Clones & She Wolves: Irigaray & the DISCOntinuum of female sexuality

Initially, while trying to make sense of Shakira’s “She Wolf” video, I hypothesized that this Shakira video was suggesting that straight white women’s sexuality is “closeted” – or, in more Irigarayan terms, what we understand to be “female sexuality” is not actually defined by women, but by normatively masculine structures and institutions; thus, a female-defined “female sexuality” is hidden behind normative masculinity and patriarchal institutions. As Irigaray argues in This Sex Which Is Not One, “the role of ‘femininity’ is prescribed by this masculine specula(riza)tion and corresponds scarcely at all to woman’s desire, which may be recovered in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt.” Women have yet to “come out” of the patriarchal closet. (I know this erases/marginalizes/trivializes lesbians, particularly the experience of actually “coming out”; this is likely a result of Irigaray’s heteronormativity, and, moreover, a huge problem for both Irigaray’s and “She Wolf’s” claim.) I think, as I will detail below, that “She Wolf” does suggest that straight white women’s sexuality is “closeted” in the manner that Irigaray describes. However, I think it is also worthwhile to think about “She Wolf” and its politics as part of a broader tradition of gay/queer/feminist disco. So, after analyzing “She Wolf,” I will discuss Cristina’s “Disco Clone.”

Here’s the Shakira video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aEW_Z5Va5s
So, “She Wolf.” First, that this is about straight women is pretty obvious: not only does Shakira’s character in the video sleep next to a male partner, the lyrics describe only heterosexual desires and encounters. The she-wolf possesses a “special radar” to “look at the single man,” and “ha[s] a very good time” while being “very bad in the arms of a boy.” The she-wolf who passes for a “woman” is also white, and the end of the video leaves no room for doubt about this: Shakira is blonde, in a white nightgown, and otherwise appearing quite innocent and non “whore”-like in an all-white room with all-white bedding. Her skin even looks paler in the muted lighting. Her partner is also white. Interestingly, the actual wolf that appears in the video transforms, briefly, into a black woman, thus further dis-identifying stereotypical white heterofemininity with “she-wolf” sexuality.

Upon entering her closet, Shakira’s character is transformed into a “she-wolf”; the closet itself turns into what looks to be a pink and uniquely sparkly uterus (or a uterus-like cave, about which Irigaray also has plenty to say). Perhaps the suggestion here is that female sexuality is trapped by “woman is a womb” stereotypes, or by the general subordination of sexuality to reproduction? The other main setting for the video is a guilded cage similar to those used to display large circus animals, reinforcing the “trapped in the closet” theme (srsly, the one thing this video lacks is a midget). The lyrics are the most strong indicator of the “closeting” theme. The song’s refrain is “There’s a she-wolf in your closet/let it out so it can breathe” (interesting choice of the non-gendered pronoun here…). The intro and the break also repeat the line “S.O.S. she’s in disguise,” thus suggesting some sort of closeting or passing. Traditional norms of straight white femininity alienate women from their “real” sexuality; these norms compel women to “disguise” their “inner she-wolves” behind ideas of passivity, innocence, and general subordination to men, male sexuality, and patriarchal social order.

In this light, I think it’s not a stretch to argue that Shakira’s dancing seems so jarringly awkward because her moves are not stereotypically “feminine” ones. Compared to norms for feminine bodily comportment (which would include things like grace, sensuality, seductiveness, come-hither-ness, etc.), Shakira’s dancing seems clumsy and bizarre. (The final “let it out so it can breathe” is delivered with a posture and hand gestures more appropriate to hyper-macho rap videos, like she’s gonna let loose a round rather than seduce somebody.) But that’s the point, right? She’s not acting out traditional female sexual roles, so of course we’re going to find this a bit…counterintuitive.

That this is a disco song (or, nouveau-disco in the Hercules & Love Affair tradition. If you have any doubts, listen to that bass, the hi-hat, and those disco strings at the end.) is not insignificant. Disco’s origins are closely tied to the origins of the gay rights movement (Peter Shapiro’s Turn the Beat Around discusses this at length). Disco was, in a very real sense, gay culture’s “coming out” into the mainstream.

Cristina’s 1980 “Disco Clone” makes the same sort of claim about female sexuality as Irigaray and “She Wolf,” but queers it a bit.

Here’s an informative blog post about “Disco Clone,” with a stream of a really early demo of the track: http://terrysmusicallife.blogspot.com/2007/03/cristina-disco-clone-prod-by-john-cale.html. You can find the album version on Cristina’s myspace page, http://www.myspace.com/dollinthebox .

