News
Rutgers put up a prepub page for my book! You can see the cover and everything (or just look up above there)!
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Robert Stanley Martin on Brassai’s photography.
I wrote about why I like Piss Christ.
A brief thread on overrated and underratd photography, strongly suggesting that nobody cares about photography much.
Kailyn Kent on wine labels for male insecurity.
Chris Gavaler argues the world is ready for superheroines kicking butt on the big screen.
Me on Ms. Marvel, female superheroes, and aggression (or the lack thereof.)
Adrielle Mitchell on Luke Pearson’s Everything We Miss, time, space, and loss.
Erotic artist Michael Manning on Beardsley and the gay utopia.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I wrote about why I still like Star Wars. (It’s the dirty robots.)
At Salon:
— you say rockist, I say poptimist, let’s call the whole thing off
— I wrote about The Bechdel Test and shaming women’s genre works.
At Splice Today I wrote about:
— how having the U.S. pay attention to Nigeria isn’t necessarily in the best interest of Nigeria.
— Myra Greene’s book My White Friends and the invisibility of whiteness.
At the Center for Digital Ethics I wrote about the Ethics of Ride Sharing, of all things.
Other Links
Michael Carson on taking the war out of war literature.
Zeynep Tufecki on Nigeria and the politics of attention.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on how racism was deployed against Bill Clinton (and Lincoln, for that matter).
Kathleen Geier on conservative family trees and the cult of victimhood.
Nobody watches Game of Thrones.
Tracy Q. Loxley on underreporting sexual harassment.
Could you take a minute to explain why you think the Bechdel test should be retired? I don’t see any reasons for that in your Salon article.
I don’t think it should be. I don’t write the headlines, unfortunately.
I think the test is useful and helpful (as I say at the end of the piece.) I think that it has some limitations which are worth thinking through when you apply it to female genre works.
So looking forward to checking out the WW book!
I haven’t read any of this stuff (as I’ve been away this past week), but several things look interesting (dirty robots? Piss Christ?), so I’ll look at those later. But congrats on the book!
I don’t even see where you explain its limitations when applied to female genre works, Noah. You say those works are by women and for women; but feminist critiques aren’t just about going after male sexists, they also have richly deserving targets in women’s media. You say the test has the effect of belittling lowbrow, genre work; but does highbrow work fail the test significantly less often, and even if it did, why is that a problem? And you say the test is “a cultural and aesthetic product”; well, yes.
I don’t think the test has ever been seriously presented as a rule of thumb for whether or not to see a film. The character who described it as her rule in the original comic strip admitted she hadn’t seen any since Alien. It’s a measure that illustrates a poverty in our culture’s conception of the human community.
WW also on Amazon for those so inclined.
I point out that the test stigmatizes heterosexual interest among women as being corrupt and corrupting, and I point out that there’s a history of both men (like Hawthorne) and some feminists criticizing female genre work for essentially those reasons. Using the Bechdel test to criticize feminist genre work can then fit into a history of dismissing that work along misogynist lines for being feminine.
Saying the test is a cultural product means that it can also be affected by things like sexism. Putting it next to m/m genre literature, for example, shows the way that the test’s stable assumptions about gender and identification aren’t necessarily true, and aren’t necessarily feminist either.
I certainly think female genre literature can be critiqued in all sorts of ways; some of it is bad, some good, like anything else. The Bechdel Test with its critique of romance comes close to criticizing the genre as a whole for being interested in romance — and stigmatizing romance, marriage, and other things associated with women is one way in which sexism works in our society.
Can’t wait for your book, Noah — and the entire thrust of the series looks interesting, with Andy Hoberek’s “Watchmen” book and what looks like a long-form essay on Archie by Bart Beaty. A level of comics scholarship beyond the level of the essay or essay collection.
Yeah; I’m torn between really liking Bart Beaty and not caring at all about Archie.
