[1] Global elites have prospered in the past decades, yet paradoxically and simultaneously, the hegemonic male has become something of an endangered species in films outside the fantasy realm of superhero epics. While Yvonne Tasker characterized the 1980s, the previous greed is good era, as the decade of musculinity, the 2000s seem to be emblematized by the flawed, damaged or immature man, the wimp or the Big Baby (cf. Scott and Dargis). In other words, although economically, the hegemonic position of the white elite man has not changed, in popular culture he has become problematized, possibly reflecting the inaccessibility of the ideal to an increasing number of (young) middle-class locked into prolonged adolescence (cf. Kimmel, Guyland). [2] 2011 Oscar contenders, however, included several films that dealt with the socially immobile white lower class (Blue Valentine, The Fighter, Winter's Bone). That year was not an anomaly as new films about working-class and their malaise have continued to emerge (Take Shelter, Mud, A Place Beyond the Pines, etc.) side by side with the habitually escapist Hollywood fare. Power, physicality and self-respect have held center stage in working-class masculinities and thus it is significant that the films listed above present us with pervasive images of male ineffectuality and powerlessness, often vis-a-vis women, both in public and private spheres, raising questions about how hegemonic white working-class masculinity can be on or off screen. David Savran, writing about the 1990s, saw the visibility of the often belligerent white male victim as an attempt to respond to the steady decline in the income of white working- and lower-middle-class men (Savran, 5). The belligerence has waned since the mid-1990s when the permanence of the decline has been increasingly hard to deny. Rather than being merely a mimetic representation of the fate of the American working class, I argue, this thematic emphasis on who have given up echoes the justified anxieties of the middle classes about their own increasing failure in a society where the status gap is not so much between the working and middle class, but rather the upper-upper class and the rest. The present article will first consider the concept of hegemonic masculinity in today's socio-economic circumstances and the problematic uses of gender in the negotiation of social change. It will then explore the representations of masculinity and class in Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine (2010) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). Hegemonic masculinity and its discontents [3] R. W. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity (first outlined in Carrigan, Connell & Lee) has arguably been the most influential paradigm in masculinity studies, with its emphasis on the normative core among multiple masculinities competing in a dynamic social and discursive universe. It highlighted the multiple determinations inherent in gendered practices, but at least in its initial form it downplayed the agency of the marginalized and the dialectical pragmatism of masculinities that mix hegemonic and marginal features for strategic ends (cf. Demetriou). Although Connell updated the concept (in Masculinities and Globalization and Masculinities) to include a wider discussion of globalization, the characterization of hegemonic masculinity was not radically transformed. The white upper-middle-class heterosexual man still stood, proudly, center stage, with his cell-phone and briefcase, even if he did this in the first-class lounge of an international airport. Connell's normative core of the gender order continues to be transnational business masculinity and, although its interrogation is intended, it inevitably maintains its dominant status (for a similar critique, see Beasley), overshadowing other forms of masculinity that have changed more than the elite in the processes of massive economic dislocations of global capitalism in the 2000s (relocation of Western working-class jobs to the developing economies in Asia, widening income gap and inequality, global financial crisis, etc. …
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [1] Desai: Your book Asian American Women's Popular Literature: Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging brings us back to one of the most foundational and formative topics in Asian American Studies--the conversation about Asian American women's popular literature. You reframe this conversation in light of cultural citizenship and neoliberalism to examine how Asian American women's interventions into the public and political occur through popular literary genres such as mother-daughter narrative, chick lit, detective fiction, and food writing. Attending to formations of cultural citizenship through popular genres, the book transforms the theoretical and methodological debates about Asian American women's literary texts within Asian American Studies and feminist ethnic studies. I also appreciate how you ground your argument within Asian American and feminist debates that have long recognized the significance of media and cultural texts (e.g., literature, cinema, comics, and television) to the interrelated formations of race, gender, and citizenship. [2] The popularity of feminist texts by Asian American women authors created a vortex of conflict that defined literary studies for a lengthy period of time; Asian American women writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan were accused of inauthentically shilling a feminized Orientalism within a racist capitalist literary market. The debates reflected the great ambivalence about popular forms and ideological heterogeneity within Asian American cultural production. Why were you drawn to writing about popular genres? [3] Thoma: My training as a scholar of Asian American literature coincided with the moment when literary critics were beginning to rigorously theorize the Maxine Hong Kingston-Frank Chin debates and the subsequent popularity of Asian American women's writing and Asian American literature in general. While discussion was sophisticated and concerned with the heterogeneity of Asian America, it in some ways sustained the debates. Certain observers continued to subscribe to the resistance/assimilation mode of reading ethnic literature and ultimately retained a bias against popular genres, actually redoubling efforts to create a particular sort of canon for Asian American literature, one that would better serve political commitments to institutionalization in the culture wars-embattled academy of the 1990s. While I do not mean to suggest either that there was a unified interpretation of the debates or that there was universal and uncritical acceptance of institutionalization, I now understand the early theorization of the Kingston/Chin or popular/literary debates as relatively important in the institutionalization of Asian American studies. It provided a sort of prospectus on that investment, indicating what the multicultural university might expect in return from this academic field, which had to do with positioning itself in positive relation to the production of knowledge as a form of cultural capital, and thus creating social distinctions and hierarchies. Mark Chiang has recently written in detail and insightfully about this process, but at the time, the meaning of the complex economic and symbolic forces involved (beyond capitalist commodification and racist fetishization of Asian American culture) was played out through discrediting Asian American women's popular literature, often though not always implicitly in the valorization of more identifiably literary works. [4] Despite graduate study in women's literature and familiarity with both the long history of its discounting in the Anglo-American tradition of the novel, as well as the feminist theorization of reception that refused a simple dismissal of the pleasures and cultural work of mass genres of popular culture, I fell prey to the theory of literary value that was being mobilized in that moment. In my dissertation, which was on transnationalism and Asian American women's writing, I selected works in which critics found literary merit and I even hewed toward texts that were evidently impacted by theoretical concerns, such as Theresa Cha's Dictee. …