The track is about “disco clones,” women mass-produced to meet men’s sexual desires (indeed, the 12” mix of the song is called “Ballad of Immortal Manufacture”). Cristina sings, to Kevin Kline’s lecherous narrator, “If you like the way I shake it, and you think you want to make it/There’s 50 just like me oh-ho/Now nobody has to spend the night alone.” The male narrator sets the terms of the sexual encounter: “I like the way you,” he says, “Do you?” she confirms; “I think I’d like to,” he says, “Would you?” she responds; “I think that I could,” he suggests, “Could you?!” she exclaims.

So, while the song details a patriarchal heterosexual encounter, it does queer things a bit insofar as disco floors were often populated, at the time, with “clones.” The “clone” was a specific sort of gay masculinity that was quite popular in the disco era. The Village Person with the hardhat, workboots, plaid workshirt, jeans, and mustache pretty much typifies the clone aesthetic. (See “clone” in the Gay Slang Dictionary: http://www.odps.org/glossword/index.php?a=term&d=8&t=3048 ). So, while the song defines the “Disco Clone” as a stereotypically feminine woman, the more common usage of the term indicates a particular style of gay masculinity. So does the song’s elision of stereotypical hetero-femininity with a common gay stereotype work because both groups are sexually “closeted”? Does disco evoke the idea/experience of “coming out”?

"Neckties" vs. "Warlords": Yeezy and HOVA's contesting masculinities

So, in my earlier post about Jay-Z's DOA, I argued that he was defending a more traditional ghetto-hetero-black masculinity against Kanye's Autotuned insurgency into hip-hop and its canon of "proper" masculinities. Kanye's LMFAO "Paranoid" remix (Youtube below) makes it clear that Yeezy and HOVA are having an extended debate about the boundaries of hip-hop masculinity.* What we have here is what political theorist Cynthia Enloe would describe as a contest between "neckties" (institutionally-sanctioned bourgeois white-collar masculinity) and "warlords" (working-class, often overtly violent).** In her article "Updating the Gendered Empire: Where are the women in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq?", Enloe identifies Hamed Karzai as a "necktie" who is dukeing it out with various Afghan warlords; at stake is not just political power and political/literal capital, but what counts as "proper" Afghani masculinity. Similarly, the 2008 US presidential election can be read as a contest between "neckties" (Obama) and "warlords" (Joe the Plumber, pit bulls in lipstick). The same debate has now reached mainstream American hip-hop: Kanye is a necktie, and Jay-Z is a warlord.

The following analysis assumes my previous posts on this topic, so for further explanation, look at the older posts.

In the "Paranoid" remix, West takes up DOA's equation of "skinny jeans" and commercial success, and argues, via a Jamie Fox reference, as follows: "They said that drum machines ain't got no soul...Yeah my jeans is tight, and my hos is white/and they play my song in the club every night...Blame it on the blues/but don't blame it on the au-au-au-au-au-Autotune". All this is rapped over a nu-rave mix.

So West is articulating a masculinity that views technology as neither alienating (soulless) nor feminizing (tight jeans do not prevent one from snagging what might - albeit in a totally racist way - be seen as the most desirable women), but as a source of power and success. Technology (specifically Autotune, but also Roland's lineup of synths) is nothing to be "paranoid" about. It is as though West poses the refrain's question "Why are you so paranoid?" directly to DOA's MC (i.e., Jay-Z): Why are you so paranoid about Autotune, anyway?

West would like us to know that he is Mr. Mainstream And Ubiquitous. Insofar as whiteness is the ubiquitious norm (cf Richard Dyer), does this line tie into West's identifications with whiteness in "Swagga Like Us"? While DOA decries market success as a symptom of feminized inauthenticity, West dominates the marketplace, and he wants us to know it. As any "necktie" technocrat knows, computers and market share/appeal are quite compatible with heteromasculinity and even machismo. In addition to his realignment of technology and commodification with masculinity, West also plays around with and attempts to disarm other "rockist" attitudes Jay-Z espouses in DOA. Now, on the one hand, the claim "drum machines ain't got no soul" could be a version of the standard and cliched notion that the use of synthesizers indicates (a) an inability to play 'real' instruments and/or (b) lack of "real" emotional or intellectual depth. On the other, and perhaps more interesting, hand, the claim could be positing that drum machines aren't "black," or at least not part of the African-American musical tradition (soul:African-American music::soul food: African-American culinary tradition). This seems like a really odd claim to make, given the role of the 808 in the origin of hip-hop, and the 303 and the 909 in house and techno (which were also invented by black men). West argues for the continuity between 808s/Autotune and more canonical forms of African-American music by referencing the Bessie Smith's "Blame it on the Blues". Although his music might not sound like stereotypically "black" music, just as his black masculinity might not fit the gangsta-thug "warlord" image all too common in mainstream hip hop, West tries to re-shape our tired and reified notions of what black music and black masculinity are (he is likely not without an agenda here...more on this in a later post).

