Movable type 2.1: Gender

Movable Type is a Media Studies journal that displays outstanding work, researched and recorded by the undergraduate students at the University of Virginia.

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Edition 2.1 Fall 2014

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Meet the Team

Homemaking, Body Image, and Consumerism Carly Spraggins

Century-Old Cover Girl Stephanie DeVaux

Queer Hip-hop: Interview with Greg Lewis and Assistant Professor Andre Cavalcante

The Pornification of Popular Culture

32 46 48 55

Lisa Myers

Notes: Patriarchy in the Media Eric Leimkuhler

Gender in Drag Performance Kensie Blodgett

Resources

l e Lisa Myers Editor

Eric Leimkuhler Associate Editor

Who am I? When we evaluate the media-saturated world around us, it is clear that everyone is asking this fundamental question; and it is apparent that we often let mediated performances determine for us what it means to be man or woman. By opening our ears to one another, those submitting to and those pushing against the norms, we can hear the communal cry of a humanity seeking to understand who we are, and work to encourage one another to embody identities outside the structures of the media.

The influence of gender within society is as omnipresent (and sometimes as polluted) as the air we breathe. Gender has the power to govern our perceptions of identity. Let this issue be a gust of wind blowing through your consciousness to remind you of the gendered norms and constructs that shape every second of our life experience. Perhaps, with this new understanding, we can begin to turn the weathervane of gendered norms and constraints in media production.

From gender non-conformist rapper Mykki Blanco to actress Adele Exarchopoulos in coming-of-age film Blue Is the Warmest Color, it seems that everyone wants to add to the gender conversation.

I am fascinated with how popular culture shapes and is shaped by disparate notions of gender and how the rise of a more vocal LGBTQ community has fundamentally problematized the binaries that have historically defined the way Americans see male and female.

We are all deeply connected to and affected by questions about gender, which have risen to the forefront of conversation in recent years. This has encouraged valuable discussion about the relationship between gender and the media. I have been particularly captivated by how gender dynamics have been portrayed in film and television in the past and the present. Now, looking towards the future, I am eager to see how representations of gender will continue to evolve in our ever-changing media world.

Mirenda Gwin Outreach Coordinator

Bethany Kattwinkel Associate Editor

m b

a c Alex Fillip Webmaster

Assistant Professor Chris Ali Faculty Advisor

Media is a profoundly influential socializing force and the crisis of female representation in the media remains an important issue today in part because of that pervasive influence. In the realm of gender and media, I am a strong believer in diversifying and expanding the place of women in the media landscape as a means of bolstering the health of our democracy and culture as a whole.

In a world all too often described as post-feminist we tend to assume that the gender struggles that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s are over and issues resolved.

The essays in this issue of Movable Type demonstrate that gender in media remains as seminal to understand and critique today as it has ever been. That our students are so invested in these issues is a testament to their desire to see positive change occur in our media and democratic systems toward greater awareness and equality.

meet the team Discourse about gender in the media is so important right now. I am especially interested in the role of women in popular modern media outlets. I love the stand that the strong, feminist women of our generation have taken in the media lately, but is this enough? Where are the women on late night talk shows?

Discussion about gender equality in media is an incredibly important topic in the growth of our country’s media industry.

k Katelyn Saks Secretary

This journal is a product of the dedication of these individuals, each of whom have worked diligently and thoughtfully to edit, curate, and create what you see before you. We are proud to be able to highlight the work of a talented undergraduate community with a passion to shape and engage with today’s media culture.

Reviewers: Becky Seidel Kerry Underhill Will Andrewes Camille Kidwell

Media communications wield incredible

power

construction

of

in

the

gender,

social defining

our conceptions of the gendered spectrum through every word, pixel, and sound wave transmitted to audiences.

Potent,

yet

entirely

intangible, gender identifications enhance the great variety of the human experience, but also feed some of its greatest enigmas. We

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hope this issue will give you a taste of how the media industry

affects, and is affected by, these complex notions.

gender

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Homemaking, Body Image, Consumerism Carly Spraggins Fourth Year Media Studies; Government; Batten Accelarate MPP

A Postfeminist Analysis of the Emerging World of Pinterest

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o matter how much time individuals and groups spend on the popular website Pinterest, it is consistently difficult to answer the simple question of “what is Pinterest?”

In popular discourse, editorial coverage, and academic reviews it has been labeled and categorized in a variety of ways – a visual search engine, social scrapbook, digital moodboard, visual curator, web discovery tool and virtual shopping cart. Part of this confusion and inconsistency is likely attributable to the disconnect between the website’s users and those seeking to classify it. While men dominate the technology and business sectors that typically observe and narrate the stories of new digital platforms, Pinterest’s global user base is 83% female.1 Nonetheless, the multitude of labels alone is evidence of the revolutionary, indeterminate, and evolving space that Pinterest occupies in the contemporary Internet landscape. In connecting the platform with the broader picture of social relations and e-commerce, “one lesson of Pinter-

est is that female-focused sites don’t have to broaden their appeal to become massively popular and influential.”2 Yet this statement begs the informed consumer and interested investor to look further and understand how this influence can be characterized and how it can be fit into the broader discussion of the state of gender equality in a digital world. As the structural design, user base, and popular content of Pinterest have developed, so too has the broader image of femininity that it produces and promotes.

Based on this development, Pinterest’s relationship to the feminine image, social class, and empowerment consumerism make it the archetypal postfeminist media platform.

As a platform dominated in use by women, the content of Pinterest will inevitably be characterized as “feminine.” Yet the particular images, messages, and content to which the feminine label becomes attached help to determine the platform’s relationship to the broader movement of feminism. In her guiding work “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” Rosalind Gill characterizes the postfeminist sense of femininity as one that is incessantly preoccupied with bodily appeal.3 In postfeminist culture, the body becomes a feminine object to be cultivated and displayed. While first and second wave feminism varied in the aspects in which they were successful, they both effectively moved society away from as stringent a definition of feminine personality traits (passive, naïve, demure, submissive, etc). However as the emphasis on these traits was reduced, increased attention was paid to articulating and monitoring the ideal type of a feminine physicality.4 In this notion of postfeminist bodily property, the aforementioned monitoring (referred to by Gill as ‘surveillance’) serves as a central linking activity among both women and greater society. In characterizing Pinterest, many have likened it to the digital remediation of the traditional, glossy women’s magazine.5 Women’s magazine publications traditionally emphasize

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the female body as well. However, this emphasis is mediated by accompanying text, which articulates and intermittently questions the process necessary to achieve such a glorifiable body.6 Though the interface design of Pinterest allows a viewer to link to such commentary available externally, as a fundamentally image-based network, such reconciling commentary is not as explicitly available or associated with the original image.7 Instead the user’s assessment of quality is based on content that is visually intriguing and photogenic, rather than substantively valuable. As applied to the female body, this aesthetic pattern often leads to popularity of images where only the body, not the face of a women is featured, following in the dehumanizing pattern of popular advertising. Rather than existing as an independent identity, the feminine “self has become a project to be evaluat-

This aesthetic pattern [of visually intriguing and photogenic content] often leads to popularity of images where only the body...is featured, following in the dehumanizing pattern of popular advertising.

”

ed, advised, disciplined, and improved.”8 As the activity of bodily surveillance becomes more prevalent with the growth of postfeminism, a “controlled figure [becomes] normatively essential for portraying success.”9 Similarly, a beautiful, well-maintained woman is assumed to have an equally beautiful, stable, and secure lifestyle.10 However, the factors, which constitute this broadly viewed ‘beautiful’ body, become more removed from natural reality as they are more closely inspected. A central feature of Pinterest is that its content becomes continually greater and continually more connected with the vast scope of the Internet. Correspondingly, this lens more specifically identifies and articulates factors of the body not previously considered in the equation of beauty, in effect declaring,

“You thought you were comfortable with your body? Well think again!”11 This intensification of standards of beauty is inherently gendered in assigning value – while the model masculine body is authentic, rugged, and natural, the feminine archetype is assumed to involve management and modification.12 Even as Pinterest’s content policy bans posts which explicitly endorse eating disorders, searches for disproportionately specific features like “thigh gap”, “protruding collar bone”, or “bikini bridge” bring up countless photos of zoomed in, defined parts of the woman’s body. In accordance with both Pinterest convention and postfeminist sensibility, these photos are linked to detailed instructions for the diet and exercise regimens recommended by users to achieve these venerated features. These instructions exemplify how the Pinterest ideal of the feminine image fits within the larger postfeminist tenet of the makeover paradigm.13 The broader message of these images and instructions endorses the postfeminist makeover paradigm by simultaneously shaming the women who lack one or all of these idealized features while assigning theoretical bodily control and encouraging them to pursue femininity through the prescribed process.

Beyond the physical attributes that constitute the postfeminist aesthetic, postfeminism is also defined by a number of assumptions that ground its philosophy.

To accept the postfeminist depiction of reality, one must also accept the supposition of equal opportunity not only between men and women but also among women.

This supposition is reflected across media, in phenomena including the overrepresentation of women in high-powered occupations like doctors and lawyers on television to the integration of enlightened sexism into conventional humor.14 From its roots, Pinterest can be considered analogous in its false parity of prospects for users. Pinterest’s disengagement from, and frequent exacerbation of social

class differences, provides further evidence of its postfeminist characterization.

Regardless of the content that would eventually come to fill the pages of Pinterest, the platform’s launch and early structure laid the groundwork for a socially isolating and postfeminist user base. Launched in March 2010, Pinterest began as a closed Beta, as is typical of most software releases.

In December 2010, the Beta site was opened but was still accessible by invite only – users in this period could each extend five invitations. Despite the invite-only barrier to entry, Pinterest became the fastest growing website in history when it grew its user base by 429% between September and December 2011. The platform did not open to the public completely until August 2012.15 By controlling entry into a network so tightly and allowing access almost entirely through personal association, Pinterest inevitably became a network of a specific “taste culture.”16 This is seen in the emergence of a distinctly ‘Pinterest’ aesthetic – one could describe a woman who wears clothes with chevron stripes, completes crafts with mason jars, and has ombre hair as very ‘Pinterest-y.’ Serving such a specific culture not only concentrates cultural capital by income level but also “encourages polarization, especially between male and female audiences.”17 Such a strong early association by any platform with a particular social class sets the standard for its future usage. Even after opening to the public, data analysis has shown a homophily of interest and product-based communities within Pinterest such that there is little interaction (via ‘following’, ‘repinning’, or ‘liking) between taste groups on the site and cultural capital remains within traditional hierarchies.18 Beyond structure, the dominant patterns of content on Pinterest favor privileged social classes and therefore maintain the false sense of equal opportunity inherent to postfeminism. In the same way that Pinterest contributes to the rise in standards of bodily beauty, its content also contrib-

utes to increases in standards of daily living and household products. Through the “aestheticization of everyday life and investment in the art of lifestyle,” Pinterest’s content further induces consumerism by making visual pleasure and art of the typically mundane facets of daily life and households. The postfeminist aesthetic collapses work life into personal life, as a way of demeaning women’s professional life as a hobby, with consumption as the preferred alternative form of feminine labor.19 Such a physically and visually dominant characterization of feminine lifestyle is inextricably linked to upper-class norms. From the expense of physical upkeep (everything from plastic surgery to expensive cosmetic products) to the affirmation of lifestyle (a well furnished home and frequent foreign travel), the brand of femininity endorsed by Pinterest assumes available leisure time and resources not widely available across social classes.20 The mere articulation of “having it all”, not as a stroke of luck, but as a choice and a skill set to be mastered, assumes middle class status and opportunity as a prerequisite.21 Such a starkly isolating and inequitable aesthetic comes in conflict with reaching a public who can generally trace the progress and history of feminism – the process by which Pinterest negotiates this disparity is characteristically postfeminist. The widespread popularity of Pinterest plays to a model termed the “no but…” feminist or the “qualifying” feminist.22 Those ascribing to these labels do not publically identify as feminist but when pressed,

feminine imagery with class-based social assumptions, Pinterest creates a landscape that distorts the female contribution and role in political economy. In an approach designated herein as empowerment consumerism, Pinterest uses traditionally postfeminist strategies (like the portrayal of objectification as empowerment) to

identify with the majority of the tenets of traditional feminist ideology. The Pinterest postfeminist inverts this model and could straightforwardly be called the “no but…” homemaker. This inversion typifies ‘typical’ female Pinterest users in that they are culturally and historically literate enough to recognize public condemnation of the term homemaker and thus would not identify as aspiring to such a label. Yet their curatorial choices on Pinterest evoke a sense of association with the expectations, aspirations, and attitudes most closely associated with the traditional homemaker. These labeling patterns are important for their standard-setting capacity.23 The re-valuation of homemaking through Pinterest is represented on both a broad and narrow scale. Pinterest forms a digital collection of crowd-sourced, feminine information and succeeds in “celebrating female-centered knowledge,” not as trivial but as useful and valuable.24 Within Pinterest’s self-imposed categorization schema, the top categories of content are Home Décor, DIY & Crafts, Women’s Fashion, Food & Drink, Hair & Beauty, Education, and Holiday & Events. Of

encourage traditional consumerist behaviors. An oft-satirized notion about Pinterest within public discussion is the way in which, psychologically, Pinterest is able to present a total non-activity as a productive capacity (ie the notion of feeling accomplished after hours of doing nothing more than clicking on pictures – the intellectual equivalent of having ‘read a book’ after completing a picture book with absolutely no words). This is in fact the plight of all social curation sites – they lower standards such that there is no expectation of new content creation.28 Rather, they provide forums for continual reorganization and shifting of existing material. Regardless of the content explored, organization has

those, the first four account for over 50% of all Pinterest content.25 Many of these categories are also considered statistically ‘clustered’ in that there is a significant percentage of overlap in content. While male Pinterest users traditionally maintain profiles with content across clustered content groups, women show greater specialization in the cluster most rationally associated with homemaking (Food & Drink, Home Décor, and DIY & Crafts).26 In this way Pinterest is able to rebrand and promote the value of homemaking without opening itself up to more direct feminist critiques. Additionally, in its function as a linked site and launching pad to finding other sites, Pinterest is interdependent

been found to be a central motivation and gratification of the use of Pinterest.29 This is not to say that these reorganizations and shifts do not have substantive effects. As previously discussed, the collective imagery of Pinterest regarding the female body and its reformatting and repromotion has brought attention to ‘problem’ aspects of the female body never before highlighted. In highlighting or essentially creating these problems, platforms like Pinterest also create space for ‘solutions’ and products to be sold.30 Empowerment as it exists in postfeminist digital media rebrands traditional rules and expectations of femininity as empowering choices – i.e. the postfeminist woman has the choice of a clean house or a dirty house and it is her, independent agency that allows her to choose the clean house.31 The Pinterest format is similarly choice-oriented in its façade of empowerment and troubling in its ability to present these choices as organic. In mediating an individual relationship with a larger, commercial brand, Pinterest ‘empowers’ the user to pick and choose what they are interested in with the brand and only receive information from

with the content of other feminine, personal expression sites. The active sub-genres of marriage blogs and mom blogs present a significant amplification to Pinterest’s existing status as a magnet and collection agency for postfeminist new media.27 By combining an emphasis on visual

that ‘board’.32 In this postfeminist rhetoric, “feminine achievement is predicated not on feminism but on female individualism.”33 To a degree, the resultant gender disparity of Pinterest as it relates to empowered consumption is economically rational. In the United States, women control 80% of household discretionary spending.34 While the marketers and advertisers seeking to take advantage of this emerging platform would hope to present them as essential, the most popular and prominently featured brands and products of Pinterest as predominantly non-essential household and personal luxury goods. While Pinterest has been previously described in this analysis as having little in the way of written content, the language that is used is that of aspirational consumption – “use,” “look,” “want,” and “need.”35 However these patterns of content veer into the unfounded when viewed in broader context, and in regards to conflicting messages. Pinterest presents a postfeminist double-entanglement in its core social class association and values. This is exemplified in the co-existing emphases on the female capacity for independent travel and success and the ultimate pursuit of an idolized, stationary, and home-based life.36 In the postmodern world, these postfeminist users are those “consumers [who] enjoy the swings between the extremes of aesthetic involvement and distanciation.”37 In this case the total concentration of Pinterest on the visual and on brand recognition heightens superficial consumption desire while the pervasive do-it-yourself

aesthetic encourages distanciation from consumerism. The heightening effect is seen in Pinterest’s practical application as a source for linking individuals to e-commerce. Consumers driven to luxury retail sites from Pinterest spend an average of $100 more per purchase than those finding the retail sites from other search engines.

