere. Hip can be a self-serving release from white liberal guilt, offering cultural reparations in place of the more substantive kind. This is white supremacy posing as appreciation. Neither of these verdicts on hip is strong enough to cancel the other out. Hip serves both functions: it is an ennobling force that covers for ignominy. Steeped in this paradox, it tells a story of synthesis in the context of separation. Its metier is ambiguity and contradiction. Its bad is often good.  

Exhibit A: Pixar and Studio Ghibli

As someone who enjoys a good heartwarming fantasy adventure story, I've got a special place in my heart for two of the most innovative and artful film studios currently working: Pixar and Studio Ghibli. Both studios have produced some of the most beautiful, challenging, and emotionally relevant films of the past two (and a bit) decades, and both are in part defined by their mission to take family-oriented fare more seriously than the majority of production companies seem to. But, after a month of watching Ghibli films every Thursday night, I noticed something interesting about the main characters in their films.

Pixar films from the top left: Toy Story, Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up

Ghibli films: Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,
Princess Mononoke, and Howl's Moving Castle

Spot the difference yet? If you said "the gender of the main characters", give yourself a pat on the back.

Pixar has been criticized a number of times for not featuring female main characters in their films (The Incredibles and Toy Story 2 come the closest, but even in these films the women & girls play backup to the male characters). Ghibli productions, on the other hand, place girls front and centre -- even Princess Monoke and Howl's Moving Castle, which have male co-leads, feature strong, capable women. Moreover, the girls in Studio Ghibli films break out of the traditional Disney princess model for female characters. Miyazaki populates his films with tomboy-ish young girls, feisty old women, feral warriors, and yes, even a fully-realized princess who saves her people from certain destruction.

Both Pixar and Studio Ghibli have taken the animated family film to new artistic heights; neither studio tells stories that are primarily romances, and both combine terrific adventure and gentle good humor with masterful art design and an emotional maturity often lacking from movies aimed at children (or adults for that matter). But as much as I love Pixar and the films they produce, it would be nice to see them take a page out of Studio Ghibli's book and put a female character front and center. The success of Miyazaki's films in both Japan and North America show that there's a market for these stories. The addition of a heroine to the Pixar roster would be a mark that the studio can be innovative both artistically and socially, inside and outside the studio.

Edit: Not ten hours ago, The Mary Sue posted concept art from Pixar's upcoming original production, Brave. The best part? It's the first of Pixar's films to star a female protagonist. Here's to Pixar entering their third decade by turning over a new leaf on gender.

I would also be remiss if I left out a recommendation for the indie animated flick The Secret of Kells. Ireland-based Cartoon Saloon's beautiful film was nominated for Best Animated Picture at the 2010 Academy awards, and featured two equally well drawn leads -- monk-in-training Brendan and the enchanting wolf-girl, Aisling. Their upcoming Song of the Sea promises to be an equally lovely addition to the animated family film wall of fame:

Song Of The Sea - Conceptual Trailer from Cartoon Saloon on Vimeo.

[And, as a reminder, if you'd like to get regular updates from the blog on Facebook, check out the Textual Relations fan page!]

Perfectly good guitar: on growing up acoustic

About a month ago, I took my dad out to see Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt in concert together at the Michigan Theater.  One of the things I'm most happy to share with my dad is a love of music; it's something he instilled in me when I was very young, and something that we've maintained to this day. We share playlists, put albums on for one another, and generally act like the the music nerds we are.

My dad was never a musician. He's fifty-two now, and my brother and I--with my mother's help--just bought him his first guitar this past Christmas. Despite this, I grew up in a musical household. I have very few memories that aren't colored with one tune or another. When we weren't listening to the B-Sides of handmade tapes or newly purchased CDs, we were listening to my dad whistle his way around the house, occasionally breaking into nonsense Italian for a bit of pseudo-opera. It's not that my dad couldn't have been a musician--he has a lovely voice and a good ear for pitch--but music in our house wasn't homemade, at least not until my brother and I started piano lessons. Instead, we cultivated what could be called the art of the mental mixtape, collecting songs here and there and forming them into the soundtrack of our lives.

