What’s your take on Roman Zolanski? Misogynist? Genius?

Or

“Stupid Hoe” is not just stupid

I’m still thinking through all that’s going on in Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoe” single/video. It’s complicated. It’s REALLY complicated. I don’t think anyone can rigorously analyze the piece and give a uniformly, one-sidedly condemnatory or exculpatory account of it. Is it misogynist? Yes. Is it feminist? Yes. Like I said, it’s complicated. It resists easy resolution into a clearly-defined meaning that fits neatly into pre-made boxes like “misogynist” or “feminist”.

Many in the mainstream feminist blogosphere are chiding Minaj for being, in bell hooks’s terms, “a dick in drag,” i.e., a woman as patriarch. But this read overlooks and under-hears the song’s and video’s nuances. So, in this post, I just want to consider—not really come to conclusions about, just consider—some of these nuances. I want to open the work to further, more careful consideration. I’m not going to say it is either misogynist or feminist, because it’s both and neither.

What follows are three somewhat separate “Stupid Hoe”-related discussions: First, an analysis of the gender politics/discourses in the track. Second, an argument against those who say “Well and good, but this is a song for children, who won’t understand that nuanced analysis you just did. So, what about the children?” Third, just an initial, underdeveloped list of things to consider in the video

Gender Scrambling, or the Role of Roman

This song isn’t facile misogyny spit out of a brightly-lipsticked mouth because gender is completely scrambled. Because of this scrambling, it is unclear if “women” are actually the referent of “hoes.”

It’s not Nicki (or Onika) who is the rapper here: the MC here is Roman Zolanski, Nicki’s gay male twin sister. Yeah: gay male twin sister. Roman is a man, but he’s also Minaj’s sister. Maybe they’re “fraternal” twins, as they say? But Roman also looks pretty identical to Nicki. Regardless, Roman’s gender identity is not at all clear: he’s a male twin sister of a female MC. Roman may not even be cis-male (as Nicki’s twin sister, maybe Roman is her FTM twin?). He’s like Minaj’s “Sasha Fierce,” except he’s a dude, sorta. Roman is Minaj’s aggressive (AG, maybe?) side, so it is no surprise that Minaj would choose his voice for a diss track. But the underlying point here is that the MC voicing this track has a really complicated gender identity: he’s neither clearly male or female, cis or trans, etc. In “Roman’s Revenge” (which is a play on the old-school classic, “Roxanne’s Revenge,” one of the first tracks by a female MC), Roman says “I’m a bad bitch, I’m a cunt”—so it’s entirely possible Roman is the “stupid hoe,” or at least one of the stupid hoes.

Minaj repeats the line “these bitches is my sons.” So maybe words that are generally taken to refer to females are being used, in this track, to refer to men? If Roman is her “sister,” “hoes” could certainly refer to quote-unquote men.

“Stupid hoes” could be her way of calling out what used to be termed “Uncle Toms”—i.e., black men who play into white stereotypes, desires, ideas, etc. This is really clear in the couplet:

Look Bubbles, go back to your habitat, MJ gone and I ain’t havin that

How you gonna be the stunt double to the n*gga monkey?

“Bubbles” was Michael Jackson’s pet monkey, made famous in the Jeff Koons's sculpture of the pair. However, here the “n*igga monkey” is not Bubbles, but Jackson. So here Roman is dissing Michael Jackson, and probably other black men who similarly buy into whiteness/white ideals/etc. in an uncritical way. It could also be entirely possible that Roman is one of these “stupid hoes,” precisely because he engages in simplistic, gender-based dissing—which is a sort of stereotype of un-gender-reconstructed, “thuggish” or otherwise “primitive” black attitudes to gender that many, many white people and white hip hop audiences continue to assume and desire. So, if Roman is indeed one of these “stupid hoes” precisely for engaging in all-too-standard misogynist dissing, then the track actually critiques its superficial meaning.

So, what is clear is that gender is so scrambled in this track that the referent of “hoes” is not necessarily women, probably actually men, at least at times, and generally not assigned to one gender or another.

So we shouldn’t be so pedantic and literal about her word useage here. She’s playing with words, making them signify beyond their usual associations. For example, it is also in “Roman’s Revenge” where her repeated claims that she, or rather Roman, is “like a dungeon dragon” reminds us that Roman is a speculative MC, a fiction, and that we should not “mistake anti-social surrealism for social realism.” To be the “female Weezy” is, after all, to be a female alien, Martian, and above all, to not be a human being.[1]

“But what about the kids?”

This is always a response to my attempts to give nuanced readings of pop songs as art. People always say, “But the audience for this is/includes children, who won’t understand all the nuance you’re trying to read into this video. So, while it might not actually be misogynist/harmful/whatever, the kids won’t understand the critique embedded in the video and they’ll just receive the damaging, hegemonic version of it”.

