Narcissism, Asexuals, and British Culture Critics. Huzzah!

Dear Academia, Church, Government, Pop Culture, and other ISA’s,

This is hard for me to say. I know we talked some time ago about my upcoming union, and you all had something to say on the matter with my peers. Adam and Eve gave you something to talk about, and Adam and Steve gave you even more. We argued over feminism, mannism, the LBGT community, the celibate community, and every reference ever in literature pertaining to sex.
Well, here is my final decision. Pop culture, you have finally won, and I have decided to be in a loving committed relationship with … myself.
Yes, I know, we’ve all heard this joke before, I know what I like and agree with myself when it comes to discussions, beliefs, activities, food, movies, and every thing else… but the thing is, is that I have to agree with pop culture, and see, autoeroticism is just ultimately better than any man or woman could be. What people like Britney Spear, Madonna, Blondie, Billy Idol, The Violent Femmes, and Gaga have taught me is that I am the best beau I am ever going to find. Victoria Secret tells me that I should look hot for my own confidence. Magazines tell me I should be healthy for me. Psychology tells me that narcissism is healthy part of development. Facebook tells me…well that I am important enough to notify everyone I know what I had for breakfast and how I feel about the weather. (Even if that video says that narcissism isn't normal. Whatever! These symptoms have nothing to do with me or my generation)

So we, that is I, are leaving for a life of happiness and success
Love,
Sarah

Yes, self-love is funny. However, what I’m really interested in is the playing out of other sexual orientations/the role of attraction in our lives. I loved Adrienne Rich, and I found Wittig and Kristeva to be fascinating, but I’m still curious. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” brought up a lot of fascinating thoughts, but I’m not sure it captured everything. For me, Rich downplayed other types of attraction, or rather, she sexualized a lot of things that I’m not sure need to be sexualized. Yes, I am attracted to both men and women’s personalities, charismas, ideas, or styles. That’s not all sexual though. Which I know isn’t the point, but I think some of the critics we read simplify attraction to be a matter of Yes, I’d have sex with them, or No thanks.

Back to sexuality, I have been reading a lot in the last few weeks about the asexuals and autoerotic folks. It’s a big topic, and the easiest way to narrow it down to an individual for me, is found in this article about Lady Gaga. Camille Paglia wrote an article for The Sunday Times a ways back, that discussed how overt sexuality is turning our culture into first a self-obsessed but then asexual culture. Now, asexuality is the same as any other orientation, for many asexuals, it is not something that they choose to be or are socially conditioned to be, however Paglia has some interesting ideas. She says:

“Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…
Gaga seems comet-like, a stimulating burst of novelty, even though she is a ruthless recycler of other people’s work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated from performers like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and Pink, as well as from fashion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness. Drag queens, whom Gaga professes to admire, are usually far sexier in many of her over-the-top outfits than she is.”

“Peeping dourly through all that tat is Gaga’s limited range of facial expressions. Her videos repeatedly thrust that blank, lugubrious face at the camera and us; it’s creepy and coercive. Marlene and Madonna gave the impression, true or false, of being pansexual. Gaga, for all her writhing and posturing, is asexual. Going off to the gym in broad daylight, as Gaga recently did, dressed in a black bustier, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels isn’t sexy – it’s sexually dysfunctional.”


“Compare Gaga’s insipid songs, with their nursery-rhyme nonsense syllables, to the title and hypnotic refrain of the first Madonna song and video to bring her attention on MTV, Burning Up, with its elemental fire imagery and its then-shocking offer of fellatio. In place of Madonna’s valiant life force, what we find in Gaga is a disturbing trend towards mutilation and death…
Gaga is in way over her head with her avant-garde pretensions… She wants to have it both ways – to be hip and avant-garde and yet popular and universal, a practitioner of gung-ho “show biz”...
Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomized, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.”

“Gaga's fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…”

I have never read the asexual school of criticism. I have never read a school of criticism (other than Descartes) that focuses on a narcissistic read though of literature. And while I have read a number of articles on how exposure to sexual rhetoric DOOM us to all be promiscuous, this is one of the few articles I’ve read that links pop-culture with sexually dysfunction and an almost post traumatic stress syndrome view of what Lady Gaga is doing to us. What say you?

