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lotesseSo I know I'm late on this one, but life has been – well, life. And actually writing things out is hard. But that needlessly sexist Know Your Stereotypical Female Characters flowchart collided with the queer feminist theory I've been trying to get my head around this last month, and here I am. This is totally me thinking through several things simultaneously here, so it might come out garbled – and I'm also transposing queer theory onto an ostensibly feminist critique – but I think I've understood something. But it's all weird and destabilized. Let's see if I can manage to articulate it.
In the introduction to her 1997 collection of essays Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick problematizes queer (/feminist) paranoid readings. And yeah, '97 is getting a little old, but the essay is still yields a really great set of terminology, imo. Paranoid reading is basically what you get when a Scholar, Armed With Consciousness and also Deconstruction, saunters up to a text and says I know what you've been hiding, you're bad (/sexist/racist/homophobic) and I'm going to expose you. And it's not that these texts aren't bad; it's that exposing them doesn't seem to actually work toward progressive goals - "for someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin on that person any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences" (4). In a post-Bush world, can we really assume that getting the word out is going to make a difference?
Well, okay, so this is where the Stereotypical Female Characters flowchart goes wrong. It's deeply invested in an hermeneutics of suspicion. Think about it – the core assumption the chart makes it that if there's a girl on tv, there's got to be something wrong with her. Which is a tremendously unproductive way to think about lingering problems in the portrayal of girls on tv – because it's too easy to shift from ferreting out the things that are wrong with the shows to exposing all the things that are wrong with the girls. Stripped of context, you end up with an image of Nyota Uhura labeled "useless girl." REALLY not helpful. And WAY too close to active sexism and racism.
Doing that leaves you pretty high and dry. Now that you've discovered that bitches ain't shit, where do you go as a woman, as someone who, yanno, likes female characters?
Sedgwick argues that paranoid reading both comes from and perpetuates the damage done to queers (/women/poc/ect). Paranoia, she says, is contagious. Sexism, racism, and homophobia are suspicious and paranoid forces. The process of queer paranoid reading "sets a thief (and if necessary, becomes one) to catch a thief; it mobilizes guile against suspicion, suspicion against guile; 'it takes one to know one'" (6). In anticipating the trauma of social injustice, we might sorta end up inflicting it. We know their lines so well that they don't even have to say 'em – we hurt ourselves because we know they're going to hurt us.
We've got lots of good reasons to be paranoid, in other words, but it might not be all that good for us – in the same way that the flowchart isn't good for us. Do we throw up our hands and say: there can be no strong female character so why bother? Or, even worse, do we say: it's because we're women, isn't it, because there's something wrong with women? This is the exact opposite of the feelings you get out of playing Fuck Yeah She's Awesome. It's actually pretty despairing, as well as being disparaging. No thanks.
Sedgwick closes her introduction by calling for recourse to reparative instead of paranoid practices of reading. Of course, she says, "reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible within paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure ('merely aesthetic') and because they are frankly ameliorative ('merely reformist'). What makes pleasure and amelioration so 'mere'? Only the exclusiveness of paranoia's faith in demystifying exposure" (22). In so far as I've been able to understand what she means by reparative reading – it's hard to define, because it's all about flexibility and how the heck do you define that – I've gotta say, it looks a lot like fanwork. Not like the namecalling paranoid critique in the flowchart.
Reparative reading is Fuck Yeah She's Awesome. It's![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ladiesbigbang. It's femslash and feminist revisions of the text and genderswap AUs and chromatic recastings and dark_agenda and all the other work we do making problematic spaces into possible homes for ourselves and people like us. And I'm not saying we're perfect at it yet, because damn we screw up all the time - I screw up all the time - but I still think it's a better way to go than by tearing female characters down in the guise of feminist work.
And – I know that I do tend to be romantic-not-tragic girl, but I can't help preferring the get excited and make things approach to social justice work that reparative modes offer. For one thing, I feel that they're better tailored to serve the people left on the ground. We've all got to live here, women and queers and all, and sometimes the paranoid mode of everything being WRONG feels pretty bad. It gets you down. It hurts. It hurts women. And obviously I'm not saying we should ditch cultural critique – neither is Sedgwick – but sometimes I'd rather make something better than I would point fingers. Because I need for there to be better things available to me, and if I don't make them they'll never happen.
I guess – at a certain point, this movement has to be about helping as much as it's about problematizing. And yelling at female characters for, essentially, daring to be female – that isn't even problematicization. That's being a rectal haberdasher of the highest degree.
In the introduction to her 1997 collection of essays Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick problematizes queer (/feminist) paranoid readings. And yeah, '97 is getting a little old, but the essay is still yields a really great set of terminology, imo. Paranoid reading is basically what you get when a Scholar, Armed With Consciousness and also Deconstruction, saunters up to a text and says I know what you've been hiding, you're bad (/sexist/racist/homophobic) and I'm going to expose you. And it's not that these texts aren't bad; it's that exposing them doesn't seem to actually work toward progressive goals - "for someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin on that person any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences" (4). In a post-Bush world, can we really assume that getting the word out is going to make a difference?
