"Why do we keep falling in love with cyborgs?" -- Interestign poste by Newitz over on i09

Annalee Newitz has posted a piece over on i09 about why we humans love (both Biblically and Platonically) cyborgs. Here's the link:

http://io9.com/5648537/why-do-we-keep-falling-in-love-with-cyborgs



Most of it is really good. I particularly appreciate her complication of the "natural human" vs. "synthetic cyborg" binary:

This is sure to be an issue in the upcoming Tron: Legacy. Characters from the 1980s film Tron, like hacker Kevin Flynn, have been living in the digital world for decades and creating pieces of software like Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who feel and act like humans. What is the difference between Flynn fabricating Quorra out of software, and fabricating his biological child Sam the old-fashioned way? Given that Quorra is treated like Flynn's daughter in the forthcoming film, the Tron series suggests the difference is moot.

We are all human-made -- some of us in a lab or a mainframe, some of us in a uterus.

The one thing that is missing from Newitz's account is power--or rather, power imbalances. Good gender theorists know that sexuality and kinship relations are always crossed by power relations (gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality, etc. etc.). Other than a brief nod to the "exoticization" of cyborgs in the very beginning, the piece really doesn't consider the power dynamics between humans and cyborgs (or among humans and among cyborgs).

But, I encourage you to read the piece :)

This robot is SO not a dick in drag, Part 3: Lady Gaga

So, Madonna chooses humanism, whereas Beyonce chooses Afrofuturist posthumanism. In this post, I’ll discuss Gaga’s post-goth sometimes posthuman-ism.

Gaga chooses the robot, sometimes. For example, in this David LaChapelle photo, her "Paparazzi” costume clearly references Lang’s robo-Maria (note too the city and the Derrigible!).



All the adult humans are dead, and the sole survivors are robo-Gaga and, if you look at the bottom center of the photo, a baby (its arms are raised and eyes seem to be open, so it at least appears to be alive). So, perhaps here we have a posthumanism that does not oppose itself to reproductive futurity.

On the other hand, nobody survives Gaga’s food-borne massacre in her Telephone video.



Interestingly, as geeksugar has noted, the deadly recipe refers to three separate scifi universes: Meta-Cyanide is from Dune, Fex-M# is from Star Wars, and Tiberium is from Command & Conquer.* These scifi references approach, in some ways, the posthuman (e.g., Darth Vader), but they are not direct appropriations of it, as we find in Beyonce. There are plenty of queer and gender non-conforming bodies in Telephone, and the lyrical content of the song is a woman’s refusal to hail the call of the patriarchal ideological apparatus. However, Telephone is not itself very posthuman. In fact, the most posthuman thing about it is Beyonce—specifically, those herky-jerky shots of her in yelling at the phone while wearing a king-of-pop jacket. Telephone doesn’t connect posthumanism to a critique of reproductive futurity.

As in Telephone, Paparazzi’s posthumanism is the effect of Gaga’s rejection of patriarchy (i.e., her refusal to be killed by her boyfriend). [The prequel to Telephone, Gaga’s revenge-killing of her misogynist boyfriend is the reason she finds herself in jail, waiting to be sprung by Bey. Which is also worth considering—in the Paparazzi/Telephone duo, patriarchy tries to kill Gaga, but a posthuman black woman saves her.] In the beginning of the video, Gaga’s bf throws her off a balcony. As a result of her injuries, at 3:17, she returns in the form of a chrome Maria-robot on crutches.



The Maria-effect also appears in the dress she wears in her mug shot, around 6:50. This video is the one instance where Gaga definitively chooses the robot as such, and the robot appears when hetero love ends in (attempted) murder. However, it is also an instance where people of color are portrayed only as household servants (not, as in her collaborations with Bey, as partners).

Bad Romance also has its posthuman moments: there’re the quasi-Cremaster white vinyl monster costumes, the anime-eyes, the McQueen insect suit, and, of course, the steampunk fembot bra. The song’s lyrical content is about a bad romance, an unsuccessful one, one without a future. So there is a sort of posthumanism here, but it’s more goth than Afrofuturist. We have monsters, insects, coffins, death, destruction, and decay. I’m sure someone has already written about this, but I wonder if certain types/styles of goth can be thought of as a sort of white posthumanism?