Lesbian an Acceptable Category?

"To destroy 'woman' does not mean that we aim, short of physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously with the categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely. Lesbian is the only concept I know which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man" (1912).

While Wittig's assertion in the paragraph above that lesbianism is a good distinction because it describes the nature of a relationship rather than the sex of a person, I see just as many problems with perpetuating a term that categorizes sexual orientation. Lesbian helps to do away with gender categories, but homosexual identity is not straightforward either. We run the risk of creating new forms of categorical oppression for homosexuals who do not fit the the lesbian or gay myth that either already is or will be generated the more sex distinctions fade.

"Glee" and "Modern Family" are two current, popular television shows which aim to portray homosexuality and make it a greater part of our culture.

"Glee" is often criticized for the lack of depth in its gay characters. New School student Tyler Raftery makes this argument in his article "Why Gays Should Have a Problem with Glee." The main problem in Glee for a long time was not necessarily Kurt's character, as Raftery argues, it was the fact that there simply were not enough voices. One openly gay character can create a "gay myth" in and of itself. As the show has gone on, though, the cast of homosexual characters has come to include at least four different pictures of what gay can look like. These characters are seeing their sexuality as something they are figuring out. Sexuality proves to be a construction as well, because these characters appear on a spectrum. The two cheerleaders turn out to have different levels of homosexuality, as Brittany is bisexual and is not willing to give up her boyfriend for a female relationship. Blaine is not sure that he is gay after he enjoys kissing Rachel. These characters have to test and approve their sexual identities and find out who they are. Kurt, on the other hand, is both gay and transgendered, but the show features both the flamboyant and completely normal-looking gay characters. Needless to say, they are all extremely simple, as many TV characters are. Raftery cannot find his role model (and neither can anyone else, really) in the mix of simple characters, but Glee has still played a role for many heterosexual people in realizing the need for homosexual sex education, parenting, and acceptance by bringing to light a wide spectrum of issues. Glee fights the compulsory heterosexuality of society despite the use of varying stereotypes and flat characters.

"Modern Family" on the other hand does a terrible job of showing the diversity of the gay population. A recent episode featured the show's gay couple, meeting with their gay friends, having some "time with their homos." Almost all of the gay men are extremely flamboyant with names such as "Longinus" and "Pepper." When Mitch's father says, "Wait, your name is Longinus?" He replies, "I know, I didn't stand a chance!" This moment suggest that there is such thing as a "gay name" making the film even worse. Ironically, Modern Family's efforts to portray gay relationships has earned it praise.

This is a link to an article about the book called The Myth of the Modern Homosexual. Perhaps this is like the "Woman Myth." This is a similar problem is it not?

Wittig says that women are a class. They are seen as slaves and men as masters. Just as the concept of woman couldn't have existed before the slavery of women, the concept of race didn't exist before racial slavery. It may seem that lesbianism escapes the master/slave relationship, but we already have an established heterosexual society, which enslaves the homosexual, disallowing them their full identity. It seems like a contradiction to say that lesbian is a satisfactory category. If women are a class, aren't lesbians?

And if lesbians are a class, then there also must be a false conscious that needs to be overcome. Not to be pretentious, but is it possible Wittig has a similar false consciousness about her lesbian identity? She clearly understands that homosexuals are oppressed, but she still claims her sexual orientation as a primary component of her identity. Gender is a real category, but it does not constitute identity. Sexual orientation is a real category, but it does not constitute identity. There are a vast range of grey areas that defy a direct categorization of gay and straight. There is a spectrum of homo vs. hetersexual attraction and a spectrum of gender performance for both men and women.

A Defense of Disney

Okay, this is not actually a defense of Disney so much as a look at the problems with the musical genre in general but alliterative titles are too good to pass up.

