The Feminist Phantasmagoria of Fukitor

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Charles Reece

The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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I discovered Jason Karns’ Fukitor thanks to the controversy in The Comics Journal thread over his use of racist imagery. That I ordered some issues based on those questionable images probably hints at my take on the controversy. Bigotry can be funny. It wasn’t too long ago, for example, that I was chortling through a documentary on Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church (I believe it’s called Fall from Grace, available on Netflix). They’re the ‘God hates fags’ family/church who express opposition to the homosexual control of America through a series of signs — often presented at funerals of soldiers and rock stars — on which they thank God for AIDS and pray for more dead soldiers. Even the KKK finds their ideology objectionable (really). It’s hard not to laugh at that. You really can’t caricature the Phelps clan. How could their message be any more risible? Nor will arguing with such people do much good if they’re too extreme for white power groups. Some belief systems are too nuts to take seriously. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t worry about hate groups and religious extremists, just that it would be a bit silly to treat what they say or believe within the parameters of a rational discourse. You don’t need to argue with them, just keep away — and laugh from a safe distance. The Westboro Church would fit right into a Fukitor storyline, if Karns ever felt like “analyzing” Christianity. His aesthetic is well suited. Phelps’ religious justification for his homophobia is about as convincing and complicated as the following (only with hellspawn that are to be more feared for being less straight):

Fukitor 7, “Doctor Werewolf versus the Zombie Sadists”

I imagine that something like that is what Phelps fears in the afterlife should gay marriage achieve equality. There’s no way that image or one like it should enter a theological discourse where it’s not taken as imbecilic. Yet, it seems that the primary opposition to Fukitor is that people are going to take it too seriously, that its macho-chauvinistic worldview isn’t sufficiently ludicrous to simply point at it and laugh. (Like a censor, the critic is, of course, quite capable of not being swayed by the dangerous message he perceives. The problem is, you know, other people who don’t possess the critic’s cultural analytic skills.) Some of the response over at TCJ reminded me of those critics of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers who pointed out the Nazi-like uniforms worn by its heroes as evidence for the film’s fascism. With a style that hardly could be called delicate or nuanced (or so I thought), he both delivered on the entertaining genocidal slaughter of a highly evolved alien insect species while pointing out that it was genocide we spectators were enjoying. Karns’ extremism is doing something similar: Fukitor’s diegeses take place within a particular sort of mindset — a souped up, more explicitly rendered version of 70s and 80s action film heroics and grindhouse terror. It finds enjoyment there in the same way one might be entertained by the xenophobic worldview of Chuck Norris’ Missing in Action series, but makes it all sufficiently extreme that only a true psychopath could ever find it a plausible expression of otherness. Here’s an example of heroic victory (against the Viet Cong) from the comic:

Fukitor 5, “The Green Hellion”

Having the hero become a cannibalistic war machine with one of “our boys” hiding in the back, meekly proclaiming victory with his fist raised in a feeble show of solidarity is enough to create something of a Brechtian distancing effect – at least, within me. That’s another way of saying I’m not merely going along with the literal views of the characters, nor is the story wanting me to. However, Darryl Ayo might still say (if he ever bothered to read the comic): “This isn’t subversive, this is the real thing. This is what racist caricature and hostility against nonwhites in the popular arts looks like. This is what racism looks like, served straight up.” What this fails to see is the caricature of white masculine power that pervades the comic. I can’t imagine even the staunchest white power patriarch wanting this comic to represent his worldview (just like the KKK has its rhetorical limits). Maybe Phelps is right, people need signs: “do not identify with hero,” “do not sympathize with the bigotry.” Thus, I’m going to supply some context for those who believe Fukitor entertains its ideal reader by simply presenting a shared worldview (as if this reader thinks the comic fairly presents his ideological take on existence).

Much of the imagery in the three issues (5 through 7) that I purchased more easily serve radical feminism as misandrous stereotypes/parodies of patriarchal power than as actual reinforcement/mere reiterations of said power. Most of the examples for these stereotypes in what follows came from Judith Levine’s My Enemy, My Love. It occurred to me while reading some of that book around the same time as Fukitor that Karns shares or mocks (you decide) the same nightmarish fantasy that Andrea Dworkin, among others, has about masculinity: “Violence is male. The male is the penis; violence is the penis or the sperm ejaculated from it. What the penis can do it must do forcibly for a man to be a man.” [p. 138, Levine] Perhaps Karns’ most manifest take on this theme (if it’s possible) will be what he’s currently working on, a barbarian tale called “The Coming of Kok,” but from what I have in hand, look at this pinup scene from issue 5’s inside cover:

A demonic cabal (cf. red eyes) of white capitalists (note the business suits) is about to sacrifice a woman (with the ceremonial sword) after a masked executioner-type finishes sexually having his way with her. It’s hardly reading between the lines to find affinity between this drawing and the radically feminist conflation of capitalism and patriarchy: “to attack male supremacy […] consistently, inevitably means attacking capitalism […]” and “when you talk women’s liberation you inherently talk anti-capitalism and anti-private property.” [p. 78-9, Echols; first statement is from Redstockings’ co-founder Ellen Willis, the second from an unknown speaker at the 1968 Sandy Springs conference] Levine suggests this analysis understandably leads to misandry: “[M]an-hating remains not an action but a reaction, not a power but a subversion of power. In a patriarchal world, woman-hating is built into every institution. […] If misogyny is the Establishment, man-hating is no more than a counterculture.” [p. 18] She analyzes three overarching stereotypical categories of misandrous imagery (Infant, Betrayer and Beast), but the one that Fukitor deals in, almost exclusively, is the Beast: “Images of [which] confront the male body, its attractions and its threats. While [its subtypes] the Prick and the Pet indicate a raised eyebrow (and a raised skirt) toward “animality,” the Brute and the Killer embody women’s detestation and terror of male violence.” [p. 27]

The Brute is represented by that big, fat, white trash dude in quasi-Klan gear who’s just polished off a lot of Bud before going to town on his victim. Levine describes this subtype as “the ogre under that bridge, and his weapon is real: rape. Representing predatory, rapacious, implacable, and misogynistic sexuality, the Brute embodies what every man could do to every woman, and crucial to his efficacy as a terrorist is his penchant for disguise.” [p. 136] Those men surrounding the Brute represent another subtype, the Killer. This guy is the technocrat who avoids empathy in favor of realpolitiks, i.e., downplaying feminine characteristics in favor of masculine ones. Violence is always an abstraction, a matter of rationality. It’s as if Karns used this stuff for a script: Capitalists, not wanting to get their hands dirty, are using a loutish workingman — plying him with cheap beer — to rape a woman in service of their plutocracy. In other words, capitalism rests on a big fat underbelly of structural violence (violence that’s written into the system), and that violence is rape. If you’ve spent any time reading feminist critiques of pop culture on the web, you’ll know that the term for this emboldened allegorical message is ‘rape culture.’ Quoting Susan Brownmiller, Levine notes how sexual violence is conjoined with keeping the peace: “Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

From Fukitor 6, “Dick: Vice Squad”

Phallogocentric laws require like-minded law enforcement, and Detective Dick is rape culture’s perfect policeman — a renegade who won’t go soft on crime, which is analogized to womanhood. He is also an example of another subtype, the appropriately titled Prick. He is “imperious, self-centered and self-satisfied, puffed up and truculent.” Dick’s the walking embodiment of the phallus, i.e., “masculine authority, power, patriarchal law and language; [depending] for its reputation on not being seen.” [p. 160] His eyes are behind shades, so he can see you, while you can’t exactly return his look. According to Laura Mulvey, the stereotypically masculine role is to do the defining, the feminine is to be defined: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” To reverse the gaze, to see through those shades, is to possibly see the phallus as a flaccid, impotent penis (smaller than you think, like the man behind the curtain in Oz). Thus, “[a]ccording to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.” The Prick has to keep up appearances of being hard. One way of doing this is pretty common throughout Fukitor, such as in the present example or the “Green Hellion” page above, namely use a weapon as the phallus, making violence the signifier of hardness, of masculinity. I don’t much see a difference in Karns’ treatment and the feminist message of, for example, Sue Cole’s “President Raygun Takes a Hot Bath”:

Both take pleasure through humorous depiction of overcompensating macho violence. In showing the Prick for what he is, “humor is the great deflator.” [p. 165] The message behind “Dick: Vice Squad” cannot reasonably be equated with Dirty Harry’s expressed anxiety towards San Francisco’s feminized, liberal bureaucracy when the hero’s success at dealing with hostage situations tends to look like this:

In the same issue, Karns satirizes another prominent area of phallogocentric domination, the objective world of science. Rather than the image of a rationally disinterested observer that feminists such as Luce Irigaray have questioned, the scientific explorers of “Buttraping Bat-Apes on Pluto” are bullheaded and driven by petty jealousy and selfishness:

Being petulant children, they require a mothering figure. Instead of the Beast, these fellows fit the stereotype of the Mama’s Boy (a member of the Infant class). Levine describes it as, “women trade stories of manipulating and being manipulated by, doing for and being done in by their big male bundles of needs, demands, and expectations. Yet women are exasperatingly eager to take the rap for these bad boys: if men are babies, guess whose fault it is?” [p. 32] The men, because of their cocksure nature and obstinate refusal to listen to the woman, are systematically dismantled in the fashion suggested by the story’s title. But she has her day, avenging her fallen colleagues:

Thus, the woman becomes the hero only after slaughtering the butt-raping primates, chaining the masculine spoils around her neck. This image is a more comically violent interpretation of Martha Nochimson’s feminist critique of Kathryn Bigelow’s meteoric rise in Hollywood power circles with Hurt Locker. Referring to her as the “transvestite of directors,” Nochimson wrote, “[l]ooks to me like she’s masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.” The director, like the female scientist, appropriates phallic power by dressing herself in it. Although Karns isn’t necessarily criticizing his character’s actions.

