Tag Archives: Noah

Meta-Crap

Posted on by

Dollhouse-tv-17

For God’s sake don’t make me watch any more.

 
We’re doing a Joss Whedon roundtable hopefully week after next. In preparation, I thought I would watch Dollhouse…but it’s so crappy I don’t think I’ll actually make it all the way through. I like Eliza Dushku; she’s charming, if not exactly talented. But charm can only take you so far.

Anyway, what’s interesting to me in the first few episodes is how they work as self-parody of television writ large. Echo (that’s Dushku) is a mind-wiped young woman who gets some new personality transferred into her in each episode, at the behest of some paying client who wants a customized toy human to play with. Each of the scenarios is basically a clichéd and indifferently realized genre exercise: Echo becomes a profiler and deals with kidnappers; echo goes into the woods with an outdoorsman and then it turns out he’s a psychopath and she’s in a slasher movie; Echo is programmed as a swaggering art thief in a caper gone wrong. The blips in echo’s program function as a kind of wink at televisions myriad plot-holes. In one episode Echo is programmed to protect a pop singer, and keeps protecting her because the programming/plot demands that she should, even when, as far as character consistency goes, it makes no sense. In that art thief ep, Echo is mind-wiped half way through, becoming completely useless—echoing, again, the erratic competence of tv characters, who are as hapless or as effective as the plot requires. The fact that Dollhouse is itself wretched television only makes its meta-commentary on the wretchedness of television more perfect. It is itself the slipshod awfulness it mimics; Whedon is a fool performing a perfectly brainless imitation of a fool.

Dollhouse isn’t just a parody of television, though; it’s a parody of Whedon himself—and particularly of his feminism. Each of the personalities injected into Echo is resourceful, intelligent, determined. They’re strong female characters all. But they’re strong female characters that are made up, and visibly hollow. More, they’re strong female characters who just about all seem designed to be raped. Echo is often programmed to have romantic and sexual encounters—and such encounters are of course not consented to by Echo’s original personality, wherever that may be. For that matter, the insertion of the personalities into a unwitting body is itself a kind of assault. The creation of strong female characters is conflated with skeevy, snickering, and generally horrible abuse. This juxtaposition fits rather too neatly onto, for example, Buffy, where the strong female lead is frequently punished and shamed for her strength, almost as if the whole point of creating strong women is to run them through a sadomasochistic fever dream.

I only made it through episode 5, and in theory 6 is where things start to somewhat improve. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there…but I guess I do grudgingly admire the start of the series for its unremittingly self-accusatory awfulness. It’s hard to think of another series that so self-consciously uses its own crappiness to indict its medium and its creator.

Utilitarian Review 5/23/15

Posted on by

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Joy DeLyria on long fictions.

Me on slow, cheerful doom.

Me on whose gender is artificial.

Phillip Smith on Darna, the Filipino Wonder Woman.

Chris Gavaler on Raskolnikov and the problem with Hollywood super dudes.

Kim O’Connor on why we need to take the sexual harassment allegations against Louis CK seriously.

Me on Game of Thrones and comics to change your gender.

Kate Polak on sexual violence and implicating the viewer in Game of Thrones.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I wrote about Game of Thrones and how critics write about all the same things all the time.

At Playboy I

—wrote about why B.B. King is the King of Rock, not just blues.

—interviewed Dianna E. Anderson about purity culture and creating a better Christian sexual ethics. .

—wrote about Game of Thrones and the complimentary media portrayals of sexual violence against women and violence against men.

—8 Minutes and why sex workers don’t need to be saved.

At Ravishly I wrote about how erasing male victims of domestic violence hurts both men and women.

At Splice Today I wrote about books for white guys.
 
Other Links

Chris Blattman on that faked gay marriage study.

Barry Ritholtz on how the minimum wage doesn’t kill jobs; it just reduces corporate profits.

Rex Huppke on how the Mad Max movie is a feminist trick.
 

bb-king-1

Comics to Change Your Gender

Posted on by

This first ran on Splice Today.
______
 

ranma-12-2311781

 
Comics in the United States have traditionally been associated with guys. The stereotype of superheroes as male adolescent power fantasies has more than a little truth to it; Neil Shyminsky’s informal survey found that 95% of X-Men readers were male. Surveys focusing on a wider array of comics have found a less lopsided breakdown, though one still tilted towards men.