In the case of the popular beauty and cosmetics store Sephora, their Pinterest followers spend a staggering 15 times more at checkout than their Facebook friends.38 In her positioning of postfeminism within the broader scope of cultural analysis, Rosalind Gill describes the sensibility as

gender theory:

understanding perspectives of gender scholarship

post-feminism

“[a perspective that] positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suffest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force.”

Angela McRobbie, Post-feminism and Popular Culture (2004w)

containing both stable features and an “entanglement of both feminist and anti-feminist themes.”39 By placing these features and themes next to the emerging platform of Pinterest and both its user base and content, one finds a striking overlap. Through its surveillance and distortion of the feminine image, its revaluation of social class hierarchies and traditional occupations, and its production of empowerment consumerism, Pinterest breaks a distinctly postfeminist ground on the Internet and, with its growing popularity, has the potential to make postfeminist sentiments even more entrenched and pervasive in society.

constructed genders “[Gender] is a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.”

Judith Butler, Your Behavior Creates Your Gender - Interview with Judith Butler (bigthink 2011)

post-structuralist feminism

“There is no reason why sexual difference should be pertinent in all social relations. To be sure, today many different practices, discourses and institutions do construct men and women [differentially], and the masculine/feminine distinction exists as a pertinent one in many fields. But this does not imply that it should remain the case, and we can perfectly imagine sexual difference becoming irrelevant in many social relations where it is currently found.”

Chantal Mouffe, Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics (1992)

Century-Old Cover Girl

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n all that it achieves, the American media largely serves as a tool Stephanie DeVaux of patriarchy that preserves white male dominance. In the same Third Year way that the media communicates “normative” ideas of everyMedia Studies; thing from morality to sexuality, it also manipulates the desire for English beauty with a constant bombardment of visual media. Specifically by

Examining the Effects of a Eurocentric Standard of Beauty

exploring the cover pages of Vogue, we can see how America’s white, Eurocentric concept of beauty has been historically constructed. By reaffirming ideas of how femininity looks, Vogue applies a blanket definition of beauty that disregards race, ethnicity, class, and genetics. Colorism has infected the black community and a hierarchy of “beauty” power has emerged. As women across racial borders chase after this visual manifestation of femininity in hopes of attaining social power, they submit themselves to the toxic effects of beauty.

Tragically, women’s struggle for power by adhering to these images is ironic and illusory; since the media is largely produced and managed by white males, women search for power by chasing after images that are inherently oppressive. Damaging in virtually every aspect, the images of “ideal beauty” that saturate the media serve to maintain social hierarchies of power, ultimately constructing a narrative of visual femininity that disempowers all women.

Media has historically played a key role in American culture, and the shift from written to visual media created an ideal environment for a homogenous definition of beauty. Before images circulated throughout the culture, those who generated the media employed written stories to construct ideas such as gender. The introduction of visual media shifts the task from interpreting a mental image to simply reproducing a visual one. This renders the construction and promotion of traditional gender roles much more effective. As Susan Bordo explains in her book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, “In newspapers and magazines we daily encounter stories that promote traditional gender relations and prey on anxieties about change.”1 In today’s visual culture, these “stories” are not necessarily written down, but presented to us in an in-your-face kind of fashion. Visual images tell stories of masculinity, of femininity,

of beauty—and they convey these narratives to us in a second, without requiring us to pause and read or even listen. Bordo terms this as a process in which “the rules for femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual images.”2 According to this mode of thinking, beauty has taken on one standardized look, communicated over and over again by visual media. Consequently, magazines like Vogue capitalize on a single image of beauty, reproducing and presenting one feminine ideal to its audience.

Looking at Vogue’s cover pages from 1902 to present day, it is striking to notice the essentially unchanging image of beauty that they portray. The fashion magazine’s cover art has historically perpetuated a Eurocentric image of femininity: glorifying the thin, pale, blonde woman with seductive red lips, long black eyelashes, and a slight, dainty nose. Looking back to the turn of the century, the cover of the November 1902 issue boasts a sketch of a white woman who wears a stylish hat indicative of fashion, wealth, and social class. Years later, the April 1910 issue adheres to the same general pattern, featuring a white woman whose clothes are faded to even further accentuate her white skin. Drawn as if choosing between two styles of hats, the cover art similarly implies her great wealth and sense of fashion. Vogue’s cover in the midst of the roaring twenties, over a decade and a half later, features a more modern version of essentially the same woman. As the spectacle of the magazine’s noteworthy September issue, this 1926 cover model is sketched pencil-thin, displaying bleached skin and dressed in all white. Moreover, she is placed on a backdrop of color, which effectively showcases her pure “whiteness” even more. Throughout these two decades of Vogue, the cover images presented by the magazine’s editors conform to essentially the same ideal. Their deliberate decision to sketch cover girls that look like this certainly helps us to realize the extent to which

the media can manipulate ideas of beauty.

Historically moving from sketched cover art to photographed models, Vogue continues to represent beauty in a Eurocentric fashion. In the November 1939 issue, Vogue’s past sketches are brought to life; three beautiful women lay on the ground—a blonde model posed in between two brunette models—who all share red lips, thin groomed eyebrows, a dainty nose, and pale skin. Draped in jewelry, their poise, fashion, and beauty mirror that of the sketched models from previous issues.

Three decades later, Vogue’s cover still perpetuates this same image. The December 1958 issue blends into the January 1976 issue, summing up twenty years with two identically slender, white, and glamorous models. The 1980’s cover pages tell much of the same story, and even today—with the switch from featuring models to celebrities—Vogue still showcases women with white skin, long silky hair, delicate features and a slender figure. Modern Hollywood faces, which tend to conform to these historical patterns of beauty, line the shelves of consumer America and subsequently communicate a Eurocentric ideal to society.

Anne Becker, Mako Fitz, and Lisa Rubin suggest that “mainstream Western media imagery tends to homogenize female beauty, removing racial, ethnic, and sexual differences that disturb Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual expectations and identifications.”3 After examining over a century’s worth of Vogue cover pages, this seems to be exactly what these visual representations are doing. By perpetuating a singular image of beauty, it becomes clear that the media has made no room for alternative images.

Without any real images of black beauty, black women today find themselves chasing after this Eurocentric ideal. Rose Weitz, in “What We Do For Love,” explains that “within the black community attractiveness still primarily centers on having light skin and long, straight hair.”4 This idea of colorism—which celebrates black women with

lighter skin and Eurocentric features—pervades the black community, and has found its way onto the few covers of Vogue that do feature black models. In 1966, Vogue presented their first black cover model: supermodel Donyale Luna. Instead of being posed like her white counterparts, her hand was strategically placed over her nose and mouth, hiding her more African features: a wider nose and full lips. Vogue’s decision to feature Donyale in this way attests to the way they—and the rest of society— perceive a Eurocentric appearance as the only representation of true beauty. Vogue’s celebration of colorism did not stop with a half-covered picture of Donyale, either.

Celebrating their 100th year anniversary, the magazine’s April 1992 issue displays ten beautiful, thin models dressed in white and posed around a ladder. Interestingly enough, the single model posed on the ladder is black. However, at first glance you can barely tell because her long straight hair reaches down the length of her entire back and her skin is barely a few shades darker than any of the white models. In isolation, this photo speaks to a past when Eurocentric beauty was at the forefront, and black women were pressured into conforming to this image. Vogue’s May 2007 cover recreates almost an exact replica of the myriad of models from the 1992 issue.

Strangely enough, it identically displays ten models posed around a ladder. The single black girl that it features is strikingly posed in virtually the exact way as her 1992 counterpart: placed on the ladder, as if she was climbing. This more contemporary model has identically light skin, black long straight hair, and overall “white” features, ultimately attesting to the way that, even years later, racial representations of American beauty have remained stagnant.

After the switch to featuring celebrities, the October 1998 issue of Vogue displays Oprah Winfrey lounging on a lavish cushion. In this instance, Vogue seems to be celebrating Oprah’s social success

and wealth more than her beauty, however her appearances are still significant.

Her hair looks straight and soft, and her waist is extremely petite. Indeed, Ben Arogundade reports on the story behind Oprah’s small figure. According to his article, Vogue’s editor Anna Wintour suggested that Oprah lose twenty pounds before the photo shoot. Arogundade reports: “Winfrey packed herself off to her retreat in Telluride, Colorado with her personal trainer and cook, where she embarked upon a rigorous diet and exercise program to drop the crucial pounds in preparation for the photo shoot with fashion photographer Steven Meisel.”5 When faced with the pressure to conform to a Eurocentric style of beauty, even Oprah sought after the body figure of thin models. After all, as Bordo writes, “The ideal of slenderness, then, and the diet and exercise regiments that have become inseparable from it offer the illusion of meeting…the contemporary ideology of femininity.”6 In this case, Oprah lost weight in order to achieve the image that media presents as feminine: Eurocentric beauty.

Modern celebrities Beyoncé Knowles, Rihanna, and Halle Berry are no exception to the “colorism” rule. In September of 2010, Halle Berry appeared on Vogue’s cover with short, straight hair, light skin, high cheekbones, and a dainty nose. The April 2011 issue featured Rihanna, clad in a sheer, bejeweled dress that clings to the contours of her body and accentuates her slim shape.

Although Barbadian, the recording artist’s skin color is extremely light and her long, bright red hair softly frames her face. Even Beyoncé, who appeared on the cover of Vogue March in 2013 and was voted People’s Most Beautiful Woman in 2012, emulates this Eurocentric ideal. Boasting a slender figure, defined cheekbones, light skin and long hair styled in an impeccable updo, she graces the cover of Vogue as a black woman that looks virtually white. All of these modern celebrities have traded in their

natural hair for chemically straightened hair or weave, managed their waist with diet and exercise routines, and invested their money in beauty and makeup products. From 1966, with the first black cover model, to present day, the pages of Vogue reflect a greater social tendency to associate beauty with white, Eurocentric features.

Once we understand the scope of women who celebrate a Eurocentric style of beauty as superior, it raises the question of why women try to emulate these images of beauty in the first place. The answer has to do with social power. Weitz explores this idea when she links beauty with power, citing that “studies also have found that men choose their dates based more on women’s looks than on women’s earning potential, personality, or other factors.”7 In this sense, more beautiful women are able to gain social power by the type of men they attract.

Weitz goes on to suggest that traditionally feminine women—those who adhere to these images of beauty—occupy a more accepted social position. She writes, “Using our hair to look attractive is particularly important for those of us whose femininity is sometimes questioned.”8 Her statement refers to how, in America’s patriarchal society, men and women are expected to conform to their gender roles: traditional masculinity and femininity, respectively. Since the media presents beauty as the image of visual femininity, then beautiful women are seen to fulfill their social roles more successfully, and are thus rewarded with a greater degree of social power. Alternatively, women who are not or do not look traditionally “feminine” are labeled as social deviants, cast out, and effectively stripped of social power. Women recreate these images of femininity as a means of empowerment—not only to attract husbands but also to procure social acceptance.

Bordo describes it as the pursuit of a “homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity—a pursuit without terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and of-

ten whimsical changes in fashion.”9 However, Bordo also demonstrates how the power associated with images of femininity is an illusion. These visual representations are actually oppressive and harmful through the beauty practices that result. She writes: “Between the media images of self-containment and self-mastery and the reality of constant, everyday stress and anxiety about one’s appearance lies the chasm that produces bodies habituated to self-monitoring and self-normalization.”10 This “self-monitoring” that Bordo references manifests in various physically and financially damaging beauty practices. Weitz agrees that “attractiveness offers only a fragile sort of power, achieved one day at a time through concentrated effort and expenditures of time and money.”11 Women who mimic the images seen in Vogue are ironically looking for power in a realm of manipulation and oppression. Indeed, true social power lies with the men who have the privilege to look and admire this beauty, without feeling any pressures to conform to these images themselves. This “male gaze,” an idea championed by Laura Mulvey in her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” explores the kind of voyeurism at work within visual media.12 While Mulvey focuses on film, the same can be applied to the covers of Vogue. The woman exists as an image—a bearer of meaning—while the man has exclusive power as the maker of meaning. Only the looker—in this case, the male voyeur—has power via the inherently objectifying act of looking. Yet as women today still kill themselves (both figuratively, and tragically, literally) to achieve an impossible standard of “beauty,” we see one of patriarchy’s biggest tricks at work.