I could keep going with examples (such as Karns’ twist on the James Bond spy as a werewolf, a swaggering poonhound that he reduces – recalling Twilight‘s Jacob — to a lapdog), but that’s enough. Either the reader will buy it at this point or never will. A comic that can be read so effortlessly as radical feminist stereotypes of masculinity in pop culture suggests something other than a straightforward support of white male privilege. If Karns had done all this in prose form, it would read something like talking points from Valerie Solanas’ hilarious SCUM Manifesto:

The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship, affection of tenderness. […] His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the services of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can’t relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. […] He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings — hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt — and moreover, he is aware of what he is and what he isn’t. […] To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure. […]

His greatest need is to be guided, sheltered, protected and admired by Mama (men expect women to adore what men shrink from in horror — themselves) and, being completely physical, he yearns to spend his time (that’s not spent `out in the world’ grimly defending against his passivity) wallowing in basic animal activities — eating, sleeping, shitting, relaxing and being soothed by Mama. Passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the `respect’ if any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.

Fukitor takes enough pleasure in puncturing and dicing up men, mocking and castrating phallic power, to qualify as an auxiliary work in service to the Society for Cutting Up Men: “[T]he Men’s Auxiliary are those men who are working diligently to eliminate themselves, men who, regardless of their motives, do good, men who are playing ball with SCUM.” One doesn’t have to agree with the message being delivered to find something enjoyable or worthwhile here. Regarding Solanas’ appeal to some feminists, Levine writes, ”a kind of lunatic nihilism helped burn over the old assumptions, clearing space for constructive revolutionary ideas.” Quoting Vivian Gornick: “The first time a woman said, ‘Cut it off!’ it was great. You never dreamed for a minute she meant it. It was the announcing: we are no longer afraid to say the unsayable.” [p. 216] Appreciating Solanas doesn’t make a woman into the nightmare a Men’s Rights Advocate has every time he hears a Loreena Bobbitt joke. Likewise, enjoying Fukitor doesn’t commit one to supporting whatever views that are expressed therein. As alluded to above, it’s a fairly simplistic view of how belief systems work in the minds of racists, gun rights advocates, chauvinists, paleoconservatives, the pro-war contingent, or whomever else might be represented within Karns’ aesthetic to believe he’s merely giving voice to how they feel about themselves. Nevertheless, even if one takes the comic as a straightforward depiction of a troubled psyche’s bigoted worldview rather than (as I’ve been arguing) the intentional use of such a worldview for comical purposes, one could still laugh at it by treating it as if it’s as worthy of serious reflection as one of Phelps’ signs.

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References:

Echols, Alice (1989) Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. University of Minnesota Press.

Levine, Judith (1992) My Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Women’s Lives. Doubleday.

Waiting for the Revolution

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Switchblade Sisters (aka Jezebels) is the last major film of Jack Hill, one of the greatest and least known American directors. Hill worked almost entirely in exploitation film, toiling away mostly for the Corman studios on women-in-prison, blaxploitation, and other genre crap. Switchblade Sisters has everything you’d expect from such a director; there’s gratuitous violence, gratuitous sex, gratuitous T&A, and gratuitously preposterous acting. As Roger Ebert noted with a sniff, “this movie falls far below Pauline Kael’s notion of “great trash.”

And, indeed, this has been the consensus opinion. Switchblade Sisters bombed on its first release in 1975, and it’s re-release with much hoopla in 1996 by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures didn’t exactly rehabilitate it. Tarantino’s DVD package has just been re-re-released, and I doubt that’ll change things much either. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a pretty rotten 53% fresh rating,, and the intensity of scorn on display from many of the critics is impressive. Stephen Holden of the New York Times sneers (http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/switchblade_sisters.html), “To watch “Switchblade Sisters” is to visit a never-never land of shopworn media images colliding in a tabloid high school of the mind.” Richard Harrington of The Washington Post fulminates inaccurately, “The acting is so bad that apparently none of the performers ever got another job in the movies.” He adds, with more justice that “the costumes in Ben Hur seem less dated that those on display here.”

Why exactly dated costumes would be a drawback is something I don’t entirely understand; the crazy retro-to-a-world-that-never-was wardrobe seems like a feature rather than a bug to me. My favorite stylistic choice is the gigantic ornate uber-tacky beret things that Lace (Robbie Lee) wears in her hair so she can look like Princess Lea (before there was a Princess Lea) while toting a machine gun in the climactic firefight. Props also to whoever decided that gangsters should wear day-glo patterned shirts.

As this suggests, the film has many defenders of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. And there’s no doubt that Switchblade Sisters is a delirious camp-fest from beginning to end. From the amped-up woman-in-prison juvie lesbian nightmare to the bloodbath at the roller rink to the macho black female revolutionaries quoting Mao, the film careens from one flamboyant set-piece to another. The dialogue is chock full of profane melodramatic quotables. For example:

”You know, sooner or later every woman’s bound to find out — the only thing a man’s got below his belt is clay feet.”

“My old man, God rest his ass, told me once, “Son, don’t ever let ‘em push you, because once they get you moving, it’s awful hard to stop.”

“Everybody knows your crank can hook a tuna.”

And, finally, there’s Robbie Lee as Lace — leader of the Dagger Deb girl gang — who speaks all her lines like her teeth have been epoxied together and she’s sucking helium through a straw. Her performance starts out outrageous and moves on up to utterly insane, culminating in a full-on wild-haired wild-eyed Shakespearean rage of jealousy and despair. Her deranged, “He was treating me like a little gutter cat!” has to be one of the most ludicrously bile-filled lines in film.

It’s also, counter-intuitively, one of the most poignant…which is why I’m not exactly comfortable with the so-bad-it’s-good reading here. As Quentin Tarantino points out in his commentary on the film, Switchblade Sisters for all its goofiness, is a film with some surprising depths.

As in many of Jack Hill’s films, those depths involve a sympathetic and unusually nuanced take on female-female friendships. The movie is about the relationship between Lace and Maggie, the newest, toughest girl in school. The two fall into a quick, intense, love-at-first-beatdown friendship. This quickly turns into a love triangle, as Patch (Monica Gayle), Lace’s former first lieutenant and best friend, tries to pry Lace and Maggie apart. And then that turns into a love quadrangle when Lace’s boyfriend Dominick, leader of the Silver Daggers boys’ gang, falls in lust with Maggie. Despite the fact that he sort of rapes her, she reciprocates his interest. (I discuss the rape at greater length here: http://hoodedutilitarian.blogspot.com/2008/03/jack-hill-and-rape.html)

So far that sounds a lot like YA teen girl melodrama, complete with crushes, jealous backbiting, and bitchy rivalry. And it is that in part. But the film balances this toxic view of women’s relationships with a more positive view. In the first place, Maggie and Lace really do care about each other. Lace goes out of her way to protect Maggie from a punitive cavity search in juvenile detention. For her part, Maggie reacts with rage when Dominic mocks Lace’s love letter in front of the rest of his gang. And even though Maggie is attracted to Dominic, she tells him repeatedly and convincingly that her primary loyalty is to Lace

Moreover, the film makes a thoroughgoing call for feminist revolution. The Dagger Debs are more or less the ladies’ auxiliary of the Silver Daggers…and they are mercilessly exploited. The boys’ literally pimp them out to other students, and force them to hold lit cigarettes in their hands so the men can bet on which of the girls will flinch first. Dom treats Lace like crap, sneering at her behind her back to his friends, sleeping with Maggie, and reacting with a torrent of abuse when Lace tells him she’s pregnant (“You think I’m ready to haul freight in some fucking warehouse for two dollars an hour so you can have a little brat suck on your tit? No thanks baby.”)