But the link between comics and XY chromosomes isn’t some sort of preordained biological truth. In fact, in Japan, comics (or manga) have been read by just about all demographics — kids, adults, men, women, and everybody else. Manga’s deliberate appeal to a wide range of audiences is one reason it became so successful in the U.S. in the 90s: shojo manga titles, or comics for girls, catered to a niche in the American market that the mainstream superhero publishers were unable/unwilling/too clueless/too sexist to fill.

One of the first major manga American successes in the late 1980s/early 1990s was Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma ½. Takahashi supposedly had determined to write a comic that would appeal more to girls than some of her earlier series, and that series couldn’t have been much more straightforward (if that’s the word) about its cross-gender  ambitions. “Ranma” refers to the hero of the book; “1/2” refers to the fact that, due to an accident at a cursed spring, that hero spends a significant portion of his time as a heroine. Whenever he’s splashed with cold water, he turns into a girl; when he’s drenched in hot water, he turns back into a guy.

If that sounds like a preposterous premise for a series — well, that’s the least of it. Viz has just started to rerelease Ranma 1/2 in budget two-for-one volumes, and re-reading the beginning of the series again, it’s hard to express, right from the start, how completely, joyfully absurd it is. By page four, we’ve got Ranma (as a girl) racing up the street pursued by a giant panda bear — a giant panda bear who turns out to be Ranma’s father, Genma Saotome. At the same time that Ranma fell into the cursed spring that turned him into a part-time girl, Genma fell into a spring that turned him into a part-time panda. And a very cute part-time panda at that.

This labile approach to gender and species is mirrored in the book’s genre commitments. The narrative is devoted to a series of crushes/romantic entanglements interspersed with violent martial arts battles interspersed with gender switch hijink and a heaping helping of sexual farce.

Though Ranma is the titular star, he shares the spotlight with Akane Tendo, a young girl who loves martial arts, hates boys, and is kind of/sort of Ranma’s arranged fiancé at the behest of their parents. The two have hardly met before they’re engaged in a martial arts battle (with Ranma as a girl), and they’re hardly done fighting before they’re running into each other naked in the bath, where the hot water has changed Ranma back into a guy. This is but the first of many nude sexual teases, all the more giggle-inducing it’s unclear who the fan service is for. Are we looking at female bodies for male gazes? Male bodies for female gazes? Both for either? Or are there other possibilities? In one scene, female Ranma and Akane run into each other in the bath again, both naked, prompting Akane to deck him (or her.) “But you were both girls, right? Doesn’t that make it okay?” Akane’s older sister Nabiki asks. For Nabiki, the gender (and genre) changes ease or erase sexual tension. For Akane, though, the male/female switch makes all relationships potentially charged with polymorphous verve.

Ranma ½ as a whole leans towards Akane’s interpretation. In making a book aimed at both boys and girls, Takahashi doesn’t opt for a middle-of-the-road, appeal-to-everybody kind of story. Rather, she revels in the way that she can giddily bash boys’ genres and perspectives against girls’ genres and perspectives and come up with ridiculous risqué adventurous loopiness for all. Thus, upperclassman Kuno’s mano-a-mano desire to best Ranma in single combat for the hand of Akane slips inevitably into courtship, as the antagonist confusedly falls in love with Ranma’s girl form, thrusting flowers at her (him) with the same hostility/obsession with which he first went after him (her) with a sword.

As the first male-male martial arts rivalry in the book, the Kuno-Ranma rivalry/romance sets a blueprint for other encounters. When the next antagonist, Ryoga, shows up, his ill-defined desire for revenge (because Ranma stole bread from him at some point?) seems like it could just as easily be some other ill-defined passion. The slipperiness of motive fits into other slipperinesses; Ryoga too fell in a cursed spring, and when exposed to cold water he turns into an adorable baby pig. That pig wins Akane’s heart, and the Ryoga/Ranma battle ends when Akane drags off the irresisitibly neotenous ungulate to cuddle in her bed. So Ranma goes to get him out of Akane’s room, and there’s an epic battle with Ryoga-pig boucing around the room in an explosion of racing motion-lines. The cuddly-animal martial arts battle ends with Akane discovering that her little comfort pet has been replaced in her bed by a very embarrassed Ranma, the funny animal comic for kids morphing into a sex comedy with the same sort of audible “Bloosh!” that always greets the panda’s ascent from water.

