Gender Trouble

A cover for a particular Anne of Green Gables trilogy has been receiving a sorrowful buzz if only for its malapropistic inception, unwittingly shaming the red-headed character of its inner pages.

Supposed book geeks are railing against the image of a blonde representing non-other than Anne Shirley, yelling at publishers for not reading the book before choosing a cover. I argue publishers know exactly what they’re doing, and that Anne of Green Gables is well known enough to warrant knowing the character is a fiery redhead (a sexual trope all its own). I like to assume this is a crude attempt to trick readers into purchasing a book solely based on the cover, which is what a lot of books do. People are less apt to read the back of the sleeve, anyway. If they were, we’d have no need for the cover.

Someone expressed a pang that the problem with the cover is the sexualization of the young blonde, tussling her hair, arching her back in a popular pin up pose, and thereby encouraging young women to act the same way. This argument falls flat on its face if anyone reads the actual book and realizes, by today’s conventions, that Anne Shirley is exactly what a young woman doesn’t want to be like if she wants popular attention and success. Yes, times have changed since the intellectual woman could depend solely on her intellect alone- but let’s face it, branding the self is as important as shelling out whatever adventures Anne Shirley could drum up in her old age.

Really though, the performativity of the photograph, not the colour of the hair, is the problem; because there is no doubt that young readers associate a successful young women with a vivacious sexuality. More importantly, if rhetorical icons like these continually represent female protagonists we do risk the danger of normalizing what young girls- popular girls- successful girls- look like from a space of hetero-normativity. Does it pressure women in the real world? I suppose it can, but there’re a myriad of representations we see in print, film, wherever. Go to the mall. This book cover just seems a moot point, and if there is any dilemma its in regards to getting a character image wrong in looks and even history- I’m pretty sure Anne Shirley didn’t ride horses, nor did she wear plaid shirts, or have highlights. Heck, I know she didn’t. That said, whatever cynically pulls on the normative heart strings of girls who want to be attractive young protagonists. In hindsight, this may be a perfect example of sex actually selling to young girls, the iconic image being so perfect in its representation of, again, an attractive, successful young girl doing girling, and no doubt affecting young consumers with a performative response of girling themselves.

-l

For more on ‘girling’ and ‘affect’, read:

Feeling Girl, Girling Feeling: An Examination of “Girl” as Affect by Monica Swindle

I just saw Le Vian Chocolate’s Diamonds Commercial on television a couple seconds ago and couldn’t help but think of Nina Powers on the power of chocolate,

“Chocolate represents that acceptable everyday extravagance that all-too-neatly encapsulates just the right kind of perky passivity that feminized capitalism just loves to reward with a bubble bath and some crumbly cocoa solids. It sticks in the mouth a bit. … I think there’s a very real sense in which women are supposed to say ‘chocolate’ whenever someone asks them what they want. It irresistibly symbolizes any or all of the following: ontological girlishness, a naughty virginity that gets its kicks only from a widely-available mucky cloying substitute, a kind of pecuniary decadence.”

This particular passage is hauled up by a lot of writers, especially in the realm of women and food and bodies. A particular read, by
Autumn Whitefield-Madrano in her essay entitled “The Sweet Smell of Sexcess” about foodie products being pushed as an alternative for eating also came to mind- conveniently, she also draws on Powers. I think the foodie scope of the argument is a little lost, and the term misused, but the point still hits home thanks to Powers. 

What’s so intriguing about this commercial, whether women see it or not, is its ability to police the body through growing up and eating. Of course, I’ll explain.

The commercial opens with a young girl gazing at chocolate and a voice over explains, ‘the craving for chocolate… is all grown up’. During this allotted time we see the young girl transform into the prime woman, and we see the chocolate transform into- what else?- jewelry, the candy of the grown woman. From a perspective of consumerism this entire situation greases capitalism’s wheels perfectly.

