Another show that I find to be really interesting in the context of feminism/post feminism is Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. While I think the whole show is really interesting in its various portrayals of female empowerment (Buffy as the most powerful, but being a singular female whose strength can't for most of the show also be within other girls, Willow as gaining a lot of strength in a form of synthesis from being around another female) which are sometimes pretty problematic (Buffy/Spike, anyone?), I think that in terms of the consumerist, post-feminist issues brought up by the articles, the final episode of the show is really interesting. In it, Buffy/Willow find a way to turn every potential slayer in the world into a real slayer, giving them all the mystical strength that before had only existed in one (or at most two) girls at any given time. This, in many ways, seems like it could be an endorsement of one of the modes of postfeminism brought up by Negra - the equality model. It doesn't quite fit, though, because not every female is a potential slayer, so it doesn't quite make feminism un-useful to the girls (especially since evil is running rampant). Certainly it doesn't fall into the same category as Sex in the City in terms of its presentation of consumerism, but I think it's an interesting counterpoint in the sense that it deals explicitly with issues of female empowerment and the issues of femininity in the current "post-feminist" landscape.

Now please excuse a slight diatribe on the issue of why both my above post and many academic articles about media tend to bother me.

I've always been intrigued by the approaches taken to media criticism in relation to contemporary culture. Angela McRobbie seems to fairly soundly criticize from a textual standpoint the positive image of feminism supposedly shown in television shows such as Sex in the City (as is argued by Diane Negra). Negra, however, is not really arguing that the show is unabashedly feminist or trangressive or subversive - rather, she specifically says in the conclusion that "some of the series' limits need to be linked to a lwoered sense of expectation for what constitutes subversive or trangressive media content in an era of great suspicion about feminism." These two things hint at my fairly fundamental problem with a lot of this criticism - it seems to care significantly more about how images of the female are represented rather than how they are received. Certainly, representation is important in that it delimits and largely structures what interpretations are feasible, but it does not operate in a deterministic model. McRobbie's article even seems to grant this point by arguing at various points that a particular interpretation exists, but is flawed because of (x).

And I feel like that is fairly fundamentally at odds with what seems to generally be the goal of many stances/movements/people, which is to work towards a shift in the way people act/view/believe. These nearly entirely textual models of analysis seem to largely dismiss the way that viewers wind up interpreting images from a particular show. Certainly pointing out who is actually able to watch these shows and the tours/etc that result is part of it, but I think the emphasis is somewhat misplaced - in short, I feel like many times feminist/anti-classist/anti-racist/etc readings are more concerned with the representation of the struggle than with the way that representation is reacted to. Yes, I know that it's one of the only things that can be talked about without extensive ethnographic research/heavy speculation, but it still tends to irk me a bit - especially when I know that my friends are largely split on Sex in the City, as half read it ironically and half don't. And while this may seem like an incidental point, McRobbie seems to really clearly point out that she sees fan/alternative readings as problematic because of their relationship to pleasure is (in her mind) not unruly or chaotic or deeply ambivalent (a point I find strange for various reasons, not the least of which is that she assumes that a cultural studies approach cannot be constantly problematized).

target women

I think McRobbie brings up an interesting point when she discusses issues of post feminism in Sex and the City and why women (who consider themselves feminists) enjoy watching the show. She writes that "fandom then seems to be the key to understanding complicity." That statement made me examine my own viewing habits and why I watched the first two seasons of Gossip Girl.

In the entire show, there is no character that I can identify with or sympathize with. The reason I stayed with the show for so long because I loved the character of Blair and *spoiler alert* I wanted to see when she and Chuck would get together...they do. I think fandom is part of the reason these shows are so popular but I can't really imagine viewers actually liking Blair or Serena. Fandom in this case results from wanting to be those characters or at least be their friends(never their equals...ex: Blair's token asian and black friends.) Blair and Serenas consumption (of clothes, boys, etc) gives them status. I've had friends argue that Blair and Serena are examples of strong female characters, but they can't be that strong if they only find fulfillment in buying the trendiest clothes, dating the hottest (or richest) guy and backstabbing their way to the top. The first year the show came out, teen fashion magazines would have pages devoted to how to look like Blair or Serena and later Vanessa (Dan's ethnically ambiguous friend from Brooklyn... which brings up issues of whiteness and race in Gossip Girl and Sex and the City.)