Those easy substitutions — of genre for genre, gender for gender, species for species — are enabled by, or work as a metaphor for, the comics form itself. Each panel in a comic is a different, fractured moment. We see a picture of Ranma kicking here and a picture of Ranma punching there and we determine those are two images of the same person simply because we’re told they’re the same person. So you can call this pig and that human the same character if you’d like; who’s to stop you? Identity in comics is a convention — and if self is simply a trope, then so is gender, and even species. Comics don’t have to be for boys only, because in comics even boys don’t have to be boys only. Ranma ½ is its own cursed pond; you fall in and come out every which body, whether a boy reading girls comics, girls reading boys comics, or a panda reading both.

 

 

 

 

Whose Gender is Artificial?

Posted on by

Radical feminist writer and blogger Meghan Murphy has written several posts over the last couple of weeks about how awful I am. I don’t really have much interest in responding in kind, but I did want to talk briefly about one argument she makes in her most recent piece, in which she accuses me of believing that gender is real, rather than a construct.
 

Berlatsky says feminist critique often involves a critique of “femininity,” which is true… Though he doesn’t quite get why. He writes:

Is femininity a tool to devalue women? Or is the devaluation of femininity a tool to devalue women? Wearing high heels doesn’t necessarily make you a dupe of the patriarchy. It could mean you’re a super-powerful rock star, and you want to show that femininity can be strong, too.

He seems to see femininity as innate, here. As though, to critique social constructs is to critique something essential about females. But “femininity” is an idea — a set of characteristics (invented and reinforced by a patriarchal society). It says “woman” means “delicate,” “passive,” “pleasant,” “accommodating,” “pretty,” “nurturing,” “irrational,” and “weak.” Feminists say women are not “naturally” any of these things. So no, femininity isn’t about “strength,” despite the fact that women are “strong.” And this is because femininity and femaleness are not connected in any material way.

What’s interesting to me here is that Murphy claims to be undermining femininity even as she reifies it.

My point, in the bit she quotes, is that there’s nothing innately weak, or innately debased, about wearing high heels. Wearing high heels is coded feminine, and is therefore seen as weak, or wrong, or silly, or stupid. But both the decision to code high heels as feminine, and the insistence that femininity is weak…those are cultural choices, not some sort of absolute truth. And pushing back against either of those assumptions — by arguing that high heels don’t have to be feminine, or arguing that high heels, as “feminine” espression, don’t have to be weak — is effectively challenging the innateness of femininity.

Murphy starts out by saying she thinks femininity is a construct too. But the construct is for her awfully real looking and solid. First, she insists that femininity has to mean nurturing, irrational, weak; it can’t mean anything else. And second, she seems oblivious to the possibility that particular gendered expressions are only feminine by convenience. She doesn’t mention any gendered expressions at all in her paragraph, presumably because everyone knows what the signs of femininity are. Murphy’s “constructed” femininity thus has both a stable meaning and a stable expression. It’s solid enough, in short, to serve as a way to police women, who are dupes and tools of the patriarchy if they express themselves in certain ways deemed artificial and constructed.

Murphy thinks she’s getting out of patriarchal thinking by de-naturalizing gender. Patriarchy insists, in her view, that gendered differences are true; by insisting that gendered differences are not innate, she paves the way for women’s liberation. But in fact, she simply replaces the binary male/female with the binary natural/artificial—and that binary is used to police and chastise the same people as ever. Note that it’s femininity here which is seen as artificial: a patriarchal trope if ever there was one. Feminine gender expression is seen as false, frivolous, weak, debased; male gender expression (in Murphy’s piece, and in general) is seen as unmarked, unremarked, and natural. The artificiality of femininity is supposed to free women from patriarchal expectations, but really it just repeats the same old patriarchal prejudices. Feminine gender expression isn’t real. That’s what patriarchy says, and Murphy cosigns it.