Well, okay, so this is where the Stereotypical Female Characters flowchart goes wrong. It's deeply invested in an hermeneutics of suspicion. Think about it – the core assumption the chart makes it that if there's a girl on tv, there's got to be something wrong with her. Which is a tremendously unproductive way to think about lingering problems in the portrayal of girls on tv – because it's too easy to shift from ferreting out the things that are wrong with the shows to exposing all the things that are wrong with the girls. Stripped of context, you end up with an image of Nyota Uhura labeled "useless girl." REALLY not helpful. And WAY too close to active sexism and racism.
Doing that leaves you pretty high and dry. Now that you've discovered that bitches ain't shit, where do you go as a woman, as someone who, yanno, likes female characters?
Sedgwick argues that paranoid reading both comes from and perpetuates the damage done to queers (/women/poc/ect). Paranoia, she says, is contagious. Sexism, racism, and homophobia are suspicious and paranoid forces. The process of queer paranoid reading "sets a thief (and if necessary, becomes one) to catch a thief; it mobilizes guile against suspicion, suspicion against guile; 'it takes one to know one'" (6). In anticipating the trauma of social injustice, we might sorta end up inflicting it. We know their lines so well that they don't even have to say 'em – we hurt ourselves because we know they're going to hurt us.
We've got lots of good reasons to be paranoid, in other words, but it might not be all that good for us – in the same way that the flowchart isn't good for us. Do we throw up our hands and say: there can be no strong female character so why bother? Or, even worse, do we say: it's because we're women, isn't it, because there's something wrong with women? This is the exact opposite of the feelings you get out of playing Fuck Yeah She's Awesome. It's actually pretty despairing, as well as being disparaging. No thanks.
Sedgwick closes her introduction by calling for recourse to reparative instead of paranoid practices of reading. Of course, she says, "reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible within paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure ('merely aesthetic') and because they are frankly ameliorative ('merely reformist'). What makes pleasure and amelioration so 'mere'? Only the exclusiveness of paranoia's faith in demystifying exposure" (22). In so far as I've been able to understand what she means by reparative reading – it's hard to define, because it's all about flexibility and how the heck do you define that – I've gotta say, it looks a lot like fanwork. Not like the namecalling paranoid critique in the flowchart.
Reparative reading is Fuck Yeah She's Awesome. It's
ladiesbigbang. It's femslash and feminist revisions of the text and genderswap AUs and chromatic recastings and dark_agenda and all the other work we do making problematic spaces into possible homes for ourselves and people like us. And I'm not saying we're perfect at it yet, because damn we screw up all the time - I screw up all the time - but I still think it's a better way to go than by tearing female characters down in the guise of feminist work.And – I know that I do tend to be romantic-not-tragic girl, but I can't help preferring the get excited and make things approach to social justice work that reparative modes offer. For one thing, I feel that they're better tailored to serve the people left on the ground. We've all got to live here, women and queers and all, and sometimes the paranoid mode of everything being WRONG feels pretty bad. It gets you down. It hurts. It hurts women. And obviously I'm not saying we should ditch cultural critique – neither is Sedgwick – but sometimes I'd rather make something better than I would point fingers. Because I need for there to be better things available to me, and if I don't make them they'll never happen.
I guess – at a certain point, this movement has to be about helping as much as it's about problematizing. And yelling at female characters for, essentially, daring to be female – that isn't even problematicization. That's being a rectal haberdasher of the highest degree.
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Date: 2010-10-18 12:06 am (UTC)Thank you for posting this. ♥
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Date: 2010-10-18 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 01:10 am (UTC)I'm not sure if I feel more squally about Uhura or Yoko Ono or m-fing Zoe.
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Date: 2010-10-18 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 04:46 am (UTC)Also, the post on "Overthinking It" made me want to chain the author to a chair and force her to watch old movies (which have *such* nuanced, complex, riveting portrayals of women. Who also get a bigger proportion of screen time and are played by acresses more likely to be top-billed.) There was someone who needed some Davis, Stanwyck, Ginger, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, hell, Judy Garland!
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Date: 2010-10-18 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 07:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 07:16 am (UTC)/rant
I did want to say that this really hit the nail on the head for me. That's generally how I view things too--I try to interpret them as their maximum awesomeness, instead of looking for things to pick apart. It has to be pretty overt for me to be like, "Something's wrong here." Like, there's this Doctor Who character that, if viewed today, would look like the Tea Partyer's version of Obama, and would be taken as a criticism of his administration--except that serial aired in 1965.