The images of beauty that adorn the cover of magazines, like Vogue, are oppressive for all women who feel pressure to emulate the appearance of airbrushed supermodels. In order to do so, they endure toxic beauty practices that lead to social, psychological, and physical damage.

Psychologically, these images are oppressive in their encouragement of “bodily objectification or engaging in social comparison processes.”13 By promoting the objectification of one’s own appearances—as well as others—these evaluations of beauty add to women’s social subordination. While men remain free from this pressure, Patricia Hill Collins argues that “part of the objectification of all women lies in evaluating how they look.”14 The anxiety that results from this constant evaluation leads women to utilize literally toxic beauty products. From the thick layers of makeup to the cans of hairspray that women routinely use, individuals strive for the face and body featured on the cover of Vogue.

However, as Bordo writes, “Female bodies pursuing these ideals, may find themselves as distracted, depressed, and physically ill.”15 Since the images that populate magazines are generally airbrushed, the representation of beauty presented to women is literally unattainable. Therefore, after rigorous diet and exercise and thousands of dollars spent on top-brand makeup, many individuals still cannot achieve the same look represented in visual media. Especially harmful is the way individuals chase after the bodies of supermodels: through unhealthy diet practices and oftentimes eating disorders. Bordo explores the illusion of anorexia as a means “to become what is valued in our society.”16 To become “what is valued” is to become feminine, which offers power over those who do not adhere to traditional femininity. Accordingly, women starve themselves to attain the stickthin body types that the media portrays as feminine. However, as Bordo points out, “The anorectic’s experience of power is, of course, deeply and dangerously illusory.”17 Indeed, she goes on to say, “the thousands of slender girls and women who strive to embody these images and who in that service suffer from eating disorders, exercise compulsions, and continual self-scrutiny and self-castigation are anything but the

“masters” of their lives.”18 Clearly, these toxic practices serve as tools of oppression for the women trying to attain beauty. Ultimately, in a society so focused on female appearance, the road to beauty is paved with insecurities and depression.

While images of beauty are harmful and oppressive for women in general, these controlling images are especially harmful for black women who do not naturally posses Eurocentric features. Bordo supports this idea in her book when she states, “The construction [of femininity] is always homogenizing and normalizing, erasing racial, class, and other differences and insisting that all women aspire to a coercive, standardized ideal.”19 This coercion, which erases racial traditions, is oppressive for black women in its very essence. The subsequent pressure for black women to strive for Eurocentric ideals of beauty is not only socially harmful, but physically and psychologically damaging as well. For a black woman to achieve the physical body of a white model, she must forsake her natural curves. As Becker, Fitts, and Rubin explain, “Whereas these models typically represent an unhealthful ideal for any woman to achieve, they may be particularly oppressive for many women of color, whose body size, shape, and features may differ significantly from mainstream representations of female beauty.”20 With a natural predisposition for more pronounced curves, black women face greater opposition in their

self-restraint:

“The representation of unrestrained appetite as inappropriate for women, the depiction of female eating as a private, transgressive act, make restriction and denial of hunger central features of the construction of femininity and set up the compensatory binge as a virtual inevitability.”

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993)

struggle for the “beautiful” body image presented by the media. Experts confirm this idea, stating that “cultural representation of African American women in media imagery powerfully influence self-concept and body image among black women in Western culture.”21 Ultimately, black women’s attempts to recreate the body image presented by media can be psychologically and physically damaging via the anxiety, depression, and eating disorders that result.

Other Eurocentric ideals besides a thin figure—light skin, delicate facial

“

Faced with greater opposition, the representations in the media lead to physical, financial, social, and psychological harm for black females in America;... [a]‘new kind of slavery.’

”

features, and straight hair—are equally sought after within the black community. With colorism a major factor in the evaluation of black beauty, skin-lightening creams are marketed to women with darker skin. Collins articulates this idea: “Prevailing standards of beauty claim that no matter how intelligent, educated, or ‘beautiful’ a Black woman may be, those Black women whose features and skin color are most African must ‘git back.’

Within the binary thinking that underpins intersecting oppressions, blonde, thin White women could not be considered beautiful without the Other-Black women with African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips, and kinky hair.”22 With appearance taking on a great significance for black women, the struggle for beauty becomes that much more important.

While the transformation of dark skin relies on creams, and the altercation of noses or lips depends upon plastic surgery, the change from kinky to straight hair becomes a frequent practice among black women.

In Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair, he comically and yet accurately depicts the physical and financial costs of chemi-

cal straighteners or weave.23 He explores the dangers of cream relaxers, which are composed of sodium hydroxide and capable of burning through skin. In addition to the physical risk, these hair treatments are not cheap. The alternative to relaxers— weave—can cost thousands of dollars. Although these practices are costly, painful, and damaging, black women still engage in these toxic practices in order to chase after a Eurocentric ideal. Evidently, the cost of beauty for a black woman is even greater than for a white woman. Collins sums up this racial discrepancy perfectly: “Judging White women by their physical appearance and attractiveness to men objectifies them. But their White skin and straight hair simultaneously privilege them in a system that elevates whiteness over blackness. In contrast, African-American women experience the pain of never being able to live up to prevailing standards of beauty standards used by White men, White women, Black men, and, most painfully, one another.”24 Ultimately, images of beauty speak to black women in a distinctive way. Faced with greater opposition, the representations in the media lead to physical, financial, social, and psychological harm for black females in America. One of the best ways to categorize this phenomenon is through the terminology mentioned in the case study conducted

by Becker, Fitts, and Rubin. They described these controlling images in relation to black women as “the new kind of slavery.”25 Looking at all of the different factors that attribute to these oppressive images, we can subsequently establish a hierarchy of power in terms of beauty. We must take into account the following elements: race, class, natural beauty, and social standing. Thus, impoverished black women occupy the lowest tier. Naturally divergent from a Eurocentric standard of beauty, their financial status prevents them from investing money in order to alter their appearance. Wealthy black women fall on the next level, along

with black women who naturally possess “white” features. Genetically in conjunction with a Eurocentric ideal, or able to buy their way to straight hair and a lighter skin color, this group possesses a greater degree of social power than their poorer and more “African” counterparts. Impoverished white women seize the next echelon; although they cannot afford to enhance their appearance, genetics renders them naturally closer to the image of “ideal beauty.” On the upper tier, wealthy white women and naturally “beautiful” women exist, enjoying relative social power. However, the gap between this level and the next is significant.

Within our American patriarchal society, the true power lies with men, who occupy the top level in this hierarchy of power.

Granted the power to own the media that produces these images, as well as the privilege to look and enjoy beautiful women, men remain socially dominant. Free from the same pressures to conform to a singular appearance that women face, men possess beauty through their ability to possess women, ultimately attesting to their powerful authority within our patriarchal society.

Clearly, the ramifications of a singular Eurocentric definition of beauty extend to all women. However, these images also have implications for society as a whole.

As Bordo writes, “Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress—central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women—[women] are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification.”26 Refocusing the attention of half of the population

from social problems to self-insecurities, these images limit social progress through their extreme control over women. Additionally, not only do these images manipulate the way women feel that they need to look, but they also reinforce male desire for a certain type of woman. Ultimately, these images perpetuate oppression and manipulation for American society at large.

As we have seen, the images that Vogue perpetuates serve to manipulate what we see as beautiful. Historically, this image of beauty has remained constant. Over a century’s worth of cover pages tell the same story: that only white, slender, made-up women can be beautiful. However, the communication of this Eurocentric ideal does not stop with Vogue. In our media-centered culture, virtually every magazine, movie, television show, billboard, or commercial reinforces a society that rewards women who fulfill their feminine role through the pursuit of Eurocentric beauty. Enamored by the social power that these images falsely promise, women engage in toxic beauty practices that can manifest in anxiety, depression, or fatal eating disorders.

Particularly for African American women, whose natural features do not conform to this Eurocentric ideal, images of “beauty” as portrayed by the media are oppressive and damaging. In order for us to remedy this socially detrimental phenomenon, society must first shift its perceptions of power. Instead of granting social supremacy to anyone who fits the Eurocentric bill, we must allow for alternative images of beauty, ultimately discounting appearances and looking for empowerment that is more than skin-deep.

que hip-

eer -hop an interview

Fourth year Greg Lewis is taking what began as a personal interest to a new level. With the guidance of Assistant Professor Andre Cavalcante, he is developing research to explore queer representations and the genre of queer hip-hop as it makes

Mirenda Gwin: Describe your project--how did you get interested in or discover the topic of queer hip-hop?

Greg Lewis: I came to the project as a fan of queer hip-hop. It was important for me to find queer media representations and queer media performers…and think about my interactions as a queer person with popular figures. I wanted to find some people who were in the queer community doing really cool things. I’ve been a fan of hip-hop for a while and I stumbled upon “Big Freedia” first, and then I explored. After seeing her and hearing representations of her music, I saw that there was something to this field-that there were other performers doing similar things that were really cool and I wanted to explore that more. I don’t know how it came up, but Andre and I started talking about this, and he said, Greg, this sounds like something you’re really interested in and excited about, and it would make a really great project, whatever that might be.

There’s a lot here I really want to unpack and explore more. So that’s kind of where my academic interests came from: first from a fan perspective, wanting to see people doing really cool things who are queer--then also thinking about what that also means for not just me, but for audiences of all kinds and what it means for the hip-hop industry, for popular culture, and for media in general.

Assistant Professor Andre Cavalcante: Geez, Greg that last sentence could start out your paper! This is part of what I love about teaching is that I didn’t know about queer hip-hop, actually, until my students talked about it. So I learned about the genre through Greg, and there were two or three other students in this class, LGBTQ issues in media. And so through them, I would go back to my office after class and watch the videos on YouTube and I found them incredibly interesting and compelling, and hearing their excitement was really cool. And when I heard Greg was inter-

ested, I thought, wow, this is perfect for you. And he’s right, there’s so much there.

MG: Why is it important that people know about and understand queer hiphop culture?

GL: I think that just in general, it’s really important for people to understand the complexities of every industry and every community and to see that in whatever medium that they are interacting with, there are people who are communicating their own identities and sense of self through different ways of expression and different ways of performance and coming from different backgrounds. In my project, I am trying to explore how these performers are doing that in the hip-hop industry, which hasn’t seen a lot of gender non-conforming, openly queer artists. I want to add nuance to my exploration of hip-hop in general; a lot of academics and fans of the industry see it in a dominant way and say all hip-hop has been hostile to queer people, but I don’t think that’s the case.

From its inception, there have been a lot of people in a lot of communities who have interacted with that genre in a lot of different ways, and this is just one way that specific performers at a specific time are doing that and working through the history of hip-hop and the history of the black and queer community and pulling these historical representations and historical ways of expressing self and expressing community, and making that their own.

AC: Greg has a really strong handle on the project. I think it’s really important that comes through; that this is his project and that I’m really a guide. Greg has a very active and expansive way of thinking. So he does not need my help in that regard. It’s very much that this is his project--he’s in the driver’s seat.

I think what’s interesting is that it lies at an intersection of communities and forc-

es that don’t typically align. There is this history in hip-hop that it is antagonistic to queerness. Hip-hop masculinity often defines itself against queerness. But what’s really cool about this is this really interesting blending and mixture of hip hop culture, queer culture, youth culture. It’s like this hybrid! I think that what it does is undermines some very stereotypical, simplistic attitudes about identities, communities, and culture. Like Greg was saying, hip-hop culture has sort of been brushed with broad strokes. Queerness has often been seen as incompatible with other forms of masculinity, particularly black masculinity, so this is actually challenging a lot of these conventional notions. So his project is on the cutting edge of it. And it’s fun! The music is great, right?! So I think the other thing too is that the music is really interesting and even just as a pleasurable experience to come across pop culture that makes it under the radar--just to expose people to the music, to the videos, to the sound--in and of itself, it’s a cool medium and a cool genre, and these artists are incredibly creative.

GL: On that note, one of my favorite things in explaining this project to people is showing them the videos. So when I presented my project to the DMP--it was a class of third and fourth years-- it was a room of white people who had never come across this type of expression before so it was kind of cool to see their faces when they first saw Big Freedia and they saw the video at The Rex, it was funny to see but also really cool to see them react to it.

MG: Do you have a favorite video or favorite song?

GL: So I’m going to go classic. I think one of Big Freedia’s first videos--it’s also the one that has the most views—“Y’all Get Back Now,” that’s it. So that video, the premise of it is Big Freedia as a giant, almost like King Kong, who is roaming

around New Orleans and getting people to come out of their office buildings and houses--so it’s a bunch of people in suits and mothers with carriages and kids who are skateboarding and they’re all coming out onto the street and dancing on top of buildings. It’s very striking how she is moving about and disrupting the city in a big and obvious way, even in just that one video. And it’s all on a green screen, so at the end, the image cuts and all you see is her walking out. Just seeing that is very commanding, very original, and very raw.

Since her first album, it’s gotten a little bit more of a glossier touch. But I think that first video was very raw and rough.

MG: But you liked that?

GL: Yeah, I liked how you could see her personality from the very beginning.

AC: I’m happy you used the word disruption. That’s been part of this project from the very beginning: exploring the notion of disruption. And not in a sort of aggressive or destructive way, just the way these authors disrupt these kinds of norms--I think that’s an organizing theme of the project.

MG: What characterizes the queer hip-hop movement and what trends have you identified in the movement, if you can identify any?

GL: Broad survey of everything out there from the most indie, underground queer artists up to Big Freedia, who has a show on Fuse and millions of views on YouTube. And I pinpointed four artists that represent the upper echelon, moving into the consciousness of mainstream.

Those artists are Mickey Blanco, Le1f and Cakes da Killa and all of them have some sort of feminine expression and espouse a femme masculinity, but their expressions of femme masculinity range from Cakes, who wears makeup and has highlights in his hair

and wears earrings sometimes, all the way to Mickey Blanco, who has a drag persona alter-ego. So the way that they express their femininity is different, but the fact that they are all expressing that and that they are all rising to consciousness of some sort is really compelling. Also how each of them articulates themselves: I have found a lot of trends and patterns in who they are and what they do in their art. I found that all of them talk about not being pigeonholed into the category of “queer rapper” or “queer hip-hop performer.” They are all really adamant about being rappers without the queer in it. This is just what they do. It’s not because they’re queer--it’s not a box they have to fit into--they are just performing who they are and that should be seen as broader hip-hop culture or industry. And that is something that they are good at explaining.

AC: And I think this has been a difficult tension for us to work with. On the one hand, we are calling this gender non-conforming, queer hip-hop; but on the other, the people who are doing this reject the label that we are imposing. So we have recognized this tension, but we haven’t quite settled it.