Representative Masculinity and Literature [1] Clemens Spahr and Philipp Loffler have recently characterized literature as a laboratory to fathom the possibilities and limits of conceptions of collectivity. Literature, they argue, helps imagine collectives, new forms of coexistence that reach across and challenge traditional group designations such as nation, culture, gender, or ethnicity (2012, 161). This essay engages in the question how a collective's imagined properties influence the ways in which literary protagonists can represent collectivity, and how this affects the construction of protagonists' gender. [2] In U.S. American literature, the construction of protagonists who stand for a larger collective traditionally draws on Enlightenment concepts of agency, a construction of agency that is not gender-neutral but specifically references masculinity (Hayden 2004, 51; Schulting 1997). Thomas Hobbes' construction of the state of nature in Leviathan (1651) may serve to illustrate this aspect. Hobbes imagines the state of nature as a state of origin for any legitimate sovereign order. Humanity's properties in the state of nature directly inform sovereign order, good because it takes into consideration the natural properties of carved out by the state of nature fiction. Man in the state of nature is, therefore, a constitutive figure to imagine legitimate collectives, and has traditionally been referenced as a backdrop to protagonist constructions in Western literature. [3] In contrast to earlier medieval formations (Greenblatt 2011 [2012, 200-201]), Hobbes does not imagine in the state of nature as an atomized individual. Instead, in the state of nature is already a figure of a family collective, and thus a quasi-sovereign ruler in his own right (Eggers 2008, 44). As Wendy Brown has explained, the members of this pater familias' family (women-and-children) exist only in relation to him, and do not have any access to political representation in their own right. They are characterized by passivity and absolute submission to the pater familias' constitutive will. Representative masculinity, in this sense, means two things: first, the pater familias' legitimate claim to sovereignty regulates family members' conduct among themselves--violently, if need be--and second, that he sovereignly decides on behalf of the family in his interaction with other men (Brown 1995, 181). In Hobbes, the male body of the monarch is simply a direct continuation of paternal masculinity in the state of nature, as the sovereign represents patres familias in the same way as they represent their families. [4] In American literature, this basic model has been translated into various constructions of protagonists as representative of collectives, although the range of prepolitical entities that can be represented by man has been strongly expanded. Not just women and children, but also territories, institutions, nations, races, movements, subcultures and abstract categories such as justice or humanity can be constructed as the prepolitical collectives that make a given male protagonist representative, and that assign larger meaning to all of his actions. A good illustration of this notion is Herman Melville's story Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) which systematically strips all forms of agency from the protagonist only to position him, in the last sentence, as a of as a whole. [5] Judith Butler has emphasized that, because of the dual nature of the man's prerogative to speak for and to use violence against the prepolitical collective represented by him, the most meaningful relationships that emerge from the state of nature model are in fact relationships between men, and it is indeed these relationships that American literature often focuses on (Fluck, Historical Novel). …
[1] In August 2011, with the assistance of an Alexander von Humboldt Transcoop Grant, Stefan Horlacher (of the Dresden University of Technology) and I organized an international conference at Kent State University, Masculinities between the National and the Transnational, 1980 to the Present. We are pleased to include in this issue three essays that had their origins at that conference, essays that pose new, innovative questions about the contemporary representation of masculinity--and about the inherent potential of masculinity itself to serve a representational function. [2] The question of representation is indeed crucial here. Though each of these essays directly examines specific instances of masculinity's narrative representation, they also collectively suggest that masculinity is not simply a social or cultural that enters the realm of representation; rather, it needs itself to be understood in terms of certain inherent representational capacities. The trend in the critical study of masculinity perhaps most impossible to miss over the last ten to twenty years, especially in the humanities in the U.S. and Europe, has been the theorizing of masculinity as a stylized, performative gender norm, a norm that, according to some accounts, inscribes the illusion of an ontologically gendered that preexists the performance itself. This understanding of gender was of course influentially introduced by Judith Butler. Whatever fundament of reality purports to operate underneath or behind this performance is, according to this logic, chimerical. This critical emphasis has famously tended to displace earlier critical vocabularies of gender, and especially categories like patriarchy: vocabularies that understand masculinity not as a corporeal (and implicitly individual) enactment or style lacking any pre-existent ground, but as a component of a larger system or structure of power relations--a function of those power relations, and indeed, I would propose, a figural representation of them. Should one understand the masculinity we associate with soldiers, for example, as entirely immanent corporeal performances of violence? Or would it be more precise to understand soldiers as functionaries within, and representations of, larger systems of violence? In their various ways, these essays all ask: how does masculinity operate as a representational figure--a synecdoche, we might say--for larger, abstract structures of power? With all the attention to masculinity as an individuated, performative style, they provide worthy reminders of the dimensions of masculinity this kind of