The solution to these myriad indignities, the film says, is feminism. Maggie’s courage and competence inspires the other girls to toss the boys out of the clubhouse and go it on their own, changing their name from “Dagger Debs” to “Jezebels” in the process. Instead of allying with white men, they then ally with a group of black women revolutionaries. In the triumphal apocalyptic showdown, the multiracial sisters sweep down with superior planning, courage, and firepower to kill the drug lords and politicians who oppress them. Death to the man!

If that was the end, we’d have an unambiguous but simplistic vision of feminist triumph. But Hill’s too clever for that. After the showdown with the man, there’s the showdown with the woman. Convinced that Dom was cheating with Maggie, Lace had betrayed the gang’s attack plans to their rivals. The hope was that Maggie would be offed; instead, Dominic is killed along with Lace’s unborn child. In one of the most painful scenes in the film she lies in her hospital bed and hysterically spins a fantasy of domestic bliss, pretending that Dominic had proposed to her rather than demanding she get an abortion. “Can you see me having a kid, hanging around some dumb house doing housework and dishes and diapers…,” she laughs in that helium-fueled whine, both pathetic and terrifying.

But the death of her man doesn’t free Lace. While the other girls throw off their false consciousness, Lace clings more tightly to hers, challenging Maggie to a knife fight over the dead jerk who was worthy of neither of them. Maggie’s victory, seen in silhouette, is a kind of exorcism, killing the part of herself that chose Dom over her sisters.

Again, though, this isn’t exactly a happy ending. Lace isn’t just a part of Maggie; she’s a sister herself. By combining the teen melodrama with the feminist parable, Hill complicates both. Maggie never would have joined the Debs without Lace; it’s their love for each other that makes the wider sisterhood possible. Until the moment that Lace calls her out to fight, Maggie insists that all she’s done has been for the other girl…and she’s not lying. Without the personal relationships, sisterhood isn’t possible — but those personal relationships are mired in poisonous sexism and jealousy. The society we’ve got furnishes the materials of the revolution; those are the only materials around. But that means that the revolution is inevitably tainted. Lace’s act of faith — her decision to befriend Maggie — makes sisterhood possible. But Lace’s weakness, and Maggie’s as well, means that Lace can’t stay true to her initial act. She doesn’t see the promised land, and as a result the promise is stained. By murdering Lace, Maggie gives the police the ammunition they need to put her away. The final scene shows her being shoved into the paddy-wagon covered in both Lace’s blood and her own. It’s not entirely defeat: the gang seems rededicated to each other, and Maggie is defiant and exuberant. But it’s not victory either.

Stephen Holden concludes his review of the movie by claiming that Switchblade Sisters is “a place where the only thing that really matters is holding onto your unworthy louse of a boyfriend.” This is such a thorough and obvious misreading of the film that it’s hard not to wonder what’s behind it. After all, this isn’t Pretty Woman, or Yes Man, or Boomerang, or any other of a billion Hollywood romantic comedies where the louse of a boyfriend gets the girl and that’s supposed to be a happy ending. In Switchblade Sisters, the fact that Lace holds onto her boyfriend is not romantic comedy. It’s hyperbolic, melodramatic tragedy.

Perhaps that’s precisely what makes Holden and other critics uncomfortable. Maybe the problem isn’t holding onto the lousy boyfriend, but portraying him as a louse in the first place — and suggesting that Lace’s love for him has not just personal, but social, and even apocalyptic consequences. For all its exploitation goofiness, Switchblade Sisters really believes that sisterhood matters more than men. Thirty-six years after it came out, that’s still an unsettling message.

Raymond Chandler’s Misogyny

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

I’ve been having a debate with Charles Reece and Mike Hunter over the misogyny, or lack thereof, in Raymond Chandler’s work. I thought I’d highlight one of my comments here for those who are interested:

I’m not using misogyny casually or dismissively. [The Big Sleep] is powered by disgust, and disgust and corruption are insistently associated with femininity. The most powerful image of the book is the mad Sternwood daughter, a vision of sexualized, feminized chaos from which the male soldiers recoil.

Again, the argument that men are killed and men are bad seems to really pretty much completely miss the point. Masculinity is absolutely an incredibly important issue in the novel — who is a man, who isn’t, what honorable men are like, how men keep themselves pure. You and Mike seem to have this idea that there you figure out misogyny by looking at the relative fates of the men and women in the book. But that’s silliness. The issue is that femininity is a corrupting influence — which affects men too. As Coates says, masculinity is built on a rejection of weakness which is nonetheless central to masculinity. Even the male body becomes feminized, because all bodies are feminized (so that, for example, the old man’s decadence, with all the hothouse flowers, is thematically linked to the way he’s living with his two united daughters…even old age becomes feminine.)

Misogyny is absolutely an ideology/passion which destroys men, and indeed promotes hatred of men (whether homosexuals, or the elderly, or anyone who doesn’t measure up to being a man, which is everyone.) One of the great things about Chandler’s novel is the way it demonstrates this so clearly and with such passion. It’s uncomfortable and probably evil, but the way it works through the permutations, and the vividness of its loathing for women and ultimately for itself, is fascinating and I think valuable. I like the Thin Man quite a bit, strong female character and lack of misogyny and all, but it doesn’t have anything like that insight or passion.

I think in part the issue is that you and Mike are only seeing misogyny as applying to female bodies? Misogyny is very frequently directed at female bodies…but it’s also, and very much, directed at femininity, which can be associated with female bodies, but which is also a trope which can be seen everywhere, in female bodies, male bodies, or decadence generally. The Big Sleep is actually a perfect example of how this works; the misogyny pervades the entire book, creating a world of corruption, decadence, perversion, and disorder, within which honorable men struggle for cleanness and honor and masculinity.

This has gotten me thinking a little bit too about why feminism is important for men. Not sure where or if I’ll write that up, but I think it’s worth thinking about — and I think Chandler is a useful way of getting at it.

The Country of Multi-Talented Women

Posted on November 16, 2012 by subdee

I think I forgot to introduce myself last time, so I’ll do that now. Hi, I’m subdee, short for sub_divided. I’m still not sure what this column will be about, but I have a feeling it’s going to involve a lot of very popular, very commercial, but nevertheless very weird Japanese comics; and Kpop.

With that out of the way, I was reading this great analysis of Star Trek: The Next Generation over on Grantland.com when I came across this paragraph about Harry Potter:

One of the reasons J.K. Rowling’s books exerted such an appeal over every sentient creature on earth is that they resolved, indeed fused, a cultural contradiction. She took the aesthetic of old-fashioned English boarding-school life and placed it at the center of a narrative about political inclusiveness. You get to keep the scarves, the medieval dining hall, the verdant lawns, the sense of privilege (you’re a wizard, Harry), while not only losing the snobbery and racism but actually casting them as the villains of the series. It’s the Slytherins and Death Eaters who have it in for mudbloods, not Harry and his friends, Hogwarts’ true heirs. The result of this, I would argue, is an absolutely bonkers subliminal reconfiguration of basically the entire cultural heritage of England. It’s as if Rowling reboots a 1,000-year-old national tradition into something that’s (a) totally unearned but (b) also way better than the original. Of course it electrified people.

Have your cake and eat it too! How many pop cultural flashpoints does this apply to?

Twilight: they are dangerous immortal creatures of the night who want to eat you up (in all senses), but the good vampires practice self-control and abstinence before marriage, while only the bad ones give in to their base desires.

50 Shades of Grey: BDSM is hot, but people who are into BDSM are emotionally damaged. Never mind how damaged they are, though, because BDSM is hot! Also, the characters look a bit like Edward and Bella from Twilight. But you bought the book because it is popular, not because you wanted to read about all that.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: violence against women is bad, and we will prove this by repeatedly exposing the heroine to violence. Also, she’ll sleep with the married, middle-aged writer-narrator, because he is supportive and nonjudgmental. This will never blow up for him, or anything like that (though it might strain his marriage a little bit).

Pretty much any comic that decries violence against women while also making it a major part of the narrative… (paging Frank Miller, Frank Miller to the table).

While these things are fun to list, they mostly don’t involve an “absolutely bonkers subliminal reconfiguration” of the literature of an entire Imperial power – rather, they are mostly mild-to-medium exploitation fare that decry sex acts while also pleasurably indulging in them. In fact, I feel that by bringing them up, I am diluting the purity of the original author’s idea, which he goes on to discuss in terms of Star Trek: TNG being a fantasy of a conservative, hierarchical society (Starfleet Academy) organized around the pursuit of liberal ideals like inclusiveness and multiculturalism.