This argument is so incredibly demeaning to both children and pop stars—who are often female pop stars. Here’s why:

1.     Kids are fans. They have the time and energy to accumulate detailed knowledge of an artist’s repertoire. They’re the ones who already know all the references, the interconnections among songs, etc. They spend a lot of time interpreting, re-interpreting, and reworking songs. Fans make their own video re-edits, for example. So don’t assume kids are just passive receptacles onto which ideology copies itself exactly, without disruption or resistance. Kids often fail to be perfectly interpellated.

2.     This is the more important argument against this critique: This critique demands that any musician who makes popular/commercial music make only the most simple, literal, easily understandable work they can. In other words, this critique demands that musicians not be artists, that they not use subtle references, irony, sarcasm, and other complex means of signification. It demands that artists directly, literally say what they mean—that art be direct, didactic expression. If we demand that pop/commercial music always be kid-safe, then we require artists in this genre to restrict their creativity to only the most simplistic, easily-interpretable forms. Interestingly, commercial pop is one of the few areas in Western culture generally where women have significant cultural and monetary capital—here, women are both aesthetically and commercially influential. This argument trivializes women’s aesthetic accomplishments, saying that this genre isn’t one where “real art” ought to happen, because it should be restricted “just” for quote-unquote “kids,” who are actually smarter than this argument presents them as being. SO, this argument demands that women limit their artistic abilities for the sake of some mythical ‘Child’”. It demands that one of the few areas in which women are creatively and commercially important limit itself, that it not be innovative, that women not be innovative. That’s actually deeply misogynist, if not in explicit intent then at least in implicit effect. Do we really want to say that this area of significant female accomplishment should not be considered/practiced as art, just because some children might be listening? We certainly don’t demand that Mozart, Wagner, or any other really racist, misogynist classical composer’s works be edited for children’s sake. SO why is it only women (often, women of color) who we seek to censor or limit in this way? Or, right, as in the pro-life movement, the objective isn’t saving children, it’s oppressing women, limiting their self-determination and their opportunities for self-advancement.

Some initial remarks on the video itself:

1.     Minaj is referenceing several female pop stars’ videos: Shakira (with the cage), Beyonce (with the dancers), Rihanna (with the Versailles-like background, as in “Umbrella”), and Katy Perry. There is perhaps a Gaga reference, too (the big Manga eyes).

2.     Is she appropriating Ganguro appropriations of perceived blackness/American-ness (e.g., around the 1:00 mark)?

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[1] When Minaj/Roman claims to be “The Female Weezy,” this complicates things even further. We have to think about her relationship to Lil Wayne, Young Money/Cash Money Crew, etc. In Y.U. Mad, Nicki, Weezy, and Birdman, who is more or less Weezy’s big brother/father-type figure, all appear in the same track, and Minaj is dressed as a blond Wayne. Here she really is the “female Weezy,” and, in this track, Birdman talks about beign a “stuntman,” which Roman then riffs on in “Stupid Hoe.” So Minaj is showing her filiation to both Weezy and Birdman, as Weezy’s older male family type figure. So the question we have to ask is: Is Weezy Nicki/Roman’s “twin brother,” in the same way that Roman is Nicki’s “twin sister”?

The Role of Music in Rousseau’s Non-Ideal Domination Contract--Or, why you should read my book

I’ve been reading Carole Pateman’s and Charles Mills’s Contract & Domination, prepping it to teach later this term in my graduate Feminist Theory class. Here, I want to talk about Mills’s discussion of the early, Discourses-era Rousseau, because I think the analysis of Rousseau’s early musical writings that I do in chapter 2 of The Conjectural Body helps explain how and why Rousseau arrived at this (non-ideal) version of the contract, and how and why he will later overlook it in The Social Contract.

Mills reads, as I do, two Rousseaus: an early, more politically radical one, and a later, more classically liberal one. Mills argues that the early Rousseau is the only instance, in classical contract theory, of a non-ideal theorization of contract as domination. He explains:

Rousseau’s famous contract is of course the second one, the agreement described in The Social Contract…in Rousseau’s earlier Discourse on Inequality, he also describes, albeit very briefly, a fraudulent contract imposed on the poor by the rich under the pretext of guaranteeing the rights of all. Thus he is the only theorist in the classical tradition to expressly use the contract idea to map and theorize injustice…It is clearly an exercise in non-ideal theory. (115).