analytic has too often tended to erase. [3] Seth Friedman's timely contribution, for example, Constructing the (Im)perfect Cover, revisits the ostensibly dated question of gender essentialism, powerfully disclosing just how persistent and intractable this question can be. When the performative artifice of masculinity, its constructed character, is not only old news for critics and scholars, but also routinely registered in mass cultural narratives all around us--when journalism and media seem so regularly to represent masculinity as inherently artificial--how, Friedman asks, does this recognition proceed within the conventions of contemporary Hollywood cinema? What are the terms of this recognition, and what are its limits? Friedman's compelling answer comes by way of a discussion of what he calls contemporary misdirection films, conspiracy narratives in which concluding plot twists compel viewers to rethink much (or even most) of the information previously provided. In the case of his central exhibits, The Usual Suspects (1995) and Unbreakable (2000), these narratives are compelled to reiterate a broader cultural recognition of masculinity's artificiality precisely in order to make a case against it: having their masculine cake and eating it too, they tap into contemporary popular understandings of masculinity's necessary artifice, while also reassuring viewers that the artifice is paradoxically based on some kind of genuine, underlying core. …
[1] Talal Asad begins his essay What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry with following question: torrent of reporting on human rights in recent years far more attention is given to human rights violations in non-Western world than in Euro-America. How should we explain this imbalance? (par. 1). Asad's answer is that human rights constitute a profoundly limited means of defining political recognition and juridical action. Rather than indicating simply a blindness on part of Western states to their own use of violence, imbalance of attention arises from fact that human rights define protection from very few sorts of violences (par. 5-9). For Asad, concept of human rights cannot be expanded in order to address variety of abuses of social justice attendant upon Western imperialism, because what human rights do is to define recognizable and actionable violence for those moral and governmental orders that are premised on reality and supremacy of the West (pars. 29-31, 49, 56-7). [2] Female genital mutilation, or what I will call in this piece genital surgeries (or fgs), has been constituted as a paradigm case of human rights violation, in sense that Talal Asad defines human rights. In using female genital surgeries, I follow lead of Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan's essay Warrior Marks: Global Womanism's Neo-Colonial Discourse in a Multicultural Context (260-61). While using cannot completely overwrite effects of female genital as an object of knowledge with its attendant epistemological violences, it attenuates obvious negative judgment implied by mutilation and also references technological practices which work on body in ways similar to accepted medical procedures--i.e., describes a thoroughly modern set of practices. From perspective of human rights discourses, as a constellation of practices codified under a single name fgs is ostensibly confined to particular and delimited cultures originating in non-West; its meaning is often invoked as unchanging and transparent; its perpetrators and its victims are assumed to be distinct and identifiable; its continued existence is posed as incompatible with freedom, civilization, and democracy; and its origins and supporting paradigms are assumed to be religious. On these last two points, fgs appears as one entry in a longer list of practices thought to be not only examples of misguided tradition but part of a larger and actively anti-secularist agenda, one that offends very character of human rights-based democracy. As a growing number of scholars have argued, concept of human rights not only undergirds Western imperialism, but also aligns ideologies of good governance with an implicitly Christian-oriented secularism which is invariably defined over and against Islam and underwrites expulsion of Muslim subjects from democratic political order (Asad; Scott; Williams). When explained, as it often is, as a feature of culture (Islamic or otherwise), origins of fgs as an object of imperial knowledge production are of course elided. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan discuss codification of fgs as an object of knowledge through the suppression of history of this practice in West, displacing these surgeries onto an ontological other. This kind of displacement occurs in accounts constructed by colonial bureaucrats, missionaries, health workers, educators, anthropologists, and travelers throughout nineteenth and twentieth centuries (264). Tracing an even longer history of European colonial representations of fgs in order to connect them to current Western feminist codification of fgs as an affront to universalist approaches to women's rights (282-84), Wairimu; Ngaruiya Njambi comments on problem of argument regarding fgs, noting that even in much scholarship which attempts to contextualize these practices in their cultural settings . …
[1] Scripting the birth, that is emplotting the story of pregnancy and labor using specific narrative and visual conventions, is a way of coping with the unrepresentability of the birthing body. These coping strategies are not meant to represent the actual experience of the birthing woman but rather to decrease the viewer's anxiety. However, viewers--particularly those who happen to be women--do form certain expectations related to labor on the basis of popular culture. relationship between popular culture and women's expectations and experiences is complex and multi-faceted but most certainly some degree of influence is to be expected, particularly bearing mind the medicalization of the contemporary world, which accounts for the removal of both birth and death from the home and, turn, from the gaze of anyone but medical professionals. As a result, most women see birth on screen before experiencing labor as birthing women. In the 1990s Poland, the first births women viewed were often those depicted Hollywood movies or American television series. While the fact that women Illinois or Georgia laughed along to the 1992 blockbuster hit Look Who's Talking comes as no surprise, that laughter takes on a different significance if the viewers are located a different cultural and political context. [2] Popular culture inevitably abounds gaps and omissions its scripting of the representation of everyday life, but it is precisely these gaps which constitute points of entry for critical analysis, providing information about a society's collective unconscious and changing notions of propriety. For the pop culture I am surrounded by and grew up in, that of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Poland, many of these gaps are related to the female body and female reproduction. With an exorbitant fertility rate being a staple feature of most soap operas, a genre which took Poland by storm the 1990s, one would expect a proliferation of depictions of childbirth. Yet, post 1989 scenes of labor (particularly