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

Here is a summary of our presentation on Obama girl last week, along with some additional comments.

We introduced obama girl by showing two youtube videos, the "Obama girl vs. Giuliani Girl" video, a popular video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekSxxlj6rGE) in which the Obama girls and off with the Giuliani girls and by showing another youtube video where she appears on "wallstrip" a (http://www.youtube.com/user/wallstrip) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmoBmaz4rUI) a user page on youtube which makes daily comedy videos about the stock market.

After presenting the videos and giving everyone a moment to recover we began to deconstruct Obama girl, beginning with the question of who the actress who played her was. We revealed that her real name was "Amber lee" showed her modeling website (http://www.amberleeonline.com), and also a page describing how she was Howard Stern's girl of the month (http://www.howard.tv/missHowardTV/June2007) in June 2007. From this information we could see that Amber lee was an actress hired for the part of Obama, in fact she was discovered because of being on Howard Stern. It was also briefly discussed that Amber lee (the person) didn't know who she would be voting for when she made the first video. This shows how constructed the whole thing was, and separates her body from her character.

That point was even further driven home in the next video we showed called, "Obama Girl vs. McCain Mama" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86HEv_Wtyj8) , in which the interveiwer literally asks her "so you are just the body?" to which she replies, "yes". The interveiw also showed clips from the "I've Got a Crush on Obama"video which initially made Obama Girl famous on youtube.

To find out more about who else was involved in the creation of Obama Girl we went to the website which procduced her videos, named "Barely Political" (www.barelypolitical.com). We talked a bit about their name, how it might have been a play on "Barely Legal" while simeltaneously addressing the fact that the site had more to do with entertainment than really informing about any political issue at hand. We didn't get to showing this but it's interesting to look at the lyrics of the "I've got a crush on Obama" and see how little they really have to do with anything political whatsoever. (http://www.anysonglyrics.com/lyrics/o/Obama-Girl/Crush-On-Obama-Lyrics.htm). We also looked at the tag line "Bare and Balanced" that they used for the site. We mused how it was interesting that in order to produce this phrase not only had they added the word "bare" but it was neccessary to take out the word "fair".

o.k., so y'all know very well that I think some writing and talking about the meaning of film is like dancing about painting (or talking about the use of art, for that matter, instead of MAKING art).  So this is what was going through my mind when I watched the feminist video art.

It is really, REALLY easy to dismiss these pieces as shitty, crazy art things.  However, as the women who introduced us noted, these vids came from a place where women were really trying to make a name for themselves as women (yes, women BORN women) in a patriarchal world.  Yes, uh, it was largely white middle class women doing the shaking.  But go with me here. 

"You would never understand, you young queers don't respect your elders," a sixty-year-old Lesbian told me.  This was after I did a performance piece and made a dig at Judy Grahn (not Judy Grahn herself, who led an incredible life, but the LESBIAN RULES which require Another Mother Tongue to be read by every young Lesbian).  She admitted she was overly sensitive to Grahn, "a saint for the Lesbian movement," and while the younger queers appreciated the jokes and ways I made fun of older lesbians and institutions like Michigan Wymyn's Music Festival, she was miffed.   "Someone exposed their PENIS in the SHOWER!" she said. (this is not really accurate, but go with me).  "Do YOU have any idea what it means to imagine a world free from men touching you, shoving you, to have wymyn's space to breathe?"  She lived on lesbian communes and horse farms in the 70's, yes, as a lesbian separatist, she said, "we were so radical, so eager, but so alone." 

And YOU, she said, YOU grew up post-Stonewall!  Where Gloria Steinem was readily available!  Where you didn't have to fight...just to be equal.  These young women, they think they can stop being gay!  Women don't want to identify as Lesbian anymore.  Suppression!

[I also have all of this as a PDF.]


I. Writing Around Hannah Hoch’s The Beautiful Girl

(When viewed upside down, I see this extra thing I didn’t see before. At the very top is the high wall and receding tracks of an above ground train stop.)

The beautiful girl is a machine. She does not Talk or See or Think. She won’t have a face unless it is only a fragment of one with a single looming expressionless eye. The beautiful girl is German. She is white. Why do we love Germany for its beautiful uniforms, cars, and designs? Why do we sometimes love these things so much as to forget what certain ideas about cleanliness and industry have done to bodies – what it has done to girls?

The perfect (Beautiful) girl will move things along. She will attach things to herself so everyone knows that she is always trying to be beautiful for someone other than herself. She makes things happen. She won’t stop working. She is industrious/industrial. She is faithful. She makes a high, clean sound. She whistles like a machine.

