Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

My Mom just e-mailed me about this exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum that she thought would be really relevant to our class . . . it sounds good.

 

Body Image

 

I am the Barbie Karaoke Machine. I have lost my voice and lost my arms. Only occasionally can I still say my catchphrases, such as “Get up and dance!” I can only occasionally play my songs for my fans. I have lost my microphone, so I can no longer amplify and echo the songs of others. But I am still a Barbie. I may not have a head and legs, like other Barbies, but I have (or had, at least) the voice that most Barbies do not have. I also had the ability to process the voices of others. I could speak for every Barbie and every little girl could speak through me. They could speak louder, sing louder, make music. I turned their voice into song. I was built in 2001 – my development process began not long after Cher’s hit song “Believe,” which made altered voices in music a trend. Just as Cher appropriated voice altering for women and pop, I appropriated it for every little girl with a Barbie collection. I am a prosthetic of the voice. If only there was a T-Pain Barbie, perhaps I would be rebuilt, repopularized. Is voice altering no longer for little girls? Without me, the female cyborg loses her voice. If anything is to become a cyborg, it should be the voice, so you can always speak your cyborgness, and you can speak it through speakers, through MP3s, and over radio waves. Through altering your voice, I give it to you.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about this video since last week. It’s “Like a Boy” by Ciara and it reminds me of The Good Person of Szchewan. This was going to be a short post, but there’s just too much to talk about with this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFRuUJR4LPI

In the song, Ciara sings about how sometimes she wishes she could act like a boy within a (heterosexual) relationship, which includes things like having a secret bank account and staying out until 4 in the morning. Here are the lyrics of the chorus (copied from some lyrics website):

What if I?...
Had a thing on the side?
Made ya cry?
Would the rules change up?...
Or would they still apply?...
If I played you like a toy?...
Sometimes I wish I could act like a boy

Acting like a boy within the relationship is only negative in this song. And Ciara wishes she could act like a boy so she could act the same way towards her boyfriend as he acts towards her. Apparently, as a woman, she could never act in these ways. And in the video, she dresses in drag. I think it’s very similar to Shen Teh, who is restricted in how she acts by needing to be a “good person,” so she develops a male persona that can be rude to people and can keep them from taking advantage of her.

In the video, Ciara both dresses like a boy and as a boy. There are four Ciara’s. One is dressed in women’s clothes (with bracelets, earrings, and heavy eye makeup), singing the song to her boyfriend. The second is dressed in men’s clothes, but still presenting herself as a woman (for example, her long hair is still prominent). This Ciara wears a tank top, baggy pants, and sneakers and has tattoos on her arms. She leans back in her chair and grabs her crotch. This Ciara cites male ways of walking, gesticulating, and dancing. She also mocks masculinity in certain dance moves (for example, a bodybuilder pose). Her backup dancers are women similarly dressed like men. At one point, they lie on the floor while Ciara seems to control their limbs by gesturing.

This is a follow up to yesterday’s seminar, when I tried to make the point that all art is political.  Someone suggested that surely Thomas Kinkade is not political.  I completely disagree.  He paints an “ideal world” for his customers.  Anything that represents what an ideal world would look like is making statements about how things should be, and how they shouldn’t be.  And we can (should?) disagree.  I dug up an old New Yorker article I remembered about Thomas Kinkade.  It’s from the October 15, 2001 issue, it’s called “Art for Everybody,” and it’s by Susan Orlean.  You can find it on Proquest.  Here are a few quotes from it that I thought were important and relevant:

 

“Not only the highlighters but the gallery staff, the Media Arts receptionists, even the people who build the frames and stretch the canvases know Kinkade's biography by heart: … That when he was twenty he experienced a Christian awakening, and that it changed his art--it stopped being about his fears and anxieties and became optimistic and inspirational, with themes like home towns and perfect days and natural beauty, and millions of people responded. It's as good a story as you could hope for if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life's bounty; even the bad parts of the story are good, because it's easier not to begrudge Kinkade his fortune when you are reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the smarty-pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who is proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.”

An essential part of the Thomas Kinkade biography is about his Christian awakening.  His biography is a part of his persona, which is obviously very important to the paintings.  They’re sold in galleries named after him, after all.  His art is intended to inspirational.  It’s religious.  Also, he markets his art through the old Horatio Alger story – everyone in America can become successful if they try hard enough!  That must be very reassuring to the people who can afford to spend over a thousand dollars on a Thomas Kinkade print . . .

I think my project will either be partially or entirely about digitalized voices in pop music. Britney Spears’ new album, Blackout, came out today (though I downloaded it weeks ago). The whole thing is full of digital effects on Britney’s voice, and the song “Freakshow” is no exception. There’s one part of the song I think is really cool. It’s near the end of the song, in the second bridge. Britney sings (with digital effects), “Me and my girls bout to get it on, grab us a couple boys to go” twice. Then, the lines are repeated but with the voice digitally lowered to the point where it sounds like a male voice. The lyrics don’t change though. So, through digital effects, Britney has suddenly switched genders. Also, the lyrics “grab us a couple boys to go” sung in a male voice become pretty darn gay. This is what I want my paper to be about – how digitalized voices (and other technologies) can be used to play with conventions of gender and sexuality (and other things too).

