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. 

Funny series of mug shot photo-collages by artist duo Ligorano/Reese::::: "LINEUP: THE UNOFFICAL PORTRAITS"

Ashcroft

HERE's a link to a blog post about this series and the media to-do surrounding it from one of my favorite celebrity-culture intervention blogs: "Gallery of the Absurd." [Christine, Celia, and Spencer showed a painting by the artist who runs this site in their wk 9 BP presentation on BRITNEY.]

and, via YouTube, HERE are the images in video form (with audio clips of the subjects themselves), as they were projected on the wall at The Kitchen, a NYC gallery/performance space.

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