Perhaps the most posthuman thing about Gaga is her LED-rific “disco stick.” It’s a glowing baton that is effectively Gaga’s phallus. That “disco stick” = phallic is made clear by the lyrics of “Lovegame,” where Gaga refers to a man’s genitals as his “disco stick.” There were also once rumors that Gaga herself was intersex/a transwoman. However, it is clear that Gaga’s “disco stick” is a lit-up prosthesis that looks a lot like a drum major’s baton.



What is interesting here, of course, is that the most posthuman thing about Gaga is her phallus—her instrument of quasi-patriarchal power. So, while Madonna pretty much adopts white patriarchy and becomes, as bell hooks argues, a “dick in drag,” and while Beyonce offers an Afrofuturist feminist critique of white patriarchy, Gaga offers us a sort of “monstrously” deformed white patriarchy. What Gaga gives us is not something that white patriarchy would recognize or own, but neither is it a full-throated critique of it. Gaga is neither a “dick in drag” nor a robot—she’s a disco stick, a monstrous deformation of both the dick and the robot.

So, ultimately, I’m proposing that we consider Gaga’s post-goth “monstrosity” as a sort of intermediary between hetero-patriarchal humanism and Afrofuturist posthumanism. I certainly need to think more thoroughly and more carefully about the precise nature of Gaga’s relation to goth, and about goth’s relation to the post-/in-human and to the monstrous qua queer/non-white Other. However, I do think that framing Gaga’s work in terms of post-goth “monstrosity” is really helpful in situating her both politically and aesthetically.


* http://www.geeksugar.com/Tech-Spotting-Lady-Gagas-Telephone-Video-Gives-Shout-out-Dune-Star-Wars-7720513

Robots, Cyborgs, and the Master/Slave Dialectic

So over on his blog, my partner Christian, who is an artist, has been thinking about the difference between the practice of robot-making and the practice of making cyborg prosthetic devices. Here's the link to his post, but I"ll reproduce it, and my comment (plus some additional thoughts) below:

http://stardotstudio.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-research-part-2-case-against-robots.html?showComment=1284682432250

Here's Christian's post:

like I said in my previous post, I've been thinking about robotics as a production model for new ideas on cyborg prostheses, bodies, auto-mechanical instruments, etc. I've also been thinking about robots theoretically, and how they may be conceptually in opposition to the cyborg.

I first started to problematize robots back in November 2009 after watching the Vanguard documentary Remote Control War - exploring the current trends in military robotic technology. this led me to think about robots as this tool, these bodies of military + industrial capability. recently I came back to this idea, wondering how to locate the robot in terms of systems of power. the origins for the term robot is Czech - robota - meaning labor and work, but with the implications of serf, or slave, labor. Hegel's master-slave dialectic would tell us that robots are these things that mediate labor and further distance the operator from the body. these robotic drones are operated by soldiers trained on video game systems, and the violence of war, the violence of the body, is abstracted and removed from the operator's embodied experience. watching Iron Man 2 last night, Robin made the comment that war doesn't really exist without killing - and I began to imagine scenarios where two opposing sides enter armed conflict against each other. instead of human soldiers, the fighting takes place between armed drones and killer robots. I've heard the argument that this future of war is preferable, because there's no loss of life. but, when capitalism produces an endless supply of robotic soldiers, there's nothing at stake, and the war could never end.

of course cyborgs are also a product of capitalism and the military, but rather than using technology to further remove and mediate the body's experience, I wonder if the cyborg's use of technology allows for creatively exploring new possibilities of embodiment. in other words, the cyborgian body opens up possibilities for hyper-abilities, while the robot immediately disallows any exploration and creative use of the body.

so I'm wondering how to negotiate this position in the studio and when navigating an art community (esp. new media) that seems to value (I won't quite say fetishize) the robot-as-art-(maker.) on one hand, I'm enthusiastic and actually really like folks like Eric Singer + LEMUR, and there's no doubt any of the hackers making graffiti-bots have any military or capitalist intentions. I'm also the last person to have any vested agendas in any sort of artist's-hand-gestural-mark-making-purity; that kind of old-and-new sincerity snake oil doesn't have any currency in my studio. No - I'm wondering if there's something to be hacked and subverted from robotics, applying to the body in order to instigate creative ideas outside a tired man/machine dichotomy.