The CD collection amassed by my father tended to be unconstrained by genre or time period. You're as likely to find yourself listening to the Brandenburg Concertos as you are to Miles Davis, or The Beatles or Bruce Springsteen or the Be Good Tanyas. I grew up listening to a lot of music, some of which has found its way back to me over the years. My taste has dovetailed with my father's since high school -- after I got my very brief punk phase out of my system -- and I've revisited a lot of the music of my youth (which is not to say it's particularly youthful music) since then. These days, my dad's got a lot of alt-country and Americana on rotation, and I picked up on that right quick. We don't argue about what to listen to in the car -- when it's not the CBC, it's a mix on my iPod or his. They're usually pretty similar anyways.

About a year ago I tried to make an autobiographical playlist. I abandoned the project shortly thereafter, but there are three songs from the list that are the heart and soul of my childhood, and I've collected them here for your enjoyment:

Something Wild - John Hiatt

It's Not Too Late - T-Bone Burnett

The Wall of Death - R.E.M.

If I was going to make one of these, today, it'd have some Blue Rodeo and some Neil Young, some Gillian Welch and Ryan Adams. It would have Melissa McLelland, and Ron Sexsmith, and Sarah Harmer, and Rufus Wainwright. And yes, a little Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt for good measure. We often think of mixtapes as things we share with friends or lovers (and I do that as well), but one of my favourite people to share music, and the pleasures that come with it, is with my Dad. He was the one who taught me that good music comes in many packages, and that the perfect pop song can contain as much enjoyment as the perfect symphony. So consider this a blog post for for him.

Pepsi thinks women are morons

Good news ladies! Diet Pepsi will soon be available in a "taller, sassier new Skinny Can" that the company says is a "celebration of beautiful, confident women".

The six inch tall new can debuts at New York fashion week, and, according to the chief marketing officer at Pepsi, is "the perfect complement to today's most stylish looks". Well thank god that Pepsi is stepping out into the forefront of tailoring soft drink packaging to women's fashion. I know I certainly won't be picking up a can of Coke anymore, not with it's gawdy red-and-white, disgusting stubby form. Why drink soda in a fat can when you can drink soda in a skinny one? Am I right ladies?

The press release goes on: "Diet Pepsi has a long history of celebrating women through iconic fashion imagery seen in our infamous and historical campaigns, and we're proud to continue that tradition". I'm so glad that Pepsi is confronting the major issues of that women face today. That my diet soda be sassy and a celebration of my skinny, fashionable femininity is certainly high on my list of priorities. It's right up there with reproductive rights and equal pay. So here's a hearty thank you to Pepsi, for reminding women that if you're drinking soda, it should be diet, and that beauty and confidence come hand-in-hand with being fashionable and skinny. Three cheers for Pepsi: they've managed to catch up to the marketing strategies of the late 1960s. You've come a long way, baby.

Black Swan and the terror of femininity

Last night, after a long conversation with a friend of mine, I finally realized why I came out of Black Swan feeling frustrated, rather than pleased. On the surface, Aronofsky's latest is a film I should enjoy -- it melds the real with the hyperreal, features excellent performances and beautiful art design, and is a film about the horrors of being female, represented by that most feminine of creatures, the ballerina.

Or is it? After the first half of the film, I was relatively convinced that I was watching a horror movie about the terrors of femininity; by the final third I realized that was not the film I was watching at all. All of the archetypes were there--the lecherous mentor, the beautiful rival, the overbearing Freudian mother, the aging diva. Many of the motifs of a threatening womanhood were there too. A syrupy pink bedroom, the smothering presence of mirrors. Injured feet and toes, references to and representations of self-harm. All in service of that most perfect of feminine icons: the ballerina.

The early parts of the film seem to support this interpretation. Nina (Natalie Porman) is a young woman--how old exactly, we have no idea--who longs for the part of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. We have no clear idea about why she wants this role; she seems to have no artistic impulses to speak of, and beyond the pressure of her mother and the fact that every young ballerina in the world wants to be the Swan Queen, Nina's desire for the part has no clear motivation. This is not a failure on Portman's part. The character has clearly been designed to be empty of the idiosyncratic motivations that would make her a real person. She is, instead, The Ballerina, the ultimate symbold of controlled, naive, feminine perfection.

Aronofsky's film has been criticized in some circles for being sexist. The story of a naive girl who just needs to find her sexuality so she doesn't become a frigid failure like her mother is not a particularly empowering one, to be sure. In its defense, however, Black Swan is clearly a story filled with archetypes. That we are not to take these characters seriously as real, fragile human beings is clear from the start. Black Swan is not fundamentally about Nina, as a character. It is about The Ballerina, as a symbol. The question, then, is what does the ballerina represent? If Black Swan is a parable, what is the moral?