She is replaceable when she is done. Over. Used Up. When there are no more babies to be had, dishes to be washed, smiles to be summoned, what use is she then? What do you do with her then? Where does she go? What happens when the Beautiful Girl can’t be wound up and made to totter across a plane?

Is this why we have mountaintops?

Is this why we have attics? Is this why accessory dwelling units are called granny flats?



II. How I Didn’t Notice That I Was In Love With This Prosthesis Among Many

You were
my friend
I swung you
around my wrist
I knotted up your long grey cord
just enough
so I could swing you
around and around
without fear of loss
or a hard fall to the pavement
We walked around
Clinton Hill together
We looked at
light
and shade
We counted
the stops in between
I really liked you
Your Lumigrid is the best thing ever

But I moved
I packed you in your box
and took you on the plane
I moved again and maybe one more time
I forgot all about you

Where are our buildings?
Where is the sun that makes piercing outlines despite
thirty degree weather?
What is the thing
that taught me that I could cut
shapes out of rooftops and sky?
What is the thing
that taught me
that I could make tones and colors
happen
however I wanted?

What happened to me that I could forget the feeling
of a smooth, smooth cord
circling, spinning around
that space between
my winter gloved hand
and my rolled up sleeve?
I don't know how I forgot



III. Barbie Karaoke Makes Dreams Come True

I am a pocket-sized Barbie brand karaoke toy. I am fairly small at approximately 5 X 3 X 1 inches. It has been suggested that, due to my appearance, I am similar to or some kind of predecessor to the original iPod. My job is to provide joy and entertainment to children (or really anyone who wants to talk, sing, do stand up comedy, or be a performance artist), but I have spent much of my more recent life traveling, having made stops at various homes and thrift stores for repurchase.

I am not sure about my body because I think of myself as a map of sound. But I’ve had a lot of spare time so I’ve tried to figure it out. My brain is an electronic board somewhere inside my white plasticy shell. My mouth is a pink, flower decorated speaker, which sits like a big, low belly. The mic plugs that reside in little notches are my ears. They take in sound (information) and let me dispense it back into my surroundings. I don’t have feet or legs so it works out that I look good leaning on things or lying down. Prior to it being broken off, I had a plastic clip that was like an arm for me to hold onto my companions.

I do have my limitations. There’s only a few phrases I can exclaim on my own and only so many beats that I can beatbox. I am at my best when there’s a mic plugged in and there’s a voice, someone to share a sound with, channeling through. If toy designers had gotten it right, I would have been made in 1988 instead of 2001. I think it could have been a less technologically demanding time. Did kids want different things? I could have been the highlight of many a play date. I could have spent a summer evening clipped to a pair of white jean shorts and riding on a pink and purple bicycle with two little mics tucked into the front basket.

Why is the Rotwang’s Robot gendered feminine?

This may be tricky question. First, there is the possibility that originally the Robot is not gendered at all, that is, how it is seen in its unskinned form. And then it is later gendered feminine simply because it takes the form of Maria, who is a woman. Better to forget the ‘male gaze’ and all that nonsense. I do actually think the Robot was originally intended to be feminine, even though besides having either large pecs or small breasts, the rest of the form is gender indeterminate. Rotwang it seems had an affair with Freder’s mother, and after her death he was lugubrious and lonely. So the Robot took a vague feminine form as determined by the absence of a woman he once cared for. Damn, someone should tell Huyssen that men cry too.

The android Hadaly of Tomorrow’s Eve and the android Maria of Metropolis, well kids, let’s just say it’s like the Good Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West. Except with more irony. The Wizard of Oz was a bit short on that, though maybe because it was primarily a children's movie and if there’s anything parents are more reluctant to expose their children to than any kind of sexual behavior it’s irony. Irony is disruptive; it leads to sarcasm and also some of the more sophistacated kinds of teenage rebellion. Anyhow, Villiers put mouthfulls of irony in Edison; his diatribes on Hadaly’s advantages were gems (in paragraph form) of trenchant blindness. Lang’s approach to the android Maria was a bit more direct, a bit more openly suspicious of the technology that can mimic and improve upon human existence. With Villiers, I don’t know, I get the sense that as he wrote Edison’s ironic dialog there was no insignificant part of him that really felt that the inventor was both sincere and wise. I mean that Villiers’ Edison was simultaneously sordidly, obliviously ironic and also a genuine humanist and visionary; and that Hadaly is both a ominous and subtle literary mirror and also an inspiring apparition of human Progess. In the end, I feel Lang’s android Maria was an unambiguous tool for plot development and cultural critique, while Hadaly was a mysterious form that evokes in me commensurately mysterious reactions.