I've actually been watching a lot of 60's Who lately, and it really feels like they're trying to write feminist characters, but don't really know what a feminist character would look like. So they'll write that a girl is a genius, but then she hardly ever gets to use that genius, and stereotypical behavior works its way in (oh noes, a rat!). But it's like, just like even though the pictures are grainy and black-and-white and the sets are cardboard, I see these colorful alien vistas in my head, I see through the stuff that just seeps in because it was written in like 1963, to these wonderful characters shining through. I think Uhura's a lot like that too, she could have been so much more if it weren't for the network's restrictions, but in a sense, she was all that by virtue of her potential, if you care to see it. All that she represented, all that she became in the viewers' imaginations, that's how she's remembered, and that's how she should be remembered, because that was her true self. All that network restriction "a black woman can't be in charge of the bridge even if she's the most qualified person standing there at the moment" crap is just dross that we skim away to get at the real character underneath.
Incidentally, I'm a tragic-not-romantic kind of girl, so it seems to work from this end too.
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Date: 2010-10-18 01:00 pm (UTC)The cross side of that is that contemporary screwery hacks me off more sometimes because pete's sake we should be over this. It's not so much that ST:AOS or the BBC Sherlock are so much more sexist/racist than their originals, but that I feel like they ought to be so much better. The length of time stretching between makes it sadder somehow, at least imo.
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Date: 2010-10-25 09:57 pm (UTC)See, I do love Nu!Trek, Sherlock and all, but like you say, they could be better! And I sort of feel like the original canons were just about progressive enough for reboot writers to feel ‘Hey, this is OK how it is, why mess with a formula that works?’ And so we end up with fun, awesome shows... but still with naff all screen time for anyone who doesn’t conform to the white, straight, male ideal protagonist. And I honestly don’t know if a reboot will ever manage to break free of that, because taking Trek for an example, yes I would *love* the new movie to have Uhura save the day (and oh god, the plot bunnies just started multiplying.), but Trek’s been the Kirk-Spock-McCoy show for so long now, people are going to kick up a fuss at anything that detracts from that central relationship (or at any rate, the writers must be pretty convinced people will, what with the whole ‘Reboot? Pfft, it’ll never catch on’ trouble they had with XI). Whew. Long, garbled sentence there, sorry.
So yes, me desperately trying to do a TL;DR here: while it would be amazing if reboots of old fandoms *could* break away from traditional WSM protagonists, I can’t help thinking that if they did, since those protagonists are so integral to the original, whether that’d be possible without splitting completely with the original.
Ugh. I really don’t think I’ve managed to say what I want there at all.
Incidentally, I do think Doctor Who’s managed much better in it’s reboot - probably because Old Who always had the female companion (and because the leading roles changed round so much - Doctor and companion, yes, but which Doctor and which companion?), so it wasn’t so much of a jump to have that companion go from has-to-be-saved to can-do-her-own-saving, without having to introduce new characters to an established dynamic.
And I'm going to shut up now and ignore the voice whispering 'Y'know, I bet Uhura was aces at codes and stuff. You like codes and stuff, don't you?'
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Date: 2010-10-18 08:12 am (UTC)Have read far too much feminist litcrit which is basically about scoring women writers out of 10 for Getting It Right in terms of 70s/80s (and quite often some particular type of feminism at that), in which no-one, ever, got 10/10.
While not wanting to say 'anything wymynnz rite iz grate!' the above does not strike me as a useful approach.
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Date: 2010-10-18 11:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 08:46 am (UTC)i'll have what she's having!
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Date: 2010-10-18 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 10:58 am (UTC)There are some particular parts of the flowchart that bother me in particular (I have an entire nerd-rage-y post waiting in the wings about slapping the SWEET NERD label on a character who is basically known for being hotheaded and in-your-face confident, and don't get me started on defining Ripley, of all characters, by whether or not she's had sex), but the whole thing is just revolting.
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Date: 2010-10-18 12:55 pm (UTC)The whole thing kinda smacks of dismissal. You thought you could love/identify with female characters? Silly feminist, happiness is for teh menz!
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Date: 2010-10-18 10:00 pm (UTC)Also, most of the flowchart is lose-lose situations for women (Are you in a horror movie? Well, don't have sex and don't get raped, but if you manage either of those, you're still just a Final Girl). Just what we needed -- more situations where women can't win.
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Date: 2010-10-18 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-19 08:11 am (UTC)The Flowchart of Doom is not a deep analysis, but...it seems like they should at least see the difference between a tired cliche and a wildly offensive cliche ("Noble Squaw" vs "Lady of War", for example. Not that I'm terribly convinced that 'elegant, older warrior woman' is common enough to be a tired cliche, but.)
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Date: 2010-10-21 02:56 pm (UTC)Yeah, when you're casting around to try to find examples of your 'cliche', you may want to rethink.
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Date: 2010-10-21 02:55 pm (UTC)WORD.
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Date: 2010-10-21 02:55 pm (UTC)Beautifully put. (Here from Metafandom.)
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Date: 2010-10-21 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-22 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-25 12:35 am (UTC)