Here's my response:
Can I try to flesh out the Hegel reference in a way that (I think) clarifies that you're not striving for greater bodily immediacy or receptivity, but rather, the actual ability to work on/change one's body.

So, you say that robots, as the slaves, allow us, as the masters, to stay at a greater "distance" from our body. I think it's not the distance that's the problem, but the stasis (and apparent fixity, inherency, etc.). Here's why:

So, OK, Hegelian dialectic: imagine one term as static "being," one term as empty "nothingness," and the point of the dialectic as putting being and nothingness into some sort of motion and creating becoming (or transcendence of one's present state, or change, however you want to think of it). In the Master/Slave dialectic, the Master is being, and the Slave is nothingess. The Slave works on the world--literally evacuates his labor into the objects he makes, and thus is nothing--to produce objects that the Master then consumes and enjoys. The Master never has any contact with the world, never works on the world, never faces any problems that he then has to be creative and solve. Because the Master never changes (never has new ideas, never transforms/is transformed by the world), he is being. It's the Slave who actually experiences any and all change, development, or, you guessed it, becomming.

So, what I think you want to argue is that robots create a Master/Slave relationship: We're the static Masters who never transcend/create/etc., and the robots are the slaves (who also experience, according to Hegel, an imperfect becoming...that's why the M/S dialectic is only about 2/3 of the way through the Phenomenology of Spirit). Real, actual becoming happens when the M/S dichotomy is broken down, i.e., when we work on and are worked on by things, when we're both subjects and objects.

So, I think what you are arguing is that the cyborg can be (I don't think you want to say it necessarily is, just that it can be) a way out of the Master/Slave dialectic.

...And here are some further thoughts:

a) I think we need to be very concerned not to re-romanticize wholeness or lack of alienation (as, say, Marx does). I think we can avoid this by focusing on the Beauvoiran ambiguity that the M/S dialectic suggests: we practice "transcendence" only by being both subjects and objects.

b)Robot logic depends on dehumanization/oppression (i.e., the robot is not me, it is Other, it is merely a means/merely an object), but cyborg logic relies on the trans- or post-humanization of the self. So, in robot logic, somebody stays "human" and thus priviliged, whereas in cyborg logic, the "human" itself is de-centered.

c) Robot logic masks the way that capital and labor produce the producer, whereas cyborg logic makes this very transparent.

Other thoughts?

This Right Here Is My Swag:

In other words, the cover for my book! I'm super-happy with the design.

"The Conjectural Body:Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music" excerpt WITH lyrics

My book, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music, is being released this month by Rowman & Littlefield. Due to some permissions issues, I was not allowed to print lyrics to “Swagga Like Us” in the book. While I reworked this specific part of Chapter 5 (p. 141 to be exact) so that I could make my argument without citing specific lines from the song, I do think a close reading of the lyrics makes my case stronger and more clear. To that end, here is the first full paragraph of p. 141, complete with citations:

Jay-Z’s 2009 track “DOA (Death of Autotune)” overtly takes music to be a form of bodily comportment and assesses the use of Autotune as a mode or style of bodily comportment (and not as a musical phenomenon).21 Specifically, Jay argues that Autotune is to be rejected because it is soft, easy, popular, and non-confrontational, whereas “real” hip hop is hard, violent, and masculine. Gendered language and imagery abound in DOA. Feminized terms (Autotune, melody, tight pants) are contrasted with masculinized terms (violence, male anatomy, "hardness" as bodily comportment and "hardness" as in un-melodic difficult listening). Autotune is consistently feminized throughout the track, and is set in contrast to Jay's macho sound and stylings. Jay characterizes users of Autotune as both dressing and sounding like women, as though Autotune itself engendered feminine bodily comportment. According to Jay, users of Autotune dress and sound like women because they lack male genitals (thus, no need to tuck, and no deep voice). In a not-too-thinly veiled dig at Kanye West (who wears tight jeans and neon colors), Jay states: "You boys’ jeans too tight, your colors too bright, your voice too light." This line calls on Jay's opening line in his appearance on TI’s "Swagga Like Us," where he also contrasts himself to a feminized (indeed, gonad-less), tight-jeans wearing Kanye. Unlike Kanye, Jay "can't wear skinny jeans 'cause my knots don't fit."22 The use of Autotune is evidence of, as Jay argues, "your lack of aggression/ Pull your skirt down/ grow a set, man." Jay is equating Autotune with the lack of "balls" in both the literal and metaphorical senses. To use Autotune is to be soft, easy, light, and trendy; it is the opposite of masculine aggression, toughness, difficulty, virtuosity, and expertise. Thus, sounding something like an uncanny latter-day Adorno, Jay feminizes commercially successful pop music by opposing it to "hard" masculine/macho corporeal styles. His new track "ain't a #1 record/ It's practically assault with a deadly weapon." So we can infer from this claim that chart-topping popular music is "easy" in a number of senses: easy to digest, easy to listen to, easy to make, etc. As such, these #1 records aren't properly masculine—they need to "grow a set" and become a little more difficult to make and digest. Jay’s consistent devaluation of femininity and, indeed, a feminized popular music, is thoroughly problematic. However, DOA remains interesting because it takes aesthetics as a matter of bodily comportment and evaluates musical practices as forms of gendered embodiment. It is an instance of aesthetics as “applied physiology.”

I’ve also discussed this song on in a previous blog post, where I’ve also linked to/embedded the tracks.
See: http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2009/09/skinny-jeans-commercial-success-yeezy.html#comments

And: http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2009/06/death-of-autotune-or-massive.html

And, uh, here’s the link to my book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Conjectural-Body-Gender-Philosophy-Music/dp/0739139029/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

This robot is SO not a dick in drag part 2: Beyonce

So, when Madonna is presented with the choice “human or posthuman”?, she clearly chooses humanism (and reproductive futurity). Beyonce, on the other hand, always chooses the posthuman (and a futurity that is not necessarily “reproductive” in the way hetero-whiteness wants it to be). I’ve written extensively about Beyonce’s posthumanism, both here on this blog and in academic journals, so I’ll just provide some links rather than re-hash what I’ve already said.

http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2009/05/single-ladies-is-not-about-bling-and.html

http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2009/12/beyoncegaga-dear-dr-mulvey-video-is-not.html

http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2009/06/george-michael-fucks-gender-wonders-if.html

My article in the Journal of Popular music studies, “Robo Diva R&B”: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00171.x/pdf


“To the LEFT!”

What is particularly interesting about Beyonce is that most her songs can be read literally and figuratively. In the “literal” reading, she seems to be reaffirming white heteropatriarchy, but in the “figurative” reading she’s subverting it. So, while the literal reading is somewhat reactionary, the figurative reading is “to the left” of that. Take, for example, “Irreplaceable”: while the vocal delivery makes it seem like a standard weepy woman is mourning the loss of her lover, the lyrics reveal that the opposite is in fact true, that dude is totally replaceable. What I particularly love about this track is how its intro references none other than industrial band Nitzer Ebb’s “Violent Playground.” Note how both songs command us “to the LEFT, to the LEFT!”:





Though the aesthetics of these songs are quite divergent, they both use (rhythm) synthesizers to lay out their respective rhythmic foundations. Also, the drum pattern in “Irreplaceable” is not too far off the canonical “Amen Break.” Note too that the narrative climax of “Irreplaceable” has Bey as the frontwoman of a rock band. Finally, if “Violent Playground” is about hypermasculinity (“We are the boys/we are the big boys”), “Irreplaceable” lets those boys know that they aren’t all that. SOOO, what we have in “Irreplaceable” is Beyonce in dialogue with industrial (via N.E.) and techno/jungle (via the quasi-Amen Break), singing a song about her rejection of patriarchal norms about female sexuality (e.g., she should “stand by her man,” that a woman shouldn’t have too many sexual partners, etc.). Technology + rejection of white heteropatriarchy = part of Bey’s Afrofuturist posthumanism.