In order to be these girls, you have to buy clothes like them and dress like them. A show that glorifies consumption is not shocking at all, but it is sort of disturbing. The show falls under McRobbie's critique that within these shows is embedded "the constant focus on femininity as requiring the regular consumption for fear of repudiation by others." Gossip Girl is literally all about the fear of repudiation by others.

random clip from Current:

Post-feminism and Gossip Girl

I'm having some difficulty with post-feminism as an idea. As I understand it, it seems more like a catch-all for the various responses that dissatisfaction with third-wave feminism. The Negra and McRobbie articles seemed to offer up different definitions of a post-feminist ideal. Negra connects it (not exclusively) to neoconservative efforts to return women from the working world to the home. McRobbie sees it as--and this is the way that I've learned it in other classes--a new kind of illusory gender/sexual independence that is dangerous because it tends to ignore the fact that the world is still quite patriarchal.

I like the comparison we've created between Sex and the City, which is oriented toward adult women, and Gossip Girl, which is oriented (somewhat horrifyingly) toward teenage girls. While marriage does not seem to hold the same obsessive value for the high school students of Gossip Girl as it does for the four women of Sex and the City, the show does place a lot of moral value in monogamy, especially for the two main female friends/rivals. This is an easy double standard to point out, but the guy who sleeps with Blair and Serena is held far less responsible for his actions than the girls (and their social circles) hold them.

Regardless of whether a particular program is advocating neoconservative family values or the image of the independent career woman, clearly both Sex and the City and Gossip Girl are structured to promote the value and femininity of consumption, particularly of fashion consumption. Sex and the City seems to approach this in two ways: that consumption is both the duty and the play of the career-oriented woman, and that fashion consumption is ultimately intimately connected with the ability to find a mate. Gossip Girl is even more brazen with its product placement and foregrounding of the importance of dressing right as a means to fit in with other girls. I wonder about the significance of the (excuse me while I wiki this) Dan Humphrey character, who seems to prize values running contrary to the excess consumption practiced by Blair and Serena--perhaps someone who has seen the series can enlighten me as to his character arc and traits. I particularly liked McRobbie's reflection on her studies of women's magazines in the '90s. These magazines can promote the image of the independent woman all they want, but at the end of the day such an image is directly connected to a complex marketing strategy meant to encourage further consumption. All in all, post-feminism seems very suspect to me.

The Perplexing Social Economy of "Gossip Girl"

I find “Gossip Girl” to be rather bizarre. Most CW shows I have seen are, but “Gossip Girl” is a particularly potent example. I don’t understand the stakes here. I don’t understand why certain things matter in this world and why certain things go without notice or comment. I don’t understand the value system. By “value system” I don’t mean the moral structure per se, but, rather, the entire system of assigning and recognizing value in its various forms. Basically, I am perplexed by the social economy of “Gossip Girl.”

It is clear that, while economic capital is a major theme, the primary form of capital is socio-political capital. Money is a ticket past the threshold of representation (although there seem to be exceptions), but once inside this world, cultural cache pays the bills. This is not entirely surprising. What confuses me are some of the ways this cache ebbs and flows (and the reasons). Lynne Joyrich discusses this odd dynamic in her discussion of Television and melodrama:

This rhythm, in film melodrama and the TV soap opera, is one of exaggerated fluctuations, marking the discontinuities of emotional experience as the plots slowly build, amidst much delay, to dramatic moments of outbreak and collision before sudden reversals of fortune begin the movement again.[i]