What causes Rousseau to “see” and account for domination in his early writings, but gloss over them later on? As I argue in the book, when he’s thinking about politics alongside and through music, he pays attention to those non-ideal details that would lead one to conclude that the “state of nature” is neither natural, nor a “neutral” starting point free of inequality. When he stops thinking about music, and just theorizes about politics, he forgets his ties to non-ideal histories and materialities. So, the difference between non-ideal, domination-contract recognizing Rousseau and ideal-theorizing, domination-contract making Rousseau is music. His understanding of music is really deep, thorough, and careful. It is his rigorous understanding of the cultural specificity of musical practices—arrived at through his infamous and furiously heated debates with composer/theorist Jean-Phillipe Rameau—that forces him to recognize the fact that “nature” or “the original position” or whatever you want to call it is always-already structured by social values, assumptions, etc. He knows that in music, there is no neutral, universal starting-point.

Rousseau’s always fairly “ideal” about politics; it’s his understanding of music that is non-ideal. He only modifies his politics when he has music on the brain. Or, he’s a more responsible political theorist when he’s working on/through music. Because I’ve already made this argument in my book, I”ve decided to paste some selected passages—that you can and should read in context!—to give you all a preview of how and why music is so important for understanding Rousseau’s “non-ideal” domination contract. These are excerpts, so they’re somewhat disjointed.

(1): When thinking about music, Rousseau is aware of Eurocentrism, and tries to avoid it:

Rousseau asserts that

[i]f the major impact of our sensations upon us is not due to moral causes, then why are we so sensitive to impressions which are meaningless to barbarians? Why is music that moves us but an empty noise to the ear of a Carib? Are his nerves of a different nature from ours? Why are they not excited in the same way, or why do the same excitations affect some people so strongly and others hardly at all? (EOL, 289).

Interestingly—and perhaps even astonishingly given the Eurocentrism that pervades even this short quotation—Rousseau does not use the perceived inability of non-Europeans to fully appreciate European art music as music as evidence of their physical difference and justification for their subordination. Instead, he assumes that every human shares a relatively similar physiological composition, and that differences in sound perception arise from varying social norms and cultural contexts. Anatomically, at birth our ears are all more or less identical. However, insofar as these ears are trained to recognize specific sounds, timbres, and pitches as significant, each society produces radically different organs. For example, the European ear, cultivated to a system which divides the octave into twelve semitones, recognizes only twelve different pitches; the South Asian ear, however, shaped by ragas which utilize a variety of quartertones, hears perfect pitches where the European ear hears only out-of-tune squawking.¹⁷

(2) When talking about music, Rousseau recognizes that Europeans’ accounts of “the State of Nature” are really just insidious attempts to naturalize/normalize/universalize European cultural assumptions, values, etc. Or, Rousseau understands that what Europeans say is the “original position” is not at all “original,” but deeply structured by pre-existing discourses and relationships.

Making an observation that will not arise again until the 1920s with the Second Viennese School, Rousseau calls Rameau’s bluff: drawing on ancient Greek and non-Western musical conventions and practices, Rousseau demonstrates that Rameau’s theories are far more normative than they are simply descriptive. Noting Western music’s arbitrary privileging of certain pitches, or ways of identifying intervals and pitches, Rousseau argues that the “peculiar prerogative” given to the intervals which make up the major triad, their supposed “naturalness,” is “only a property of calculation” (ETP, 273), that is, a privilege which does not arise from nature, but from convention. Rousseau explains, “It is, therefore, neither because the sounds that make up the perfect chord resonate with the fundamental sound, nor because they correspond to the aliquots of the entire String,…that they have been exclusively chosen to make up the perfect chord” (ETP, 273). More simply, Western music theory privileges the octave, major third, and fifth not because they are “inherent” within or natural to frequencies we recognize as sound, but because these are the most obvious to us, given our methods and instruments of analysis and their predispositions and limitations. ..

Indeed, Rousseau’s strongest proof against the “naturalness” of Rameau’s system lies in the fact that the more famous theorist cannot account for other conventions like the minor mode (and its lowered third), the Neapolitan chord, voice leading, and various other widely used musical practices. As Rousseau notes, “I have spoken only of the Major Perfect Chord. What shall be done when one must show the generation of the Minor Mode, of the dissonance, and the rules of Modulation? I instantly lose sight of nature, arbitrariness riddles every part, the pleasure of the ear itself is the work of habit” (ETP, 274; emphasis mine). Juxtaposing the ear (a physiological organ) and habit, Rousseau explicitly claims that seemingly “natural” phenomena like hearing are necessarily educated by “habit,” convention, and culture.