second-stage labor) Polish visual culture remained rare for more than a decade, only to explode visibility after 2000. It can be claimed that the increased visibility of birth on screen can be attributed to the availability of ready-made scripts, or conventions, which, turn, are part of Polish culture's post-1989 imbibing of western, particularly American, pop cultural strategies of representation. [3] Many strategies can be used to explain the tabooization of the birthing body and its gradual readmission into popular culture (but only on certain terms). Within media studies, psychoanalytic theory, particularly Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, with its connotations to uncleanliness and contamination, has been successfully applied to discuss visual strategies for representing maternal bodies and appears to be a promising tool for discussing representations of the birth itself. In much of the Western world, the birthing body is culturally coded as and, as such, poses problems of representation for popular media. According to Kristeva, interaction with the abject, as something situated outside the symbolic order and reminding one of the possibility of death, is a traumatic experience. maternal body is the site of the ultimate --and at the same time the primal--abjection, as Kristeva points to the necessity of abjecting the maternal order to constitute one's subjectivity and to enter the symbolic order (Kristeva, 12-14). birth itself can be seen as a metaphor for the messy process of separating oneself from one's mother, an observation developed by Barbara Creed her analysis of Ridley Scott's movie Alien The Monstrous Feminine. (Creed, 251-266). No wonder that some of the first American movies depicting birth scenes were horror films. According to Creed, horror films attempt to deal with the by first displacing it, then staging a confrontation with the abject, in order, finally, to eject the abject (253) and provide the viewer with a cathartic experience. …
[1] Engineering a cure for the heteronormative family has become one of the signature missions of certain forms of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the twenty-first century. Processes like artificial insemination and surrogacy are increasingly depicted in popular culture representations as commercial options for women (particularly career women) to fulfill the naturalized role of motherhood and build families conforming to contemporary norms of whiteness, middle-class status, and heterosexuality. While the use of ARTs might enable new forms of kinship, identity building, and family formation, as many feminist scholars have pointed out, the increasing commercial availability of such technologies tends instead to shore up gendered norms and heteronormative family structures (Balsamo, Davis-Floyd, Kaplan and Squier). The perception of ARTs as service to these norms is, in fact, so pervasive that even technologies not yet in place and ripe for imagining difference tend to be portrayed as disruptive forces of otherness that challenge the sanctity of the family, but they are usually absolved by producing the idealized infant. Within these elements of contemporary reproductive discourse, the is a unique example of the ways in which fantasies about reproductive technologies negotiate these tensions between technological innovation and familial norms. [2] While the notion of humans experimenting with human biology has appeared throughout history in various fictions and speculations, the 1990s heralded the appearance of the in cultural discourse, a term commonly employed in the mass media to describe the conception of infants according to particular parental and medical standards. Biologist Colin Tudge defines the as a child to a specification, that would supposedly employ the now common processes of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) (Tudge). While, as Tudge indicates, there are important scientific factors in designing children, the is also tied indelibly to certain elements of cultural fantasy in popular discourse. Perhaps one of the most interesting qualities of the is its ability to blend scientific and popular discourses, as the series of popular medical books appearing on the topic since the 1990s indicates (Green, Sandel, Stock, Tudge). The term designer baby is commonly referenced in major newspapers and on news sites (at least once a year since 1990 in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune), accompanied by articles that invariably cite medical doctors or specialists. Several television documentaries have also appeared, meant to explain the ethical and medical issues involved in designing children to a popular audience (Who's Afraid of Designer Babies, Frontline: Making Babies, Designer Babies: the Genetic Revolution). Moreover, alongside its identity as a child engineered to a specification, the invokes medical standards for the healthy body, and with the use of PGD, is both criticized and valorized through its potential to eliminate various forms of disability (Snyder and Mitchell, Silver). [3] In its position at the crux of medical and popular discourse, the has also played an important role in fictional narratives about ARTs. Science fiction has dealt with the possible alien and alienating aspects of designing human beings irrevocably different from and possibly superior to our current norms (Gattaca, Dark Angel, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Splice). Portrayals of the are also intimately concerned with the well-being of the heteronormative family, and often pose the figure of a genetically infant or human being as paradoxically a threat to that unit as well as a saving grace (After Amy, Picoult). [4] Commonly idealized in popular culture, the image of the family wields a formidable normative force (Coontz, Stacey). …
[1] In September 2005, activist and mother Cindy Sheehan was arrested in front of White House for participating in an organized peaceful sit-in, in which protesters demanded that George Bush receive their request for his plan to end war in Iraq. The civil disobedience action came at end of a weekend long demonstration in Washington, DC, opposing war. Sheehan had gained notoriety that previous August when she camped outside of Bush's home in Crawford, Texas, demanding an audience with him so he could explain noble cause for which her son died (Sheehan 2005). Sheehan's encampment, dubbed Camp Casey after son she lost in war, became a powerful symbol for anti-war movement--one that highlighted anguish of a citizen mother. Sheehan's actions were not novel or new--but actions that had historical precedent. In participating as a mother in public sphere of political protest, Sheehan was practicing a form of twenty-first century Republican Motherhood and her actions imbued growing anti-war action with cultural currency of motherhood. Cindy Sheehan's protests, while endlessly discussed and displayed in media coverage of her actions, cannot be comprehended without an understanding of ways in which American women have framed their civil actions in context of motherhood. In addition, motherhood has been used as a way for media and public to interpret Sheehan's actions, as well as other women's political protests and activism, to create a frame of reference that is congruent with identification of women as mothers and