The success of the object as food supplement works exceptionally well with women and bodies, especially when women are unfortunately burdened with the task of wrong ways to eat their entire lives, especially if they are subject to believing the particular bodies they see in Western culture as right, wrong, normal, not normal. Food is a tempting and dangerous thing, especially in a world policed by perfect bodies and calorie counting. Because while women want to eat, they are stigmatized by the danger of becoming unattractive, which is why objects that manifest the characteristics of food work so well to become conduits for actual food, absolving the guilt and shame of decadent, fat rendering eating, ignored in youth for a short time, until girls start practicing being girls, make up and all. Now, of course most women may say they aren’t concerned with perfect calorie counting, but there is no doubt they are saddled with a voice that occasionally nags them for eating a little too much.

For the past two years I’ve been serendipitously privileged with jobs in the wellness industry, selling and making creams and lotions that have a lot of food scents- vanilla, chocolate, mint, whatever fruit. And though it’s nice to smell like these things, they also activate a desire to eat- unfortunately you can’t eat a decadent coconut body lotion that contains borax. Even I have to admit, I’ve come across some that have made me salivate. I argue that while some men wear scented body lotions- which smell like food-it is very very rare, and women are the prime targets for this marketing strategy.

Because women police their eating much more than men, who can always eat more and get ‘big’ and be more accepted, products that masquerade as food become ways for women to absolve themselves of the guilt of eating. You don’t eat a lotion, and it’s good for staying young and looking young- and even being thin. In the instance of beauty products, scented creams, especially if all natural and non-toxic, become ways to have your cake and eat it too. The body can ingest without calorie intake and be satisfied- or at least, women train themselves to be satisfied. It takes time, but it’s better than a future of fat. More importantly, women are praised for taking care of themselves.

In the case of diamonds and Le Vian’s commercial, which operates just as complexly, the diamond becomes a food object a woman can always use to satiate her desire for decadent things. Not only that, it becomes a fetishized food substitute she is praised and revered for having. Jewelry represents success in wealth and relationships. She can have her chocolate and not feel bad because it is viewed in this case as a good thing, not consuming action that represents poor discipline. Indeed, it is the best kind of discipline- a loved woman gets diamonds, a rich woman gets diamonds. All axioms of the successful consumer in capitalism.

By the commercial’s end, the women is held by her significant other, satisfied, and happy with the nourishing, fetishized, consumer good.

I noticed multiple viewings of jewelry commercials, of all places, on the SPIKE NETWORK, which delivers another level of analysis to this body policing through jewelry. What would a man think when constantly seeing these chocolate diamond commercials? Me aside, I can assume that men can nourish women with these products that become as life giving as food, while objectifying the women in their lives to statuses of normative- being supplied for and remaining thin, remaining beautiful. The pressure for the male viewer certainly is palpable. I counted three commercials in the span of a half hour. Even if they don’t feel the pressure, there is some particular hypnotic rhetoric going on, especially if we view the television screen as a window for objective reality- for what is true in the world and culture. You may say I’m foolish, that people know better. But when marketing becomes more sophisticated and when consumers engage in the activity of purchasing products they see on commercials, I believe what I say hits home. Indeed, the fantasy displayed may not be real, but the idea of making it reality- of seeing a utopian life on television and working towards it- is something viewers more often than not want to do, especially if it can make their lives more validated.

-l

(The fantasy window is an interesting subject. For more information, feel free to pic up anything by Anne Friedberg.)

I’m snowballing before bed…

I’ll be brief- because this movie alone warrants its own critical analysis, one which I myself find daunting and unrewarding- because I don’t get paid to do this stuff, and being a White dude writing Feminist/Queer theory is so problematic for other people. But I invite everyone to enter into a discussion with me- this movie is a Queer goldmine, from abilist Dwarves as comic relief characters to young female empowerment that falls flat on its face. That said, I’ll talk about that. As a hyper feminist Hollywood text, Snow White & the Huntsman succeeds, but I use the term hyper feminist here scornfully, because the empowered female archetype I see Hollywood use to empower young women- heck all women- only serves to solidify an ideal of heteronormative capitalist supremacy.