In contrast, maybe a better way to approach gender expression is to admit that we don’t really know what’s artificial and what’s natural, or even what those words mean in the context of human behavior. The most human thing about humans is they use all those artificial tools, like language; humans are most natural when they’re most artificial, and maybe vice versa. As long as there is a “wrong” “artificial” “weak” gender expression, it seems likely that it will be attributed to women, and used to denigrate them. So, why not just stop policing people’s gender expression altogether? As long as an individual’s gender expression isn’t hurting or impinging on others fairly directly (like, when masculinity is used as a lever to get people to shoot each other), people should be given leeway to express their gender as they wish without being told that they’re dupes or artificial or monsters or failing feminism. Because it doesn’t make much difference if you’re censuring people in the name of biological truth or the one true feminism—especially when it’s so often the very same people who end up being censured for performing their gender wrong.
 

bigexcluded

Julia Serano said most of this better than me in her book, which you should buy.

Utilitarian Review 5/16/15

Posted on by

Wonder Woman News

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela reviews a bunch of Wonder Woman books, including mine, at Public Books.

The Dartmouth student newspaper is confused about the subject of the talk I gave there.
 
On HU

Janell Hobson and the context of global racism.

I am bitter that Paul Krugman gets to write pop culture crit at the NYT.

Should I try to run a patreon to write my book?

Kim O’Connor writes an open letter to Art Spiegelman about the PEN awards and Charlie Hebdo.

James Lamb with a long post on why diverse superheroes are an impossibility.

Chris Gavaler on how the KKK fit the definition of superheroes.

Phillip Smith on Saga and trauma.

Donovan Grant on the possibility of black superheroes.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote about Wonder Woman, A-Force, and how super sexy may be better than super violent.

At Urban Faith I reviewed Robert Marovich’s history of Chicago gospel.

Jordannah Elizabeth interviewed me to ask me what I think I’m doing, anyway.

At Raivshly I made a list of lesser known torch singers.

At the Reader a little review of Jason Eady, the best country singer out there now.
 
Other Links

Nicole Cliff with a list of books all white men own.

Dianne Anderson on the demand that Christian bloggers be nice.

Tressie McMillan Cottom on how if academic institutions want their scholars to be public intellectuals, they need to support them when the social media firestorm erupts.
 

images

Patreon: Threat or Menace?

Posted on by

Okay; so last week I talked about maybe using a kickstarter to fund my book (on the topic of Can There Be a Black Superhero?”. The collective reaction was, meh.

So as an alternative, I thought that I might possibly shut down the blog for a few months as a way of getting time to work on the book.

Alternately! If people really don’t want the blog shut down, I could try to do a Patreon to fund the blog so I could work on it in good conscience, and then do the book as the hobby.

Any thoughts on that as an option? I guess I’m not confident that anyone would want to pledge to the blog, but it couldn’t hurt to find out. My one concern is that it would be crappy for me to take money for the blog when contributors aren’t paid…I don’t know. Thoughts?
 

blackkirby1

John Jennings and Stacey Robinson, from the Black Kirby project.

Utilitarian Review 5/8/15

Posted on by

FullSizeRender

 
Wonder Woman News

I am giving a talk at Dartmouth Sat. morning on WW; maybe even as you read this.

Matthew Cheney gave me a really nice review on his blog.

Joan Hilty reviewed my book at the Wellesley Women’s Review of Books.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: James Romberger on Marie Severin.

Me on how the success of Louis Armstrong doesn’t disprove Jim Crow.

Should I do a kickstarter for my next book?

Ibrahim Ineke with a devotional reading of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight.

Aaron Kashtan on whether comics geekdom can become more inclusive.

Chris Gavaler on the Nepal earthquake and superhero Orientalism.

Roy T. Cook on the paradox of comics; reading pictures and drawing words.

Nix 66 on 8 minutes, sex workers, and getting truth from women’s bodies.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote about how the Black Widow/Hulk romance sucked.

At the Atlantic I reviewed an excellent historical comic about the Civil War.

At Playboy:

—I talked about cell phone’s important but limited role in holding police accountable.

—I reviewed Maya Rodale’s Dangerous Books for Girls, about why people hate romance novels.

—I wrote about how Age of Ultron is a slave narrative and you should root for the robots.

—I wrote about how you can’t have feminist liberation without choice.

At Quartz I reviewed Sam Magg’s Fangirls Guide to the Galaxy.

At Splice Today I wrote about how My dog is dumber than my cat.
 
Other Links

Katherine Cross on choice feminism.

Tara Burns on how sex workers killed 8 minutes.

Juniper Fitzgerald on discrimination against sex workers in academia.

Paul Thomas on the disappointing black Captain America.