wives, thereby reinforcing accepted gender roles. Sheehan's actions politicized her maternity, turning constructed and widely accepted gender role of motherhood into a political weapon. [2] Scholars of United State's history and women's history are well acquainted with term Republican Mother. Linda Kerber popularized term over 30 years ago when she articulated creation of a political role for women of revolutionary generation. Kerber argued that the tangled and complex role of Republican Mother offered one among many structures and contexts in which women might define civic culture and their responsibilities to state ... (Kerber 1976, 188). Furthermore, Republican Mothers used their roles to secure access to education for themselves and their daughters, using domestic sphere, a realm reserved exclusively for women, as a locus of public agency and authority for women. Although Kerber was writing about political role of women in absence of male rights of citizenship, I would argue that political actions of women under guise of motherhood can still be defined as a version of Republican Motherhood, but perhaps we need another term--politicized maternity--to describe political currency of motherhood. Whichever term we use, it is clear that Cindy Sheehan's protests, earning her title Peace Mom, were rooted in activism of her ideological maternal predecessors, especially those who have protested America's involvement in war and organized violence, and provide a model for historical continuity in understanding women's strategies for effective political activism. Only by understanding history of women using motherhood and accepted boundaries of gender for their own purposes, can we make sense of Sheehan's successful use of her own motherhood. Sheehan, like many women and mothers before her, transformed maternal practice from a commitment to treasure bodies and minds at risk into organized resistance to violence that threatens them (Ruddick 1995, 157). [3] Cindy Sheehan's protests are part of tangled historical and contemporary discourses on motherhood and gendered cultural logic of motherhood. Motherhood, as a political tool, has been appropriated by forces along entire continuum of political spectrum. Both pro and anti-war movements have used gendered discourse of maternity to promote their causes, each relying on feminized discourse and praxis of culture of motherhood. …
Affect is not an expression of transsexuality but is, rather, the definitive condition of it. --Lucas Cassidy Crawford, Without Organs? Transsexuality offers a dramatic instance of the temporal instability of the flesh. It sets embodiment in motion. --Susan Stryker, Transsexuality: Postmodern Body and/as Technology. [1] No body seems fire the postmodern cultural imaginary quite like the body. As Judith Halberstam has noted, The body in transition indelibly marks late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century visual fantasy (76). Transgender bodies and lives are increasingly available for consumption in Western literature, film, televisual media, and in virtual spaces across the internet. We should be careful, however, in assuming that this proliferation of signs indicates a movement toward equality. While transitional and non-conforming bodies may momentarily deconstruct the fiction of static gendered categories, representation may also be manipulated enforce these categories and shore up their ongoing foundational (Prosser, Second 11) through a proliferation of what Sara Ahmed has termed straightening devices (Queer 92). As bodies commonly imagined be in migration between discrete and opposing genders, transsexual and bodies evoke tropes both of boundary crossing and the power of boundaries (re)inscribe norms (Alexander 71). increasing popularity of narrativity indicates the unacknowledged struggle operating the heart of gender's intelligibility: if most of us struggle maintain the illusion of a consistent and perceivable (Bornstein 65), then trans bodies reveal the social processes that produce even as they may reassure us that one can come home to or arrive at one's true in the end. [2] This article seeks explore the ways in which transness--transsexuality and the broader category of transgender as a multivalent and politicized term collecting multiple forms of transitional, medically transitioned, and non-conforming genders--is becoming popularly consumed in North American visual culture. In popular visual texts, difference is commonly reduced an experience of prescribed affect: the trans body is fashioned as one that feels bad--a dysphoric body. Dysphoria indicates a state of unease or general dissatisfaction, and the term is used classify anxiety and mood disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, among other organizations. 2013 revision the APA's DSM V proposes reclassify gender identity disorder as gender dysphoria--a change that increasingly defines trans identification as an emotional disorder, typified by a specific aversive emotional component that constitutes a juridical form of stigmatization for people (Rationale). In Western culture, explanations for identity increasingly entrench transness as mode of feeling, and trans difference is understood as fixing the problem of how trans people feel--and make others feel--about their corporeality. [3] Trans difference has been typified in Western culture as a question of feeling bad about one's body or gender, particularly because transness itself has no as-yet discovered biological etiology. In both medical and fictional literature, identity has been sutured specific forms of negative affect--rage, sorrow, wishfulness, denial--as both instrument[s] of pathologization (Butler 76) and expressions of what is imagined be an inherently dysphoric ontology. fictional figure has traditionally been marked as vulnerable or productive of extreme emotional states, portrayed either as the emotive center of a narrative (The Crying Game), as disturbed, erratic, or unstable (Silence of the Lambs, Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives), or psychotically violent (Dressed Kill, Sleepaway Camp). …
[1] Smart, confident, and gorgeous ... a real 10! This attention-grabbing headline can be found in a database of potential egg donors, positioned above a picture of a fair-skinned young woman along with her height (5'9), eye color (green), and hair color (blonde). In this database, profiles of young, talented, and beautiful women compete for the attention of prospective parents searching for the genetic contributor to an imagined child. Should they choose smart, confident, and gorgeous, or responsible, intelligent, ethical, and good-hearted? Do they select the blonde, Jewish firefighter in Israel to carry on a religious and cultural heritage? Will any of these traits surface in their future child through genetic inheritance? [2] These are a few of the questions faced by intended parents who seek an egg donor through a commercial agency. Further complicating the situation is the fact that some intended parents require not only an egg donor but also a gestational surrogate to gestate the fertilized egg. In contrast to traditional surrogacy, in which the egg of the surrogate is inseminated with the sperm of the prospective father or a donor, gestational surrogates share no biological connection to the fetus(es) they carry. The