Despite being a film that makes use of so many of the tools of feminine terror, this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Nina's confrontations--with her sexuality, in the form of her choreographer and her rival, and with her womanhood, embodied in her mother and Winona Ryder's prima ballerina well past her prime--are the archetypal confrontations of womanhood. That Black Swan is a primarily a horror movie does not detract from this. The body horror central to the film's artistic direction points towards female embodiment. There are lingering camera shots on damaged or deformed toes and feet; the physical sacrifice Nina makes to become the perfect ballerina parallels the difficulties inherent in wearing high heels to become the perfect woman. Mirrors are everywhere in the film, and always oppressive. They reveal error and digust, rather than beauty.

Most salient, in my eyes, was the repeated reference to self-injury. It is established early on that Nina has strange cuts on her shoulders, from whence her black wings will eventually emerge. But the conceit of the film is that these cuts could have been caused by Nina's propensity to scratch herself. Her mother mentions this multiple times, and is even portrayed  as having developed strategies to deal with it. Much of the early body horror in the film is obsessively focused on nails and cuticles, areas of the female body particularly subject to self-harm. As the tension around Nina builds--she is sexually harassed by her mentor, repressed by her mother, and jealous of her more openly sexualized rival--the scratches worsen. Here is a woman confronted by the terrors of womanhood, terrors written on her body in places and styles traditionally associated with feminine horror.

At a certain point in the movie, Nina, having recently overcome her sexual reticence, is seated alone on a subway, across from an old man. As he watches her, he licks his lips lasciviously and begins to masturbate while they travel. Nina barely movies. What purpose does this sequence have, if not to represent the ultimate fear that comes with femininity: that you will be trapped in an inescapable space with someone who sees you only as a body to use and desire?

So where does this leave us, as we walk out of the theater? In the end, Black Swan is a frustrating experiment in genre and in theme; it squanders its opportunity to be a genuinely terrifying film about the anxieties of femininity, choosing instead to be a rather mediocre horror movie that, by the end, has descended into camp. Aronofsky's technical achievements are remarkable, the performances beautiful, and the art direction extremely strong in developing the theme laid out. The problem with Black Swan is that it chose the wrong theme, and, in doing so, missed its chance the achieve something truly, deeply, and magnificently horrifying.

Merry Christmas! Have a book, Part I

My mother has a rule when it comes to Christmas time gift-giving. It goes like this: we are the family that gives books. When every other member of our extended family is engaging in a toy shopping extravaganza for the younger cousins, we are in our local Chapters (that's the Canadian Borders equivalent for my more southerly friends), stalking the aisles for the perfect book.

Buying books for people can be easy or it can be hard. It's easy enough if the person you're buying for has a John Grisham habit or is a fourteen year old girl with a penchant for the undead, but things get a little more difficult when you're trying to find a book for someone whose tastes are a little more diverse. Buying someone a book isn't just about what they like to read -- it's also a representation of who you think they are and what you want to share with them. If they don't give you a list, sometimes you have to do a little scrounging. Luckily, I spend over 9000 hours per week in bookstores because I have poor coping mechanisms and flipping pages keeps my heart rate down and my mood elevated, so I've seen a lot of books in my day. In lieu of the paper I'm supposed to be writing, here's your handy-dandy 2010 holiday book shopping guide, Part The First (what, you thought I could restrain myself to just one post?). Note: the one thing I am bad at when it comes to books is staying current, so this list might hop around a bit.


For your literary father who likes his prose poetic and his landscapes cinematic: 

Gil Adamson's The Outlander was a semi-finalist in last years Canada Reads competition (the winner, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes is another excellent read), and for good reason. Set against the backdrop of the early 19th century West, Adamson's novel follows Mary Boulton, a 19-year-old woman who murdered her husband and is on the run from his two brothers. Tracked by bloodhounds, and wracked by her own delirious mind, Mary retreats from her crime, and her culture, to the wilderness of the Rockies. Adamson's style is lyrical, but her pacing is tense and her story populated with well-wrought portraits of the people who lived and died in the Canadian West. If you like your cinematic landscapes with a lot more blood and a lot fewer x-chromosomes, try Cormac McCarthy's masterful Blood Meridian. Or pick up Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy.