I can think of a recent novel/anime/manga series that might fit, though: and that’s Sainkoku Monotagari.

Clumsy girl + multiple hot guys with long flowing hair and robes = must be shoujo

Saiunkoku Monotagi, “the story of the country of many-colored clouds,” is a light novel series centered on the adventures of a young would-be government official, who dreams of passing the imperial exam and loyally serving an Imperial China-esque country. The catch is, she is female, and therefore forbidden from sitting the exam.

You see where I’m going with this, right? There’s a history of these Fantasy Imperial China stories in East Asia, but traditionally the women in these stories are either great marital arts masters (if wuxia) or supernatural creatures (if supernatural kung-fu). In the more “realistic” palace-drama stories, meanwhile, they are either married to/the daughters of male characters; or evil harridans who work behind the scenes, through the men with official positions. They don’t study hard and work diligently to accomplish great feats right out there in the open…

Yeah, why not!

Sainkoku isn’t the only story to look at history and imagine a better place for women, of course. It’s been compared to the 2003 K-drama Jewel in The Palace, about the Joseon Dynasty’s first female court physician, for instance. (And indeed the plot of Saiunkoku – first volume published in November of 2003 – shares many similarities with the plot of Dae Jang Geum.) Looking beyond historical dramas, there have been an even greater number of fantasy re-imaginings. Here’s an excerpt from the TV Tropes entry for Feminist Fantasy:

Another type of Feminist Fantasy is a feminist retelling of an old story, like a fairy tale or folktale. These are very popular nowadays, and seem to be the way this generation of Disney princesses is turning out—see Enchanted and Princess And The Frog. The former is completely self-aware and sends up the traditional Disney Princess archetype, and the latter is about a princess who wants to be a businesswoman and ends up with a guy along the way.

On the Princess and the Frog –> Enchanted continuum, Sainkoku falls in the middle, but closer to Princess and the Frog (straightforward pursuing-a-of-dream-that-does-not-involve-a-man) than to Enchanted (purposeful deconstruction of genre tropes).

Which genre tropes are we talking about, though? Reverse-harem tropes, where the female protagonist is inexplicably surrounded by hot men who compete for her attention? Shoujo tropes, where the protected, naïve main female character betters the lives everyone around her with the strength of her pure love? Palace Drama tropes, where factions cross and double-cross each other in a struggle for political power? Wuxia tropes, where supernaturally gifted swordsmen wander the countryside righting wrongs or at least testing their skills?

If you picked E, all of the above, you’d be right. Sainkoku is a palace-drama story dressed in shoujo reverse-harem clothing, with some wuxia and supernatural elements thrown in to keep the audience interested.

See this page for more on wuxia

In Japan, most fans are fans of the novel series, first, and of the anime series (released but now out of print in the US) and the manga series (currently publishing under the Viz – Shoujo Beat line) second. If they are really fans, they might also collect the mini-novels and calendars; read the spin-off novels focused on other characters; and listen to the drama CDs by the anime voice actors. SaiMono, in other words, is an institution with a wide reach… JK Rowling, incidentally, is currently at work on a spin-off novel about Sirius…

As far as who reads the books: SaiMono isn’t just a shoujo series targeted at young girls, it’s also one of the pinkest shoujo series ever. Check out these covers:

Surrounded by beautiful men, check, pink, check, flowers, check, long flowing robes and hair, check and check…

In fact, “pink” is more true of the anime series than of the novel series, whose covers actually become progressively less pink as time goes on. Still, it’s partially thanks to the breast-cancer-awareness levels of pinkification going on in the anime and early novel illustrations that my friend Charmian – notesonleaves – spent so long trying to convince us that Saiunkoku Monotagari is a strong dramatic story outside of the “reverse harem” and “anachronistic girl power” and “shoujo whitewashing of brutal history” trimmings. And she was right! Actually most of it is politicking and character development. To hear more, read on…

In Saiunkoku, the bad old days of civil war, famine, poverty and unpredictable politically-motivated assassination are within the living memory of most of the cast. Not only that, but these events – and dysfunctional family power struggles – have left most of them with PTSD, or personality disorders, or other remnants of trauma. In the middle of this group of very competent, but very damaged weirdos, Shuurei sticks out not because she is especially sheltered, but because she was able to depend on her family at all. The past playing itself out in the present, especially through barely-suppressed memories of past trauma, is another thing Saiunkoko Monogatari shares with Harry Potter, of course.

On that note, while the SaiMono-the-manga is mostly just a mechanism for delivering the story of the light novels, one place it really shines is the conveyance of subtle shifts of emotion – especially when it comes to Shuurei’s main love interest, the King –

Ryuuki, who became King by default after his older siblings all eliminated each other

It’s against this background that the story takes place, initially framing itself as the story of Shuurei pretending to be a member of the harem so she can get the thrice-shy Ryuuki, who is pretending to exclusively like men, to participate more in his own government.

So since this story begins, literally, within a harem, let’s first talk about the reverse-harem angle. SaiMono owes a big debt to Fushigi Yuugi, the story of a modern girl sucked into a fantasy novel. Miaka finds herself at the center of a web of beautiful and damaged men, despite being, like Bella and Sailor Moon, a clumsy and gluttonous teenager without many traditional leadership qualities.

Fushigi Yuugi’s Miaka and Tamahome

Measured against this yardstick, Shuurei emerges largely as a refutation. She’s not clumsy or gluttonous: she’s good with money and skilled at a classical instrument (the ehru). Furthermore, Shuurei’s goals stand directly in contrast to Miaka’s goals: to serve her country impersonally and professionally as an official, relying on her own intelligence and skills rather than a man.

A traditional feminine failing possessed by the protagonists of these kinds of stories – because, let’s face it, they aren’t cute if they don’t have at least one – is not being able to cook, but the story explicitly makes Shuurei a great cook. Her father, a mild-mannered librarian with a hidden ruthless side, is the one who cutely can’t cook.

All is not refutation and subversion, however. Shoujo plots work better if their main characters are a bit naïve or idealistic, so they will work to change the system rather than accept their place within it. This is the case in Sainkoku, where Shuurei stands out among the traumatized cast as having been unusually sheltered. She’s helped, often secretly, by very many men throughout the narrative, including her father (secretly a SPOILER), her retainer (secretly a SPOILER SPOILER), her uncle (with SPOILER family connections); and the King, who wants to marry her but in the meantime will support her dream.

What’s interesting about all of these sheltering men, actually, is the way that SaiMono insists that the male urge to shelter young female relatives is at least partially pathological. Her father and the retainer, for instance, are secret – or maybe not-so-secret – psychos who are largely genial and apathetic in all things – until you threaten their loved ones (and isn’t that usually considered a feminine quality – the mother bear protecting her cubs?). The worst culprit in the arena of psychotic over protection, though, is Shuurei’s loving uncle Reishin, who is so determined to love and protect her from afar that he can’t even approach her, but only watch over her secretly. Even his friends think he’s a creep.

Within the story, the fact that Shuurei has been sheltered is actually a problem – it gets in the way of her being an official. The male cast are constantly watching her, and constantly telling each other not to interfere too much – to let her make her own mistakes and learn from them.

So SaiMono is a fix-it story, designed to rectify this one galling aspect of otherwise very enjoyable palace dramas: that there’s no space in them for strong female characters to pursue their (non-romantic) dreams. Not only is it a fix-it story, it’s one that sticks with its principles even against what the readership might like to see. For example, even the other characters, after a certain point, are rooting for Shuurei to end up with Ryuuki – but to do that would be to throw the story back into that other kind of narrative, of women working through men. She can’t marry him without giving up her dream, and he can’t make her do it without betraying her trust. The two premises of the story, that it’s a shoujo fantasy and that it’s a feminist fantasy, are at odds with each other. It’s not clear until the very last moment which one will win out.

A properly feminist story can’t have only one good female characters, of course: it also needs strong female role models. So SaiMono has a character who’s a princess with wuxia skills; another who’s a high-class courtesan owner of a brothel; another who’s a ninja; another who’s an inventor; and so on. The author appears to have put some thought into Sainkoku as a work of feminist fantasy, in other words.

That being the case, are the old bugaboos, the evil women with special powers, exorcised in this story? And are those who don’t think it’s appropriate for a woman to become an official recast as the villains, the way they are in Harry Potter? Sort of, but then again not really. There *is* an evil supernatural woman (although, on the other side of the ledger, also a good one). Shuurei is on the side of progress for women and inclusiveness in government, but also on the side of entrenched “major clans” over the wishes of the members of the petty nobility. Since there are a lot of factions, it’s hard to say who the “villain” is, apart from the people Shuurei has to win over.