To further explain his critique of Rameau’s naturalism, Rousseau turns to Rameau’s argument that every person has an innate sense of the octave, major third, and fifth, and can accurately recognize and produce them at will. “M. Rameau claims that an ignorant person will naturally intone the most perceptible fundamental sounds, as, for example, in the key of a do [the root] a sol [the fifth]” (ETP, 276). It is not so much the results of Rameau’s survey that Rousseau disputes, but his sample. Given Rameau’s Western European subjects, it is probably true that all had a relative sense of do-mi-sol intervallic relationships; even the most rural and poor populations were exposed to and educated by church hymns. Because people in Tokyo, Delhi, and Cairo practice music which does not necessarily utilize this system of harmony, the question remains: “What subjects has he used for this test?” (ETP, 276). Obviously, it is Parisians, or those from the province—that is, Westerners, “[p]eople who, without knowing music, have heard Harmony and Chords a hundred times, so that the impression of the harmonic intervals and the progression corresponding to the Parts in the most frequent passages had stayed in their ears, and were transmitted to their voices without even suspecting it” (ETP, 276). Even though many of us may be able to sing a sol-do interval like it was “second nature”—indeed, most without even knowing what a fifth-relationship even is—this vocal capacity is the culmination of significant, if informal, ear training. As we walk through town and hear the bells toll the hour, as we watch television and listen to an unending glut of advertisements, as we listen to music on our commute to work, as we wander through the grocery store, as we perform even the most mundane tasks of daily life, we are literally bombarded with examples of octaves, thirds, fifths, and chords consisting in their combinations. This “voice,” then, the voice of singing speech (and, notably, the voice that Derrida wrongly puts forth as Rousseau’s index and epitome of “pure presence”) which appears to be “innate” and “natural” to human beings, is in fact the coincidence of various cultural forces, habits, and conventions. Rousseau’s argument here is that music is not a natural phenomenon so much as it is a social product and cultural force. He explains, “[M]ere noise says nothing to the mind, objects have to speak in order to make themselves heard” (EOL, 288).

From a Rousseauian perspective, one could say that nature is not at all found in Rameau’s arguments, for this “nature” is theorizable only in hypothetical terms. What Rameau posits as a factual claim is in fact a moral claim—indeed, as I discussed above, one of Rousseau’s main objections to Rameau’s theory is that it is an inaccurate account of the physics of sound, an “ideal” that obfuscates empirical fact. Rousseau’s point in the Essay and the First Discourse is that it is impossible to make appeals to “nature” that are not already moral; this is why his histories are always emphatically conjectural. Rousseau’s claims about the always-already-social materiality of music set the groundwork for his—and my—notion of conjecture, which I develop in the later sections of this chapter. 

(3) Putting the musical writing in context of the Discourse on Inequality

Even though his first task in investigating the origin of inequality is to understand how humans were in the State of Nature, prior to socially instituted privilege and oppression, Rousseau repeatedly emphasizes that such understanding is impossible. He takes several different approaches to argue this point. First, he returns to a theme of the First Discourse: namely, the misleading and corrupting character of scientific knowledge. In attempting to gain objective, “scientific” evidence about the state of Nature, we actually further remove ourselves from it and, ironically, thwart our own aims. “[I]n a sense,” explains Rousseau, “it is by dint of studying man that we have made it impossible for us to know him” (D2, 124). This irony results from the fact that there is no neutral, objective, unbiased epistemic model with which to approach Nature, a claim which forms Rousseau’s second approach. All forms and means of knowing are possible because habitually-concretized filters allow us to make sense of the infinite data with which we are presented; these filters reflect the biases, presuppositions, limitations, strengths, and idiosyncrasies of their situation. Accordingly, Rousseau claims that there is no view from nowhere, but that “all the scientific books…only teach us to see men as they have made themselves” (D2, 127). Nature is unknowable because reflection upon this state returns our own image—one which we have sketched—to us. If we can never have certain knowledge of Nature, Rousseau acknowledges in his third approach to this problem, we can’t be sure that Nature is “real” and not, in fact, a figment of our imaginations. Nature is “a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist” (D2, 125; emphasis mine). Devoting the entirety of the preface to deconstructing his contemporaries’ claims about the state of Nature as one of originary purity and pure presence, Rousseau clearly believes that “nature” is at best a myth. This is why he offers the caveat that, regarding Nature, he “shall form vague and almost imaginary conjectures on this subject” (D2, 134; emphasis mine).

If nature is basically a retroactively constructed fiction used to explain and justify present conditions, then even if harmony is an empirical phenomenon, part of the physical world, it is not for that fact the origin of musical systems, nor is it useful as a normative or regulative standard (for the science of harmony, like any science, reflects the values of its creator and his or her society). It “only teach[es] us to see men as they have made themselves” (D2, 127). Studying harmony—i.e., the purely musical—tells us nothing about music, per se, but only about us, our society, and our socially constructed relations to and ideas about music.