HOVA represents (in both the active and passive voice sense of the verb) a more traditional hip-hop hypermasculinity: baggy pants, macho toughness, overt concern with heterosexuality, ghetto/working-class (see my previous DOA post). West represents a newer, decidedly middle-class black masculinity who fetishizes a different category of commodities as a means to articulate this identity (Marc Jacobs and Jil Sander rather than Maybachs and the Yankees). In the end, it seems that the conflict between these two masculinities really is one of class. West performs a more "refined," intellectualized masculinity highly concerned with aesthetic taste, whereas Jay-Z performs a rougher, grittier, streetwise masculinity highly concerned with authenticity.

West's attempts to articulate a more mainstream, indeed bourgeois black masculinity take place in a media landscape dominated by another skinny, intellectual, technology-addicted middle-class black man (Obama, duh). I could be wrong, but maybe we're finally getting a critical mass of images of black men that don't conform to the "gangsta" or "thug" images that have dominated US media and driven record sales for the last two decades? In other words, might white Americans be finally realizing the shocking fact that not all black people are the same? I'm probably being too optimistic here.


*

** http://books.google.com/books?id=X-qc4j8_ZfkC&pg=PA268&lpg=PA268&dq=enloe+updating+gendered+empire&source=bl&ots=S2ZwVYM6oW&sig=S0P_xfRl_LR79ZAXK4tbvxUu7AU&hl=en&ei=o8mlSsXfFcGFtgf8nunaDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=enloe%20updating%20gendered%20empire&f=false

Pop and the New Millenium Music Critic

In his P2K essay, Tom Ewing argues that, in the last decade, pop finally became something that serious people (music critics, academics) took seriously. This is not so much attributable to some change or set of changes in “pop” itself, but mainly to the fact that “serious” people started looking for things in pop that they already considered “serious” (things that had always been there, and that some “serious” people had been writing about for decades). What Ewing’s analysis demonstrates (without overtly naming it) is that people started looking for “masculinity” in pop.

People stopped assuming that “the pleasure of pop is surrender” (Ewing, 2) – feminine passivitiy, the experience of feminization. Instead, new millennium pop critics took the position that “what made the tracks important wasn’t how they made you feel, but the innovative tricks creators used to get those effects” (Ewing, 2). Pop was no longer considered a feminized domain, a genre that spoke only of and to stereotypically feminized phenomena like “feelings”. For these new millennium critics, what made pop interesting was its whiz-bang techno-geek factor. Critics took up tracks as collections of neat studio tricks and clever samples. In the same way that “feelings” are feminized, techie-geekdom is (hetero)masculinized: emotions are for girls, but knob (or mouse) twiddling is for boys. Music critics have always tended to look for (and praise) masculinity. This is why they had previously trivialized pop – the found only femininity and feminization in it. However, now that pop had the techie-geek factor, they saw masculinity in it. Once pop becomes properly masculine, it gets positive attention from critics.

It hardly needs to be noted that most of the people behind mixing boards, running ProTools or Ableton, and otherwise producing records, are men. So, shifting the object of pop criticism from content (“feelings”) to production also shifts critical focus from the performer to the producer. Ewing acknowledges as much: “There wasn't always much room for the performer in all this praise-- instead more and more attention went to the production teams…even if they'd never made records of their own, these men would be critical heroes of the 00s” (Ewing, 2). He uses the gendered term “men” to describe a list of producers he had just listed: the Neptunes, Timbaland, Max Martin, etc. Ewing does not seem to recognize the gender politics of his claim here. All these producers are, indeed, men. The performers they were producing, however, either women (Spears, Aguilera) or boy bands whose music targeted a female audience. In focusing their attention on producers, new millennium pop critics are framing pop as a discourse made by men, and pop criticism as a discourse of men writing about men.

In the new millennium, pop suddenly became a masculine enterprise, an appropriate topic of attention and praise for the decidedly “boy’s” club of popular music criticism. It’s not so much that pop changed – pop always changes – but that critics changed the way they viewed and understood pop. Pop was no longer a void of femininity and feminization; there was something “serious” (masculinity) there for “serious” people (men). Focusing on (male) producers and stereotypically masculine techie-geek aesthetics, new millennium pop critics could now take pop seriously because they finally found something “interesting” and “important” in it.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the new millennium (2001, to be precise) also included the publication of Susan Cook’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what you mean to me: Feminist Musicology and the Abject Popular” in Women and Music.

Here's a link to the Ewing article: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7703-the-decade-in-pop/2/