vast majority of documented surrogacy arrangements in the United States today are gestational, due in large part to advancements in reproductive technologies allowing for egg donation and in vitro fertilization. Intended parents in the market for reproductive services are faced with the fraught processes of choosing donors and surrogates, and attributing significance to the contributions of those selected. [3] Traits ranging from racial identity to creativity and compassion are coded as heritable in the contemporary United States. Yet there is a contradiction between the commodification of race in the reproductive-services market and the last several decades of scientific research proving that race has no biological basis. Despite this scientific evidence, Americans remain obsessed with genetics, as demonstrated in the deployment of race in the reproductive technology industry. At times, racial difference is made quite explicit in the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry, such as when intended parents select an egg donor with a racial background that matches their own. At other times, especially when intended parents are choosing a gestational surrogate, racial difference is dismissed as inconsequential to ART outcomes. [4] This essay analyzes databases of egg donors and surrogates compiled by agencies that connect intended parents with reproductive service providers. Profiles of egg donors showcase each woman's physical characteristics, personality traits, and individual talents, while surrogacy databases largely focus on the practical questions of reproductive history, lifestyle (such as tobacco and alcohol use), and remuneration. I contend that this difference reflects an understanding of reproduction that privileges the power of genetics over gestation. Moreover, the deployment of race in these databases is inconsistent, as is the fragmented discourse on race in America more generally. [5] I build my theoretical argument by examining scientific discourses on race and genomics as a multivalent arena of knowledge production--following the contributions of feminist studies, I view scientific practice as situated, embodied, and culturally contingent. Here I examine how scientific assertions of the biological meaninglessness of race largely fail to trickle down into the popular consciousness, and how this failure is abetted by the continued use of race as a meaningful category of analysis in reproductive medicine. The Commodification of Race [6] In the introduction to Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, editors Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson argue that what they call post-genomic science has revitalized, rather than undermined, the use of racial categories to stand in for biological difference (1). …
[1] In early nineteenth century, lurid tales of imprisoned and sexually violated nuns entertained and outraged Protestant Americans. most famous and popular of these tales was Awful Disclosures of Hotel Dieu Nunnery ostensibly written by Maria Monk about her experiences in Montreal convent. Awful Disclosures tells a familiar anti-Catholic story of a Protestant youth, seduced into convent life with promises of salvation, knowledge and opportunity. Once she enters convent, novice discovers horrible secrets of torture and sexual abuse. Appalled by this violence, which reveals to her true nature of Catholic Church, novice escapes to warn others of convent's danger. It unclear how much of Awful Disclosures came from Monk's imagination or from pen of a group of male reformers that included her lover, William Hoyt, nativists Theodore Dwight and J.J. Slocum and anti-slavery advocate and protestant minister George Bourne, who introduced Monk's story in his newspaper American Protestant Vindicator (Billington, Fessenden, The Convent, Franchot, Griffen, McCarthy, Pagliarini, Regan, Schultz, Introduction, Sullivan, Weller). [2] Awful Disclosures notorious for its descriptions of tortured bodies and sexual violence. It was within violated, pained and dead bodies of its narrative that Monk's supporters and detractors located truth. Her anti-Catholic supporters argued that her story exposed literal whore of Babylon who inhabited Catholic Church, while her critics countered that Monk's ability to conjure such images revealed a knowledge of sex and violence more in keeping with experiences of a prostitute than with those of a nun (Franchot 26). Likewise, historians have placed of Monk's story in its linkages between sex and violence. According to historian Bruce Dorsey, the irony behind this anti-Catholic literature was that in an effort to expose supposed sexual iniquities of Catholics, nativists produced a form of popular pornography for a broad antebellum reading public (239). And, in his fascinating study of antebellum literary history, David Reynolds argues that these images of sexual violence overwhelmed any legitimate message contained within such tales. He places Awful Disclosures within an immoral reform tradition that used didactic rhetoric as a protective shield for highly unconventional explorations of tabooed psychological and spiritual areas (55). Reynolds concludes that Awful Disclosures' anti-Catholicism [was simply] a pretense for studying hidden lust and sadism (65). [3] While Dorsey and Reynolds use this claim to underscore failure of escaped nuns tales as literature, I argue that their exploration of sexual violence precisely what makes these texts fascinating. Awful Disclosures offers a unique opportunity for understating how male reformers imagined techniques of violence that made a woman rapable. When authors of literature conjured rapable women they had to imagine and account for violence of act of rape even if prurient often overrode pedagogical function of these narratives. My reading interrogates how authors of Awful Disclosures focused on physical realities of violence to construct a rape script. This focus on techniques of violence that made rape possible exposes rape as a violation of women's bodies and attack on their souls or inner most being. While this point may seem obvious to twentieth century feminist reader, it represents a significant break from typical nineteenth-century constructions of rape. Theoretical and Historical Context [4] In their introduction to anthology, Reading Rape, Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda Silver argue, in courts or in media, whether in art or criticism, who gets to tell story and whose story counts as truth determines definition of what rape is (1). …
