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

 

For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.  I’m not a Christian Scientist (or religious at all) but both of my grandfathers were raised as Christian Scientists.  There’s a really amazing biography of Eddy by Gillian Gill (available at the Evergreen Library!).  Christian Science is in a lot of ways a rejection of the body.  It doesn’t acknowledge materiality as real.  Healing is done through prayer – the concept is that sickness is the result of wrong thought.  If you think correctly, you can transcend material illness.  Mary Douglas has given me a way of thinking about this.  Christian Science strongly strives for being “disembodied spirits.”  Illness, then, is another “irrelevant organic process” to be screened out.  However, the attitude of Christian Science to the body is very complicated.  Gill mentions something about how obstetrics was an underdeveloped field when Eddy founded Christian Science.  A Christian Science birth was in many ways actually safer than giving birth in a hospital.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find this passage through using the book’s index, and it’s a good 700 pages long (including the essential endnotes), and I could be remembering it wrong.  However, while looking, I found a really interesting section where Gill discusses the first edition of Science and Health, Eddy’s book about Christian Science.  Gill writes about how it is nonlinear, and similar to work by Lacan and Derrida.  She draws parallels to work by Luce Iragaray, a French philosopher and feminist.  Gill happens to be one of Iragaray’s translators.  In an endnote, Gill writes, “There are interesting correlations to be made, on the level of feminist theology, between Mary Baker Eddy and Iragaray.”  This could be an exciting subject for a future project.

 

 

Here, belatedly, is my exam design assignment . . .

 

 

Here's my proposal . . .

 

 

Here is my (hypo)thesis: rap is Brechtian.

What I think is Brechtian about rap is that it creates an alienation effect.  Brecht talks about the alienation effect in acting as the actor presenting herself playing a character.  The point is that the audience shouldn’t get swept up in the character, but should always realize the character is a specific person in a specific place and time being played by another specific person in a specific place and time.

Rap music, in my view, is more centered around persona than other forms of popular music.  Generally, there are a handful of people who were involved in the production of the song.  There’s the rapper, the producer, maybe a featured rapper, maybe a featured singer for the hook, and that’s about it.  And you know who these people are.  Often they even introduce themselves at the beginning of the song.  For example, Ayo Technology by 50 Cent, which Emily wrote a great blog post a few weeks back, starts with 50 saying “So special. Unforgettable. 50 Cent. Justin. Timbaland. God damn.”  Even when not introduced in this way, rappers generally are speaking to the listener about themselves, not just expressing emotions for us to be moved by.  Guests rappers are common on tracks by pop or R&B singers, and they almost always are speaking as a separate persona from the singer.

I like to think of Brecht as offering us a way of noticing universalist discourses in productions of art.  Dramatic theater, in his view, provokes us to say, “Of course, that is exactly how it is, there was no choice” about every decision a character makes.  Epic theater forces us to realize that characters are located within history and within discourses, and there is nothing universal about their decisions. 

My section of our beauty parlor presentation:

 

• SLIDE 1
• SLIDE 2
• We are all, to various degrees, fans of Britney.  This presentation is not about criticizing Britney, though it also isn’t about defending her behavior.  We simply want to critically examine one of the cultural discourses about Britney – specifically, about Britney and Cheetos.
SLIDE THREE
• Mostly a gossip blog phenomenon
• Clearly, she does like to eat Cheetos, but it’s become a phenomenon where many discussions of Britney on the internet have to mention Cheetos in some way.  For example, as a possible name for her son.
• SLIDE FOUR
• Here’s one example, from a blog called The Gallery of the Absurd from January 2006.
• The text:
Look, I realize this is pandering to the lowest common denominator of cesspool gossip, but my mission is to illustrate gossip...and so I do what I must.  My inspiration comes from the fact Britney Spears and Cheetos have become so synonymous that one term is rarely mentioned without the other. Just take a look at what the bloggers are saying. In addition, Star magazine has been monitoring Brit's weight gain over the past month and even ran a cover photo screaming "Brit Gains 20 lbs. MORE!"  Our investigative team has just uncovered Frito-Lay's plans to expand their product line by offering Cheetos Britney, an even cheesier, greasier and more unnatural shade of orange crunchy snack.
• SLIDE FIVE
• Paraphrased from Julia

• Cultural anxiety about Britney’s body is symptomatic of cultural anxiety about bodies in general.
• SLIDE SIX
• Celebrity as image
• Someone opposed to Britney creating part of the image (literally)
• Britney as cyborg – her image is created by any number of people, similar to Obama Girl
• Britney as cyborg – monstrous compilation of images coming from her, her management, her label, her producers the paparazzi, bloggers, magazines and more (including us)
• Cyborgs adapting part of their body to space, celebrities fortifying their body to extreme environment of celebrity culture – Britney’s refusal to do so
 

 

I was devastated to find that the amazing interview with Pauline Pantsdown and Vanessa was not available on YouTube. However, I was able to find mp3s of I Don't Like It and Backdoor Man.

Backdoor Man

(you should be able to save this as an mp3 from this page)

I Don't Like It 

(this link will take you to a page with a link you can use to download the mp3 right near the top.  WARNING: this site has swastikas as the background, I think as a critique of Pauline Hanson's racist politics.)

 

 

http://idolator.com/tunes/the-final-countdown/artificially-intelligent-guitar-able-to-tune-itself-destroy-human-civilization-322554.php

I just found the following blog post about a new electric guitar that tunes itself.  The photo accompanying the post is of the Terminator (I think).  The post jokes about this guitar being evil and wanting to destroy the world.  I think there’s this underlying concept of this guitar as a cyborg, which goes back this cultural idea that a guitar is natural, a natural means of expressing yourself in a way that, say, an 808 or a vocoder is not.  This is a theme of my project, so I was excited to see this post.  I think the author is clearly sarcastic (i.e. they are mocking anxieties about cyborg guitars, not engaging in anxieties about them) but that what they are joking about gets at all the discourses surrounding guitars.