For your teenage cousin whom you are trying desperately to keep away from Twilight:

There's been a lot of hullaballoo lately about Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy being the girl power answer to Twilight-mania, but for this recommendation I'm reaching back to my own past for Tamora Pierce's excellent (and empowering) Song of the Lioness quartet. Pierce is one of the few YA authors who openly deals with gender, sexuality, relationship violence, and feminism in all of her novels, but her first quartet of books, about a woman, Alanna, who disguises herself as a boy to become a knight (and a gifted mage to boot!) is the gold standard for fantasy novels about kick-ass women and the choices they make. I'd spend my time recommending the rest of her novels (The Immortals and The Protector of the Small quartets are much beloved), but there's only so much space for gushing, so instead I'll also recommend Maria Snyder's highly entertaining Poison Study. Biggest benefit of all of these recs? None of them contain sparkly vampires who watch you in your sleep.

For your history-loving grandpa who already knows everything about everything:

Philip Dray's There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America showed up at just the right time for me -- I'd been publicly complaining about the lack of a popular history of labour not written by Studs Terkel when all of the sudden this book appeared on the Daily Show to satiate my desire. The book fulfills the promise of its subtitle -- at 784 pages, it is, indeed, an epic tale -- meandering through the early days of American industrialism all the way up until the 21st century. Dray's narrative is both panoramic and intimate, and never strays too far into polemic, maintaining a healthy attitude toward the tensions that have characterized the American labor movement from its very beginning. If your grandpa is less into unions and more into intellectuals, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club has the benefit of being both an intellectual history and a rollicking good story.

For your younger brother who finished Harry Potter and is looking for something a little more grown-up:

The best thing that I can say about M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation is that it is essentially perfect. The story of a young black slave living in Boston at the time of the Revolutionary War, Anderson's book is nothing short of brilliant. His characters are fully realized, his history is impeccable, his plot is compelling, and his politics are subtle enough not to overwhelm the narrative, but progressive enough to make this book a standout among YA fiction. Anderson's previous novel, Feed, is an equally accomplished futuristic dystopia, and both novels are worth reading no matter how old you are. Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is also excellent. And, at risk of breaking my own rule, Nickelodeon's Peabody award-winning Avatar: The Last Airbender is a brilliant TV series that, like Octavian Nothing, transcends its YA status to tell a complex, harrowing, and beautiful story.

For your budding-feminist daughter who isn't quite ready for an encounter with Judy B.

Susan Douglas' Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work is Done is a Backlash for the digital age. Just when Faludi's seminal work was starting to feel a bit outdated, Douglas' book asks how we square persistent gender inequality with the media message that feminism is done. With a glut of nth-wave feminist books out there by everyone from Feministing's Jessica Valenti to Ariel Levy, Enlightened Sexism stands out as a book that moves away from asking why young women don't identify as feminists and towards a critique of the culture that tells them that they don't have to. Or, do what I did when I was 16 and pick up a copy of bell hooks' Feminism is For Everybody. For the dude in your life looking for a little gender theory of his own, you can't get much better than Michael Kimmel's excellent Guyland. Or just pick up Justice and the Politics of Difference and admit you're a theory junkie from the start.

And with that, I'll leave be until tomorrow. Coming up: books for that friend of yours who "really likes music" but won't stop fucking listening to The Wall sixteen hours a day. Etc.

Stuff I've been listening to

It's the end of fall semester, which means burying myself in a pile of books and holing up until I emerge with two literature reviews and a pile of graded papers for my undergrads. While my go-to technique for dealing with the workload in the past has been to sit in front of a computer screen for 48-hours, injecting coffee into my veins and lamenting my poor time management skills, this year I've taken up the musical strategy. This involves picking at least five CDs and having them on non-stop in the background until you stop hearing the lyrics and start doing some work.

In other words, it involves inordinate amounts of time spent making playlists and the self-deception that this process is actually important for my work. Major players in this year's ongoing war between productivity and my sanity include:



Old Man Luedecke

Old Man Ludecke is the stage name of Chris Luedecke, a definitively not-old singer-songwriter and banjo player from Nova Scotia. His albums Hinterland and Proof of Love fit squarely in the Canadian branch of the folk-revivalist movement that includes performers like Gillian Welch and everyone who showed up on the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. I'm a sucker for the banjo, and a sucker for the Maritimes, but even if I wasn't, Old Man Luedecke would be worth a listen. Check out a video of his song The Rear Guard here.

Old Crow Medicine Show

In keeping with the first recommendation (I really do have a thing for banjo and bands with 'old' in the name, ok?), Old Crow Medicine Show is another folk revival band based out of Nashville. Their songs -- which combine an old-timey sound with an excellent sense of the modern and absurd -- have been rotating on and off my playlists since 2007, but I haven't ben able to get enough of them lately. Their video for Wagon Wheel comes with healthy doses of irony, Americana, and a Dylan-penned chorus.