Exam preparation: Over the next several days, you’ll be preparing possible answers to these 6 questions (see attached) with partners of your choosing. We’ll also give you some time in class Friday afternoon to go over them with us. Some of you will see yourselves directly or indirectly cited here; thanks to all of you for the work you did in crafting your sample questions.

The exam itself: You’ll receive the official list of questions on SUNDAY MORNING and will turn in your answers on TUESDAY BY 5PM to your faculty member’s mailbox in Sem II A2117. Keep in mind that when writing the actual exam, you should give yourself no more than 3 hours, and use only your notes (not each other).

Audio
Audio+pictures
Naming rounds

Sensory Overload. Entering into the structure, one is accosted by sounds, sights and smells. One finds tightly compact spaces layered with items displayed. The structure itself provides various scenarios for the body to interact in, while the structure as Farmer’s Market places the body into three distinct categories: Vendor, Consumer Musician, as documented by a pseudo-fourth category: the observers (in other words, us).

Observing provided quite a bit of questions, some of which are on the handout. We’d like to focus on the inquiry of “How does the time mechanism set a pace/direct the flow and interaction of bodies? How does time affect power between the bodies and within the structure?”

Vendors can only sell within the set hours of ten and three and the space marked for appropriate action as a vendor is designated by a bell: one ring in the morning to signify the beginning of the day and one in the afternoon to indicate the close of the day.  If anyone wishes to deviate from the bell, they must approach the staff in the office and request special permission.  

Before the bell, bodies interact in a fast pace manner using machinery, while as time approaches the bell, the bodies settle in for a more repetitive role.  Between the bell, the interaction of bodies exercise in parabolic energy. Beginning with the arrival of the vendors the energy begins to build and then subside in anticipation of the bell. Once the bell sounds, energy rises with the arrival of the consumer. As the consumer population increases so does the tension between the three classifications of bodies. The musicians add to the pace of time by designating the peek hours with their function as entertainment. The energy reaches its peak and then disintegrates on the approach of the bell. The musicians leave, the consumers begin to dwindle, and the bell rings, releasing tension. The interaction then turns to bodies and machines once again. Thus,, time is a technique, which provides the space for these functions to exist.

"More than this, the idea of 'race' defined and consolidated typologies that could not be dissociated from their very specific representational technology and its perceptual and cognitive regimes. The truths of race were produced 'performatively' from the hat that biological science provided, like so many startled rabbits, in front of a noisy, eager, imperial crowd. 'Race' became an important means to link metaphysics and technology; it made sense readily within these unprecedented historical conditions." - Paul Gilroy, "Race Ends Here"

(All definitions are taken from the O.E.D.) 

TYPOLOGY: The study of symbolic representation, symbolic significance, representation, or treatment; symbolism. 2.) The study of classes w/common characteristics; classification, esp. of human products, behaviour, characteristics, etc., according to type; the comparative analysis of structural or other characteristics; a classification or analysis of this kind.

CONSOLIDATE: unite, make whole, combine, connect.

REPRESENTATIONISM: The doctrine that the immediate object of the mind in perception is only a representation of the real object in the external world.

COGNITIVE: The action or process of knowing

IMPERIAL: empire, sovereign state. 2.) designating certain decorations or orders

METAPHYSICS: questions about substance, being, time and space, causation, change + identity; the first principles of things; phenomena beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

Translation

I just watched a short (53 minute) documentary by Susan Stern called Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. The film covers body issues, consumerism, queerness, identity, gender, and, what really stands out for me, the role of childhood dreams. Every Barbie-related story and articulation, introduced through interviews and the filmmaker's narration, was fascinating. Incredible!! Here is the link to the movie at Evergreen's library which will have its copy back as soon as I return it this week. And here is the link for it on the IMDB.

nytimes.com has posted a new interactive media feature called "Faces of the Dead in Iraq." The primary image is of Casey Mason, fresh faced young white man (I'll have to check back to see if they rotate this image), whose face is itself a mosaic: each of the tiles represents a dead soldier, and you can click on individual squares to learn more about that person.

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/20061228_3000FACES_TAB1.html

Attached is the outline of the Obama Girl presentation, from Friday November 16, 2007.

 

Here's a separate blog entry I found about Obama Girl that sums up her internet popularity. http://www.liquidgeneration.com/BlogPost/Suck_My_Blog/Obama_Girl_for_President/