I just wanted to take a quick look at musicals and notice that Disney is not just perpetuating gender stereotypes, but actually bowing to the musicals tradition. Theatre is often considered to be one of the best venues for breaking ground on gender stereotypes, but take a look at the progression of gender ideas in musicals for a second:

Showboat (1927): Women are separated from their men due to racial discrimination and male gambling problems. (One man pulls a clever "trick" sucking his mulatto wife's blood so that he has "black blood" also and must go off with her, but later leaves her). The woman who does not find a man has become addicted to alcohol. The other woman is remarried at the end of the play, and despite all the bad actions of men throughout, this is construed as a good thing.

My Fair Lady (1956): Man decides to prove his brilliance by pulling a scam. He uses a woman as his tool to do this. Scam succeeds. The woman becomes angry when her own part in the plot goes unrecognized. Another man falls in love with her and goes about admiring her and singing songs about larks. He is construed as flat and foppish. Woman eventually goes back to first man and first man takes back up his mantle of overbearingness, apparently not having learned his lesson. This is construed as humorous and positive.

Fiddler on the Roof (1964): Man is poor with lots of daughters. All the daughters are married off. This is construed as a good thing. One daughter marries a man who is not of the father's culture. Father disowns her. This is construed as bad but understandable.

Music Man (1967): Sketchy man comes to town, seduces intelligent, independent woman. Woman covers for man's fraud, falls in love with man. This is construed as a good thing.

The Producers (1968): Men try to pull a fraud. They fail, but the audience is supposed to find their efforts vaguely charming or clever. Women are sex objects. This is construed as humorous.

Chicago (1975): I haven't seen this one but from what I understand: women kill men for one thing or another involving inadequate or unfaithful sexuality. Women compete for media limelight. A woman pulls a trick which gets her her husband back and gets her out of prison. When her husband learns of her trick, he leaves her. This is construed as bad. She teams up with her competitor for the limelight at the finale (this is good?).

The Phantom of the Opera (1986): Woman is seduced by a creepy man. Woman also falls in love with a childhood sweetheart. Woman also is ruled by memories of her father. Creepy man is construed as intellectual and tries to pull off several murderous plots which are successful. Childhood sweetheart promises to protect woman. Childhood sweetheart tries to outwit creepy man but fails. Woman melts creepy man's heart by being willing to sacrifice herself. Creepy man lets them both go. This is construed as sad, but there is some debate as to whether it is sad that man was creepy in the first place or that woman left creepy man. Either way, woman ends up married and this is construed as good.

Jekyll & Hyde (1990/7): Man decides to rebel against society in order to try and save his mentally ill father. This is construed as a good thing. Man meets independent-thinking prostitute, tells her he wishes to be her friend. This is construed as a good thing. Man has a faithful fiance, construed as an ideal sort of wife. Man's experiment goes terribly wrong, he murders lots of people, rapes the prostitutes, and eventually murders her. This is construed as very bad but conceivably redeemable. Man makes it to his wedding, seemingly conquers his bad side, but it comes out at the wedding. Man gets his friend to kill him. This is construed as bad but the right thing to do.

Rent (1993-4-6): I have to admit I haven't seen this one, but from reading the synopsis: lots of people deal with health and money issues, at the finale a woman and a man declare their love for each other, and this is construed as good (maybe the best thing to happen in the play?)

Wicked (2003): Woman is stigmatized for the color of her skin. Woman is independent, free-thinking, and powerful, and grows to have a deep friendship with another woman. Man is carefree and disdainful of education. Woman makes man learn to care, man champions woman. Woman abandons close female friend to go live with man. This is construed as bittersweet, but the right choice.

Glee (2009-present): Women pretends to be pregnant to impress her husband. This is construed as manipulative. Husband eventually leaves her. Gay boy struggles to find his identity, does so by being flamboyantly effeminate, angry, and pushy about his sexual orientation. Another gay boy (and a lesbian girl) hide their homosexuality behind anger. A last gay boy is totally cool with everything, and also fits the wide chest, muscular arms stereotype. Girls are attracted to him (a girl is attracted to the first boy too, but only through emotional manipulation of another girl). Boy is a rebel and beats people up emotionally and physically. He is sometimes redeemable for his occasional protectiveness. Three girls are ambitious. This is construed as bad in all of them. Romantic relationships are the center of most plot developments, and every character appears to be pursuing the perfect partner.