The Tallest Man on Earth

The Tallest Man on Earth (Sweden's Kristian Matsson) sounds like an early Dylan who decided to abandon the politics in favour of breezy, melodic tunes and cracklingly sharp lyrics. Like almost everyone I listen to on a regular basis, he clearly spent a lot of time taking inspiration from the American South, and, like a lot of folks coming from the outside, seems to have an ear for what exactly it is that makes that music so compelling. Matsson spent the last few years opening for Bon Iver and Jon Vanderslice, so if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat, check out one of my favourite of his tracks, A Field of Birds.

And lest you think I only listen to men who sound like they learned everything they know on the front porch of their grandfather's Kentucky homestead, never fear: I listen to women who sound that way too.

The Be Good Tanyas

The Be Good Tanyas have been my go-to band for times good and bad since my last year of high school, and I haven't gotten tired of them yet. Their song Light Enough to Travel was the soundtrack (along with Basia Bulat's The Pilgriming Vine) to one of the happiest and most important periods of my life. Frazey Ford's unique warble on The Littlest Birds has been my constant companion on roadtrips towards and away from friends and lovers, and Human Thing is still one of my favourite music videos of all time. But its Ootischenia, with its vaguely feminist lyrics (so tear the pages from the family Bible/it came down upon the women for survival) and its earthy, messy rhythms and harmonies that is the soundtrack to my paper-writing at 4:00 am on a Thursday night. If that hasn't convinced you, I don't know what will.

LOLTheorists or: Why the Internet is the Best Thing Ever

I was going to write a lengthy post explaining how excited I was to come across the intersection of social theory and cat macros, but I think these images speak for themselves:

Foucault

Butler

Althusser

Mulvey

Kant & the Frankfurt School

If you want more of this boisterous and completely nerd-riffic entertainment, visit loltheorists for all of your academic macro needs. I know I'm going to try to work these into at least one academic presentation.

Dance break!

One of my favourite ladies singing two of my favourite songs. Mostly posted because 'Mother of Pearl' starts with the line "feminists don't have a sense of humour" and just gets better from there. There's also a great video up from NPR that give some insight into her songwriting process.

The language of choice and the politics of justice

About a week ago, a friend of mine posted, without comment, a link to this interview on whether porn has 'hijacked' our sexuality on her Facebook page. Now, as when I first commented on the article, I'm not going to take up a position on the question in the title. Instead, I'd like to pull out a quote from the middle of the interview that gave me pause: 

"...we need to have feminism with politics. And what's happened, I think, is that politics have been bled out of feminism, so now you get this idea that we got what we wanted, or at least we can be empowered as individuals. I'm sorry, but you cannot be empowered as individuals when women as a group are systematically discriminated against."

The idea of a feminism with politics is one that I've been thinking about for a while now. I came to my feminism through two distinct routes: academia and pop culture. In academia, I read and wrestled with writers from Mary Wollstonecraft through Simone de Beauvoir, through Catherine MacKinnon and the second wave, through bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, third wave theorists of sexuality, and post-structuralists like Butler and Haraway. In pop culture, I read and enjoyed Bitch and Bust, watched Buffy and Battlestar Galactica, read novels about women knights and watched indie romantic comedies with quirky female leads.

My feminism during those years was essentially an applied version of a de Certeauian strategies/tactics model: if I was encountering oppressive ideology through the media and products I consumed, then I was going to resist that ideology through alternative readings of pop culture products, through parodic presentation of self, and through a general attempt (if poorly articulated) to be a feminist by consuming in what I felt was a feminist way. Watching sexist television was somehow a political act if I knew that it was sexist and enjoyed it ironically.

During my final year of undergraduate education, I read three books that changed my thinking. The first was Nancy Fraser's Justice Interruptus. The second was Steven Lukes' Power: A Radical View. And the third, and most important for me, was Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference. All three books have a uniting factor: they talk about women's rights in the context of justice, rather than the context of choice.