GL: I think it all goes back to this notion of disruption, how they express themselves. The reason they are doing that is they are trying to distinguish themselves from people in the past; it is almost more revolutionary for them to assert themselves among the highest performers in the industry, and I think that’s the way they see it. I think they want to be seen on the same level as other rappers.

MG: In your research, have you been able to pinpoint certain social movements or changes in collective social consciousness in greater American culture that have allowed for the development of this new genre of music?

AC: This goes back to the tension we have

been struggling with, right? What is the cause...I don’t think we’ll ever be able to pinpoint a cause, and there are many and they are intersecting, but it’s a worthy question.

GL: It is! I think a lot of it has to do with what is compelling in this point and time: the tension in broader society and especially in queer society, and I think also in black society--this tension between assimilation and resistance, it is becoming more pronounced. On one hand, there is the pull

“

This is just what they do.

It’s not because they’re queer - it’s not a box they have to fit into - they are just performing who they are, and that should be seen as broader hip-hop culture or industry.

”

toward assimilation, with the gay marriage movement and mainstreaming the LGBTQ movement in general, housed under the HRC and these other big corporate groups, so there is that side of it. A lot of white cisgender gay men have white privilege and tend to assimilate. Then there is this other broad community that is resisting the assimilationist impulses and so when we are talking about how these performers articulate themselves, they’re also straddling that boundary between assimilation and resistance. And in some ways, you can’t do either completely because the whole question on how to become mainstream, that’s what a lot of performers want: to have

their expression, their performance, their art made accessible and made popular to a greater community than just their own. In some ways, they have to perform in certain ways and work in certain ways through that to make the biggest impact that they can and that they desire to, but they also have to stay true to their expression: this isn’t about the money or anyone else. This is about themselves and their expressions and what they want to do and they don’t care in a lot of ways about how they have to fit in. In some ways, this is reminiscent of the resistant mentality and I think this tension that lies within these four performers and the way that they express themselves can be mapped onto broader society and the two can reflect one another. The broader society is also struggling with these issues: in the queer movement, where do you go from here? Do we continue to assimilate while stepping on others who are below us in order to reach that level of mainstream success, or do we resist and fight from outside?

thing that I appreciate a lot about the artists and their expressions is that…they’ve had to fight their whole lives to express their identities and their art, and the audience can take it or leave it. We don’t care if there are people pushing back or if people don’t like it. They don’t have a motive for converting people--they just want to do what they do and push back the pushback, or move it to the side, or breakthrough it. They are not about dwelling on who likes it or not, which I appreciate about the artists, all four of them, and they have all said this in different ways.

AC: Also, the media culture: why now?

You talked about the fact of YouTube, that online social media exists--we want to make the case that that is in part responsible for the circulation of these videos, for their popularity, for the kinds of publicity they are receiving. Like Greg said, I came to this through YouTube videos. There is something to be said for the videos--it’s that watching the video is part of the experience. There is now a platform for these kinds of artists and media to circulate, and to find audiences.

GL: I think this is something that everyone is still struggling to figure out, with the intersections of those two communities. I think you see it in Raven Simone: a couple days ago, she had an interview with Oprah where she didn’t want to call herself a lesbian or define her sexuality or blackness. On the surface level, people look at that and say that’s so frustrating--they map on the post-racial or post-gay society mentality—‘Oh, she just hates herself, why isn’t she proud of what she’s doing?’

I would argue that she is proud and what she is doing is being revolutionary and resisting what others are mapping onto her.

And I think that the four artists I am looking at do the same thing and on the surface level, it’s frustrating, because they don’t necessarily own or label what they do or try to fit it into a community. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter what they are doing, it just matters that they are doing it.

MG: Do you think these videos and this music is making queer culture and queer hip-hop more accepted, or does it marginalize the queer population more?

GL: At least from the beginning, when people first see it, it’s something that does get pushed back because it’s so new and, in a way, avant-garde. But I think that one

AC: Greg, would you also say that’s a sensibility that queer culture and pop culture share--this is who we are, a sense of self-assurance, marginal groups, queer culture with its anti-normativity, and queer culture being associated with strength and resilience? So it seems that there is an area of overlap and companionship between these two cultures.

AC: It is also interesting to see the actual labels that they are claiming--that might be something interesting to look at. What kinds of categories and identities are they outwardly claiming? What about the idea that one has to reject the queer label? This is very much a Foucault argument, that we always have to come out and wear gayness on our sleeve. So it’s interesting that that is the identity that has to be rejected as opposed to other ones. And what’s interesting is what we think of this rejection.

GL: And the way they do it isn’t hiding: so all of this adds to the complexity and adds to what I’m trying to unpack: without projecting anything onto them or putting any more weight onto something that they might even want, I’m trying to figure out what it means and, as Professor Cavalcante said, what does it mean that they’re doing it in these ways? What do these expressions entail and what can they tell us about how audiences are interacting with that and how audiences appreciate that?

&

audio visual

Five performances to explore, as recommended by Greg Lewis

1 2 3 4 5

“Explode” by Big Freedia “Wavvy” by Mykki Blanco “Wut” by Le1f “Goodie Goodies” by Cakes Da Killa “On the Regular” by Shamir

AC: What’s interesting is that it’s not a rejection of queerness out of shame, which is the modality out of which it used to operate--is it more out of pride?

In the past, the desire to reject queerness was out of shame and stigma. And I think Greg is confronting a new question: what does it mean within this context to reject queerness when it is not out of shame and stigma? There is another motivating engine here--there is something else.

Again, this is one of the more interesting themes that his work is uncovering, and so I think that why the project is so exciting is because he is really bumping us some new questions. And I don’t think we have an established set of tools to work with.

A lot of this is figuring it out as we go.

GL: I say we do have a set of tools we’re working with. Maybe this is too radical--I would say that the set of tools that we are supposed to be working with are very much like colonial tools. I would say in a community grassroots discourse, people and especially people of color are starting to question the imposition and the label of queerness. Why are our identities interpolated through this lens of homo-nationalism essentially, and through the lens of queerness, and what does it mean to go against that? People describe the LGBTQ community, but what it really should be is multiple communities, almost like multiplicities of queerness without necessarily having an identity heaped onto you. I think that’s something that queer theorists have touched on, but I think radical people of color and queer youth are thinking more about throwing out the tools we have used to define us in the past, and are kind of rejecting those definitions and trying to grapple with and push against all that has been mapped onto us, and then coming up and speaking truth, speaking identity, and expressing identity into existence in ourselves.

MG: As a whole, black male culture

in America is seen as largely homophobic. How do black artists balance their black and queer identities, especially in light of the fact that black culture is often perceived as anti-queer, and that throughout history, the black male body has been hyper-sexualized and focused on its virility and hyper-masculinity?

Cake, for example, is a gay performer who uses hyper-masculine lyrics in his songs.

How do artists like Cake reconcile the way society sees their race and gender?

GL: One of the most offensive things the media does in representing black culture and representing black performers, especially queer black performers and queer black people in general, [is] it pits the two identities against one another. Theorists from bell hooks to Audre Lorde have talked about this struggle, and that’s very much a white imposition, white supremacy operating to separate a community and to keep any radical potential from manifesting itself.

White supremacy and the media are working together in many ways to use these tools to break apart and separate these identities.

The notion of the black community being more homophobic than other communities is definitively false and that perception is there primarily because white supremacy wants it to be there. White supremacy wants to break apart and split those identities, and that in itself is a colonial project.

AC: I think the first part of the question, we need to reject the premise, that black communities are inherently more homophobic. We can actually talk about black masculinity as a skin, or a response, to the daily, overt oppressions that you experience. There is a lot of literature on black masculinity as a skin--as a black man, you have to develop a thick skin. So there is that really real aspect, but then it has to be understood in context of the actual communities, the actual struggle, and the actual material circumstances. It’s not just

as simple as saying ‘Black communities are homophobic.’ There is a very complex reason for the way that black masculinity operates and the way it is represented and this is really what Greg is trying to get at. Its representation then becomes the real and becomes what people think of is the norm.

GL: I was at a trans-summit in Richmond this past weekend [10/4/14] and a trans woman stood up and she identified as part of the black community and she just moved to a black neighborhood. She was an older woman, and she said that in previous places that she lived that were not majority black neighborhoods, she didn’t get the same level of pushback of her identity and outward expression of gender and she raised the point that it seemed to her like the black community seemed more homophobic than other communities and so in a way, you can see how engrained this sentiment is in the communities themselves and how it spreads. Rejecting the premise is really important to show, and I think the performers I am studying would reject that premise, but also looking at how it operates is very compelling and something I’m aiming to look at too.

AC: Mignon Moore writes about this too: the struggle between conflicting identities. This is not new, this notion of queerness and blackness perhaps not having the neatest mapping onto one another. But again, it’s important to realize that it’s not inherent, but that there are actual, historical, and cultural reasons for that.

MG: How does the intersectionality of African American culture and queer culture affect the themes and lyrics of the songs that you are studying?

GL: Historically, there has been the use of language and the use of specific genres and forms to express those two identities as part of queer black history. Going back to

Vogue culture and the way that black queer people reconcile those conflicting identities that we talked about before and the way they work through them is by creating another language, or another sense of expression.

And it’s something that is really easily coopt, something that we see a lot now, Nonqueer black communities pick up the language that black queer people use, phrases and words from the queer black community like ‘shade’ and different ways of expressing and using language in specific ways is often co-opted. And this is not a new thing.

In a lot of ways, black culture in general has been assimilated into mainstream society and so I think that going back to the tension between assimilation and resistance, how is language used to communicate specifically queer black experience and how is that language and lyricism translating in the rise to mainstream consciousness of the four performers? Is that translating? What do they have to do? They don’t really have to do anything, but there are different cues and different ways that what they do has other impacts for other communities and how they interact with it.

AC: I think that what you need to talk about is the genre of bounds. Genre presupposes what can be said, because they are not lyric-heavy songs...So if you were to listen to a heterosexual performer of bounce music and a gender nonconforming performer of bounce music or hip-hop music, in what ways would they overlap and in what ways would they differ? To what extent do you think the genre itself determines what can and cannot be said?

MG: In your presentation [9/11], you focused on “male” artists because you claimed that “female” artists have hit mainstream (eg: Lil Kim, Azalea Banks, Missy Elliot). What is the difference between female and male queer hiphop? Can males one day make it as big as female performers like Missy Elliot?

GL: I just finished a hip-hop literature review, and a lot of academics and journalists have written about female rappers and, in a way, [have] worked through the genre of hip-hop as almost a masculine thing to a gender non-conforming thing in itself.

AC: Wow, so just being a female rapper, you are a priori, de facto gender non-conforming.

GL: Yeah. And there’s also this notion of objectification, so there are different ways that female rappers do have to toe the line between expressing a certain level of masculinity and gender non-conformity and also perpetuating a sense of objectification, which isn’t necessarily good or bad. I know that Nicki Minaj is someone who people hold up as a queer artist of some sort, or a gender nonconforming artist of some sort.

And there is, in a lot of her performances, music videos, and lyrics, still sense of objectification to her. And she does have a very traditionally feminine gender expression. The way that female rappers have negotiated gender and have expressed their art through hip-hop is a complicated question, but also a different question with different implications and different ways of conforming. For my project, my interest lies in femme-masculinity because there is this notion of hip-hop being a traditionally masculine genre. At this moment now, we have seen gender nonconformity from people who identify as male [and] it’s not really something we’ve seen before. There have been rappers who identify as gay [that] have been a part of the genre and industry, but not many performers have been gender non-conforming in the past. We are in the moment where this has come to consciousness in a new way. One basis for my research is actually Andre’s advisor at the University of Michigan, Robin Coleman, who wrote on a rapper named Caution, who identified as gay but also espoused a thug masculinity that Coleman argues was hard

for audiences to reconcile [with] those two identities. She says that there was no way of seeing, for an audience, Caution’s gay sexuality and thug masculinity. Big Freedia and the other three artists go against this thug-like masculinity, so the question becomes, how are audiences interacting with and making intelligible these performers?

AC: That’s the final piece of the puzzle!

Right now, we are in the textual stage, so we are looking at the videos, we are analyzing them textually and again picking out all of these themes, and we will try to do an audience light, where we will look at social media comments to start to have a sense of how they are being perceived by audiences. ***

“

As a white person, I am not completely part of the communities that I am studying and exploring. I’ve been thinking a lot about where I stand in that and striving to make what I’m doing very intentional, and then also making sure that I represent the queer black community and queer black rappers in a way that is very nuanced and complex that works to highlight what is so complex and so new and so awesome about their work. The final note is thinking about that and trying to be as invested in the community that I am studying as I can.

”

-Greg Lewis Media Studies; Women, Gender, & Sexuality

one foot in, one foot out

“

Greg is incredibly self-reflexive about the process, and in doing this research, you have to be. And with my own work, I have a similar experience. I research transgender communities. You sort of have one foot in and one foot out: you’re not entirely an outsider, but you’re not entirely an insider either. It is an interesting position to be in because there is some sense of familiarity, but also a sense of newness. I think that scholars should not run away from studying across difference. I think it is difficult, but I don’t think you should run from it. As long as, again, you’re self-reflexive in the ways that Greg clearly is, you can do a pretty good job.

”

-Andre Cavalcante Media Studies Department Professor

The Pornification of Popular Culture The Normalization of Sex through Popular Music and Social Media Lisa Myers, Fourth Year Media Studies; American Studies Feeling like an animal with these cameras all in my grill, Flashing lights, flashing lights.

You got me faded, baby I want you Can’t keep your eyes off my fatty, daddy, I want you. 1

T

hese are the lyrics that iconic pop star Beyoncé just a few short lines into her 2013 song “Drunk In Love.” She slides her body in the sand and sways with the smoke that gathers around her on a beach. Her golden skin is lit only by the moonlight as she walks toward the camera, holding a trophy in one hand and using her other hand to ruffle her hair and caress her own skin. A see-through veil is wrapped over three tiny triangular pieces of black fabric: one that covers her lower

half as a swimsuit might, and the other two covering less than 30 percent of her chest. She is alone. And yet, she is simultaneously in the spotlight as millions of eyes - at least 149 million according to the view count on the official YouTube music video – lean in to watch her perform.

