Awesome review of white privilege in Avatar and other recent scifi

http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar"

This review, by Annalee Newitz of i09, is spot-on. I wish *I* wrote it.
Some of the highlights:

-- "Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege...When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything."
--> I take this to be the key claim in the review. Whites want to appropriate the experience of being non-white, but yet retain the privileges of whiteness. White people can never really "go native," b/c they can never, no matter how fervent or earnest their wishes, fully renounce white privilege. They will always be seen - and thus treated - as white. Importantly, because of their whiteness, white people can "get away" with the very same things that are cited as reasons for the inferiority/pathologization/continued marginalization of people of color. For example, white women as heads of household is seen as a sign of women's liberation, whereas black female heads of household are seen as evidence of pathological family structures in black communities.

-- "These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside."
--> So the problem here is that whites still assume privilege in their new "native" role - they assume they'll be the leader, they'll be the ones to "liberate" these poor natives, and that the natives can't liberate themselves without the advanced knowledge/values/technology of white/Western/human civilization. In other words, whites assume they'll be treated like the Ewoks treat C-3PO, not as they treat Han and Luke.

-- "...we'll need to stop thinking that white people are the most "relatable" characters in stories."
--> The problem here is, obviously, that the movie business assumes a normatively white, male, straight, generally bourgeois audience. More problematically, it assumes that people can't or won't identify with characters of lower social status - perhaps going even so far as to assume that minority audiences don't want to identify with underprivileged characters like them, but with privileged characters/ideal/normative characters. I agree with Newitz that, especially in scifi, privileged audiences should be asked to identify with aliens (esp. b/c there's no harm really begin done here - by asking people to identify with fictional groups/characters, you avoid problems like glossing over history, minstrelsy, etc.). Perhaps scifi should teach us how really super-hard it is to identify with beings whose experiences we don't share, how really super-wrong it is to try to assimilate their experiences to ours, how really super-problematic it is for whites to assume that we can colonize the knowledge and experience of non-whites. (PHIL 3227 people -- think about the Ang article here...Which, for all y'all not in the class, is Ien Ang's "I'm a feminist, but...").

"This is a song about faking orgasms!"

The title of this post comes from the introduction to the Au Pairs song "Come Again".

So, I've been thinking recently about Gaga's relationship to post-punk -- With all her homage to "The New York Scene," the connection isn't too hard to make. Musically she's much more Eurodance than strictly post-punk (not to say that Eurodance is unrelated to post-punk: Factory Records and acid house, anyone?), but her fashion sense is totally "no-wave" - it's all beauty = ugly = grotesque. MAC's "Viva la Glam" paired Gaga w/Cindy Lauper for a reason.

Gaga is all about the awkward, the monstrous, the uncomfortable -- which are all post-punk sentiments. It's about dancing in full recognition of your own discomfort with your own body, and your anxiety over your own discomfort with your own body. It's about being funky AND awkward. (There's something to be said about whiteness/white identity here, but I'll leave that for later.) It's not about romance, but BAD romances, aka "love like anthrax". Contort yourself!

That said, it's interesting to think about Gaga's "Poker Face" alongside the Au Pairs' "Come Again" -- they're both songs about women faking orgasms.

Au Pairs:


Gaga:


Other than the subject matter, I haven't really thought through relevant similarities or differences between the tracks. So, if you have any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.

Also, anyone know of other songs about women faking orgasms?

UNC Charlotte Ethics Bowl Team

Here's a video of UNC Charlotte vs. Univ. of Miami Team B in the Mid-Atlantic Ethics Bowl semifinals. Kathleen's presentation about research ethics and Javan's response to UM's Kantian environmental ethics are *excellent*!!




Students: Kathleen Lowenstein, Javan Lapp, Megan Norton, Lindsay Sprick, and Dafne Morales (not pictured - illness sidelined her). There's also a cameo of asst. coach Davis Kuykendall and the back of my head.

Beyonce/Gaga: Dear Dr. Mulvey, Video Is Not Narrative Cinema

Beyonce and Lady Gaga have a newish video out for their collaboration "Video Phone".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtIdxk2zqXs


The men in the video all have cameras for heads:



This might be seen as a literalization of Laura Mulvey's (in)famous article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Here, she argues that in mainstream narrative cinema the camera (and thus the spectators) adopt the "male gaze". Most commercial films frame "woman as image, [and] man as bearer of the look" (Mulvey). In these films, women are passive objects gazed upon by (hetero)masculine viewers.

"In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire" (Mulvey).

The "look" she holds is both that of the male characters in the film, and that of the camera -- which is, in turn, that of the audience. As Mulvey explains, "the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen." So, the camera's view is one and the same with the male gaze. D00ds = cameras.

But this is where the similarity with Mulvey ends...probably because videos (from video art, which was self-consciously NOT cinema, to music videos to MMS videos) are NOT narrative cinema.

First, neither the song "Video Phone" nor its music video make any attempts at musical or visual narrative continuity.* Musically, the song uses neither harmonic development (the most common form of narrative in music), nor rhythmic development to solidify its form. For obvious reasons, the backing track calls on the minimalist looping characteristic of "ringtone rap": short, high-pitched hooks looped over sparse drum-machined beats. Loops and hooks repeat, but they do not develop. Mulvey claims that eroticized images of women serve to interrupt narrative development in mainstream cinema: "The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation." However, if there's no development, then eroticized images of women can't serve to interrupt narrative progression.

In other words, eroticized images of female bodies can't fragment the video or be fragmented by its gaze because fragmentation is the name of the game. According to Mulvey, the male gaze cuts the female body down to its constitutent parts (legs, breasts, etc.). Women portrayed as body parts, not as whole beings capable of agency.** In this video, there are no fragmented body parts (except for a two second shot of Beyonce's torso at 4:48-0). There are, however, a ton of "chopped" images reminiscent of the visual effect of a strobe light in a dark room or, um, the visual effects of MDMA (ecstasy). Further, the vocalists' faces are always included in the shot, which indicates (especially if you're Levinas) that B and GG are "whole" or "full" people. They're not just here for our voyeruistic pleasure, they're here to *do* something. Indeed, the lyrics give us the sense that they're here for their pleasure -- and this is not a mere pleasure-in-being-looked-at, it's a pleasure in commanding one's image and others' respect for it and for oneself.

Beyonce & Gaga's bodies aren't some sort of regression or degredation because
THEY are the ones doing the looking. Even though it's the d00ds with the cameras as heads, to is these erotic female bodies and voices that are calling the shots in this video. The lyrics suggest that the cellphone video is a test suitors must pass to receive further attention from the female narrators: take me seriously enough to put a face to my name ("If it's gonna be you and me, when I call they better see me on your video phone"), and then I'll tell you what time of day it is. The chorus repeatedly asserts "I can handle you," and the video more than backs this up. From taking a man hostage (tying him up, blindfolding him) to placing him at the center of a target that both B and GG use for practice (~3:28), it is pretty clear that the women in this video are anything but passive objects of our scopophilia. Gaga's assertion "I'll put you in my movie if you think you can handle it" underscores the fact that the gaze is hers and Beyonce's.

In video - or at least this video - women are both image AND bearers of the look. So maybe this video is, in the end, a lot more bell hooks than Laura Mulvey.




*For more on narrative in music, see Susan McClary's 1991 "Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality".

** "One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen" (Mulvey).

p.s.: If anyone has figured out why the intro sequence looks and sounds like something out of a Tarantino film, let me know. I'm also still trying to work though the Bettie Page outfit...