Why is Dan so incensed when he finds out that Serena slept with Blair’s boyfriend a long time ago? He doesn’t even like these people (in fact, it seems that he barely knows them). I can imagine being disappointed to find out that Serena would do such a thing, but he seemed personally offended. Why is this immediately a deal breaker? Serena has already explained that she has actively tried to make changes in her life since that time, even leaving town for an extended period. What I assume is an attempt to paint Dan as having integrity ends up looking like morally superior posturing. Like other shows of this kind, “Gossip Girl” assigns oddly excessive value (or, to put it another way, stakes) to certain plot points and character developments. But, of course, that is the bailiwick of a sensational drama, particularly about teenagers – inflation of value.

---

[i] Lynne Joyrich, “All that Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture,” Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, eds. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 229.

Baudrillard and Canclini/Trentmann

Hi everyone!

So in re-visiting Baudrillard this weekend with the help of Aniko’s notes, I definitely think I understand his argument a bit better. I’d love to discuss him in relation to the readings for this week a bit more in class today, so here are just a few of my questions/preliminary observations (by no means is this an exhaustive list):

1) Baudrillard’s theory shifts the focus away from Marxist theories of production towards consumerism. In what ways can we consider his work a theory for post-industrial societies?

2) Baudrillard’s emphasis on a self-regulating system of objects and desires seems to disavow any possibilities for resistant appropriations (in the cultural studies sense). I think that Canclini provides a necessary corrective to Baudrillard in this respect, for while Baudrillard improved on Marx by shifting the emphasis from producer to consumer, Canclini provides a model in which he imagines a communication circuit between producers and consumers.

3) In looking again at Baudrillard, I find a fundamental contradiction in his essay between his emphasis on communicative systems of objects and ideological control and his notions of sign play and slippage. How can he invoke Claude Levi Strauss’s structural approach on one hand and Derrida (at least implicitly) on the other? In my opinion, Canclini brings Baudrillard one step further by more specifically articulating how commodities as codes can be used in the process of communication, citizenship, and identity/community formation (and without Baudrillard’s apocalyptic tone). Canclini’s critique of postmodernism halfway through his essay seems almost like a direct refutation of Baudrillard’s later work. (In my opinion, I don’t think “Consumer Society” is purely postmodern just yet….)

4) Trentmann’s article on the relationship between consumerism and modernity seems to provide a historical refutation to Baudrillard and Marx’s conception.

Some interesting comparisons

I think the brief Hartley reading was really interesting since it put forth a few things that would "benefit from interdisciplinary and international comparison." I'm particularly interested by the second and third points from his list - and the third seems to me to be fairly related to Canclini's article (I'll explain the relation I see in a little bit).

On the second, though, I think that's really interesting is the difference between the way different copyright holders in different countries deal so very differently with their intellectual property. In the US, we see pretty frequently companies holding onto their IP for dear life and refusing to change the way they interact with it. Large music and film companies sue people for downloading and look at piracy as a problem to be eliminated rather than as symptomatic of a need to change the way they're going about distribution (TV stations seem to have caught on to this idea much more quickly, hosting their shows online in better quality than is possible on megavideo and the like). This almost seems to be part of a digital divide - hinting that one place where it may be located is across sectors of use and to what extent it defines interaction with the world (deriving from socialization, job, and so on - more on this in a few moments).

And yet, some industries are so incredibly different. Japanese anime, for example, wound up being distributed in the US largely because the people who owned the IP were so much more willing to let their property be distributed by fans to another country. Originally, it was thought that there wasn't a very large market in the US for it, partially since much of the themes are more adult while animation is traditionally viewed as something for kids in the US. However, fan distribution circuits (largely helped by fansubbing practices, which were sped up by the digital boom in the 90s because creating subtitled videos became much easier) proved a market within the US. Had companies cracked down, this may not have happened and probably wouldn't have happened nearly as quickly. Though now the market is shifting where the race to be the first to create/release a fansub has meant that tons of shows are being released and the anime market is starting to be in a bit of trouble by releasing dubbings (which are often not well loved by fans - the constant mocking of Naruto's voice actor, as well as the many voices in Yu-Gi-Oh! illustrates this pretty well) much later (you can see one fan subber's comments on this process at http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2008-03-11/3). He says the solution is to speed up the market - similar to what seems to have happened with television distribution online.