More interesting in this regard is her song “Radio”. While “Irreplaceable” shows that men let Bey down, “Radio” lets us know that the radio is the real object of her affection, b/c it “never lets [her] down”. Take a listen:



It’s also worth looking at her live performance of the song, where dancers are dressed as robots and she’s wearing some sort of robo-Wonder-Woman costume:


Anyway, the lyrics of the song basically say that Bey loves to take advantage of the fact that bass-heavy records, when played in a car with an adequate sub woofer, function more or less like vibrators.

When I get into my car, I turn it up
And I hear vibrations all up in my trunk
And the bassline be rattlin through my seat
And that crazy feelin starts happening

Beyonce not only chooses the robot, she screws the robot. So, in this song, Bey argues that white heteropatriarchy always lets women—especially women of color—down. Technology—cars, stereos, the radio, dance records, synths, drum machines, etc.—never lets her down. This is consistent with my reading in the “Robo-Diva” article, where I argue that Beyonce uses Afrofuturist feminism to reclaim/revalue black female sexuality. This tactic is also used by Kelis, whose “Acapella” video shows Afrofuturist posthumanism as a context in which black motherhood is valued (while, obviously, in humanism it is devalued—see, for example, Moynihan report, “welfare mothers,” “anchor babies” etc.). I’ve written a previous post about the Kelis video, which you can find by searching her name up in the top left corner of this page.
How is this Afrofuturist posthumanism queer, then? Lee Edelman identifies queerness as the ““perpetual repetition” (10) that is “secreted” by the idea of sexual reproduction. “Queerness…empty, excessive, and irreducible, it designates the letter, the formal element, the lifeless machinery responsible for animating the ‘spirit’ of futurity” (Edelman 27; emphasis added). Similarly, black musicologists have argued that Western musics “secret” the work/role of repetition: as Tricia Rose explains, James “Snead claims that European culture ‘secrets’ repetition, categorizing it as progression or regression, assigning accumulation and growth or stagnation to motion, whereas black cultures highlight the observance of repetition, perceiving it as circulation, equilibrium…: ‘In European culture, repetition must be seen to be not just circulation and flow, but accumulation and growth. In black culture, the thing is there for you to pick up when you come back to get it” (Rose, Black Noise, 69). Afro-diasporic musical traditions privilege the very repetition—often machinic repetition, performed by synthesizers and/or samplers—that white Western heteropatriarchy attempts to disavow and devalue. In choosing the robot—lifeless machinery in perpetual repetition—one chooses queerness (at least in Edelman’s sense). Robots don’t reproduce, they replicate.

Beyonce’s friends are most certainly electric. She chooses—and indeed screws—the robot because she recognizes Afrofuturist posthumanism as an alternative to white heteropatriarchal humanism’s devaluation of black female sexuality.

Beyonce represents posthumanism, and Madonna, humanism. Between these two extremes is Lady Gaga, who sometimes chooses the posthuman. More on Gaga in the next installment in this series.

My first TV interview!(??!!)

So, the local cable news channel interviewed me today about the idea that listening to violent music can cause someone to murder cops:

http://charlotte.news14.com/content/top_stories/630138/trial-brings-up-debate-over-music-s-influence-on-behavior

The short version is: The idea that "the gangsta rap made me do it" rests on Plato's idea that art is an ethos (a habit) that encourages/trains one to perform certain behaviors. What Plato (and the "ethical regime of arts" broadly) lacks is: (1) the idea of fiction; and (2) the idea of free will. These two ideas help explain why it is that kids can watch, say, Toy Story, and not go away with the idea that their toys are alive.

"Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic," or, paging Jana Sterbak

So, Gaga's new cover for Vogue Japan is making the rounds on teh internets today:




Interestingly, nobody is mentioning that it's basically a take on Jana Sterbak's relatively famous and important piece of feminist art, "Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic," first performed in 1987.