Accordingly, when Rousseau states that “harmony, having its principle in nature, is the same for all Nations” (LFM, 144), he is not claiming harmony is in fact “natural” or universally uniform; rather, his point is that if harmony were in fact universal—governed by consistent laws of physics—and if music were in fact “natural” phenomenon, then every society would recognize the same frequencies, intervals, consonances, and dissonances. Even a quick foray into the work of Pythagoras will demonstrate that this is not, in fact, the case. “If there is a natural melody derived from harmony,” Rousseau argues,

it should be one for all men, since harmony, having its source in nature, is the same in all the countries of the world. But the songs and tunes of each nation have a character that belongs to them, because they all have an imitative melody derived from the accents of the language (ETP, 288).

Repeating his earlier point more succinctly, Rousseau illustrates that the “purely” musical is a fiction, for it is impossible to understand the particularity of music without taking into account its relationship with extra-musical phenomena, namely, words. Music does not exist as a “fact” of nature and the physics of sound, but as a production of a very specific set of social, political, environmental, and economic relations. Because it does not and cannot exist in some rarefied, “pure” form completely unadulterated by language and convention, any account of “harmony” that one might attempt to give is just as conjectural as the genealogy of language Rousseau recounts in the first part of the Essay.

(4) Look, and I even relate it to Mills and Non-Ideal Theory!

This notion of conjecture that I develop from Rousseau and, in the next chapter, from Julia Kristeva, contributes to a non-ideal account of nature and human embodiment. When we speak of the materiality, particularly when the physical materiality under question is the raced, gendered human body, our notion of the material must be robust and complex enough to account for all the social work that makes/has made it possible for us to even perceive what we take to be materiality as such; in Derridian terms, we need a notion of the material that accommodates and acknowledges the work of arche-writing. While racist, sexist, and classist ideologies might encourage abstraction away from the empirical fact of oppression, in order to construct an ideal-as-descriptive-model, there is, particularly in the case of nature/human embodiment, going to have to be a robust and not strictly empirical notion of the material that is being described. As Rousseau has demonstrated, there are some phenomena, such as nature or the body, that, in order “to start with an actual investigation of [phenomenon X’s] properties” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 167; emphasis mine), we are going to have to move somewhat away from the demonstrably actual and toward the ideal or idealizing. In acknowledging that “a simple empiricism will not work as a cognitive strategy” “one has to be self-conscious about the concepts that ‘spontaneously’ occur to one, since many of these concepts will not arise naturally but as the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 175). Mills does suggest that some concepts like nature or the body will need quite a bit of unpacking or genealogical deconstruction in order to be put to effective feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist use. Mills does not, however, inquire further into this claim; this is what my notion of conjecture does. Rather than “abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 170), my theory of the conjectural body attends to precisely these realities by describing how the material and the social interact to produce empirical actualities that themselves normalize status-quo relations of privilege and power—put simply, to how “nature” and “culture” interact to produce “real stuff” that normalizes social hierarchies. Rousseau’s early musical writings are a productive place to begin thinking about a historicized, non-ideal account of embodiment because, as I have shown, his whole disagreement with Rameau is grounded in Rousseau’s problematization of the way in which Rameau’s concept of nature is “the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns.” Rousseau’s use of conjecture is problematic insofar as he bases his assessment of political actuality on an ideal-as-idealized-model; importantly, when he conjectures about musical “nature,” his understanding of musical actuality is grounded in an ideal-as-descriptive model. Indeed, it is possible to read Rousseau’s critique of Rameau in terms of non-ideal theory: because of Rameau’s Eurocentrism, he abstracts away from important empirical and cultural facts about the ways in which sound waves interact with human sensory faculties.

So, in sum, if we want to mine Rousseau as a source for non-ideal theory, we need to understand his musical work. This is also a case for increased attention to music in critical political philosophy.

Mainstream Feminism’s Demand for Realism: On “Fotoshop by Adobé,” aesthetics, and posthuman feminism

This video has been making its rounds on feminist social media:

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

The video critiques, via parody, the standard practice of ‘shopping female images, both in the mainstream media, and in individuals’ own “private” photos of themselves (full disclosure: my partner ‘shopped our wedding photos, and that was in 2005). The underlying assumption in this video is that image alteration is a problem—at bottom, it’s deception, a moral wrong. It assumes that the only “good” images are realistic ones.

But why should photos be realistic? 

In this post, I want to complicate and ultimately critique the mainstream feminist view that image alteration is a moral and political flaw. In other words, I think mainstream feminism’s demand for realism relies on overly simplistic (and thus inaccurate) understandings of (1) how images work; (2) how people perceive images; (3) the role of fantasy in individual and in public life; and (4) the “naturalness” of “human” bodies. I’ll discuss each of these points in order.