That’s because SaiMono, despite initial premises, is committed to the idea that the world is complex. For instance, passing the exam doesn’t magically confer respect upon Shuurei, who continues to struggle with others’ perceptions that she is not capable. Similarly, it’s not enough for Ryuuki to suddenly decide that he wants to participate in the leadership of country: there are forces that have already moved to fill that role, and some of them are no less patriotic and well-meaning then him, and are much more competent.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: SaiMono is still young adult fantasy entertainment. Even “complex” issues tend to have simple solutions, as when Shuurei fixes the fortunes of a poor province with no natural resources by establishing a university there. Still, simplified or not, these kinds of plots are what I was hoping to see in The Legend of Korra, another story about a young, sheltered female protagonist with the potential to do great things. Korra let me down when the writers supported her choice to become a vigilante, but SaiMono surprisingly held up.

Korra looking over Ba Sing Se, the capital city of the Earth Kingdom and a complicated place.

Sainkoku Monotagari is idiosyncratic in other ways besides just the commitment to a feminist message. For instance, the author has a favorite reoccurring character type: the seemingly-well-adjusted mild-mannered underachiever, who turns out, almost invariably, to be a scarily competent and ruthless person. In the world of SaiMono, younger siblings very often assume leadership within clans while their more-damaged overachiever older siblings play hooky. There’s also the fact that the series’ main love interest, the King, is bisexual – a surprising angle, and possibly the most subversive thing about the series. Although, sadly, this plot point doesn’t get a lot of play after Ryuuki decides that Shuurei is the love of his life and that he’ll take only one wife.

Returning to the original premise of this post: perhaps that opening quote doesn’t apply as well as I thought, as there is very little that’s “subliminal” about the feminist retelling of this series. It’s not only a clear attack on the idea of separate roles for women, but also pretty careful to include a wide variety of female role models. On top of that, though I’m not familiar enough with this to say for sure, I do sometimes get the idea that “subversion” is a wuxia genre trope to begin with… although then again Saiunkoku is more of a palace drama than a wuxia story…

A better case might be made for some of the other idiosyncrasies of the series: for instance, Sainkoku’s take on standardized test-taking (passing the test is when your problems begin, not where they end). Or how about the insistence that birth order and skills are less important to success than personality and temperament? What about all those “lazy” hidden genius characters who don’t work hard but succeed anyway, but then throw that success away? …Actually who am I kidding, that’s not a subversion, that’s the premise of lots of Japanese fiction. They are really entertaining, though.

Ran Ryuuren, eccentric genius #10 in an ongoing series

Since this article started with a discussion of Harry Potter, I’ll end with a short list of other ways in which it is superficially similar to JKR’s bonkers subliminal reconfiguration: first of all, an emphasis on wacky hijinx among a large ensemble cast; related to that, a strong sense of character and of individual characters having their own motivations and lives outside the main storyline; finally, the nominal “mystery” plot of each volume – which is however much less mysterious after all the politicking and hijinx are stripped away.

Finally, of course, it’s a massively popular series! Light novels series, anime, manga series, voice actor drama, tons of character goods and officially sanctioned side-stories and spin-off novels…. there’s a Saiunkoku machine. And no wonder. I feel like some bronies should be discovering Saiunkoku, which is another one of those sparkly pink woman’s stories purposefully built to include asskicking as well as dark, tragic pasts. Maybe if the anime weren’t out of print, or the characters didn’t have such damnably difficult to remember names (Shuurei vs Shuuei vs Seiran vs Seien vs Shouka vs Shoukun vs Shusui). If the anime ever gets put back into print, perhaps we’ll see.

Or, you know, young adult entertainment

Voices From the Archive: Kelly Thompson, Still In Love With Rogue

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

I was surprised to find this comment about Rogue by Kelly Thompson on Miriam Libcki’s post long before I thought she knew this blog existed. Anyway, it’s short, but I couldn’t resist reprinting it.

Miriam:
You do a great job of articulating what I’ve thought about Rogue for years, but never really managed to put into words.

It seems silly to say Rogue is an inspirational force in my life (especially considering where some writers – I use that term very loosely – have taken her character since I first fell for her) but she really was a powerful touchstone for me as a teen…and as a feminist statement that shaped my world a little, whether I realized what it was then or not.

I never really got over my love affair with her. I constantly pick up comic books with Rogue in them, even today, hoping I’ll see a glimpse of the character I fell in love with so long ago. These days I never find her in the glossy pages, but fortunately I’ve got all those great back issues to re-read.

Thanks for giving Rogue the credit she (and her creators – even if they didn’t have the intentions right) deserves.

Kelly

On Second Thought, I Really Don’t Like Wonder Woman, Part 2

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Charles Reece

The entire Marston/Peter Wonder Woman roundtable index is here.
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In Part 1, I laid out some problems with Marston’s notions of the “good guys,” the women in power, i.e., Wonder Woman and the Amazons. In Part 2, I first look at a more fully realized female ruler in a mythical realm, then move on to consider some women of fantasy who resist the dominant power.

Wonder Woman and the Queen Regent

Since we’re talking fantasies, I prefer my castrating terrorism to be much more directly and, you could say, honestly horrific. Don’t pretend that the Amazonians aren’t another instance of a power fantasy with subjugation of the individual will being the goal — that it’s not just as frightening an idea as any other fascistic dream — simply because it’s gynocentric.

As a corrective to Marston’s gendered (I’d say sexist) approach, consider Queen Cersei Lannister from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones. As she constantly reminds us, this is a patriarchal society, so she was born with a certain chromosomal disadvantage. Her twin brother Jaime assumes the propriety of the patriarchal rules, whereas femininity requires her to study them for loopholes. Like her mythological namesake, she turns men into pigs – albeit, not through witchcraft, but by her own sexual allure and ability to manipulate the rules of the dynastic game. Camille Paglia could’ve been thinking of Cersei when she wrote: “Man has traditionally ruled the social sphere; feminism tells him to move over and share his power. But woman rules the sexual and emotional sphere, and there she has no rival.” [p. 31, Paglia] As the best femme fatale in recent memory, she uses what the gods gave her to manipulate those (men and women) around her into achieving her will (she removed her husband, King Robert, for one). She’s as sexualized, duplicitous and dangerous as her predecessors in film noir, but with a different emphasis.

Martin takes a lot of care in establishing the difference between the way patriarchy imagines itself and the way it actually operates. One’s rule is established in the last instance by convincing enough people to believe in it. Those who really serve the ideology as it presents itself – the patriarchal image as a code of honor, honesty, self-sacrifice and all the “manly” virtues – tend to get their heads handed to them, like Ned Stark. But ideology requires for its continuance that we still act as if we believe in it. Cersei would have no power if the system collapsed, so she has to play a role that’s coded as feminine. To paraphrase her dwarfish younger brother, Tyrion, it’s better to be a rich cripple than a poor one. At an even greater genetic disadvantage than his sister, he, too, must be deceitful in order to make the system work for him. Thus, contrary to film noir, deceit isn’t really a feminine trait (any more than it’s a matter of dwarfishness), but a requirement of anyone who’s coded as other in a system that grants one power. Power is androgynous; any gender encoding is ultimately arbitrary even though it still has a practical effect on access. In Season 2 (Episode 1), when Littlefinger attempts to assert power over Cersei with knowledge that her son, King Joffrey, isn’t the “rightful” heir to the throne (being borne of an illicit affair between Cersei and her twin), the Queen Regent provides the lesson that, however she might’ve come by her influential position, “power is power.” As with knowledge, masculinity shouldn’t be confused with power itself.

Wonder Woman and the Final Girl

In keeping with the broadly stated alignment of masochism/submission/feminine and sadism/domination/masculine that’s the basis for gaze theory (the camera being a sadistic male voyeur that dominates the female spectacle), Wonder Woman is more the former than the latter. Although Wonder Woman regularly uses dominating tactics (the lasso, fisticuffs) they’re always reactive (the villain strikes first). Like Billy Jack, she wants to love, not fight, but she’ll kick your ass if you force her. There’s no question why the Saturnic girls hate Paradise Island so much; it’s clearly better than their home. [p. 4] We have nothing to fear from the Amazonian matriarchy, because it’s as submissive as we’re supposed to be. They only use psychic domination on caricatural villains. This is your basic superhero moral gobbledygook, only encoded as feminist. Azzarello got something right in his interpretation: if this were a rape/revenge movie, the Amazonians wouldn’t be the avenging party. My sympathies lie with Eviless. [p. 9]

Marston might be promoting a submissive morality, but there’s not much of a masochistic aesthetic to along with it. Wonder Woman is the dominating will. When she’s bound, it’s always wrong. The reader is to identify with her regaining control, making others submit. Similarly, Wonder Woman does a lot of hitting, but is rarely hit herself. (I count only once: Giganta nails her with a club. [p. 44]) Therefore, this is a relatively painless masochism. And that’s basically Marston’s ideological sleight-of-hand, selling submission as a pleasurable form of domination. A boy doesn’t have to fear the loss of control (“castration anxiety”), because he’s identifying with the powerful heroine who’s supposed to be in control while she pays lip service to surrendering one’s self. Princess Diana is little more than a superpowered Phyllis Schlafly redirected at masculinity.