 

 

Celia, Christine, Theodora, and I wrote this dialogue about the repressive hypothesis. Christine and Theodora performed it in class. 

1: Hey everyone, let’s start a student group called “Sex is Hella Repressed.”
2: Wait, is sex hella repressed?
1: Of course it is! We’re never allowed to talk about it, which is why I talk about it all the time. We need to start a movement!
2: Wait, if people aren’t allowed to talk about sex, how come you’re able to talk about it all the time?
1: It’s because I’m so radical! It feels great to talk about it, because I’m defying power. I’m sticking it to the man!
2: Wait, so this is why you feel compelled to talk about sex?
1: Yeah! Fight the power!
2: Wait, so in your movement you’re trying to get other people to talk about sex?
1: Well, yeah. I feel personally repressed by this system. So everyone needs to talk about sex all the time so we can overthrow it.
2: So you want to use S&A funds to have people sit around and reveal their sex lives?
1: Yeah, dude. S&A needs to fund more radical things. We should publish a manifesto about our sex lives so we can have pride in our subversive identities.
2: So we should all name, confess, and display our sexual practices?
1: Yes, then we won’t be so repressed! We should do a performance, and have a parade in red square.
2: Check it. That’s basically what happens every day. We’re told all the time that we’re repressed, so we talk about sex all the time. Don’t your radical friends applaud you every time you talk about sex? So how exactly are you repressed?
1: Well, dude . . .
2: Society wants to know people’s sexual behavior so it can categorize them. So you’re repressive hypothesis is an incitement to talk about sex. You’re not fighting the man, you are the man.
1: [looks befuddled]
2: And I’m done.

 

 

My paper is about Pumping Iron II, and I used Judith Butler. If you read it, let me know what you think.

 

 

Not a corpus, just something I wanted to share from this morning's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/books/30kaku.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

The article is a review of Alan Bennett's new novel, The Uncommon Reader, which is about what would happen if the Queen of England became an avid reader. Here is my favorite part:

"She takes to asking people she meets what books they’re reading, which has the effect of making them feel uncomfortable and inadequate. And she asks the president of France at a state dinner what he thinks about Jean Genet, which leaves him utterly flummoxed."

I may need to read the book now just to find out what his response is . . .

 

 

In high school, I went through a particularly pretentious phase where I convinced myself that I understood Kathy Acker, though I eventually had to admit that I had no idea what she was doing. She’s a writer who plays with other texts (which has gotten her criticism for “plagiarizing”) and questions the idea of a central subject. I recently was reading about post-structuralism on Wikipedia and it mentioned her. Suddenly, her work made a lot more sense to me, especially in light of our cut-up writing exercises in week four. Perhaps her work would be of interest to some of the people who are doing experimental writing for their winter quarter projects?

Here are some quotes from a 1989 interview with Sylvere Lotringer reprinted in her book Hannibal Lecter, My Father:

“I became very interested in the model of schizophrenia. I wanted to explore the use of the word I, that’s the only thing I wanted to do. So I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person next to the true first person … I was experimenting about identity in terms of language … You create identity, you’re not given identity per se. What became more interesting to me wasn’t the I, it was text because it’s texts that create the identity.”

“What I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text.”

“I don’t use the bourgeois story-line because the real content of that novel is the property structure of reality. It’s about ownership. That isn’t my world-reality. My world isn’t about ownership. In my world people don’t even remember their names, they aren’t sure of their sexuality, they aren’t sure if they can define their genders.”

This is a personal ad for an already semi-formed group including Celia, Christine, Ella, Theodora, and me.

We are a group of disciplined, hard-working, punctual students, and we're really excited about having fun together doing these projects next quarter. Some of us are highly detail and schedule oriented. We are doing a variety of projects in a few different mediums. We plan to get excited about each others' projects and think about them outside of our four hours of meeting time each week. We are going to commit to doing all the reading before we meet and to be willing to discuss it seriously. We will be open minded about seemingly unrelated topics and excited about finding connections between them (it will be fun!!). We are planning on having fun semi-formal group meetings outside of our scheduled time to watch movies or engage in other cultural productions and discuss them critically, or maybe just eat waffles. What brings us together is our strong work ethic.

Some of the topics our individual projects will be looking at: soap operas, Catholicism, pop music, urban spaces, queer identity, race, gender, Latino studies, performance art, fashion, plastic surgery, etc. (Add your topic here!)

Our products will range from critical writing to creative writing to immensely gay photographic portrait series. If you are working in a medium other than these we would still encourage you to talk to us!