(1): Photography as Art, or How Images Work and (2) How People Perceive Images

The “Fotoshop by Adobé” (FBA) video assumes that images have a moral obligation to accurately portray how women’s bodies really are in real life. The demand is for 1-1 re-presentation of a body in a picture. This demand rests on a complete misunderstanding of how images work, how they are made, etc. In other words, the creators and fans of the FAB video demand that images not be art (I use “art” here in the loose sense, to include things like craft and entertainment, not just “fine art”). That’s an impossible demand. It’s also based on a very, very old understanding of how images work, one that existed before the invention of concepts like “art,” “fiction,” and “fantasy.” 

The 1-1 re-presentation they demand is an unrealizable ideal. Even the weaker claim, “more or less realistic” re-presentation is itself a fiction. No photo, even photojournalism, represents the complete, unbiased, truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth. Some things are in the frame, some things are left out of focus. All photography is, to a certain extent, a lie. Every photo is an interpretation. No photo is objective. And no photo, no matter how high the resolution is, is an unmediated re-presentation of an IRL situation. Photography, and image-making in general, is a form of mediation. Sight itself is highly mediated, even when we’re “just” using our eyes and our brains. So, the demand for “objective accuracy” denies the mediating factors in image-making in general, and in photography in particular. Basically, this demand for “realism” wants the image to disavow its image-ness, and just be a mirror of “reality.”

If you think this sounds a lot like Plato’s criticism of the poets, you’re right, it is! Plato didn’t like the poets because they mis-represented reality; they were liars, b/c their work deceived people. Plato couldn’t distinguish between fiction and deception. Thus, because no image can be completely realistic, he condemned all images for being deceptive. Two plus millennia later, we often and relatively easily distinguish between fiction and deception, and have plenty of room in our culture for fiction, art, etc. So, I think the mainstream feminist demand that images be “realistic” is out of synch with broader cultural norms that tolerate, uh, art. We should be careful not to, in the words of Kodwo Eshun, "mistake anti-social surrealism for social realism."People don’t actually expect images to be realistic. We know they’re mediated, produced, faked, etc. In fact, feminist work in media studies is part of what contributes to the wide spread of this knowledge. The site “Photoshop Disasters” exists because people know that images are shopped, and they’re not accurate. The site makes fun of bad shop jobs that don’t successfully “fake” it.

So I don’t think the solution is getting rid of shopping. Image alteration is itself neither good nor bad, neither feminist nor anti-feminist. I think instead we need to make people even more familiar with image alteration, so they can spot it when they see it…in the same way that we teach students in our “Women & the Media” type classes to pay attention to camera angles, lighting, cinematography, etc. We shouldn’t get rid of art, or demand that images not be, uh, images. We just need to better image literacy. This guide from Lifehacker is a good start.

(3) The role of fantasy in individual and public life

The mainstream feminist pro-FBA position holds either (a) that all ideals are normative (i.e., things ought to conform to the ideal), or (b) we should renounce all fantasy and the reality principle should rule. I, on the other hand, think we need non-regulatory ideals, fantasy, un-reality, surrealism, etc. In fact, the only way feminism can be broadly compelling is if it meaningfully engages our fantasies, or ideals, our imaginations, etc. Feminism needs room for fiction, fantasy, speculation, and other non-literal forms of expression.

Regarding (a), that all ideals are normative: Not all ideals imply an ought. [Even theorists who problematize normative ideals recognize that there are other, non-normative kinds of ideals.] Perhaps I like swimming and in an ideal world I would have gills so I could swim more. But this ideal doesn’t imply that I or any other human have gills. It’s just a nice idea. Superheroes offer us idealized versions of character, bodily ability, gendered bodily appearance, etc., but these are not normative ideals. If superhero stories tell us anything, it’s that being the ideal actually sucks, because ideal instances aren’t normal (most people are far from ideal); the best superhero stories show us the problems with the normativity of these ideals. So I can have ideals about beauty and bodily aesthetics that aren’t normative; admiration doesn’t automatically translate into normativity (so, to be technical, this is pretty much rejecting Kant’s idea about the subjective universality of beauty). 