Rather than roll over for power (give up the “phallus”), I’d rather see boys (and girls) identifying with Carol Clover’s “Final Girl” in slasher films, the last remaining character to face off against the monster (e.g., Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis):

If the act of horror spectatorship is registered as a “feminine” experience — that the shock effects induce bodily sensations in the viewer answering the fear and pain of the screen victim — the charge of masochism is underlined. [Not that the male viewer doesn’t also take on a “sadistic” identification with the killer, she adds.] It is only to suggest that in the Final Girl sequence his empathy with what the films define as the female posture is fully engaged, and further, because this sequence is inevitably the central one in any given film, that the viewing experience hinges on the emotional assumption of the feminine posture. [p. 105, Clover]

Clover refuses to call identification with the Final Girl feminist, because of the many reductive psychoanalytic assumptions that have been a hallmark of feminist film theory: she is “a male surrogate in things oedipal, a homoerotic stand-in, the audience incorporate; to the extent she ‘means’ girl at all, it is only for purposes of signifying phallic lack, and even that meaning is nullified in the final scenes [where she picks up a ‘phallic tool’ and inserts it into the killer].” [p. 98] This essay is long enough already, so I’ll resist the urge to debate the issue of just how masculine the Final Girl is or whether she’s a good feminist role model. Clover sees androgyny as a problem, whereas I agree with Gramstad that it’s the goal. But irrespective of which position one might take, the Final Girl is certainly heroic: with great resolve and ingenuity, she resists the urge to give into a nearly unstoppable malevolent force that often is in obedience to a “loving” maternal authority (the dead mother’s voice). Against matriarchal or patriarchal domination, my heroes fight for self-determination.

Wonder Woman and the Femme Fatale

The femme fatale […] tells the truth about sexual relations. It, in fact, is about male fear of Woman, not male hatred of Woman. The femme fatale shows in her supernatural kind of power that Woman is ultimately unknowable, not only to man, but to herself. Most feminists today, obsessed with success and the career world don’t want to think that Woman has any special connection to nature by virtue of her reproductive apparatus. I myself feel that when the femme fatale is thrown out of the canon of modern popular culture, we lose an enormous amount of the voltage between the sexes that made some of the great films so powerful in the studio era. The origins of the femme fatale are going all the way back, really, to pre-history, the goddess cults of antiquity. We have myths like that of Medusa [and] the succubus […]. There are just so many examples of these images world wide that I have to ask how could they possibly be coming from false social indoctrination? Surely these vampire motifs are being generated automatically in culture after culture around the world by the basic facts of male-female anatomy. That is, that every time a man has sex with a woman he is approaching, again, his site of origins. Therefore, there is always subconsciously a fear that as he puts his essence (as a sexual being), his erect member, into the body of a woman … why, she might take it and he might never get it back again. Or he might, by some weird, nightmarish process, begin to shrink down to a baby again and be re-absorbed into the feminine matrix. [Camille Paglia, approximately 1:40:00 into her audio commentary for the Basic Instinct dvd]

Safe to say, that’s not the majority opinion on the femme fatale among feminists. Nor do too many claim Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct as their favorite movie – at least, Paglia’s the only one I could find. Nevertheless, I think she’s right (and she was the premier counter-intuitive intellectual culture-muncher until Slavoj Žižek cock-blocked her). The standard line of thought agrees that the femme fatale is the dangerous representation of sexual feminine mystique, but objects that it exists as spectacle for, and to be put into its narrative place by, the sadistic gaze: the willfully transgressing female, exerting her independence (frequently depicted as criminal), is brought under control by the dominating male power whereby feminine chaos is restored to patriarchal order. Likewise, in Wonder Woman #28, Cheetah, Eviless and the other femme fatales, who dare assert their freedom, have to be captured, punished and possibly reprogrammed by the dominant order (matriarchy or the mother’s voice in place of the patriarchy). Generally dismissive of the objectifying male gaze [1], Paglia chooses to focus on the fact that where there’s fear of female power, there is an acknowledgement of that power. As she expresses in “No Law in the Arena” (a personal manifesto), the code of Amazonism is that this power should be used in resisting the suppression of woman’s free will. [p. 40, Paglia] No wonder her admiration for Sharon Stone’s Catherine. The character heads her own little Amazonian secret society, but would not be welcome on Paradise Island.

Catherine is Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine (the abject representation of the pre-Oedipal mother)[2] in the role of the serial killer. She is more symbolic of her gender than her androgynous brethren are theirs (e.g., Jason, Norman). Her vortical vagina is the locus of her power, devouring all proximal sexual energy to be re-directed as she desires. Just the sight of it turns the lawful masculine order into a sweaty mess. Verhoeven seems to have filmed her with gaze theory in mind. She controls when and where the masochistic hero, Nick (Michael Douglas), sees her naked. And if she’s being spied on voyeuristically, she directly returns the gaze with a cold, calculating stare. Nor does a panoptical vantage point save the voyeur from her gaze. Loving the penis, her weapon of choice isn’t the castrating blade, but a true fetishistic analog, the ice pick. And what’s the first thing to be penetrated in close up? The male eye.

Basic Instinct is one of the purest expressions of the masochistic aesthetic’s double bind in film noir:

If the male spectator identifies with the masochistic male character, he is aligned with a position usually assigned to the female. If he rejects identification with this position, one alternative is to identify with the position of power: the female who inflicts pain. In either case, the male spectator assumes a position associated with the female. In the former, he identified with the culturally assigned feminine characteristics exhibited by the male within the masochistic scenario; in the latter, he identifies with the powerful female who represents the mother of pre-Oedipal life and the primary identification. [Gaylyn Studlar, quoted in Williams, p. 131]

Catherine is the cool figure one wants to identify with and fantasize about. By telling the story from Nick’s perspective as the investigating police detective, she is kept mysterious and the viewer is forced to identify with his pathetic, failing attempts at trying to maintain some semblance of machismo control. One wants to be punished by her for his feeble-minded conformity. Her sadistic control is a fantasy of resistance against both social and cinematic domination. In this way, Basic Instinct is in the long line of crime films that use the criminal as a symbol for freedom (e.g., Scarface, Bonnie and Clyde). Catherine does the binding and escapes punishment. Any attempt to contain her, by either the patriarchy’s representative or one of her Amazonian sisters, results in that person’s death and/or psychological obliteration.

I submit that the flaunting of so many characteristics commonly associated with patriarchal cinema makes Basic Instinct feminist, while the androgynous, or trans-gender, identification (sadistically with Catherine, masochistically with Nick) serves as a critique of the more reductive versions of gaze theory. As a celebration of Catherine, the film provides a counter-narrative to Wonder Woman, where Villainy Inc. is given its due as the proper (anti-)heroes of the story. If you can’t resist the lasso, as Catherine does the polygraph, then make it serve the resistance.

Conclusion

I went into the Marston’s last issue figuring I’d be bored, and came out with a newfound appreciation of just how ideologically noxious a well-intentioned, goofy superhero book could be. He evidently lived in a world of inverted qualia. The book remains a real chore to get through, but it’s always fascinating to me when a liberal finds totalitarianism a utopian expression of his or her core values, feminist or otherwise. Maybe Wonder Woman will inspire some little girl to shatter dictatorship’s glass ceiling when she grows up. That would be real progress.

Footnotes:

[1] “[S]exual objectification is characteristically human and indistinguishable from the art impulse.” [p. 62, Paglia] To which, I say, “amen, sister.”

[2] Creed has an entire book devoted to the subject, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, but I’ve only read her analysis of Ridley Scott’s Alien in “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Like the general consensus on the femme fatale, this representation would seem to only serve the patriarchy:

This, I would argue is also the central ideological project of the popular horror film – purification of the abject through a [quoting Julia Kristeva] “descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct.” [p. 46, Creed]

Although, I could see a pro-feminist interpretation of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist using this approach pretty much writing itself.