Choice is the cultural keyword in contemporary Western feminism. It's also a concept easily appropriated  for the purposes of frustrating feminist concerns. While free and open choice is an admirable goal, and one that I am deeply in favor of folding into a justice-centered feminism -- after all, what is justice without choice? -- I am also wary of making it the end goal of feminist politics. This wariness stems from, and is subsequently directed towards, two sources. First, I am concerned about the supposed authenticity of choice and it's relationship to non-domination. In this case, my critique is directed towards  intellectuals, feminist or not, public or not, who valorize choice without taking into account the notion that preferences are or can be (de)formed. Second, I am concerned about the relationship between choice and consumption. This is a critique levelled more directly at myself and other women of my generation, who have often found ourselves expressing our feminism through the things we buy and the media we consume, without much visible thought about the relationship of consumption to the oppression of women.

In her work on sex and social justice, Martha Nussbaum introduces the concept of 'preference deformation'. Using a definition of preference that encompasses desires, emotions, and appetites, Nussbaum argues that liberal thought has traditionally accepted the idea that preferences can be distorted, and that these distortions can affect choice. The question for feminism, is in how we relate choice to freedom. In Power: A Radical View, Lukes argues that there are some views of freedom in which being free is defined as a lack of interference in the realization of my preferences, whatever they happen to be. On this view, says Lukes, "then how my preferences are formed, how my judgements are made and what influences them -- none of this has any bearing on the extent of my freedom". If, on the other hand, my preferences are distorted by the operation of ideology, than my freedom cannot be found simply in the exercise of choice. In the introduction to Throwing Like a Girl, Iris Marion Young questions the non-ideological nature of 'authentic' experience:

Often people seem to assume that if we express our authentic experience, we will be free of ideology and the false impressions of society that lead to conflict and irrationality. But this is clearly not so: ideology operates, or interpolates, as Althusser says, at the most immediate level of naive experience. 

This is fundamentally a critique of a liberalism that argues feminist critiques have been addressed as long as women are the ones 'choosing' what their lives look like; either abstractly, through participation in democratic politics and capitalist markets, or concretely, through the choice to have children or not, to enter the job market or not, etc.

In her book The Aftermath of Feminism, feminist cultural theorist Angela McRobbie expresses a different problem with the language of choice. She writes the following in the introduction:

Elements of feminism have been taken into account, and have been absolutely incorporated into political and institutional life. Drawing on a vocabulary that includes words like 'empowerment' and 'choice', these elements are then converted into a much more individualistic discourse, and they are deployed in this new guise, particularly in media and popular culture, but also by agencies of the state, as a kind of substitute for feminism...There is a kind of exchange, and also a process of displacement and substitution going on here. The young woman is offered a notional form of equality, concretised in education and employment, and through participation in consumer culture and civil society, in place of what a reinvented feminist politics might look like.

Here the critique is leveled at a hegemonic culture that appropriates the language of choice, and substitutes consumerism for justice. But McRobbie also takes a long, hard, look at herself in the mirror. For feminists invested in pop culture or ironic expressions of femininity, the question remains as to whether or not buying the right clothes, wearing (or not wearing) the right lipstick, and reading the right books and magazines are feminist acts. Moreover, in a culture where young women are reluctant to call themselves feminists, but readily embrace the notion that purchasing is activism, where can we locate a politics of justice for women who are on the margins of the capitalist system?

Whatever wave of feminism we're currently on needs to revisit its thinking on individual choice in the context of larger structures of domination and oppression. I don't know at what point the opposite of oppression became choice, rather than justice. The thing is, "but she/I chose it" just isn't good enough for me in a world where we manage to recognize structural constraints and active ideology everywhere but in our own personal lives.

More on in a similar vein on Feministe; the author explores the language of choice vs. the language of justice in the context of reproductive politics. Particularly salient and very much worth reading is amandaw's comment: "'Choice' never bothered to look beyond the in-group and see whether their problem was even the same problem other people faced."

Cartography again (last time, I swear!)

I spent a large amount of time this morning watching clips of The West Wing on YouTube. When I was in high school, The West Wing was probably my favourite show -- it was smart, political, funny, and dramatic, and never got bogged down in the melodrama of the characters' personal lives at the expense of the larger political action. If I had $200 to spare, I'd lay down money for the complete series box set any day.

One of my favourite early episodes focuses on "Big Block of Cheese Day", when the White House staff members listen to the concern of members of the public who usually don't get the ear of the White House. C.J. Cregg gets stuck with Cartographers for Social Equality, resulting in one my all time favourite scenes:




Nothing is where you think it is! This reminded me of the post I made yesteday on radical cartography and the visualization of social issues. Every once in a while, a weird academic issue like map projections makes it into pop culture. Enjoy!