I wrote the following comment on the board before seminar today, but we didn’t have a chance to discuss it:

“this dude turns from werecat to zombie then in real life he turns into a woman and this dude was black then he bleached his skin cuz he wanted 2 fit in like what the hell”

- YouTube comment on the video for Thriller (accessed Monday night)

I love this comment.  When I first read it, it immediately struck me as almost a synopsis of Mercer’s article.  Mercer is talking about Jackson’s boundary crossings in the Thriller video as standing in for his boundary crossings in real life, which cause a lot of anxiety.  Though this commenter clearly still holds the anxiety about these boundary crossings, he or she has made the same connection as Mercer between the transformations in the video and the transformations in life. I feel that there is a real danger when examining popular culture of feeling that, as scholars, we understand and can make connections that others in the audience don’t or can’t make.  What I like about this quote is that it shows how someone watching music videos on YouTube for fun, and commenting on them in the informal (no capitalization or punctuation) manner that is standard for YouTube comments, can make the same connections that Mercer makes in his article.  This is not to criticize Mercer’s article by any means (which is far more complex, obviously), but just to say that we can’t pretend the average consumer of popular culture is not thinking about what they consume and making connections between things.

Vertical Roll by Joan Jonas

I don’t know a lot about the difference between video and film, but isn’t the vertical roll, like that depicted here, something from film, not video? The introducer said that Jonas was using the roll and the noise to disrupt our gaze over her body, and that there was an idea of being inside a box with early video art. Does the body within the roll represent a body on film, and the face outside the roll represent some sort of agency or looking-ness (as opposed to gaze) possible with video? When watching it, I really felt that the face represented something positive, of escaping. But from what? The disruption of the roll, or from being the object of gaze? But the face is outside the roll, which was supposed to disrupt the gaze. I guess I’m a bit confused about the message of this work, though I actually liked it a lot. I didn’t find it that difficult, really, after I got used to the sound.

Female Sensibility by Lynda Benglis

What’s very interesting to me here is the way that bodies and voices are separated. The women in the film aren’t objectified, I don’t think. This was before the straight male fascination with / eroticization of lesbians, wasn’t it? The bodies exist in a bright, colorful space, but it’s a space without sound. The voices exist in a misogynistic space (that of radio), but we don’t see bodies associated with it. It seems that the bodies we see have escaped from the misogynist space of the sound we hear. Or, perhaps not, because they may be rebelling against it, which is different from existing outside of it.

Through the Large Glass by Hannah Wilke

I don’t know enough about the art world / Duchamp / the Large Glass to really know what Wilke was trying to do with this piece. I thought what Bridget said about her career was very interesting though (I think it was about Wilke’s career, though it was a bit confusing which artist she was referring to at the time). The idea was that Wilke was thought to just be an exhibitionist, and to be too pretty, and this made her less of an artist in people’s eyes. But, when she was dying of cancer, and documented it with video, this somehow legitimated all her previous work. Why is it that a beautiful woman who shows her body is automatically not an artist? And why is it that, if she is later dying, suddenly she is an artist? There are some really interesting discourses about women’s bodies going on here. If she wasn’t an artist because she was too pretty before, is she an artist later because cancer makes her body less desirable?

First of all, I want to say that my favorite part of Metropolis is the campy facial expressions and movements of the evil robot Maria.  It is interesting to note how “good” and “evil” are portrayed through face and body.  It was never difficult to tell which Maria we were seeing on screen because of body language.  So, what bodily/facial actions are possible when one is evil as opposed to when one is good?  (This makes me think of the Good Person.  How would the actress who played Maria have acted the parts of Shen Teh and Shui Ta?)

It’s very interesting to think about the metonymy of heads and hands.  Fredersen and those of his class are the heads – they work with their heads.  Grot and the workers are the hands – they work with their hands.  This suggests that Maria and Freder work with their hearts – interesting, then, that Maria works in child care.  The final scene is very interesting because the joining of head and hand through heart all takes place by shaking hands.  I think that, as a silent film, it wanted to show this reconciliation physically.  And, apparently, the only way to show this was through hands.  This suggests that only the hands, the workers, exist on a physical plane, as only the body part that stands in for them can be used to show the meeting of the hand and head on a physical plane.  Fredersen, Rotwang, and other “heads” can’t show this about themselves physically, because this work takes place as disembodied spirits (to cite Mary Douglas).  Is this, perhaps, why Rotwang has literally lost his hand?

The difference between Tomorrow’s Eve and Metropolis are striking to me.  Tomorrow’s Eve is not about class at all, while Metropolis is entirely about class (which is not to say that it doesn’t address other issues and contain other meanings, just that the main explicit meanings of the film revolve around class).  In Tomorrow’s Eve, Ewald is fooled by Hadaly, but in Metropolis, Freder is not fooled by the robot Maria at all.  And, of course, Maria is already perfect because her inside nature matches her beautiful outside appearance.  The robot Maria is more like Alicia from Tomorrow’s Eve because her beauty is a façade.  Rotwang originally was building the robot to replace Hel, who was dead.  There wasn’t anything wrong with Hel – in fact she was perfect.  In Metropolis, the robot is built to replace what is missing.  In Tomorrow’s Eve, the robot is built to be just as good as a human woman because both are entirely artifice.