Over the past century, popular culture, defined by Dick Hebdige as “society’s total way of life” that marries “language, experience, and reality” has become infused with sexualized images and ideas.2 While pornography is explicitly labeled as such, the realm of popular culture has become more heavily penetrated by the sexualized philosophies found in pornography in such a way that removes sex from its previously sacred context and re-labels it under the heading of “the popular.” By placing ideas and images about sexual activities under this new framework, sex itself has become part of the commercial mainstream, and the previously private relations between two individuals have developed into an event where two actors perform for the masses to attend, evaluate, and critique.

In order to understand how the normalization of pornography in popular culture has occurred, it is important to first look at the transformation of youth culture in the postmodern era. After evaluating the overlapping themes that youth culture, popular culture, and postmodernity exude, which incidentally confirms a collapse of public and private spheres and a flattening of the world into a homogenized commercial atmosphere, it is necessary to analyze specific texts that the average American is consuming, both on an active level and a subconscious level. Once those ideas are worked out, it is possible to connect the sexualized images displayed on the screen to the resurfacing of those same ideas within social media, where users are provided a platform to construct identities based on the ideologies they learn from popular culture forms.

When seeking to address the pornification of popular culture in a postmodern

world, there are a number of postfeminist defenses that propose a challenge. Many of these scholars state that, rather than categorizing this normalization as a problem, the sexualized body on display actually offers women a space to take control and convey themselves as strong, independent beings empowered by the ability to exhibit themselves to the public. These empowerment arguments that are prevalent in much of the current scholarship on feminism and sex have challenged me to approach the discussion of pornification from a distinct angle in my own research.

The conservative pushbacks of sexualized displays of women in the media often fall short in expressing the poor consequences of sex exposed in public, commercialized formats. To combat this, I hope to demonstrate that the pornification of popular culture is not negative because sex in public is unsafe for children’s eyes, or because sex is, in general, bad or dangerous. Rather, the reason the normalization of pornographic images is a problem is because placing sex under the markers of the “popular” removes what I argue to be an innately sacred art from its exclusive context of marriage. The displacement of sex, which is biologically set apart as an activity involving only two people, complicates understandings of self and others.

When represented within a commercialized culture, these pornographic images produce negative repercussions such as the desensitization of sex through exploitation, the continued crisis of femininity, and the growth of a self-directed society. Because the current media environment is one that shares everything publically – thoughts, images, sounds, videos, and arguments – my research must begin by approaching this problem from a step back. Therefore, I begin by evaluating youth subculture and ideas of postmodernity, including the collapse of public and private spheres, language crises, and lack of authority, origin, or absolute truth,

all of which are integrated and promoted in the pornification of popular culture.

Understanding Youth Culture and Postmodernity Youth Subculture to Popular Culture to the Postmodern “It’s our party we can do what we want.

It’s our party we can say what we want.

It’s our party we can love who we want, we can kiss who we want, we can sing what we want,” Miley Cyrus encourages her audience in her song, “We Can’t Stop.”3 The video, released in June 2013, broke the record for “fastest video to reach 100 million views on VEVO platforms,” and currently has over 397 million views on its VEVO YouTube channel.4 These phrases declare a distinct group mentality of youth culture, a dismissal of external authority, an argument for relative truth, and a justification of experimentation and irresponsibility. Cyrus is one of many pop icons that exemplifies America’s progression into a stage of postmodernity, characterized in culture by blurred boundaries, a lack of authority and origin, and a shift from absolute to relative truth. These three traits are moments that develop out of youth subculture, which has been implemented into, and facilitated the fluid structure of, popular culture. The meshing of youth culture and popular culture has shaped the postmodern stage, resulting in a crisis of language and a crisis of femininity.

“Postmodernism emerged like a breath of fresh air allowing cultural critics to shift their gaze away from the search for meaning in the text towards the sociological play between images and between different cultural forms and institutions;” therefore, the ways in which individuals begin to extract meaning from pop culture moments is becoming much more fluid and open, with no set author or origin.5 Meaning is not lost, but its significance has shifted so that viewers and participants of culture are permitted to have, as Stuart Hall would express,

“dominant, negotiated, or oppositional” decoding methods, all of which are accepted.6 It is evident that youth subculture is characterized by resistance, lack of responsibility, and instability, which comes as no surprise since youth culture is a place where teenagers are experimenting with their identities.

“One of the attractions of subculture [is] precisely that it offers strong subjectivity through the collective meanings that emerge from the distinctive combination of signs, symbols, styles, and other ‘signifying texts.’”7 McRobbie’s work points to places where this sort of negotiation of the self occurs: social spaces like clubs/ raves, female teen magazines, and popular music and film. “At its best, postmodernity invites us to engage in a continual process of disillusionment with the grandiose fantasies that have brought us to the brink of annihilation.w”8 It is in youth culture that new, progressive ideas are granted permission to be explored because it acts as something of a safe space where little to no fault is attached to youth individuals who are attempting to navigate ideas about the world. “Youth cultures, in whatever shape they take, stake out an investment in society” and seamlessly “become part of a wider popular culture which is continually looking to the innovative elements in youth culture in order to claim dynamism for itself.”9 Youth culture is a place of investigation and limited responsibility, but the content is not the only thing in this realm that is picked up by popular culture. The structure of youth culture itself has become popularized. McRobbie again expresses this, stating, “to ignore the intense activity of cultural production as well as its strongly aesthetic dimension is to miss a key part of the creation of a whole way of life.”10 This way of life – the irresponsibility, freedom, and de-emphasis of authority – is what has been adopted by the popular. Arguments about the importance of context have been aired, noting that the “rigid isolated object (of art)…is of no use whatso-

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ever. It must be inserted into the context of living social relations,” but postmodernism allows fragmentation to not only exist but thrive.11 The discrediting of authoritative structures and the unstable role of a finite producer has resulted in an inability to hold either performer or producer accountable.

The concepts of youth culture, popular culture, and the postmodern are converging, and, while it is “important to draw the line between youth culture and pop culture, crediting the former with a form of symbolic class authenticity and the latter with all the marks of the consumer culture, in reality the two are always merged, involved in an ongoing relationship.”12 It is clear that, while the “dislocation…experiences of fragmentation, and crises of identity were as much a part of the experience of modernity as they are now,” the postmodernism age offers encouragement and acceptance of these disjointed philosophies.13 Rather than noting the brokenness, individuals are blind to the negative consequences by this new placement of pornography, defined as the “elaborate and detailed depictions of body parts, bodily motions and bodily fluids” into the mainstream. Pornography is labeled as popular without recollection of its intrinsic setting (within a marriage) and is classified instead as a decontextualized, detached, and commercial activity.14 Collapse of Public and Private Spheres Spring break, bachelor parties, New Year’s Eve. Each of these are events in which a “what happens in Vegas” mentality overwhelms the masses, allowing particular actions otherwise considered distasteful to ensue. Miley Cyrus suggests this mentality within the setting of the MTV Video Music Awards, declaring it as a place where she feels free to “go for it” in order to “celebrat[e] your videos.”15 “It’s supposed to be a silly night,” Cyrus qualifies, and Alan Carr concurs: “Like you said, that’s what you do at the VMAs…That’s where you do it.”16 When the private act of sex is extended into widespread media, the distinctions of pub-

lic and private collapse, and boundaries are blurred. While the integration of new media in the home has prompted this in drastic ways by providing the masses with access to sexualized images online, the shift into postmodernism has spurred this breakdown as well by considering the public and the popular an appropriate place to experiment, and a place to encourage individuals to test their identities without responsibility. The accessibility and presence of sexualized images in public spaces has displaced sex in a way that complicates how youth come to understand it as an expression, an entertainment, and an indulgence. Because “sexuality, previously confined to the private sphere…has gradually entered into all quarters of the public sphere,” there are no clear-cut margins to distinguish what is genuine versus joke, real versus fantastic, or subject versus object.17 Miley Cyrus again capitalizes on these blurred lines and misunderstandings as she further navigates questions about her VMA performance.

“I’m coming out in pigtails looking like a giant adult baby basically, but doing really naughty stuff. That’s obviously funny. If I really wanted to come out and do, like, a raunchy sex show, I wouldn’t be dressed as a damn bear.”18 This attempt to remove sex from its place of sanctity and detach it to make it performable as a joke is a distinct display of postmodernism. The problem arises in the fact that sex itself is valuable and cannot, even by its placement in the public sector, lose its value. “The superficial does not necessarily represent a decline into meaninglessness or valuelessness in culture,” rather the normalization process creates multiple crises because the value of sex is not lost, but disoriented in a complex way.19 The tragedy of the postmodern situation is thus expressed through this collapse of public and private spheres as individuals are left with an inability to distinguish between what is sincere and what is sarcasm.

The fragmented pieces that signify sex within music video performances suggest

an “era of simulation” that is bound up in postmodernity – an era that “substitute[s] the signs of the real for the real” which “threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ or ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’”20 In addition, a crisis of intimacy is introduced as multiple viewers become privy to the sexual expressions that are created and intended for a man and a woman to participate in alone, which is biologically evident through the “presence” and the “lack” of the male and female bodies respectively.21 The establishment of a viewer does not devalue sex, but changes how it is understood, creating a public intimacy in which all is shared and all is performed with the consciousness of subjectivity, scrutiny, and the “gaze” (or an “awareness of being viewed”).22 This is manifest in numerous popular culture realms, and is especially noticeable in popular music videos. Because we “live in a world of moving boundaries…a world in which borders are crossed…a world in which new sub-nationalism and trans-nationalism are embraced,” there is a lack of push back against pornographic images entering into the public.23 The postmodernist encourages a fluid society in which sex is not feared and is used as a platform to empower, embrace, and control. Any attempt to create rigid boundaries is complicated because there is not a line that can be drawn for what pornography is and is not since pornography is defined by the unique responses of individuals, mentally, emotionally, and physically.

Crisis of Language The necessity to use the public, popular sphere in order to demand fearlessness toward sexual ideas indicates a failure of language surrounding sex. In particular, over-sexualized music videos flourish because they allow individuals to view a construct of their imagination, fantasies, and desires in a shameless fashion. That which is presented in the mainstream arena is acceptable because it is open to the gaze of the masses and is therefore justified. This need to defend the desire for sex, and to

use popular culture as the outlet to do so, proves that no outlet currently exists to discuss the longings for sex as natural or pure because it has been labeled as bad, or even dangerous. One example of this is through the “SafeSearch” filter on Google Image searches. These default settings are programmed to remove images that “contain pornography, explicit sexual content, profanity, and other types of hate content.”24 While this could be understood as a way to protect sex from gaining a place in the public sphere, the result is that it connotes sex as something that needs to be put in a box, sealed up tight, and never mentioned – something to be feared. “The phrasing equates sexually explicit images with hate”, while the notion of needing safety and protection portrays sex as risky and dangerous.25 However, this is not an accurate depiction since sex and purity, though numerous arguments refer to them as oppositional, are in fact, united. The question in a postmodern society then is how to resituate sex as something that is pure, without the baggage of shame or exploitation of it to define identity, power, or control. Its current placement in the public sphere has caused humiliation and egocentricity to the previously wholesome display of affection for another individual, which is clear by the way the normalization of sex is praised and encouraged as a guilt-free way to explore sex without labeling the viewership as indulging in pornography. There is no doubt that sex sells and sells well, which indicates that sex is a legitimate desire that cannot be ignored. However, there is presently no space to dialogue about it that allows for it to maintain its virtue, which is why consumers hold onto and praise its placement into the popular region of culture. Also, to phrase the desire of sex as something that “sells,” (which is frequently expressed in the media) also detaches it from affection and restructures it as a transactional process – a service provided in exchange for something else rather than freely offered

out of love. Sex taps into a primal curiosity inherent in every human, but inserting the visual discourse of sex in music videos for the masses to gaze at disorients the posture by which individuals approach it. Its resurfacing through music videos and social media relays the message that sex is suitable to experience in whatever format – motivated by or removed from love, within or outside of marriage, with or without the presence of another human, and through acknowledgement or fragmentation of the body.

It is necessary to develop a vocabulary that allows youth subcultures to ask questions without being dismissed but also provides them with an awareness of the destruction that can arise when sex is simulated through pornographic images, creating a “hyperreal” state that dislocates it from “origin or reality.”26 The language ascribed to pornography as taking place on the Internet, in a “virtual reality” suggests that “reality may be multiple or take many forms” creating a culture that is “increasingly simulational.”27 By complying with the hyperreality presented on the screen, the finite characteristics of sex become unstable, “transforming the identity of the [real].”28 In order to avoid this, ideas like power and freedom need to be aptly qualified, and a discussion about where men and women are able to exert their unique strengths, without exploiting the purity of sex, must be established. The pornification of popular culture through music videos has led to a sex-positive environment; however, sex-positive has come to take on a dynamic meaning, enabling sex to be considered appropriate under a variety of fluid circumstances.

Crisis of Femininity The ambiguity created by sexual displacement and pornography in the public has led to a crisis of femininity within popular culture. Sex is exploited both by men and women who use it as a space to exert power. “[Girls] do not want to be represented in a humiliating way,” so to counter

the oppression of women within a patriarchal society, the postfeminist woman uses her body to demonstrate her dominance, resulting in continued exploitation of sex as she reworks it into a performance.29 Jennifer Lopez depicts this in the music video for her 2014 single, “I Luh Ya, Papi.” The video presents a role reversal for men and women, and is used as an outlet for her to represent women as the leaders who impose power over the objectified, vulnerable men. “It was all part of that trying to… flip the roles and have [the men] feel what it was like to be on the other side of that objectification,” Lopez stated behind the scenes of the music video.30 She expressed that making the video was exciting because it was “a lot of fun” to see the males in that subjugated position; however, she neglected to disclose why she chose to continue to position herself in an objectified role: the video shows her dressed in revealing clothing and continuing to act as the primary spectacle for the audience’s gaze.31 Rather than solving the problem, the sexual interactions between men and women become centered on the fight for power. Through the pornification of music videos, sex has become a place for people to demonstrate independence. Dependency, though, is a fundamental part of sex, evident in the basic biology of the distinct bodies of males and females; therefore, a crisis of femininity occurs when people are led to a misunderstanding of how to participate in sexual acts through negotiating what it means to control or be controlled by another. These balances are skewed as both sexes compete for the opportunity to assert authority over the other through visuality, rather than discover unity with one another. The icons of popular music videos teach a young woman to “lavish attention on herself.”32 McRobbie notes the way postfeminism has transformed women by removing her from the role of “victim of romance.”33 The postfeminist woman “is no longer a slave to love.