There are tons of others to choose from (Into the Woods and Last Five Years, I actually think really play with gender stuff more complexly than a lot of these). But even with some few exceptions, notice the trends. I didn't pick and choose these plays to illustrate a point, I just chose some that I knew were famous and outlined them real quick. Consistently, men are considered clever and heroic if they are tricky (even if that trickiness is bad, as in The Music Man) while women (as in Chicago) are wicked in their trickery. Heroes who are belligerently commandeering are contrasted with foppish figures who are construed as less manly. Women who are intelligent and independent consistently get married and submit to their new husbands. When men do something awful (murder, for instance), they are redeemable or pitiable, or did it for the right reasons. Women are wicked, albeit sexy. Men and women are incomplete and unhappy without the other. These aren't hard and fast rules, but they are generally true, pretty much across the board.

What do you think? Are there other musicals that fit this? Musicals that rebel against the trend? And why do you think this trend is so attractive? Does Glee fit the bill, or is it able to play with things more because its a long running tv show (and if it is able, does it succeed)?

Regionalism and WOW

I think I’ve talked about feminism in every class this week. Needless to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about equality and understanding, which in turn led me, back to thinking about Marxism, socialism, capitalism and all sort of other types of economic equality.

I’m doing research right now about Flannery O’Connor, and I came across this little gem of an article about the differences in attitude and beliefs in the 1960’s between the Northeast and the Southeast:

Lance Bacon has shown that O’Connor’s faith and art were not solely fixed on trans-temporal truths, but that she was deeply concerned about the homogenizing ethos of the Eisenhower era. It was a time rife with anti-Communism and pro-Americanism…It was the first American age to witness the triumph of the automobile and advertising…O’Connor was openly allied with the other critics of this consumer-centered call for conformity and homogeneity…They all saw the rampant new commercialism and commoditization of American life obliterated ‘the new possibility of some other reality than the material.’ (Wood 15).

(Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-haunted South. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004. Print.)


This idea of regional differences in ideas of equality from a Marxist/all the other “ist” view has interested me for a while.

This is a gross oversimplification, but it seems like our regions at times can be reduced to either agrarian/communist communities or urban/capitalist. Different stereotypes of oppression match up with each. Big cities run on immigrants, and the devaluing of all workers. Rural farming communities depend on caste systems, where racism and sexism are rampant, and religion is the opiate. The book about O’Connor focused exclusively on the East coast, but I was struck by how Wood’s description could be used to capture attitude about central Washington or LA. While Wood was talking about Southern literature, I think it’s not far off from the way we are portrayed in literature as well.

On a slightly different note, I also just read this article about people who pay other people to earn them money for online games like World of Warcraft, so that they didn’t have to miss their own jobs. I was struck by the oddity of devaluing their own lives through work, while at the same time paying others to succeed for them in a fictional realm.

Thoughts? How are regional differences from our coast reflected in literature, and are they legitimate or stereotypes that reinforce capitalist ideals? What do you think about outsourcing Internet role-playing?

Poems and Problems

Adrienne Rich's poem brought to mind one of my favorite poems, called "The Trouble with 'In'" by Heather McHugh. Similar to Rich, McHugh plays with language and the way in which women are subject to the male gaze and the power men exert over women through their perceptions of them. So here's the poem:


The Trouble with "In"

In English, we're in trouble.
Love's a place
we fall into, so
sooner or later they ask

How deep? Time's a measure
of extent, so sooner or later
they ask How long? We keep
some comforters inside a box,
the heart inside a chest,

but still it's there the trouble with the dark
accumulates the most. The end of life
is said to be
a boat to a tropic,
good or bad. The suitor wants
to size up what he's getting into, so her gets
her measurements. But how much

is enough? The best man cannot
help him out -- he's given to his own
uncomfortable cummerbund. Inside the mirror,
several bridesmaids look
and look, in the worst
half-light,

too long, too little, not enough alike.
And who can stand to be
made up for good? And who can face
being adored? I swear

there is no frame
that I would keep you in.
I didn't love a shape
and later find you to fit it--
every day your sight was a surprise.
You made my taste, made sense,
made eyes. But when you set me up
in high esteem, I was a star
that's bound, in time,
to fall. The bound's
the sorrow of the song.
I loved you to no end,
and when you said "So far,"
I knew the idiom: it meant So long.