Gaga's referencing of this piece is totally post-goth; feminist, at least in the way Sterbak's piece is...that I dunno...

Janel Monae vs. Shephard Fairey

As promised, here is an excerpt from a work in progress where I read Monae as critiquing Shephard Fairey's appropriation/use of images of radicalized non-Western women of color.


First, let's put some images in play.

They are, in this order: (1) The cover of Monae's single, "Cold War"; (2) The cover to Monae's single, "Tightrope"; (3) Fairey's "Commandata"; (4) Fairey's "Revolutionary Woman with Brush"; and (5) Fairey's "Mujer Fatal".












The cover art for Janel Monáe’s 2010 singles “Tightrope” and “Cold War” appropriate the aesthetic of Fairey’s images of radicalized non-Western women of color in a way that critiques rather than reinforces or reworks the logic of hipness. While Fairey presents others/Others in his own style, Monáe presents herself in the style of Fairey’s works. Monáe’s covers break with the logic of hipness because they adopt Fairey’s aesthetic choices, not his (or other white male hipsters’) perceived personal attributes or social identity. In so doing, Monáe demonstrates the racist and sexist assumptions behind his appropriations of exoticized, orientalized non-Western femininities of color.

Both covers share the street-art aesthetic and red, black, and white color scheme of much of Fairey’s work. Stencil- and spraypaint-like effects are used on both covers, and both appear to have been “distressed” (i.e., perceived “wear-and-tear” is built into the composition). “Cold War,” for obvious reasons, also makes use of his communist/constructivist styles (the red star, the sunburst as in “Revolutionary Woman with Brush”). Like the “Mujer Fatal” mural, the “Tightrope” single uses a background of repeated images of women. The main difference between Monáe’s covers and Fairey’s works is the power dynamics: Monáe’s works are a self-representation of an aesthetically and politically oppositional African-American woman, whereas Fairey’s pieces are the representation, by a multiply-privileged subject, of a multiply-marginalized object. In Monáe’s covers, she is both subject and object, while the radicalized non-Western women of color in Fairey’s works are just objects—or rather, instruments in Fairey’s self-representation. The “Cold War” cover addresses Fairey’s instrumentalization of women of color. Here, the horizontal red streak covering Monáe’s mouth suggests that the Commandata’s spray paint has put a gag on the singer. Fairey’s images of non-Western women of color silence and erase actual women of color, be they artists and/or activists. Thus, Fairey’s supposedly “peaceful” graffiti bombing is in fact a sort of “cold war.” The track’s lyrics suggest that, in a supposedly post-feminist and post-racial society where women and POC have “political” emancipation but lack “real, human” emancipation, the feminist, anti-racist struggle is now a cold war—i.e., a struggle fought indirectly, e.g., through coded language and/or the politics of representation. Cold wars proceed paradoxically: just as Americans and Soviets kept the peace by building stockpiles of weapons, white heteropatriarchy perpetuates misogyny, Eurocentrism, and normative whiteness by romanticizing and instrumentalizing non-Western femininities of color.

Monáe presents herself in the style of Fairey in a way that reveals his works’ silencing of women of color, and subsequent inclusion within, rather than opposition to, white heteropatriarchy. His works’ cultural capital (i.e., hipness) is the surplus value derived from the symbolic “work” performed by these images of non-Western women of color; thus, like all forms of hipness, Fairey’s appropriation of postmillennial black hipness does not break with, but participate in, hegemonic economies (of identity, of cultural value, etc.).

Janel Monae vs. Madonna/Beyonce/Gaga

So, commenter Andrew asked why I wasn't including Janel Monae in my series on Afrofuturism. There are a few reasons, including:

1. She's not a "pop diva"--i.e., she's a critical darling, yes, but she's neither a multiplatinum-selling nor an arena-filling household name. My mother certainly knows who Madonna is, and almost certainly knows Gaga and Beyonce (if only for the latter's film roles). Neither my mother nor Charlotte radio programmers know who Monae is.