[1] Cuween, a small Neolithic cairn, perches on top of a hill on Orkney Mainland. A flashlight waits in a bucket by door, and visitors crawl on hands and knees, one by one, into pitch-black interior. After savoring a degree of darkness rare in modern life, they direct beams of light up tapering walls to marvel at skill of stonemasons. It is impossible to resist impulse to clamber into chambers and crouch where bones once lay. Green and smooth, Maeshowe, another Orkney cairn, rises enigmatically from field where it has stood since around 2700 BC. The designation of this monument and surrounding Neolithic structures as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) in 1999 significantly increased tourism to area (Card et al. 429), so while visitors may still enter Cuween unsupervised, access to much larger Maeshowe now requires a timed ticket, bought in advance. Throughout year, thousands of visitors, bending uncomfortably low, shuffle through tunnel-like passage entry, making physical journey from light to dark and a more psychological journey from present to past. Exploring any of Neolithic sites in Orkney is to bridge time, to feel kinship with those who built them. [2] Without doubt, a major reason Maeshowe attracts so many people is its symbiotic relationship with its environment. Most famously, at sundown during December solstice, winter sun lines up with door of tomb, shines down passage, and focuses its rays on stone wall within. Interest in this phenomenon, moment when light stabs darkness, is so high that Historic Scotland provides web-cam coverage, but Maeshowe fascinates others besides tourists and solstice celebrants. Whether they are vacation visitors, archaeologists, anthropologists, or poets, explorers experience sites differently, applying their own intellectual tools and imagining Neolithic lives from their respective points of view. Leslie Riddoch has written that these are Stone Age marvels which inspire and astonish, and Simon W. Hall expresses experiences of many when he refers to the profound impact of entering a (160). They imply that to enter a cairn is to become one with it, to undergo a transformation. Maeshowe, which can now be experienced only under regimented conditions required by Historic Scotland guides, clearly retains extraordinary power to inspire. Indeed, this ancient mound has attracted a great deal of literary attention from both noted and obscure writers. Considering these cumulative interpretations, rather than relying solely on work of archaeologists, opens up a more comprehensive, textured, and, indeed, gendered understanding of ancient history and our commonality with Neolithic peoples. [3] George Mackay Brown, Kathleen Jamie, Myra Schneider, and Dilys Rose are four of more prominent authors for whom Maeshowe has proven inspirational. They have experienced tomb through a doubly imaginative process: first by reading it as they would read a poem and then by expressing that interpretation in writing. While Brown was an Orcadian, living most of his life alongside Neolithic sites, Jamie, Schneider, and Rose, all of whom have Scottish roots, experience Maeshowe as tourists, drawn across Pentland Firth to enter passage and travel into darkness. Significantly, all three of these more contemporary writers are women. Hall, in his valuable survey, The History of Orkney Literature, contrasts use of prehistoric by female Scottish writers with that of their male counterparts, stating that it is less political, that women authors take the opportunity to reestablish place--and, significantly, inner lives of women in prehistoric or early historical northern landscape (162-163). I would argue, however, that their work also engages public world to a greater extent and is more ideological than this statement implies. …
Introduction [1] Since their inception in 1790, prison and literacy programs have been scrutinized and studied in order to gauge their potential usefulness in the rehabilitation of the incarcerated (Rubin, 3). A large body of literature, overwhelmingly consisting of personal accounts and analyses from librarians, and the occasional inmate, has been produced discussing these programs and institutions. The narrative of the prison library extends beyond memoirs and research. Many novels, films, and television shows which have prison as their setting or focus will include scenes or storylines within the prison library. The image of the reading prisoner is part of the American national psyche and with very few exceptions the narrative surrounding the prison library--be it fictional or nonfictional--is overwhelmingly supportive of these services. Besides routine lamentations about lack of funding or frustration over the occasional administrative roadblock, the majority of accounts are profuse in their praise of the prison library as beneficial to inmate growth and rehabilitation. [2] The oft-stated positive characteristics of these programs are manifold. They offer opportunities for prisoners to gain knowledge and further their education. Book programs and are often connected with education classes and vocational trainings in which inmates can learn skills that will be useful upon release. Outside of the prison walls, these individuals may not have had the opportunity to focus on education and literacy but during a period of incarceration they may be able to spend concentrated periods of time with library staff and volunteer educators. Access to books can also be seen as a way for prisoners to have leisure time and moments of freedom from the otherwise violent or oppressive life of an inmate. The relief these types of programs offer inmates is lauded as beneficial and perhaps even necessary to the survival of the individual within the prison system. Inmates themselves are often the most vocal advocates for access to reading materials while incarcerated and the most adamant protesters when these materials are removed, often taking part in lawsuits--with varying success--against prison institutions that try to restrict this access (Sweeney, 20). Literature frees the mind, conceivably making the fact that the body is oppressively contained somewhat more bearable. [3] Considering these myriad potentially positive aspects of institutional libraries, educational programs geared towards inmates, and prison book programs/book groups, it is easy to assume that creating these types of programs and supporting them once they are in place is an important and necessary way for the government to support a population of its citizenry who are among the most at risk. Yet this idea becomes more complex when one recognizes that the prison system is one of the many influential tools of State power. Although organizations such as the American Association (ALA) have created guidelines for within correctional facilities, these are not in fact under the sole jurisdiction of librarians or any public library association. Library facilities, library collections, and library services in the federal prison system fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice. Each of the fifty states has its own department of corrections (or similarly named agency) with responsibility for the state correctional facilities and libraries (Lehmann, 490). Everyone, and everything, within the prison system is controlled by the State. Libraries and book programs within this system are there only because the State allows them to be and this beneficence comes at a high price. [4] This price most often presents itself in the form of censorship. Prison administrations, as well as local governments, frequently censor the types of books available to inmates. …