I think there are a number of other volumes in the works too…
Looking forward to WW, Noah. The cover and blurbs look great. I just taught a selection of WW comics in my class, and they looked a bit stunned after my mini-lecture on Marston.
Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but as far as blurbs go, I thought of a half dozen people here who could probably offer some snappier promotion. “Engaging close readings” that “fill an important gap” just doesn’t seem to all that sexy — at least for a book with bondage in the title.
singed,
someone with zero marketing experience
Yeah…I think the blurb is aimed specifically at an academic audience, it seems like. I wouldn’t mind having one that tried for more mainstream readership. Maybe I’ll ask them about it….
re that vox piece, I’m shocked — shocked, I say — that critical tastes don’t align with the mainstream. If you added up the total box office for the past 150 years of Cannes Palm d’Or winners, that’s still only one seventeenth of the domestic blu-ray profits of the Rob Schneider vehicle Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo. Or something
It’s probably just that it’s the fact that it’s covered in venues which in fact generally cover the most popular things in other media? The Atlantic covers Beyonce and Star Wars and whatever the latest superhero hit is…and Game of Thrones.
It’s not totally without precedent; the Atlantic doesn’t cover romance novels either, which are really popular, no matter how I try to get them to. But since the mainstream media does in fact cover some mainstream entertainment, it’s just a little odd when they don’t.
Will everyone’s faith in humanity be restored once they realize that a number of Palme winners have actually beaten Deuce Bigalow at the box office? The entire history of Cannes winners can’t beat Titanic though.
The Vox thesis cleverly omits The Walking Dead which gets lots of coverage/recaps and is also a super ratings hit.
Whoops! Good call; sneaky of Vox there.
Noah — okay, that makes sense of the article for me; I hereby retract my snark.
Noah: “I point out that the [Bechdel] test stigmatizes heterosexual interest among women as being corrupt and corrupting…”
That’s a very harsh interpretation. There’s no lesbian war on Christmas here. The test illustrates the extent to which movies deprioritize women’s experience in the interest of narrative economy while privileging men with plot-developing exchanges.
Congratulating lesbian-themed work because it passes by default or condemning male-male romances for failing would be missing the point. The equivalent for those categories would be whether those films treat their characters as being exclusively focused on seeking sexual partners.
“the Bechdel test… can fit into a history of dismissing that work along misogynist lines for being feminine… [it] comes close to criticizing the genre as a whole for being interested in romance — and stigmatizing romance, marriage, and other things associated with women is one way in which sexism works in our society.”
Criticizing female genre work for having limited horizons and poorly reflecting female experience is not misogynist; a misogynist response would be to treat those limitations as being characteristically female.
” Criticizing female genre work for having limited horizons and poorly reflecting female experience is not misogynist; a misogynist response would be to treat those limitations as being characteristically female.”
Except it actually historically often is. For example, romance is seen as female, and therefore is denigrated. Which is kind of what the Bechdel test does, or at least can do (it says heterosexual romance is not a feminist topic.) Even you here; romance has limited horizons. That’s a really standard criticism, and it assumes that female interest in romance is less broad or less important than (say) an interest in geopolitics, or epic political change. Which is a value judgment which denigrates femininity. Similarly, the “poorly reflecting female experience” may well be true — but it also brings up the question of why these things are so incredibly popular if they’re so bad at speaking to women. Are women just so dumb they can’t figure out what their experience is? Or what?
You could read Pamela Regis’ Natural History of the Romance; she talks about the uncomfortable history of denigrating romance, and how that comes both from men and from some feminist critics.
I’m happy to criticize female genre work. But there is a history of misogyny and denigration there which it’s useful to keep in mind. Just dismissing that and then repeating the tropes of the denigration is not helpful, I don’t think.
“Congratulating lesbian-themed work because it passes by default or condemning male-male romances for failing would be missing the point.”
Maybe there’s more than one point. Maybe looking at the way things don’t fit can tell you things, if you haven’t already made up your mind it can’t.