Anyway, I digress. Sorry for that rant, now on to the digital divide stuff and Canclini. The stuff about the digital divide, to me, comes from around page 45 where a split is talked about in who has creative understanding of the products and who doesn't. This hints at what seems to be a large part of the current divide - not so much who sees the knowledge as important (indeed, it seems the recognition of the ability to use it is pretty well recognized - and given an earlier point, for anyone to care everyone has to recognize the value of that use), but who has the ability to actually creatively use the tools. Here, Canclini argues that it comes from those who can afford to subscribe to information services and more exclusive networks - but I think this is a really limited view. I think, to a large extent, that creativity comes from the ability to have free time to practice - in short, who has a computer/tv/camera to use at their discretion, without worrying about the time. I think Ellen Seiter makes this point really well in her article "Practicing at Home" by comparing higher level uses of technology to playing a piano - sure, everyone may get to play some at school, but the children who can only practice there are not the ones who will become concert pianists. They need to have a piano at home that they can practice on. Likewise, to creatively use a computer means having the time when you can use one (implying often having multiple computers at home) to play around with various tools. The divide as it will continue to exist, then, seems to be still largely related to money - though not in the direct sense of being able to buy things, but being able to buy time to gain the skills that enable people to have "decision making capacity."

Thoughts on Canclini's "Consumers and Citizens"

Since this is my first blog post, I think it would be more constructive to the class discussion if I compare the readings with the films we have watched so far, and from there, I wish to raise some questions I have when I was reading the articles.

While reading Nestor Garcia Canclini's article "Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts," I found the concept of class in consumption particularly interesting. Canclini mentions that scholars have been actively looking for ways to investigate consumption patterns and the rationalities behind consumption, and one way of researching is to look at one's class and group distinctions. It is certainly true that people from different upbringings and backgrounds might very likely to consume differently. Some forms of consumption specifically create major divisions. On one hand, cannibalism, for example, in many media platform, is often performed by people from upper class e.g. foreign movies such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and Hollywood productions like Silence of the Lambs. On the other hand, cannibalism is sometimes portrayed as uncivilized and grotesque, one example being the Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. Canclini believes that consumption is motivated by an interactive sociopolitical rationality, does that mean consumers from different classes reproduce different rationalities during consumption? While Canclini does mention that the shortcoming of this research model is that it understands consumption primarily as a means to creating divisions, I think it's worth discussing if consumption can be influenced by these differences and distinctions? Or in other words, do these divisions make consumerism and capitalism work?

Going from Canclini's article, he also devotes the last part of his essay to transnational consumption and identity. He says that different cultural subsystems often generate different complexity and capacity for innovation. I agree with this statement, especially after seeing that different regions in the world have such different patterns of consumption, yet I find it fascinating that the West is often portrayed as consumers, whereas the East as producers. Frank Trentmann touches on this issue by talking about how, ironically, China had been the major consumer in the world just one to two centuries ago. The shift of consumption patterns from East to West is quite intriguing to me, and I'd love to invest more time on discussing why this trend might have appeared. Industrialization certainly has something to do with that, but I believe consumers from both cultures must have contributed to this unequal participation in production and consumption. Relating this back to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatball, it is quite certain that the film is making fun of waste and excess the West has created, yet I can't seem to find a film or a fairy tale from the East that touches upon these issues on obsessive/ excessive consumption.

Until then, I think Cloudy does not provide an ethical lesson on the danger of excess as it refuses to face the consequences of Flint's action. What do you think?

- Pearl