2. She's not a pop musician--i.e., her music is mainly soul with a little bit of other flavors mixed in; it is not contemporary pop, and it is definitely not club music. Madonna, Beyonce, and Gaga all traffic in top-40 radio pop and club bangers. Moreover, Monae's work is obviously "smart", whereas the pop divas' work has two layers: the superficial, mainstream interpretation (e.g., "Single Ladies" is sung literally, a song about hetero monogamy), and the not-quite-so-superficial critical interpretation (e.g., "Single Ladies" is sung sarcastically, as a critique of the wedding industrial complex). Monae's works tend to lack that easy, mainstream interpretation; they're more overtly political.

3. This follows from the last point in #2 above: Monae's work lacks precisely the tension that I'm tracing in Madonna, Beyonce, and Gaga. Their works, I argue, all contain a moment where one has to choose between human-Maria and robot-Maria (to use the language of Lang's Metropolis). In Monae's ouevre, that matter is always-already settled.

4. Monae uses Afrofuturist imagery, but her music is actually not very Afrofuturist. Madonna, Bey, and Gaga all, at least at sometimes, call on an Afrofuturist musical aesthetic; they reference disco, house, techno, ringtone rap (just to name a few genres), and make use of Autotune and the Roland family of synths.

Hopefully those distinctions clarify why I'm leaving Monae out of this series. However, I will post an excerpt from a work-in-progress where I read Monae as critiquing visual artist Shephard Fairey.

I miss bell hooks, too.

You should check out Gina Ulysse's post in the Ms. Magazine blog, "Why I miss bell hooks".

A short excerpt:

"Where was the feminist response to this incident? I don’t doubt for a minute that Black feminists talked about it amongst ourselves. Fact is, we all know only too well there is always a high price to pay for offending white sensibilities. There’s never been a safe public place for our rage. These days, some of us take less risk since the backlash blows can be particularly brutal. This means more conversations with friends–reminders that we are not crazy. But we keep coming back to one question: Where is bell hooks? We miss her."

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/08/02/why-i-miss-bell-hooks/

"This robot is so not a 'dick in drag'", Entry 1: Madonna

Precisely because she extols the liberatory power of hetero sex, Madonna remains firmly within the humanism that Lee Edelman identifies as “reproductive futurism.” In spite of all the love she gets from 80s white feminists and from gay men, Madonna’s oeuvre consistently reaffirms the redemptive power of reproductive love. This theme is borne out even in her most controversial work. Take, for example, the “Like a Prayer” video. Burning crosses and black Jesus aside, the video’s narrative focuses on the mutual redemption of Madonna and the wrongly-accused stranger she exculpates. The music leads us to major-key gospel choir uplift, and the lyrics speak of the redemptive power of the child (“like a child, you whisper softly to me…when you call my name, it’s like a little prayer…in the midnight hour, I can feel your power…etc. etc. etc.). This song is all about the Child (capital “C”, which Edelman identifies as the sine qua non of heteronormative humanism). bell hooks couldn’t have been more right: Madonna is a “dick in drag,” a representative and enforcer of white heteropatriarchy.

Madonna’s humanism is most evident when her work deals explicitly with technology. I want to examine two such examples: (1) the “Express Yourself” video, which refers to and reworks Lang’s Metropolis, and (2) “Future Lovers,” which is based on what may be the first electronic dance track ever, Summer and Moroder’s “I Feel Love.”

First, “Express Yourself”:



The video is clearly a take on Lang’s Metropolis: the Deco Gotham-esque city, the “steampunk” factory scene, the eagle on which Madonna sits remind us of interwar Germany. Sure, there’s the “Manhole” homoeroticism in the dancers/factory workers, but this gayness (not, notably, queerness, b/c it’s still within binary gender) is appropriated by Madonna to prove her white heteropatriarchial cred. There’s Madonna, the pretty blond in the role of Maria, and the two scheming men in the roles of the Master and Freder. Once Madonna slips into “something more comfortable,” she performs a very stereotypical white hetero feminine sexuality. Sure, some may say it was “bold” at that time to see a white woman act like that, but Madonna had already been expressing her “shocking” sexuality for quite a while. Ultimately, up till 1:59 in the video we have nothing outside of binary, mainly hetero, gender.

