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meta: convergences (reparative reading/stereotypical female characters
So 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.