Regarding (b): we should renounce all fantasy and the reality principle should rule. While on the one hand I think this is a straw-man version of the mainstream feminist argument—i.e., I don’t think those who hold this position actually intend to make this claim, or realize that it is the logical implication of their position—on the other hand it is the logical implication of their claim. When you launch a “campaign for real beauty” (which I know is a corporate schill, but many mainstream feminists unproblematically embrace it), you imply that we ought only see/admire “real” images of “real” women. There is no room, in this campaign, for “unreal” or “fantasy” beauties, for speculative or imaginative female embodiment. In fact, the demand that everything be “real” imposes its own normativity. It has to lay out criteria for what counts as “real”: you gotta, for example, have pores or wrinkles, or be of a specific body proportion/size, etc. Rather than critiquing beauty norms about “real femininity,” it just lays out a new set of norms about what counts as a “real” woman. Aren’t ads that explicitly claim to present “Real Beauty” more normative than fashion shoots staged, contrived, highly stylized scenes? At least the latter don’t make any claims to what counts as “real.” They’re pretty fake, actually.

And it’s the fakeness and, well, weirdness that I love about obviously photoshopped ads. Take, for example, the infamous Ralph Lauren images:

These are obviously altered pictures: these women’s hip bones are as wide as their cheek bones! These images are positively surreal. The website Photoshop Disasters wouldn’t be successful if people weren’t able to discern wildly (and sometimes even subtly) “un-realistic” images being passed off as “realistic” ones. The point with a lot of fashion photography and advertising is that it’s not intended to be real in the first place: the fashion and advertising industries hook us by selling us fantasies. We know we will never get a plate of food that ever looks as juicy, fresh, and delicious as the one we see in the advertisement. I also know that even if I buy Cover Girl foundation, I’ll never really look as great as Ellen DeGeneris does in those ads, because even Ellen doesn’t look like that IRL. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t have slick, or even wild and crazy ads, fashion spreads, etc.

(4) The “naturalness” of “human” bodies

The FBA/mainstream feminist view on the “reality” of images normalizes certain forms of “human” embodiment. It relies on the naturalistic fallacy—i.e., the view that “natural” = “good.” For example, the video critiques shopped makeup ads with the line: “My skin feels like plastic!” The assumption here is that plastic is bad. But natural isn’t always good, and artificial isn’t always bad. Death and cyanide are natural, just as medicine and feminist theory are artificial. These mainstream feminist critiques of image alteration assume a humanist perspective that is both logically problematic (as I just mentioned) and often ableist and transphobic. This humanism posits a norm for what counts as “real” human female embodiment. It has a rigid conception of what counts as “real” human female embodiment, and marginalizes women (and men, and trans/genderqueer people) who practice alternative forms of embodiment, and who often rely on artifice to maintain their bodies. What’s so bad about plastic skin? Prosthetic limbs have plastic “skin”. What’s so bad about artificially crafting your ideal face with makeup, or even surgery? Transwomen and transmen do this.

Even more problematic is the way this position overlooks the fundamental artificiality of every human body. Body ornamentation and alteration is as old as human civilization itself. In fact, we wouldn’t have “bodies” without alteration, ornamentation, and artifice. Feminist and queer theory shows us that bodies don’t just naturally exist in some pure, unaltered state. “The body” is itself a socially constructed idea, and we only come to know, experience, and understand our bodies both as bodies, and as gendered bodies, through lots of training and artifice. [I make this point in the early chapters of my book.] Culture shapes bodies into bodies. All bodies are artificial, because they emerge, grow, and live in socio-historical situations. This is the point of posthuman feminism. “Natural” bodies don’t exist; if they were “natural” they wouldn’t be recognizable/legible as “human” bodies.

In sum, I find these mainstream feminist critiques of image alteration both philosophically and politically problematic. The demand for humanist realism both ignores the phenomenon of “art” and installs norms for what counts as “real” human embodiment. I actually think this mainstream feminist critique of image alteration is a very, very conservative position. It demands that we not imagine otherwise, that we not entertain wild possibilities, that we only stick to what everyone agrees is “real” (which is, of course, an agreement that doesn’t include everyone, and misrepresents the “reality” of a select privileged class as universal reality).  It is, in other words, what Ranciere calls “consensusdemocracy,” or what other thinkers call “neoliberalism.”

So, not only do I think we need more image alteration, we need more body alteration. Art is good. Fiction is good. Speculative fiction is great. Speculative embodiment would be super! Well, all lived embodiment is speculative, it’s just that some forms of speculation appear more wildly counter-factual than others, given norms about what constitutes the “fact” of human embodiment.  Instead of using body alteration to reaffirm norms for “natural human embodiment,” we should use makeup, surgery, clothes, exercise, etc., to appear more “fake.”

The Traffic In Men?

This week, my graduate feminist theory class read Gayle Rubin’s classic article “The Traffic In Women.” We considered whether and how men could be trafficked—i.e., how men might be used as the medium for relations among other men. Rubin argues that men are certainly trafficked, but never as men: they might be trafficked as black, as proletariat, etc., but, at least in Rubin’s view, men never use other men’s maleness or masculinity as the media through which they transact their relations amongst themselves. In Rubin’s framework, it is as men that one transacts others: as a man, one is endowed with agency and subjectivity. If a man is to be the object of trafficking, he cannot be regarded as a man. So, in Rubin’s view, men are transacted, but never as men, because it is as a man that one is situated, vis-à-vis others, as a trader and not chattel.Trading women as women is what makes men, men.