She no longer waits miserably outside the

cinema knowing that she has been ‘stood up’…There is love and there is sex and there are boys, but the conventionally coded meta-narratives of romance, which… could only create a neurotically dependent female subject, have gone for good.”34 In the music video “Timber,” Ke$ha performs actions that attempt to prove her control over her own body, such as grabbing her own breasts or surrounding herself with other seemingly strong women who adorn shirts with the words “It’s Going Down” printed across them.35 By flaunting these phrases, viewers understand that it is the women who are making the decisions and choosing to act sexually, rather than being manipulated to do so by men. “Do you reckon he’s getting more out of it than you are?” Alan Carr asks Miley Cyrus about her explicit “Wrecking Ball” music video in which she carries a sledge hammer and exudes confidence in her sexuality by swinging on a wrecking ball in full nudity.36 Cyrus simply laughs at this statement and does not provide an answer. The fact that the woman’s body remains the “site for sex” prevents women from regaining the power they so aspire to exercise, and the purity of sex continues to be exploited. By “construct[ing] herself exactly along this axis of all body” and “by placing her body…as something that can and does give pleasure…the image of [the female] is disruptive. The “commercial machine” of popular culture continues to emphasize sexuality in a way that “equates woman with body” in a destructive manner.37 In addition, the popular video of today not only demonstrates but also emboldens the role of the spectator, and changes the way he or she understands sex.

Turning Inward “Got that hourglass for you, baby, look at these legs,” sings Jenifer Lopez as she struts in front of half-naked men with her entourage wearing a white, skin-tight leotard.38 She phrases this concept in two parts: first, she acknowledges the viewer’s focus, and

immediately after, demands that viewer to direct his/her attention to her own body.

Lopez is able to direct the masculine gaze according to her own agenda, while simultaneously revealing that agenda as a longing for attention. This combination stems from the normalization of pornography.

Popular music videos not only demonstrate but also encourage the third-person gaze of pornography, made manifest by the collapse of public and private boundaries. Consumers of popular culture gain an understanding of sex from a viewer’s perspective, watching from the periphery rather than engaging intimately in a oneon-one setting. How individuals learn about sex transforms the way they will act on it as they are confronted with sexual moments; therefore, when that education develops out of viewership, sex becomes a stage to perform and construct the self.

Popular music videos invite audience members to do what they cannot: they are asked to participate, yet they are unable to fully engage because of the distance set in place by the screen between themselves and the performers. When pop stars piece together moments of nudity, movement, and facial expressions, they indicate that sex is something that can be performed, acted, and displayed for an audience, dismembered from its context of origin. Popular culture insinuates that sex can be simplified into those splintered bits, without acknowledging the intentionality, physicality, or personal and emotional interactions involved when coming into contact with another individual. In addition from this detachment suggested by pornography in the mainstream, the woman’s body is recreated as a site of scrutiny, offered up for observation by men and women, and for self-centered critique by women. “Women are simultaneously looked at and displayed;” thus women viewers are placed in a complex situation as they identify with both the male stance (directed by the camera) and with the female being watched.39 This dual gaze paired

“

with the post-feminist themes of empowerment though performing sex turns the focus of female youth inward on themselves, and subsequently construct an identity rooted in becoming the object of gaze.

In will.i.am’s 2013 video “Feelin’ Myself,” featuring French Montana, Miley Cyrus, and Wiz Khalifa, Cyrus sings, “I’m looking at the mirror, the mirror look at me. The mirror be like, baby, god dammit, you the shit.”40 While the women in music videos display their bodies to prove their power, they also continue to direct their

When pop stars piece together moments of nudity, movement, and facial expressions, they indicate that sex is something that can be performed, acted, and displayed for an audience, dismembered from its context of origin.

”

bodies to encourage the audience gaze and, when that gaze is met, the female considers herself “empowered.” In actuality, she proceeds to succumb to the demands of the masculine eye. One current songs that exemplifies the philosophies of a me-centered culture is the Chainsmokers’ 2014 hit, “Selfie.” The video, which currently has over 93 million views on YouTube, offers layers upon layers of a scrutinized self, fabricated for an imagined audience. The primary woman in the video uses the camera as her mirror, leaning in and contemplating her hair, lips, and overall image in front of the public viewfinder. “When Jason was at the table, I kept on seeing him look at me when he was with that other girl. Do you think he was just doing that to make me jealous?” asks the brunette within the first ten seconds of the video.41 This video as a cultural artifact proposes that the postmodern society is one entirely based on performance, visuality, and an assembled self involving hidden agendas that manipulate the thoughts of another person. The girl feels a pressure to compete against the other women at the club in order to catch the

eye of this boy. To do so, she must build an identity out of her physical appearance, which she hopes will place her at the center of his masculine gaze. Her confidence is based upon his approval, which, rather than taking place in person, will occur through the online setting of Instagram.

As the narrative of the video progresses, he “likes” the selfie she posts, which registers as a mark of acknowledgement and approval for her outward construction.

The first mention of the word “selfie” came out of a 2002 ABC Online forum posting, where an Australian man defended the blurriness of a photo taken at a friend’s house while drunk by commenting, “sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”42 Since then, the official definition, according to Merriam-Webster, refers to “an image of oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.”43 By linking the word by definition with the online social experience, the speculation around social media connected with an inward facing society is made apparent. By providing this stage commercially through the commonality of the sexy music video, pop culture invites observers to continue their watchful “participation” without actually being able to participate due to the detachment of the physical elements hindered by the screen.

Sex is simplified to an assemblage of erotic fragments and is transformed into a site for people to manufacture and gain approval of themselves. The postmodern culture interprets sex as a me-centered apparatus.

social self: “The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.”

Charles Horton Cooley, Social Process (1918)

Society that demands instant gratification The detachment of mind and body continues to play a role in the visual imagery of popular music videos, which leads to immediate, yet brief and therefore incomplete, gratification of desires. Visual elements for songs such as Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Jason DeRulo’s “Talk Dirty” are just two of many examples that display sexuality as detachable from love and accessible to all. The women performing in Thicke’s video act as signifiers of innocence and playfulness, while DeRulo splinters mind from body through his crude lyrics, confessing that he “don’t speak the language, but your booty don’t need explaining” because “all I really need to understand is when you talk dirty to me.”44 The heightened sense of arousal that stems from the display of particular private spaces in the public sphere is a characteristic specific to pornography. “Encounters with porn involve moments of proximity where one is moved by images and becomes conscious of the power that they hold,” hence the visual images of a body revealed in specific postures can incite a corporal reaction from the spectator. These visualities provoke a power connection to that which is vulnerably displayed, but no predominant emotional response is guaranteed.45 It is precisely this detachment that commercialized sex plays with that results in an imbalance of the real and the construction.

“Pornographic images and videos involve a complex interplay between authenticity and artifice, the indexical and the hyperbolic, immediacy and distance,” which, as sex is normalized, becomes more difficult to separate.46 Easy access to pornography results in the ability to be instantly pleased, but at a cost. Individuals allow the simulation of sex to temporarily fulfill their desires for intimacy rather than seeking out longterm fulfillment. Music videos provide an extraordinary arena, mixing more than one sense to simulate sexual expressions, but this art form is highly divided, as is clear

by the lip-synching, costumes, theatricality, and camera, which primarily composes a focused shot on specific female body parts – lips, hair, or aggressive and stimulating features of the body. To be sure, it is not simply an issue of mistaken reality by the observer that leads to this. “One can live with the idea of distorted truth,” which is where the popularity of pornography rests.47 Those watching recognize that what is displayed is a constructed performance; however, the postmodern, simulated world has moved to accept these images as they are, allowing them to satisfy their carnal desires.

Enabling the online simulation and deconstruction of sex to act as a model for the real results in misperception; thus “the duplication suffices to render both artificial.”48 Online Performance and Identity Theory The invitation we have received to the privatized space of sexual intimacy from music videos in the postmodern era has led us to become more concerned with the construction of our own identities.

“Electronic communication technologies significantly enhance these postmodern possibilities,” and youths use those postmodern tools as instable foundations to build identities upon.49 The overflow of this is made manifest, not in popular music videos themselves, but in the world of social media, where people, especially teenagers, are given a canvas to express and construct themselves using the framework of sex. Popular culture’s sexual iconography has influenced the ways individuals seek to promote their bodies in a pornographic way, fueled by the encouragement they gain from the public. Music videos online, which is the most predominant place individuals watch them, allow viewers to comment on what they have just witnessed, which is one way that social media and pop music videos are tied together. Also, the linking characteristics of the Internet allow the spread of music videos from one site to another,

expanding their spectatorship exponentially. The more dominant they become, the more widespread the performed sexualities become. Users’ ability to respond directly to the sights they are seeing provides a crucial dynamic to the construction of identity on social media sites as well.

“Young people…seem to be at the forefront of exploring and inventing these categories [of identity], often within the language of popular music,” explains Gilroy. “New identities show signs of endless diversity and intensive cultural crossover,” including the crossover between pornography and popular culture.50 These “hybridic identities” are functions of a deeper-rooted identity crisis of the female youth especially.51 A number of psychoanalysts have offered ways of understanding concepts of visuality and identity composition, and their theories provide insight into how one might be provoked to establish themselves online, as influenced by popular media.

Cooley explains that the question of the self is never resolved and fixed and is therefore always open to change, transformation, and realignment. Though writing in 1902, he seems to emphasize a particularly postmodern concept of fluidity. Not only is there an impulse to mold to that which we see and deem acceptable or desirable, people shape their self-concepts based on their understanding of how others perceive them.52 Society is an interwoven entity of “mental selves,” which are made manifest in social media sites like Facebook and Instagram today. Another psychoanalytic concept that plays a part in the discussion of the sexually constructed identity is Cooley’s establishment of the “social self.” He reports that the “words ‘me’ and ‘self ’ designate ‘all things which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.’”53 Consequently, to declare some object or thing as ‘mine’ is a way for me to better understand myself.

Sex in a postmodern world is a moment where the male and the female both fight to

gain control, and the demand for power becomes a way to define the two participants.

When creating a lens into the sexual experience by posting photos to online forums, the concept of the social self is put into practice and is opened up to an increasing degree due to the power of the comment box, where viewers see and respond to what is visually provided. Those who post images are privy to another’s mind through the response capabilities, which was previously an imagined aspect of the social self. “The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves,” or that which a mirror could provide, “but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind,” which is no longer imagined but presented publically online as people reply to others’ performed identities.54 This is how users of social media understand sex as they are placed in a spectator role on the set of the intimate scene: the attention during sex in a postmodern world is focused not on the other person, but more frequently on how one imagines the other individual is perceiving him/ herself. A self-looking individual, molded by the fast-paced commercial culture that strives to sell commodified ideas conveniently and instantly, is an unstable individual who lacks a balanced understanding of power. Additionally, this postmodern individual is perverted by the disintegrated ideas of misplaced and displaced sex.

Albert Bandura discusses how the comments that friends and followers on social networking sites can impact people. “The individual notices something external and after repetition begins to internalize and mimic it. If the individual receives external rewards for this behavior, the learning will be internalized.”55 The first statement Bandura makes speaks to the way youths digest the ideologies infused in mainstream music videos and recreate them in their own profiles. The second statement suggests that the nods of approval and acknowl-

edgement gained via the “like” button or the comment boxes reinforce behavior and provoke the continual posting of similar images. These general concepts of learned behaviors are not inherently negative, and can certainly act in positive ways to reinforce appropriate behavior. The problem, nevertheless, is that, due to the fluidity, lack of authority, and deconstructed boundaries of postmodernity, “appropriate” is a relative term that has come to encompass sexualized images removed from their privatized, intimate context. While scanning the Internet, the comments that are displayed include phrases such as “you’re so hot,” “those lips tho,” “git it,” and “damn baby girls.”56 These responses combined with an enormous number of “likes” (often over 100) have become just as normalized as the degrading photos of the selfie displaying cleavage or accentuated lips to which they responding, resulting in a cycle of the social learning theory around pornography.

Conclusion After analyzing a multitude of popular music videos from recent years and evaluating both the academic and online discourse of sex, it is evident that sexuality in a postmodern world is a point of crisis. In addition to the collapse of public and private spheres and the lack of authority and origin prevalent after the shift from absolute to relative truth, individuals struggle to find a language to understand sex as pure and, in the chaos of searching for one, are confronted with visual media that displays identity in a number of ways. The visualities of music videos go primarily unchallenged within the postmodern world of instability. In fact, the images of women in specific are often praised, both by the male and female gaze, and are hence recreated by youth in social media as they navigate how to construct their identity based on sexual ideologies, self-seeking motives, and instant gratification. The pornification of popular culture

removes sex from its intimate location and, in doing so, complicates how individuals

can understand the value of sex from the complex position of commercial spectator.

Scholars have recognized that patriarchal systems will continue to exist due to the media’s tendency to perpetuate messages of female subordination through a lack of female representation at a professional level.

A UNESCO study compilation found that the barriers to women’s ascent to management positions in media are no longer overt policy faults or “flagrant discrimination”; rather, they are the lingering “invisible barriers – the attitudes, biases and presumptions which, curiously, even the women themselves often do not recognize as discrimination”.1

At the crux of the feminist worldview is an acknowledgement that institutional power structures are inspired and maintained, in large part, by gender differences; these power structures often rely on an assumption of male superiority and dominance.

Mainstream news media has almost always focused on the concerns of men – naturally, as they were the only ones in the positions to make decisions that controlled the content. The drowning out of women’s voices and perspectives through systemically hindering their ascent to power in media detracts from diversity and enrichment in programming and editorial; indeed, “having a broader diversity of voices is important for it’s own sake, not necessarily because of gender but because of difference.”2

man With the exception of a few outlying studies and statistics, media scholars over the past several decades have reached the general consensus that women are grossly underrepresented in the control of media production, either through ownership, employment, or other types of editorial and programming responsibilities.

n

Throughout the past decades, the depictions of women in media – their image on-screen, or their description in a news piece, for example - have attracted the critical eye of feminist media scholars; however, there is also an incredible amount of importance to be ascribed to the role of women in ownership and production of media, and the political economic implications of female involvement behind the scenes of these industries.

up

Patriarchy in Media Production Eric Leimkuhler Third Year Media Studies; Spanish

Bending Gender in Drag Performance Exploring Dimensions of Femininity Kensie Blodgett Fourth Year Nursing; Women, Gender, & Sexuality

W

oman. To break it down: Wo-man. A modifier of the more simplistic root ‘man,’ which appears as the underlying unit. There is so much variation carried by the words ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ but both belong under the umbrella category of human.