I said I’d be brief, so in brief, on a superficial level, the film operates to make itself a superficial feminist homage, but manages, much to my delight, to be a practise in the queer art of failure, until that itself becomes betrayed, ironically, by the female protagonist attempting to empower female kind. Why is this?

The story of Snow White begins with a King losing his wife, mourning, falling for another beautiful woman and then being killed by her, whom, she tells the listeners, is someone who’s made it her life’s mission to punish men for using women as objects- loving them for their beauty- and then throwing them away. She thus states that beauty is the only thing that has power, or something of the sort. So, beautiful woman becomes evil queen, audience recognizes vanity metaphor, thinks beauty is on inside, paradoxically still worships beauty in real life (thank you, H&M). But that’s another line of flight I’ll stay away from.

What seems important is that Snow White, who escapes to advance the plot, isn’t really an empowered female as much as she is a female empowered by queer characters. In that respect, the film fails in female empowerment but succeeds in a heteronormative perspective because it maintains heteronormative control, especially from a male space of power, while hypnotizing audiences into making women think they’re empowered.

To explain further. The Huntsman searches out Snow White for the resurrection of his dead wife (that’s the reward). He’s a degenerate drunk, liminal in society as far as I’m concerned (on the edge of two plains of existence; hypermasculine archetype, drunk, useless, non-capitalist loser). He at first searches out the poor fawn Snow White, finds her and almost returns her until the Evil Queen’s bro shirks on the deal, thus saving her. What’s important though is that through the journey, the liminal failure that is the Huntsman- great war hero turned drunk loser- is queer in the story, because though a handsome cowboy, he still ain’t perfect by heteronormative capitalist standards. I’ll diverge here to explain that heteronormative supremacy in this story has huge roots in capitalism because of the space of heteronormative balance that the film comes to by the end.

So, it turns out that the Huntsman indirectly, and directly, teaches Snow White skills that allow her to survive ‘outside’ the Kingdom- she becomes queer, paradoxically in a quest to become ‘not queer.’ That is, to restore the Kingdom to a place of peace, which the Evil Queen took away. It’s at this junction that I argue that the queen, again paradoxically is actually herself queer, and fulfills a capitalist heteronormative agenda to return peace and order and submissiveness on a female heroine who will rule a Kingdom that has roots in Patriarchy.

Ironically, Snow White becomes a Hetero Wolf in Queer Sheeps’ clothing. But we don’t know that until the end.

What else proves Snow White’s (SW from now on) queerness transformation? Howabout her death? Jesus metaphor aside, she becomes ‘poisoned’ by the queer queen and put under a spell (no doubt another analogy for the ‘black magic’ ‘not naturalness’ of queerness that heteronormativity uses to disqualify it). Instead of the heteronormative Duke’s son, Prince Charming, fighting the good fight doing everything right, kissing her and having her wake up, it is, in fact the Huntsman, in drunken fit and hysteria who unknowingly does so. This would otherwise be problematic if you view him as straight male kissing straight female, but- again, he is a queer metaphor- AND! the movie cleverly doesn’t allow him to know he’s the one that wakes her up- AND! they never get together by the end- thank queer God. Thus, SW is reborn, a true liminal queer heroine, having mastered the art of queer failure. BUT! she rallies the troupes of expelled villagers in order to overcome the Evil Queen and restore order, as if a cell sent by some Heteronormative government, and she manages to destroy herself by giving up her queerness for ‘Queenly’ responsibility and order. The kicker? She kills the queen with a move the Huntsman taught her- queer against queer, presenting the viewer with the hetero truth that queerness is problematic because it collapses in on itself. it destroys its own Other. The only thing that can work, and is the natural Order is King/Queen/Patriarchal rule. Everyone has a space, job, role in the Kingdom and that equals happiness.

The saving grace of the film? The Huntsman is at Snow White’s coronation, eyes her among the crowd, but is not decked out in anything fancy but still his old garbs and demeaner, unchanged in the least. He remains liminal, he remains queer, he gives viewers a little hope.

-l