In this poem, I think that McHugh is really playing off of the ways language comes to create its own identity, and in many ways, it is the language that overpowers the woman. In Rich's poem, Rich examines the way in which language is used to create an alternate reality. The first section, with its beautified wording, explores the narrator's ideal and the way he (I'm going with the assumption this first narrator is a he for the sake of simplicity and my argument) views the female through his own desires of what he wants her to be. His use of language to overpower is reflected in the second half of the poem, in which the verb is forcing the noun into submission. In a similar way, McHugh also examines the way in which the words create their own realities, and she intentionally twists the words on themselves to show the complicated way in which we use language. The comforter (both a blanket and a person who offers comfort) inside a box (both a literal blanket box and a box as in limiting the individual, as is referenced again later) and then the more obvious "heart inside a chest" reflect the way in which language is both inadequate to say express what we really want to say and expresses too many different things at once.

In the latter half of the poem, McHugh examines the way in which these language deficiencies trap her. Ensnared within the framework of "star," the object of someone else's ideal, she cannot help but fail. Much like the woman in Rich's poem, the narrator in McHugh's poem feels the pressure of an imposed male ideal. Although she has freed him from conforming to any ideal, he has not granted her the same privilege, and she is still caught within his alternate reality. Her poem is a reaction to this, taking the traditional romantic words that trap her within the ideal and tearing them down, reducing them to a mere play on words, but still in the end, she has not overcome. She is left facing the power and problem of words: the arbitrariness of "I love you" in contrast to "so long," and the capacity for "so far" to become "so long." The relationship offers no constancy, just as words offer no constant meaning as they are shifted from context to context. And in the end, the suitor sizing up, the failing bridesmaids, and the doomed star all add up to the same point: the ways in which we impose our ideas on each other denies them their true identity. But the language breaks down. The relationship cannot endure inevitably. The cummerbund suffocates. And the verb chokes the noun.

"Dear Woman" -- An apology

So this popped up on my Tumblr today, and thought it might promote some interesting reactions, especially given the discussion over the last few days:




And... go!

Would Bakhtin like "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve?"

Since we are all familiar with the Adrienne Rich poem that we looked at last class, I would like to look at the same poem through the lens of Mikhail M. Bakhtin. We discusses extensively the extent to which poetry is, as Bakhtin claims, truly monologic. Does poetry sometimes contain the same dialogism and heteroglossia that Bakhtin says can create a "dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments, and accents?" (1074). I will argue that, while he may still prefer the novel, this poem performs a lot of what Bakhtin commends the novel for. The only thing lacking is perhaps the "grotesque realism."

This poem, however actually does exhibit "grotesque realism" in a sense. or it at the very least achieves the same affect that is hoped for through grotesque realism. The point of this grotesqueness is to "resist official culture, political oppression, and totalitarian order" (1074). This resistance is the "carnavalesque."

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread

sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing

now diagram the sentence

Based on a reading of this poem that we developed in class, there are two voices speaking. There is the first voice that is the poetic one, perhaps the common voice emerging from a culturally constructed romantic discourse, then there is the second voice. That second voice can be read as a parody of the first. Through reducing the language of the first half to an analysis of nouns and verbs, what is often thought of as romantic becomes grotesque. That is the carnavalesque and dialogism and heteroglossia are the tools that get us there.

There are other ways to read the poem. There is no reading that matches the poem just perfectly. For that reason, there are more and more voices and messages that are all held together in this particular combination of words, thus, heteroglossia, while it looks different in a poem, is nonetheless possible.