Neither is stationary, unvarying or static, and both encompass wide births. As labels used in American culture, each demarcates certain defining characteristics and set roles.

However, identity is fluid, and as such, there is crossover between what it means to be male and female, masculine and feminine; nothing is set in stone. The biological does not necessarily correlate with the cultural derivative.

What does it mean to be a woman? There is no correct, universally applicable answer to this question. Womanhood varies across social geographies, spanning the spheres of the home front to the workplace to the spheres of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and lived experiences as well as to the more general spheres of time and place. Due to the subjective nature of womanhood, the following pages will examine dimensions of womanhood though an external vantage point: female drag performance and lifestyle. Gender and requisite femininity will be investigated as a performance in addition to the interplay between the performer and the ostensible gaze of the observer at the moment of budding.

“

It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a[n actor’s] mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role…It is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.1

”

Drag performances consist of individuals who take on and impersonate stereotypical behavior associated with either the male or female gender. Most shows are specific to one gender of performers and are classified as either “queening” or “kinging” events. The former features male-identifying individuals who don traditionally female attire and perform to songs in front of a live audience, while the latter refers to females who dress as and impersonate men.2 Besides physical clothing, neither type of performer hides their biological sex as they portray the alternative-gendered character on stage.3 Less frequently, venues will have competitions involving bio-queens or faux femmes, individuals who are biologically female, gender-identify as female, and perform heightened levels of femininity.4 There is little research on cases of an equivalent ‘bio-king’ performance. Some may argue that this is because much of everyday life is a stage for the performance of heightened masculinity. Portrayals of hyper-femininity or masculinity are expected in the drag community. In order to focus on ideals of femininity in American culture, this paper will concentrate on the culture of drag queens.

A typical performance usually involves lip-syncing to popular music, aesthetic maneuvers around the audience, and the collection of monetary tips, with the end goal being competition for approval from the audience or a panel of judges.5 Most drag queen shows occur in either clubs or bars, often those with gay men compromising the main clientele, even though straight women are typically a mainstay in any given audience. Other performances take place as “balls” in private venues to a selective, insider audience. As depicted in celebrated films like Paris Is Burning and theatrical pieces like Wig Out!, these are the arenas where drag culture is at its finest.

In order to compete to be the “belle of the ball,” queens must belong to a House, or a group of queens (who may or may not ac-

tually live together in a building) who are organized into a faux familial structure, led by a “Mother” who reigns as the most senior, prominent and successful queen in the group. She serves as the guide for her “children,” or lesser queens and/or new additions to the so-called family. Within this family, a hierarchy is perpetuated by names, titles, and drag-specific vernacular. As queens are added to the family, they adopt the Mother’s or the House’s name as a rite-of-passage and newfound privilege. The drive for fame within the drag community is the major motivator for the Houses, in addition to performance as an outlet for creativity.6 The use of language is especially important in drag culture as it blurs the gender binary and adds dimension to racial demarcations. In addition to performing based on stereotypical female archetypes instead of impersonating real women, queens also do not use natural speech styles, but rather call upon the stereotypical speech patterns from various groups, such as gay male, white female, African American, textbook masculine, and southern or northern lexicons. By combining all of these forms, the realm of drag effectively fuses the racial and gender lines, as well as those of locational geography.7 In a linguistic analysis where drag performances were recorded, the research paid primary attention to how each queen incorporated speech into her performance. Mann notes that the call-out to the audience contained stylistic features of stereotyped women’s language in that “women constantly ask questions rather than make statements,” and seek reaffirmation and politeness, stemming from a “lack of certainty and self-assurance.”8 The majority of drag queens followed this pattern, breaking up their monologues with questions and posits of uncertainty.

However, they managed to linguistically straddle the gender lines by introducing stereotypically masculine styles into their speech, in addition to the feminine.

Expletives were used profusely, as frequently as every fourth word. While women are supposed to “use super polite forms and euphemisms,” obscenities were used in direct opposition to women’s speech because they “break norms, shock, and show disrespect for authority.”9 This study found that swearwords could be grouped in three main categories: all-purpose, body parts, or address terms, with “shit”, “fuck”, and “bitch” being the three most commonly used words.10 The latter term displays a unique irony due to the fact that the queens themselves are acting as women, thus degrading their own characters. They act under the title “queen,” which is the polar opposite of a “bitch.” The shock value of this juxtaposition of terms serves to illustrate the spectrum of the role women can play in society, oscillating between ruling, powerful queens often seated next to an exponentially more powerful king, to “bitch” which is on par with a dog, alluding to worthless and conniving traits. Even linguistically, drag showcases the impositions placed upon women to perform femininity across the other roles they are subject to embody.

The internationally acclaimed play Wig Out!, written by Tarell McCraney in association with the Sundance Summer Theater Lab, can be used to examine a typical drag ballroom scene, linguistic patterns, and the requisite familial structure.11 The play centers on characters in the House of Light, with Rey-Rey as the Mother and Nina, who’s male identity self is named Wilson, as one of the children, who is flirting around a relationship with Eric, a young man who hitherto is unfamiliar with drag culture and performers. In a closing soliloquy, Rey-Rey sentimentally exclaims: I brought win after win and the name Legendary to a house with little to know light until there was Rey, there was no way, so even though I may not have the glow of youth, motherfucker, I got the glam of age. I know what it’s like to try to hold up fabulousness while everyone withers

and dies around you. I walked amongst the legends who didn’t make it through.

I lost most of my house to an AIDS war that the kids didn’t know how to survive.12 In this excerpt, the classic language invoked by queens comes into play as ReyRey alludes to her House, her kids, and walking in the ballroom competition scene.

The linguistic patterning is interesting as it represents a traditionally feminine conglomerate, with Rey-Rey’s select word choice of self-descriptors like “glam,” “fabulousness,” and “glow,” in juxtaposition with the traditionally masculine aggression of expletives like “motherfucker.” She refers to the wisdom she garnered to survive from years of experience in contrast to the naïveté that comes with youth. To quantify the extent of her survival, Rey-Rey makes a historical reference to the AIDS epidemic, which largely affected the gay male community in the 1980s, and 90s. The highlighted difference of age speaks to the seniority measures within the Houses and acts as both an insulator and exclusionary device within the drag community. In addition to hierarchy, here age is closely linked to beauty, and hence to femininity, by associating it with “glamour” and the privilege that “fabulousness brings.” It is the blending of Rey-Rey’s character that causes the audience to pause and reflect on the ability of one individual to encompass both the male and the female lived experience.

Wig Out! delves into the question of identity in terms of realized gender, sexuality and community. Wigs themselves provide an extended metaphor for the fluxion of gendered identities and personas.

Throughout the play, each of the characters begins a monologue with the words “my grandmother wore a wig…” calling upon not only gender-bending, but the strength of familial ties, both inside and outside the world of drag. Wigs signify the crossing of the gender binary. For instance, when Nina wears her wig, she is female, but without it on, he is male and goes by Wilson.

Along with the change in appearance, there is a strict difference in assumed identity.

The stage directions highlight this barrier when, directly after Nina’s wig monologue, the directions demand “Wilson pulls the wig off.”13 The last scene in the play involves Eric, the previously ignorant young man, who dons a wig uttering the recurring opening lines of that monologue. It underscores his entrance into the drag community as well as his questioning of his own formerly secure gender identity, preferences, and appearances. When Lucian, another member of the House of Light, says, “My grandmother wore a wig. My mother wore a wig. My father wore a wig…,” it suggests that drag or something parallel to it connects those who provide the greatest influence in life: real and/or adopted family.14 More importantly, this statement intones that everyone, be they associated with drag or not, wears some sort of disguise or alteration from their true selves. This is often achieved through the pressures of societal norms for how women and men are idealized as polar opposites by much of postmodern America. Each person uses personas as masks when needed, much like drag queens use hair, makeup, and clothes.

Identity is both contrived and situational.

The conventional notion of drag is that the performers are “transgendered provocateurs of dichotomous notions of gender,” while others believe queens to be “aspirants to masculine power… and ultimately misogynists.”15 However, it is important to examine what lies beneath the aforementioned superficial views. Drag performance intersects with cultural notions of femininity, gender, sex and identity, as well as the clash between archetypes and lived experiences. The majority of the artists who perform in drag are neither promulgators nor provocateurs of social injustices. Rather, performers of female drag act as litmus papers to test for and display social constructions that constitute the backbone of gender and identity. In the barest of forms,

they epitomize and mirror the social pressures impressed upon all women. That is, drag showcases the impositions placed on women to look, feel, and be a certain way and meet certain standards, which collectively has come to describe the term ‘femininity’. It is in this manner that American society seeks to create two – and only two – sexes, and their consequent gender roles.16 Drag serves as a meeting point and subsequent melting pot for all variations of social organization, from gender to race to sexual orientation to privilege. In the clash of these features, a hierarchy is created at a point of potential social coalescence; however, this is not where these performances differ from the norm. Instead, what makes drag unique is how and what its particular culture does to the social organizational patterns presented. Drag purposefully parodies social norms that separate groups based on superficial features, alliances, or backgrounds. The culture surrounding the performance of drag turns a “spotlight on the social constructions of masculinity, femininity, homosexuality and heterosexuality” because this unique genre defies the normative standards of behavior, and in essence reveals the underlying complexities of layers that constitute and link gender and sexuality.17 From a feminist stance, drag queens epitomize the “patriarchal dividend,” a term used to signify the explicit and implicit

performance:

“Gender is manifested in the ways that individuals style their bodies and carry themselves, and also in how they speak and move.

In this way, gender is not only produced by and on particular bodies but is also located within particular activities, behaviors, and practices...Therefore, gender becomes embodied.

Joy L. Johnson and Robin Repta, “Sex and Gender: Beyond the Binaries” in Gender, Sex, and Health Research (2012)

benefits of being biologically male in any faction of American society.18 The power that simply being male provides, whether or not one is acting feminine or masculine, female or male, is immense. It allows facets of mobility to be achieved that are not regularly open to biologically trained women. That is, by being men in real life off the stage, drag queens have a level of freedom and immunity while on stage because their male sex allows them to become only temporarily feminine and then return to their masculine identity once the wig is off. On the other hand, women are allowed to dress in male drag because it is seen as appropriate and reasonable that women would want to be men (often considered the optimal gender) and obtain the power afforded to men. Through this lens, drag can be seen as merely an outlet for women to remain marginalized, oppressed beings in the web of social hierarchy, as the men who portray them do not even use real women as models, but rather the stereotypes that have become diminutive.

Opinions, perceptions, and mental flexibility – of both the audience and the performers – are tested throughout the course of drag queen shows. The audience is made aware that the performers are “performing femininity and being a woman,” but at the same time exist as men, not women, outside the walls of the ballroom.19 Essentially, drag performers achieve what they are not by being overtly female and covertly male, or adopt personas they were never meant to assume. In order to reconcile this source of tension, one must delve into social constructions of what it means to be masculine and feminine and to be male and female. Drag ultimately situates those involved in the realm of the metaphysical.

In a piece entitled “The Trouble with ‘Queerness’,” the author quotes Judith Butler, a well-known philosopher on feminist, queer, and gender issues, in saying that, “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as

well as its contingency… indeed the parody is of the very notion of the original.”20 The deconstruction of this statement reveals several important features. In her use of the word “imitation” as opposed to ‘representation’, ‘abstraction’, or even ‘doing’ (as West and Zimmerman would have advocated), Butler alludes to a conscious and determined portrayal of images of gender performed elsewhere. That is, drag queen performance seeks to gather stereotypical concepts and localized teachings of womanhood and manhood, femininity and masculinity, White, Black, Asian, and Latina cultures, and other supposed oppositions, to ultimately synthesize a new ‘other.’ These teachings of how to “do gender” and adhere to societal norms is upended by drag queens, even as they ostensibly accept these teachings.21 Drag ultimately blurs these lines by the variations in dress, linguistic patterns, and interactions with members of the audience. These methods use hyperbole to communicate the message of mass-adhesion to social standards of a dichotomous system.

Exaggeration is one of the most significant aspects of a drag performance. On top of showcasing gender norms, it enables the audience to simultaneously associate with and disengage from the performers.

In this stage of flux, successful portrayals are contingent upon the gaze of the performers meeting that of the audience, and vice versa. There is a sense of validation that is only achieved through this course of interaction. It is through the world of drag that external, standard gender, sexual, and racial norms are clearly exhibited for the audience to observe. It is this observational period that allows questions to arise – questions of one’s own identity and of social identities on the micro and macro levels. All spheres, from personal interactions at the shopping mall, the grocery store, crowded city streets, rural communities, race-specific communities, and professional offices, provide arenas that challenge or reaffirm one’s personal

identity in contrast to one’s social identity.

Drag provides the starting-point for this analysis. The key convergence point is also where Butler’s “parody” comes in to play.