Obviously Rubin’s original analysis is a very blunt instrument. It can’t account for the fact that even when men are traded as, for example, members of a certain race, class, religion, subculture, or alternative embodiment, their gender never just goes away. In fact, the trafficking in blackness that we see in American pop music aesthetics is a trafficking in black masculinity; similarly, black athletes are trafficked as black men.  White/Western men traffic non-white, non-Western men, as men whose masculinity is qualified by their race and/or nationality. White Western traffic in “abnormal” masculinities: e.g., Puar’s “queer terrorist masculinities”.

But what about men being trafficked as men in order to facilitate relations among women? Does this ever happen? Rubin seems to dismiss this possibility outright: if patriarchal sex/gender systems are predicated (in large part) on “the exchange of women,” how could patriarchy tolerate such a role reversal?

Well, it happens, and while capital tolerates it (b/c it’s all just exchange value in the end), culture does not. The best example of women’s “exchange of men” as men is the teen pop idol: Justin Bieber, The Jonas Brothers, N’Synch, NOKTB, WHAM!, Shaun Cassidy, The Beatles, etc. Teen girls use the myth, image, fantasy, construction, etc., of their chosen Idol as the means and medium to transact relationships with other female fans. This goes beyond basic commodity fetishism—it’s not just different groups of girls establishing their identities vis-à-vis the idols they identify with (e.g., the popular/mainstream girls like Beiber, the b-girls like Soulja Boy, etc.). Rather, fan communities coalesce around these “idols,” and it is in these fan communities that girls develop friendships; they go to shows with other fans, they trade pictures, articles, interviews, remixes, they brag about the exclusive schwag they bought, etc. The ostensible content of these fangirls’ activities is focused on the teen idol, but the real point is the, uh, female homosociality. Judith Jack Halberstam gestures towards this idea in her reading of riot grrrl. Halberstam argues:

The phenomenon of boy bands, for me, raises a number of questions not simply about the performance of masculinity but also about what [Gayle] Wald refers to as the threatening aspect of the ‘ecstatic responses that they elicit’.  After all, while music critics love to dismiss fandom as a passive teenybopper subculture, there is something all too powerful about a nearly hysterical audience of teen girls screaming and crying together; this activity may well have as much to say about the desire between the screamers as it says about their desire for the mythic boys”(Halberstam 2005, 177; emphasis mine).

Pretty much anyone who is not a teenage girl heavily polices the exchange of men. Teen Idol music is more or less unquestionably, obviously, and uniformly derided as the worst musical, lyrical, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon ever. It is considered the quintessence of triviality, badness, etc. It’s supposedly obvious that teen idol music is worse than smooth jazz, worse than Kenny G, worse than muzak. But, musically, it’s not actually that bad. Often, the songs are quite catchy and well-crafted, and the idols themselves are quite good vocalists (e.g. Biebs’s raw talent, his “discovery” via YouTube). So why the obvious, impenetrable, commonsense derision, derogation, and disgust toward teen idol music? Halberstam has it: there is absolutely no way that hegemony can let strong, powerful expressions of female desire articulated on women’s own terms, to say nothing of female homosociality, stand as acceptable. With teen idol music, women use men, as men, to transact relations among themselves, as women. [Ilana Nash's article in this book is a great explanation of how this works.] This is the opposite of patriarchy. As Halberstam suggests, it’s likely in opposition to hetero-patriarchy. So, heteropatriarchy compromises with capital: teen idol music and fan cultures can exist as profit-making enterprises, but any power, credibility, traction, or relevance they might actually have has to be so thoroughly and completely discounted that the threat of female homosociality/the traffic in men is completely neutralized and domesticated.

So if you think teen pop is transparently, obviously, irrefutably shit, then patriarchy wins. That’s exactly what it wants you to think. Because in thinking this, you deny women’s agency, women’s desires, and women’s attempts to relations among themselves. [Sure, you could object that this happens via the objectification of a boy/dude, but, following Beauvoir, I’m going to argue that objectification isn’t inherently morally flawed. Because we are interdependent, we use others as means. The problem arises when we use others only as means, and the objectification is systematic.] So for all those who bemoan the lack of “political” music these days, know this: some of the most politically radical and threatening music out there comes in the form of “Baby, baby, baby-OOOOOOh.” If it wasn’t so dangerous, why would hegemony be so strongly invested in convincing us it shouldn’t be taken seriously?