At the 2:00 mark, Madonna drags things up a bit, appearing on the factory floor in a man’s suit and a butchy haircut. The choreographed crotch-grabbing and bicep-pumping reinforce her masculine identity, as does her position as the object of the (implicitly gay) workers’ gaze. In fact, a lot of the choreography (the crotch-grabbing and footwork that shows white socks with dark shoes) is reminiscent of Michael Jackson, the king of pop. This is the key moment that distinguishes Madonna’s take on Metropolis from Gaga’s and Beyonce’s. Where Madonna’s revolutionary action consists in transforming herself into a white man, Bey and Gaga transform themselves into robots (which, as I have argued elsewhere, are coded as black women).* Madonna’s blonde ambition is to accede to privilege and its trappings; her “insurrection” does not de-center any norms, but adopt them. By juxtaposing the hetero love scene with the workers’ uprising in the factory, the end of the video posits that heterosexuality—not, notably, either Madge in drag or factory man-on-factory-man sex—is salvational and redemptive. Here, then, by refusing the robot, Madonna reaffirms white heteropatriarchial humanism. As I will argue in subsequent posts in this series, Bey’s and Gaga’s choice to adopt the identity of Metropolis’s famous robot is a dis-identification with white heteropatriarchial humanism.


On to “Future Lovers,” as performed in Madonna’s Confessions tour:



First, despite all the supposedly shocking allusions to pony-play, this performance proves bell hooks’ take on Madonna continues to be correct. Notice that Madonna always remains in a position of dominance over the non-white, non-straight, or even somewhat kinky straight “people” represented by her dancers. The track’s humanism is much clearer when you compare its lyrics to those of the song it reworks, “I Feel Love.” So, “Future Lovers” is, like “Express Yourself,” about the redemptive power of (reproductive) love. Love is the future, even: “lovers shine in eternity/in a world that’s free.” The song even attempts to “warm up” the bare repetitiveness of Moroder’s original instrumentation by adding sustained chords over the synths and drum machines (Moroder does this only in the intro and the break, when there are no vocals). Summer’s “I Feel Love,” however, speaks of nothing but indulgence and sensuality: she says only “I fell love” and “It’s so good”. The love that Summer feels is ateleological and nonredemptive.

So, in spite of all her supposedly “radical” posturing, Madonna’s work consistently reinforces the redemptive power of hetero (reproductive) sex. She also reinforces humanist values by refusing to adopt posthuman identities, and by trying to “warm up” too-cold electro tracks.

Next, I’ll talk about Beyonce’s Afrofuturist posthumanism. This will mainly be a summary of the article cited below, with some further considerations of the queerness of Beyonce’s Afrofuturist posthumanism (which is the subject of an article I’m currently working on).

* See James, Robin, “Robo-Diva R&B” in The Journal of Popular Music Studies Volume 20, Issue 4, Pages 402–423.

Announcing a "series" of posts on Afrofuturism, queerness, and pop divas

I'm happy to announce that, over the next few weeks, I'll be writing a series of posts related to some research I've been doing this summer. The title of the series is:

This robot is so not a ‘dick in drag’: race, queerness, and the humanist or posthuman future in Madonna, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga

Here's a brief summary of the series:

In contrast to Madonna’s humanism, Beyonce and Lady Gaga offer us two different postmillennial posthumanisms. Beyonce’s is more or less textbook Afrofuturist cyborg feminist, and Gaga’s is more queer technogoth (or, postmillennial wannabe P.Orridge). While I think there are grounds for claiming that Beyonce’s approach is also (at least in some sense) queer, I am uncertain if Gaga’s dystopian futurism actually does much to de-center or “queer” whiteness.


I’m using Lee Edelman’s framework for thinking about “reproductive futurism” and queerness. I’ve discussed it before in this post:

http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/2010/03/joy-of-repetition-really-is-in-you-lee.html

You can also look here for more on Edelman: http://glq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/12/2/341.pdf (scroll down to the second review)

I'll be posting the Madonna section today, to be followed by Beyonce and then by Gaga.