References:

Alder, Ken, “A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America” (2002), a .pdf download from author’s website.

Clover, Carol J., “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” (1987/1996) in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant (Ed.): p. 66-113.

Cox, John, “The Evolution of Surveillance: Security Comes with a Cost” (2009) on the author’s website.

Creed, Barbara, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” (1986/1996) in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant (Ed.): p. 35-65.

Gramstad, Thomas, “The Female Hero: A Randian-Feminist Synthesis” (1999) on POP Culture: Premises of Post-Objectivism.

Jones, Gerard, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (2004)

Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975/1986) in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, Philip Rosen (Ed.): p. 198-209.

Paglia, Camille, “No Law in the Arena” (1994) in Vamps & Tramps: p. 17-94.

Solanas, Valerie, S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1968) on UbuWeb.

Williams, Tony, “Phantom Lady, Cornell Woolrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic” (1988/2003) in Film Noir Reader (7th Edition), Alain Silver & James Ursini (Eds.): p. 129-143.

Wood, Robin, “Fascism/Cinema” (1998) in Sexual Politics & Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond: p. 13-28.

On Second Thought, I Really Don’t Like Wonder Woman, Part 1

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Charles Reece

The entire roundtable on the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman is here.
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My interest in Wonder Woman has always been lukewarm, with a back issue collection ranging somewhere between Dazzler and She-Hulk. The bondage theme led me to try one of those DC Archive editions, but the mind-numbing repetition of “oh, you’ve bound my bracelets” and “now, I have you tied up with my lasso” only proved what I thought impossible: how meek and boring sadomasochism could be. I imagine what Suehiro Maruo might do with the character – questionable as feminism, true, but free of tedium. This is a roundabout way of saying I prefer my feminist icons with teeth. And William Marston wasn’t interested in artistic ambiguity, but propaganda:

[That w]omen are exciting for this one reason — it is the secret of women’s allure — women enjoy submission, being bound [was] the only truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to the moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound. … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society. [p. 210, Jones]

Submission as an essential quality of womanhood might sound dubiously feminist, too, if not for Marston’s insistence that what is woman’s by nature should be a virtue for man to follow. There was no Sadean intent for us perverts. Submission was Marston’s end to violence, not a subset. When moralizing critics of his day objected to the overtly fetishistic nature of Wonder Woman, Marston’s response was that bondage is a painless way of showing the hero under duress. Unfortunately, he was correct: his and Harry Peter’s depiction is about as troublingly kinky as the traps laid for Batman in his sixties TV show. As issue 28 indicates, even the villains use physical force only to subdue the heroines, never for torture: When Wonder Woman and her mom are bound by burning chains, Eviless makes it clear that the flames don’t actually burn. [p. 20] As fetish or drama, this is about as flaccid as it gets.

When I read about Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang’s revamped version of Amazonian culture (pun wholly endorsed), it sounded more to my taste than Marston and Peters’. I won’t repeat the argument I had with Noah about the potential in the revamping, but I would like to emphasize that I more or less agree with the idea behind the original Amazonian myth: there’s something to fear about a culture made up exclusively of warrior women. To me, feminism promotes the end to discrimination against women, but it will not rid the world of other social ills like totalitarianism, xenophobia, or any form of bigotry that isn’t directed at minimizing the humanity of women (e.g., it can be perfectly consistent with misandry and the sexist exclusion of men). As Paradise Island shows, feminism isn’t mutually exclusive to any of these ills.

If there’s a danger to Marston’s feminism, it’s in his tranquil submission to a “loving” authority. Don’t ultra-nationalists love their country? He circumvents this problem by making his heroes as anodyne as possible. We should trust the Amazonians, because we know they are pure and virtuous. Granted, this hardly sets Wonder Woman apart from all the other classic DC heroes, but isn’t that a problem? Even a feminist heroine can be as indicative of the fascistic aesthetic as any of her male counterparts. Marston’s creation helped with equality in representation, but it did so by presenting some ideas that any libertarian-minded type should find fairly repellant (and by ‘libertarian’ I mean the philosophical belief in free will, not necessarily the political variety). Fear need not lead to hatred (e.g., Marston’s Amazons don’t hate men, but they surely fear them as a social disease); it could be the basis for a healthy skepticism. Any society that promotes a totalizing agenda should be feared and distrusted, as should art promoting such an agenda, whether it’s rooted in misogyny or feminism.

Wonder Woman and the Objectivist

If Marston had a perfect Earth 2 counterpart, it would look a whole lot like his contemporary, Ayn Rand. Where he promoted the collectivist submission of self to others, she viewed self-assertion as the highest virtue and altruism as evil. He was resolutely feminist, she resolutely anti-feminist. His heroic ideal was female, hers male. What’s interesting is that despite Rand’s libertarian bona fides, she basically agreed with Marston that the essence of woman is to “submit to a loving authority”:

For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship – the desire to look up to man. “To look up” does not mean dependence, obedience, or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration; and admiration is an emotion that can be experienced only by a person of strong character and independent value judgments. … Hero worship is a demanding virtue: a woman has to be worthy of it and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and morally, i.e., as a human being, she has to be his equal; then the object of her worship is specifically his masculinity, not any human virtue she might lack. … Her worship is an abstract emotion for the metaphysical concept of masculinity as such. [from “About a Woman President,” quoted in Gramstad]

They just disagreed on the gendered structural ideal to which women should “look up.” As Thomas Gramstad lists them (because no way in hell am I going to bother reading the author herself), the characteristics Rand was likely thinking of as ontologically masculine heroism are the regular, positive clichés one associates with phallic power: “being strong, enduring, independent, verbally accurate, competent in making and using tools, persevering and excelling in one’s activities, and in the ability to organize and lead.” A good woman has the ability to recognize such virtues as deserving of worship by possessing some of the classic feminine clichés: “emotional openness, the ability to listen and nurture, being cooperative, easygoing, warm, loyal, playful, adept at non-verbal communication skills, and able to identify and express emotions.” [ibid.] Rand was adamant that a woman could never be a hero, only a hero-worshipper. To attempt the latter would be a denial of her ontological/structural femininity. Despite her disavowal in the quote above, it’s hard to see how this view doesn’t promote the inferiority of women and their need to be dominated by men, a de facto submission.

Marston, however, had no trouble with submission; it’s the moral obligation of his heroes. So Steve Trevors makes a good contrast to Rand’s heroic ideal. As a feminist parody of Lois Lane and the superhero’s imperiled significant other, Steve is a neutered joke on that most manly of professions, the soldier. He’s what Valerie Solanas called — in her own mocking of phallocentrism, S.C.U.M. Manifesto — an auxiliary member, “encourag[ing] other men to de-man themselves and thereby mak[ing] themselves relatively inoffensive.” [p. 21, Solanas] (She could’ve provided another alternate Wonder Woman preferable to the real thing, with far more imaginative uses of the lasso, I’m sure.) If little boys saw him as a sissy with not much to admire, maybe they should consider that’s the kind of role model little girls are saddled with their whole life. But Marston wasn’t doing satire. Little boys were to aspire to be more like Lois Lane than Superman.

Where does all this knee-bending end? With a nod to Aristotle (a favorite of Rand’s): Man submits to Wonder Woman, she submits to Hippolyte and the gynocentric dogma of Paradise Island, which is derived from Aphrodite. But does the goddess obey a higher principle, or is she, by sheer force of will the loving authority sui generis, the prime lover? You’re going to reach a dominating will or order at some point that’s not submitting to anything higher. Despite all the chauvinistic nonsense (and there was plenty), Rand attempted to identify responsibility within the self, rather than have the individual relinquish control to another, whereby an authority is entrusted to follow whatever moral principles Marston believed to be beyond the individual’s grasp. Thus, I find Gramstad’s feminist correction of objectivism a far more consistently moral view than either Marston’s or Rand’s. Accordingly, heroic virtue shouldn’t be seen as gendered, but “androgynous,” borrowing from the instrumental and expressive values commonly identified within the respective provinces of “masculine” and “feminine.” Nor should one act as the heroic model because of obedience, but through autonomous agreement with the various characteristics constituting that model.

If Marston’s argument for being bound doesn’t sound like fascism’s bundle of sticks, it’s because his fantasy of Wonder Woman always has her using Amazonian power in the most decent way possible. Well, that, and because fascism is assumed to be the prime example of knuckle-dragging masculinity. In his argument against separating cinematic form from fascistic function (“Fascism/Cinema”), Robin Wood identifies certain tropes of Leni Riefentahl’s Triumph of the Will as latently fascistic, if not explicitly so, wherever they appear [p. 19-23]: empty rhetorical speeches connoting nationalism and ideological purity as the solution; dehumanized spectacles of people functioning as a machine; phallic power display; the indoctrination of children into “the dominant ideology (patriarchy, capitalism) as unquestionable fact and truth”; an obsession with cleanliness and work (e.g., alienated labor is spun as service to the represented ideology while a pleasurable activity such as sex is repressed and seen as dirty); the ideology is represented as the inherent vox populi [1]. If a woman can be the fascist auteur, why can’t a feminist society be fascist?