The fact that American society has gender standards and bifurcation and that there is such a distinct line that cannot be crossed (e.g. maleness and masculinity is the strict repudiation of anything feminine) is in itself a parody. Thus, in parodying gender through drag performance, we can begin to see how faulty, imitative, and conditional the constructed gendered system is. The gender system in the United States is a binary one that exists by pitting opposites against each other. We have seen this phenomenon of the “battle of the sexes” encouraged time and time again in sports, in the classroom, and in professional offices. At the same time as this “battle” is supposedly being fought, it is an unequal war. That is to say, social projections of men and women are not the same because “if, in doing gender, men are also doing dominance, and women are doing deference, the resulting social order… is a powerful reinforcement of hierarchical arrangements.”22 West and Zimmerman argue against seeing sex as solely biological and gender as an achievement that is fixed and unvarying. They postulate that the gender binary specifically creates and maintains differences, which are not based on biology, between the arbitrary categories of men and women. The authors suggest that “to ‘do’ gender is not always to live up to normative conceptions of femininity or masculinity; it is to engage in behavior at the risk of gender assessment.”23 Gender is not innate, but is constructed through various social mechanisms. After investigating the world of drag and its involvement in defining personal identity and displaying, and often parodying, cultural norms in “The Trouble with ‘Queerness’,” Horowitz comes to understand that: I, as a person with an identity that constantly makes me legible as myself to myself and others over time, only

exist as a function of relations. And it is the relative consistency of these relations over time that gives weight to gender. Thus, one might be gay or masculine or genderqueer but inasmuch as one does (agentizes) intra-actions that give meaning to gayness or masculinity or genderqueerness, [that is where identity lies].24 One’s femininity or masculinity only exists to the extent that it is performed through “clothing, grooming, posture, movement.”25 Gender identity is not a fixed characteristic, and drag queens “perform in ways that underscore the social construction of gender and sexuality” allowing the audience to see just how flexible that identity is.26 It allows everyone involved to appreciate the ways that consciously performed gender can influence both the audience and the performers. In doing so, drag is an educational measure that promotes solidarity among queer and straight individuals. It provides the necessary geography to “dismantle rigid and binary gender and sexual categories and subvert heteronormativity.”27 The Drag Queen Anthology states, “being is not an either/or proposition and that there are actually multiple ways that gender can be performed and experienced.”28 Drag performances deliver this option of a gender and identity spectrum and reject the gender binary. It accomplishes this realized gamut by blending the lines of race, background, sex and gender, which are usually kept separate. As Berkowitz and Belgrave suggest, “femininity, masculinity, and queerness are all allowed to circulate freely in drag performance settings.”29 In the physical and abstract geographies that drag performers inhabit, the intersecting realms of previously definable and unvarying norms allow for a certain degree of mobility that would otherwise rarely be possible outside of the limits of the ballroom stage. Why are there greater dimensions of freedom on the stage than in real life? And what gives drag this unique capacity to move outside

of prescribed modes of behavior? Theater and any subdivisions thereof where performance, character portrayal, and creativity intersect have historically provided an outlet for marginalized communities, and in this case the queer community, especially gay males and trans individuals. In creating an unambiguous dialogue with certain linguistic intonations that is decidedly separate from standard American English, drag culture reifies itself as occupying a legitimate cultural enclave. With the open social code of mores, dress, interactions, and familial structure, the drag community has created an insular (yet not closed by any means) safe haven for a marginalized community. The establishment of a community of sisterhood serves as not only an outlet for expressed creativity, but provides a protective measure. Protection is necessary once outside the stage doors because “nonconforming gender performances threaten the patriarchal order and challenge long-standing Western philosophical distinctions between appearance and reality.”30 A drag queen is anyone who consciously

makes a performance out of femininity and represents “two souls in one.”31 Drag is in a unique position because it straddles the lines of gender normativity and simultaneously defies heteronormative behavior and, at least superficially, reifies misogynistic normatives. It portrays a range of acceptable gender behaviors within the world of drag, as well as the heightened portrayals of roles within the fabricated familial structures. Drag reveals notions of what it means to be a woman and a man, followed by conceptualizations of femininity and masculinity, and by exaggerating those archetypes, parodies the entire construction of gender norms and expectations within the confines of American society.

Queer activist and poet Andrea Gibson wrote, “We have to create; it is the only thing louder than destruction.”32 This simple statement embodies the sentiment of drag performance, in that, by physically creating and embodying personas on stage, the performers reclaim forms of discrimination stemming from sexual and gender identity.

resources Homemaking, Body Image, & Consumerism

1 Enguage, “A Review of Social Media’s Newest Sweetheart,” Enguage Full-Service Marketing, http://www.engauge.com/assets/ pdf/Engauge-Pinterest.pdf.

2 Kevin Roose, “It’s Time to Start Taking Pinterest Seriously,” New York Magazine, 24 Oct. 2013, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/time-to-start-taking-pinterest-seriously.html.

3 Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.2 (2007): 147-66.

4 Susan J. Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work Is Done, (New York: Times, 2010) 5 Jane Arthurs, “Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama,” Feminist Media Studies 3.1 (2003), 83-98.

6 Ibid.

7 Ian Mull and Seung-Eun Lee, ““PIN” Pointing the Motivational Dimensions behind Pinterest,” Computers in Human Behavior 33.4 (2014): 192-200.

8 Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 156.

9 Ibid, 150.

10 Joanne Hollows, “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Postfeminism and Cooking,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179-202.

11 Gill, Postfeminist Media Culture,” 155.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Douglas, Enlightened Sexism.

15 Enguage, “Social Media’s Newest Sweetheart”.

16 Arthurs, “Sex and the City,” 84.

17 Ibid.

18 Shuo Chang and Vikas Kumar, Specialization, Homophily, and Gender in a Social Curation Site: Findings from Pinterest, (University of Minnesota: Press).

19 Arthurs, “Sex and the City,” 84.

20 Douglas, Enlightened Sexism.

21 Hollows, “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess”.

22 Elaine J. Hall and Marnie S. Rodriguez, “The Myth of Postfeminism,” Gender & Society, 17.6 (2003): 878-902.

23 Ibid.

24 Douglas, Enlightened Sexism, 16.

25 Enguage, “Social Media’s Newest Sweetheart”.

26 Chang and Kumar, Specialization, Homophily, and Gender.

27 Anthea Taylor, “Blogging Solo: New Media, ‘old’ Politics,” Feminist Review 99.1 (2011): 79-97.

28 Chang and Kumar, Specialization, Homophily, and Gender.

29 Mull and Lee, “Pinpointing Motivational Dimensions”.

30 Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture”.

31 Hollows, “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess,”.

32 Mull and Lee, “Pinpointing Motivational Dimensions”.

33 Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, (London: Routledge), 1994.

34 Enguage, “Social Media’s Newest Sweetheart”.

35 Mull and Lee, “Pinpointing Motivational Dimensions”.

36 McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture.

37 Arthurs, “Sex and the City”, 86.

38 Roose, “Start Taking Pinterest Seriously”.

39 Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture”, 149

Century-Old Cover Girl

1 Susan Bordo. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. (Los Angeles: University of California Press,1995), 166.

2 Ibid.,169.

3 Anne Becker, Mako Fitts, and Lisa Rubin.

“Body Ethics and Aesthetics Among African American and Latina Women” in The Geography of Desire: Race, Place, Gender and Identity. (2003), 256.

4 Rose Weitz. “What We Do For Love.”

Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings. (McGraw Hill, 2004), 269.

5 Ben Arogundade, “Oprah Winfrey Cries at American Vogue Cover Shoot” in Arogundade, 1998.

6 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 172.

7 Weitz, “What We Do For Love,” 50.

8 Ibid., 52.

9 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 166.

10 Ibid., 203.

11 Weitz, “What We Do For Love,” 270.

12 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Feminist Film Theory. 28-41.

13 Becker, Body Ethics, 257.

14 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 98.

15 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 184.

16 Ibid., 179.

17 Ibid., 179.

18 Ibid., 182.

19 Ibid., 168-169.

20 Becker, Body Ethics, 256.

21 Ibid., 261.

22 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 98.

23 Good Hair. Dir. Chris Rock. Chris Rock Productions, 2009.

24 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 98.

25 Becker, Body Ethics, 261.

26 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 166.

The Pornification of Popular Culture

1 Beyoncé Knowles featuring Jay-Z, Drunk in Love. By Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Noel Fisher, Andre Eric Proctor, Rasool Diaz, Brian Soko, Timbaland, Jerome Harmon, and Boots. Columbia Records. 17 Dec. 2013. VEVO. 2 Dick Hebdige, Subculture the meaning of style. Taylor & Francis e-Library ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. (10) 3 Miley Cyrus, We Can’t Stop. By Mike L. Williams II, Pierre Ramon Slaughter, Timothy Thomas, Theron Thomas, Miley Cyrus, Douglas Davis, Rickey Walters. RCA. 3 June 2013. VEVO 4 Jason Lipshutz, “Miley Cyrus’ ‘We Can’t Stop’ Video Breaks VEVO Record.”Billboard. N.p., 29 July 2013. Web. 5 May 2014.

5 Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. (4) 6 Stuart Hall, Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Birmingham [England: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1973. Print.

7 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 169 8 Jane Flax, The end of innocence, in J.Butler and J.W.Scott (eds) Feminists Theorise the Political, London: Routledge, 1992. pp. 445–64.

9 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 151 10 Ibid., 156 11 Walter Bejamin, Understanding Brecht, London: NLB. 1970.

12 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 16 13 Ibid., 62 14 Susanna Paasonen, Carnal resonance affect and online pornography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011. Print.

15 Miley Cyrus, Interview by Alan Carr.Alan Carr: Chattyman. BBC Entertainment. BAFTA, London, UK: 13 July 2013. Television.

16 Cyrus by Carr, 2013 17 Susanne V. Knudsen, Generation P? youth, gender and pornography. Copenhagen: Danish School of Education Press, 2008. Print. (47)

18 Miley; The Movement. Dir. Paul Bozymowski. Perf. Miley Cyrus. MTV. 2013.

19 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 4 20 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.

21 Sigmund Freud and James Strachey, The psychopathology of everyday life. New York: Norton, 19661965. Print.

22 Jacques Lacan and Anthony Wilden. The language of the self; the function of language in psychoanalysis, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968. Print.

23 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 65 24 Paasonen, Carnal resonance, 32 25 Ibdi., 32 26 Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation, 1 27 Mark Poster, The mode of information: poststructuralism and social context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Print. (538).

28 Poster, The mode of information, 538 29 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 159 30 “Jennifer Lopez Premieres New Single ‘I Luh Ya Papi’”. MTV News UK. Viacom International Media Networks. March 6, 2004.

Retrieved March 6, 2014.

31 “Jennifer Lopez Premieres New Single ‘I Luh Ya Papi’”. MTV News UK. Viacom International Media Networks. March 6, 2004.

Retrieved March 6, 2014.

32 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 160 33 Ibid., 159 34 Ibid., 159 35 Pitbull, featuring Ke$ha. Timber. By Kesha Sebert, Armando C. Perez, Lukasz Gottwald, Priscilla Hamilton, Jamie Sanderson, Breyan Stanley Isaac, Henry Walter, Pebe Sebert, Lee Oskar, Keri Oskar, Greg Errico. Polo Grounds, RCA. 7 Oct. 2013. VEVO. 36 Alan Carr Miley Cyrus interview citation (part 2 video) 37 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 67 38 Jennifer Lopez featuring French Montana. I Luh Ya, Papi. By Jennifer Lopez, Noel Fisher, Andre Proctor, Karim Kharbouch. 2101 Capitol. 11 Mar. 2014. VEVO. 39 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 62 40 will.i.am. featuring Miley Cyrus, French Montana, Wiz Khalifa, and DJ Mustad. Feelin’ Myself. By William Adams, Jean Baptiste, Dijon McFarlane, Karim Kharbouch, Mikely Adam, Cameron Jibril Thomaz. Interscope. 26 Nov. 2013. VEVO. 41 The Chainsmokers. Selfie. By Andrew Taggart. 604 Records, Dim Mak. 29 Jan. 2014.

VEVO. 42 The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year

2013 is... | OxfordWords blog.”OxfordWords blog. N.p., 18 Nov. 2013. Web. 3 May 2014. <http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/ word-of-the-year-2013-winner/>.

43 “Selfie.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 5 May 2014. <http:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/selfie>.

44 Jason Derulo featuring 2 Chainz. Talk Dirty.

By Jason Derulo, 2 Chainz, Eric Frederic, Jason Evigan, Sean Douglas, Ori Kaplan, Tamir Muskat, Tomer Yosef. Beluga Heights, Warner Bros. 2 Aug. 2013. VEVO. 45 Paasonen, Carnal resonance, 13 46 Ibid. 17 47 Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation, 5 48 Ibid., 9 49 Poster, The mode of information, 534 50 McRobbie, Postmodernism and popular culture, 187 51 Paul Gilroy, Between Afro-centrism and Euro-centrism: youth culture and the problem of hybridity. Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research 1, 2 (May): 2–13.

52 Charles Horton Cooley, Human nature and the social order. New York: Scribner, 1902.

Print.

53 Ibid., 138 54 Ibid., 152 55 Linda Holtzman, Media messages: what film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Print.

(18) 56 Facebook public images

Patriarchy in Media Production

1 Margaret Gallagher, "Introduction." Introduction. Women and Media Decision-making: The Invisible Barriers. Paris: Unesco, 1987. N. (15).

2 Stana Martin, “The Political Economy of Women’s Employment in the Information Sector.” Sex & Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media. Ed. Eileen R. Meehan and Ellen Riordan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2002. N. (115).

Bending Gender in Drag Performance

1 Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday Anchor Books (1959):11-12.

2 Dana Berkowitz and Linda Belgrave. “She Works Hard for the Money: Drag Queens And the Management of Their Contradictory Status of Celebrity and Marginality.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39, no. 2 (2010), 160.

3 Stephen L. Mann. “Drag Queens’ Use of Language and the Performance of Blurred Gendered

And Racial Identities.” Journal of Homosexuality 58, no. 6 (2011), 793.

4 Rachel Devitt. “Girl On Girl: Fat Femmes, Bio-Queens, and Redefining Drag.” Collected Work: Queering the Popular Pitch. (2006), 28.

5 Berkowitz and Belgrave “She Works Hard,” 160.

6 Lisa Underwood and Steven Schacht. “The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators.” The Drag Queen Anthology: The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Publishing. (2003): 2-4; Rachel B. Friedman and Adam Jones “Corsets, Headpieces, and Tape: An Ethnography of Gendered Performance.” Cross-Cultural Communication 7, no.

2 (2011), 82.

7 Mann “Drag Queens,” 794 8 Ibid,. 799-800.

9 Ibid,. 801-802.

10 Ibid., 807.

11 Tarell McCraney 2007 12 Ibid., 67.

13 McCraney 83.

14 Ibid., 92.

15 Underwood and Schacht. “The Absolutely Fabulous,” 2.

16 Candace West and Don Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (1987), 133.

17 Berkowitz and Belgrave “She Works Hard,” 2010, 162 18 Ibid., 162.

19 Underwood and Schacht 2003, 4 20 Katie R. Horowitz. “The Trouble With ‘Queerness’: Drag and the Making of Two Cultures.” Signs: Journal of Women In Culture & Society 38, no. 2 (2013), 304.

21 West and Zimmerman. “Doing Gender,” 137.

22 Ibid.,146.

23 Ibid.,136.

24 Horowitz “The Trouble With ‘Queerness,’” 319-20.

25 Berkowitz and Belgrave “She Works Hard,” 162.

26 Leila J. Rupp, Verta Taylor, and EveIlana Shapiro. “Drag Queens and Drag Kings: The Difference Gender Makes.” Sexualities 13, no. 3 (2010), 287.

27 Ibid., 290.

28 Underwood and Schacht “The Absolutely Fabulous,” 4.

29 Berkowitz and Belgrave “She Works Hard,” 162.

30 Ibid.,169.

31 McCraney 2007, 43 32 Andrea Gibson The Madness Vase. Long Beach, CA: Write Bloody Publishing, (2011), 87.