[1] In this essay, I am interested in how changing expectations of masculinity are reflected in the erotic text A Spy on Mother Midnight; or, the Templar Metamorphosed and parts two and three of that text, printed the same year, A Continuation of Mr. F--'s Adventures in Petty-Coats and A Further Continuation of Mr. F--'s Adventures in Petty-Coats(1748). (Throughout this essay I will consider the three parts of the text as one, as the letters are numbered continuously throughout. I will refer to the three parts of the text by the title of the first text, A Spy on Mother Midnight, and cite them parenthetically by letter and page number). This text is particularly useful for study of masculinity because it is published as standards of male friendship are shifting, and as ideal men are expected to govern their society and their more benevolently. Both the epistolary style of the text--it is written in series of six letters from one male friend to another--and its visible but suppressed violence reveal narrator straining against the new limitations on friendship and violence. Laura Thomason is the only scholar to address A Spy on Mother Midnight at length; her argument, like mine, is interested in the homoerotic elements of the text as well as its lack of violence. However, she argues that the text is light-hearted celebration of libertine sexuality, and that the sense of distance [created by the epistolary frame] and the tale's light tone obviate the need to punish Mother Midnight's characters or its readers for either their homoerotic or their pornographic interests (271). My reading, however, places this text and its second and third parts--which are crucial to an understanding of the text's homoeroticism and which are not addressed by Thomason--within larger context of shifting expectations of male friendship and masculinity, including decrease in the acceptability of individual violence, and argues that the epistolary frame itself calls attention to the same-sex desire at the base of all erotica. [2] Unlike much of the period's erotica which, as Karen Harvey notes, allowed men to look at sexually desirable male bodies, by placing these bodies in strictly heterosexual context: male bodies were craved for by women, revealed only to women, and responded only to women the unique characteristics of this text call attention to the very possibilities of male vulnerability and male same-sex desire that they should obscure (Majesty, 214). The narrator's own cross-dressing--which he undertakes in order to penetrate all-female spaces and to pursue resistant lovers to their private chambers--calls into question the very masculinity that his successful conquest of multiple lovers attempts to solidify. Indeed, though the narrator does manage to coax or trick many into bed with him, he also incites the desire of several men convinced by his dress that he's beautiful young woman. The narrator ultimately loses control over his performance; his own body becomes objectified and passive as he renders himself subject to men's advances and--through the letters he writes documenting his escapades--to his closest male friend's own sexual gratification. This epistolary frame simultaneously reveals the same-sex male desire that always lingers beneath erotica which vividly displays male sexual conquest for presumably male readership. The narrator's attempted performance of sexually dominant masculinity ultimately highlights the innate perversity of the insatiable libertine Englishman, as he disrupts gender boundaries which he cannot then reinstate. [3] Jason M. Kelly points out, using the exclusive, all-male associations of the Calves-Head Club and the Mendenham Monks as examples, that there was an active masculine libertinism through the mid-eighteenth century. These libertines still celebrated and reveled in specifically aristocratic privilege, but balanced those excesses with more polite interests; they represented a specifically Enlightenment form of gentlemanly association that valued knowledge--both classical and modern--as parallel to libertinism (794). …
It should come as no surprise, then, that women figure prominently in Vietnamese cinematic depictions of their against the United States. However, although there are cinematic representations of women in combat in Vietnam, it appears that domestic emphasizing family relations and interior, psychological dilemmas, figure most prominently in Vietnamese depictions of the (particularly in films made in the 1980s). Even though Vietnamese filmmakers may simply categorize these films as dramas or, more specifically, war dramas, a strong argument can be made for looking at these films in relation to the Hollywood or European melodrama. Like their Western generic counterparts, these Vietnamese films often feature female protagonists, foreground the domestic sphere and familial or romantic relationships, personalize sweeping social or historical events by focusing on the lives of a few individuals, emphasize the dramatic exaggeration of emotions with music and certain cinematic conventions (e.g., low-key lighting, canted camera angles, jarring editing techniques), and include narrative elements which both distance through irony and invite the viewer (with point-of-view shots, dream sequences, etc.) to intimately identify with the characters and their
•f nothing else, the furor occasioned byThe Perfect Moment, the now notorious Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, has served to delimit the scope of the conservative mania for deregulation. Good government may now mean virtually no government at all, yet the modern art industry, unlike, say, the airlines, has not been abandoned to its own devices. Certainly the museum, the ultimate arbiter of valuemaesthetic and economicrain the modern art market, remains fully the object of anxious scrutiny and control. It is not, then, surprising that museum existence, albeit in the form of a traveling exhibit, should be the focus of the Mapplethorpe controversy. It is in relation to this thoroughly controlled and regulated art industry, which is isomorphic with our disciplinary society of generalized regulation and control, that I want to place the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. "Place" is the operable word in what follows, for I am concerned with the imbrication of content and context, with the relation that obtains between the sexuality depicted in Mapplethorpe's Bill, New York, 1976-77, The Slave (1974), and Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979) and the conditions under which that sexuality is displayed, disseminated, and consumed. It seems to me meaningful, for example, or a determining factor in the construction of meaning, that the photographs now appear in an academic journal rather than, say, a gay porn magazine, where Mapplethorpe's work has also been featured. (Unhappily, however, only two of an intended three photographs appear in these pages: For reasons that it would not divulge, the Mapplethorpe Estate denied permission to reproduce Bill, New York, 1976-77.) And because of the context in which the photographs now appear, I shall assume an audience already schooled in my theoretical sources: Foucault's Discipline and Punish and, to a lesser extent, The History of Sexuality. Rather than rehearse the familiar arguments, I shall attempt to counter the routine criticisms, which frequently seem motivated by little more than Foucault's refusal to confirm the academy in an image of its own radicalism; namely, that his vision of the panoptic or disciplinary presupposes a modality of power from which there is no egress, against which there can be no resistance. What I want to suggest, what I want to suggest Mapplethorpe's Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter suggests with particular insistence, is that disciplinary power cannot survive