Despite its presentation as a revolutionary utopia against patriarchy, Paradise Island exhibits all of these tropes (and I’m just talking about issue 28): Men aren’t allowed on the island for fear of contamination (ideological purity and nationalism). The Amazonian view is presented as unquestionable fact in the empty rhetoric of Hippolyte, which sounds like she had one of the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a speechwriter: “The only real happiness for anybody is to be found in obedience to loving authority.” [p. 48] As already seen, Marston intended to indoctrinate children into his counter-ideology (the dominant ideology of the Amazons). Just like the throngs of people cheering the Nazis on in Reifenstahl’s film, all the Amazons seem to be of one mind (which goes along with Marson’s notion of a “a stable, peaceful human society”). Whatever fetishistic quality bondage might’ve had for Marston personally, its use in his comic is always in service of the Amazonian ideological state apparatus. When the lasso falls into the hands of Eviless, the solution is not to destroy such a dangerous tool, but for the proper authority to regain its control (normalizing the kink as productive work in place of the dangerous and mysterious world of private sexuality). Should anyone be unwilling to submit to the loving Amazonian authority, Wonder Woman never has a problem with classic “phallic” displays of purely violent repression (presumably a transitory measure like the temporary dictatorships of utopian leftist thought). And, like a clockwork orange, these unruly types are sent to Transformation Island for a Venus girdle fitting and re-programming [2].

Wonder Woman and the Utilitarian

Liberal do-gooder resistance to retributive justice can often slip into the most totalitarian of utopian ideas. By focusing on utilitarian notions of rehabilitation and deterrence, rather than a just punishment to fit the crime, the criminal’s agency can be diminished for the general good. What results is a society that begins to look like a penal colony. There are the science fiction dystopias such as A Clockwork Orange and The Minority Report, but also B. F. Skinner’s utopian model for the real world, Walden Two, where a centrally planned system of positive reinforcements has eliminated crime through the shaping of behavior (the behaviorist had no truck with talk of free will, Beyond Freedom and Dignity being one of his major popular works). And, to my mind, Marston’s Transformation Island is a more horrifying, feminine version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon.

The concept is ubiquitous nowadays (cf., the masthead above), but briefly: The panopticon is a circular prison with a watchtower in the center covered in two-way mirrors, where guards can observe any of the prisoners through the glass walls of their cells that face the tower. It’s a model of efficiency: few to no guards are needed at any given time, because the prisoners can’t determine when they’re being watched. Thus, they learn to act as if they’re always being watched. Besides the obvious visual analogy of the tower to the phallus, the concept can be read as masculine due to its use of Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze.” [3] Similar to what’s done with Rear Window, substitute the film audience for the guards, the screen for the glass walls and images of women for the prisoners, and you pretty much have her view of cinematic pleasure. The woman/prisoner exists as spectacle (connoting “to-be-looked-at-ness”), “freezing”/disrupting the progression of narrative/legal order, which is what the masculine camera/guard’s gaze is ultimately searching for: “This alien presence [erotic or criminal spectacle] then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative [patriarchal or legal order].” [4] [p. 203, Mulvey]

Transformation Island’s rehabilitation isn’t merely concerned with controlling behavior, or what can be seen, but in the complete restructuring of the criminal’s affective states and desires. As Ken Alder points out, the early popular reports on Marston’s beloved polygraph tended to code its subject as feminine due to stereotypes of women “as emotional, secretive, and deceitful, identifying them with ‘nature’.” [p. 9] Similarly, Amazonian rehabilitation is “feminist” because it goes beyond the conscious expressions, behind the visible and, of course, replaces the typical male rational observer with the care of matriarchal authority. A successful transformation occurs when the subject not only conforms to Amazonian law, but willingly resists being freed from the psychic chains of her Venus girdle. There is no engagement with the subject as an individual, only a one-size-fits-all, Manchurian Candidate-styled reformatting of the transgressive will with a servile Amazonian one (such as the reformed Irene [p. 21]). I guess the Borg could be seen as a peaceful society – I mean endogenously, they’re matriarchal, work well together and always remain so calm – but is it anyone’s idea of a loving authority? Maybe Marston’s. Irrespective of gender alignment, this is pure dehumanizing objectification being sold as loving care.

The panopticon is particularly scary as a structuring metaphor for society itself. People willingly displaying themselves on online social networks and getting accustomed to the accretion of cameras in banks, businesses and on the streets are instances of Shoshana Zuboff’s “anticipatory conformity”:

I think the first level of that is we anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with awareness. We know, for example, when we’re going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or we’ll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke. It’s within our awareness to self-censor. And that self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom. [quoted in Cox]

As the sense of privacy erodes, people modify their behavior to fit what the omnipotent gaze, the collective will, wants. The Amazons are much more Orwellian, erasing and rewriting the self until it conforms to their utopian ideas (Newspeak is dialectic compared to the Venus girdle.) And Marston thought this absolute dominance a good message to promote to children, all for some twisted version of feminism. Again, totalitarianism and feminism are not mutually exclusive.

Rest up and come back for the thrilling conclusion tomorrow.

Footnotes:

[1] I don’t disagree that much of this imagery is always potentially fascistic, only that it can’t still be appreciated for it’s formal beauty as such. Wood (following Mulvey) uses the example of Busby Berkeley’s spectacles in a fairly dismissive tone due to the objectification of women for the male gaze, as if simply appreciating their organized beauty is little more than swallowing fascistic rhetoric. Putting aside the issue of whether such objectification is always bad, I can’t help but think of Claire Denis’ equally beautiful and “mechanized” movement of the French Foreign Legion in Beau Travail. It is militarized, organized and very phallic, but is that all there is to it? (Clips of both examples can be easily found on YouTube.) To reduce all appreciation of these examples to the dehumanizing and totalizing gaze seems entirely too simplistic, even where there is a penumbra of fascism. Fascism has to have some appealing qualities; otherwise, no one would ever freely choose it.

[2] I’m not the only one to connect Wonder Woman with fascism:

On the surface at least, William Marston’s texts for Wonder Woman — a self- proclaimed feminist hero — subverted these [patriarchal] stereotypes. […] Yet Wonder Woman fights Dr. Psycho with tactics that hardly differ from the dissembler’s own fascist propaganda. Although she espouses liberal rhetoric and is a fierce advocate of feminist equality, when she ties up Dr. Psycho with her truth lasso, he is obliged to tell the truth. Bound by her lasso, Wonder Woman’s adversaries are ‘‘forced to be free.’’ [p. 9, Alder]

[3] Too much credence has been given to the genderification of the kinoeye. Before Mulvey’s essay, the subsequent explosion of gaze types (sadistic, male, masochistic, female, transcendent, etc.) and critiques from other feminist theorists like Kaja Silverman, Linda Williams and Carol Clover, the supposedly sadistic voyeur par excellence, Alfred Hitchcock, had already implicitly dismantled such an idea with his notion of suspense. That is, the filmmaker creates suspense by giving the audience more knowledge of the danger faced by the protagonist (with whom the audience identifies) than the character has. The way Hitchcock often did this was by placing the camera with the villain. This pro forma technique doesn’t assert identification with the villain, but, quite to the contrary, creates a sympathetic fearful affect for the protagonist, male or female. Silverman suggests much the same in “Masochism and Subjectivity”:

I will hazard the generalization that it is always the victim — the figure who occupies the passive position — who is really the focus of attention, and whose subjugation the subject (whether male or female) experiences as a pleasurable repetition from his/her own story. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the fascination of the sadistic point of view is merely that it provides the best vantage point from which to watch the masochistic story unfold. [quoted in Clover, p. 105]

While Clover (in the same essay from which the above quote was taken) tempers her theorizing with the observation that a camera is sometimes just a camera. [p. 90-1]

[4] I’d grant that this is an analogy, not a homology: According to Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach, dealing with the alien presence is really a way of decreasing castration anxiety. The “two avenues of escape” for the male unconscious are sadistic voyeurism (“pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt […], asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness”) or fetishistic scopophilia (“the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous”). [p. 205] Both avenues might be pursued in the integration of a narrative female figure, but unless the criminal is a femme fatale, only voyeurism would seem applicable in the panopticon.

Update: Read part 2.

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