feminist blogs

The following is a new article by Tim Mitchell, published in the “depth” section of PopPolitics magazine. Mitchell analyzes how the underappreciated “Mimic” trilogy of sci-fi horror films has a lot to say about postmodern America: The other day, I found an October 2007 story by R. Colin Johnson on the EETimes Web site that sounded [...]

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This week the National Post of Canada goes where very few media outlets have gone before: an academic conference.

Here's the editor's note that appears above the first report in the series:

When 5,000 academics gather this week in Saskatoon for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, everything from the geography of shopping to gender in governing will be on the agenda. In a week-long series, the National Post explores some of the most interesting research being showcased.

Now, usually I'm not one to make generalizations about how attitudes in other countries are radically different from those in the United States. Most of those assumptions are made by either a very biased personal experience or from a very small sample of elite members of the respective societies.

But can you imagine an American newspaper -- let alone an American TV news channel -- making this same commitment?

Of course, this is at the core of what's wrong with American news. When it comes to politics and culture (as opposed to scientific or medical topics), American media refuses to acknowledge that there are experts in the field that can provide research-based answers to many of our questions. Instead, we rely on "pundits" who are experts at looking good and providing the catchy soundbite.

Ironically, Zosia Bielski's first report from the conference for the National Post -- in which she reviews recent "findings" concerning the current state of feminism -- shows that academics don't always have the right answers.

East Carolina University Professor Donna Lillian's research on the increasingly infrequent use of the word "Ms." is fascinating and ultimately depressing -- especially when it's the younger generations who are the ones less likely to being using "Ms."

But Jennifer Crawford -- a Ph.D. student at Saint Mary's University in Halifax -- misses the mark in her criticism of the Feminist Majority Foundation's "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" campaign:

"Is this -- this slogan on the fuchsia baby tee, or italicized in screen-print across a cute tote bag, or pinned with good intentions on to the lapel of a jacket, this shut-down of communication -- is this what feminism looks like?" asks Ms. Crawford in a session called "Who Cares What a Feminist Looks Like? Inscriptions of Gender, Sexuality and Personal Politics" [...]

She admonishes the campaign for feigning accessibility with four ethnically diverse women, a clear message that "feminism is for everybody," but launching it with freshly scrubbed Ashley Judd, the "conventionally aesthetically pleasing and feminine actress."

Ms. Crawford also notes that all four women are "beautiful, successful, affluent and reasonably sized," which in her mind excludes the "man-hating, hairy, angry queer," one of the most "political and passionate demographics of the feminist community," the "devout feminist" she insists has been discarded as a negative stereotype.

Yes, these women are celebrities -- not "ordinary" people. But that's the point. The celebrities that everyone knows -- either admires or hates -- also happen to be feminists.

And considering that they were going to celebrities, it's hard to imagine four more "real" women -- not all stereotypically "beautiful," not all "reasonably-sized." Certainly Ashley Judd can be considered an image of traditional Hollywood glamour in some of her movies and on the red carpet, but I have seen just as many pictures of her attending benefits and other socially conscious functions with short hair, a t-shirt and jeans -- the uniform, I'm presuming, of Crawford's "devout feminist." She appears that way, in fact, on the cover of Ms.

I'm aware of the dangers of dumbing down or commercializing feminism (although these days I'm more worried about the demonization of feminism). It just isn't happening here.

And even though I'm taking issue with this particular academic argument, I appreciate the fact that the National Post is giving me something to ponder. The news rarely does that these days.

I should note that a couple of months ago I took the National Post of Canada to task for their well-intentioned but somewhat simplistic and reductive look at the "Menaissance" -- what they claimed in a series of related articles as the return of "guys being guys."

What I should have recognized back then -- and praised -- was the significance of Post's willingness to provide a broad, in-depth analysis of a complex issue. I'll try not to make that mistake again.

If the world of pop culture criticism were like the Hollywood it covers, then Robert Thompson would be George Clooney, Martin Scorsese and, oh, Scarlett Johansson -- all wrapped into one. He's not just our greatest celebrity. On days when a story breaks with a pop culture angle, it feels like Thompson is our only celebrity.

Are you sensing a little jealousy? Well, it's not there, to be honest. Maybe it's because even though it feels Thompson is the only person the media looks to for opinions about pop culture, his analysis is usually right on. He's always ready to give pop culture credit for its complexity and depth -- and, at the same time, he's willing to question the often questionable ideology behind some of it. And he does it all in very accessible, yet still eloquent and original, language.

Of maybe it's because, as AP reporter Jocelyn Noveck explains, he's a genuine, friendly guy who really knows his stuff.

Ironically, the dominant theme of Noveck's story about Thompson is that Thompson is a media darling. The irony is not lost on Noveck, though, who points out that many media outlets, including her very own AP, have an unofficial moratorium on using him in their stories:

So often has Thompson been quoted, over 17 years at Syracuse, that some news organizations (including The Associated Press) have lately tried consciously NOT to quote him.

But nobody said we couldn't write ABOUT him.

How often has he been quoted? "At The New York Times alone," Noveck writes, "an archive search shows Thompson quoted more than 40 times in the last four years, by writers in a wide range of areas. At the AP, he's been quoted close to 20 times in the past year."

And David Rubin, dean of the Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where Thompson works, give first-hand testimony to Thompson's popularity: "I've seen Bob get 60, 70, 80 media calls in one day. I've seen him in a hallway on his cell phone for hours. You could go so far as to say Bob is the most quoted academic in the United States."

Besides reveling in Thompson's hyper-popularity, Noveck also gives a lively synopsis of how Thompson got to his present position. A primer, perhaps, for the rest of us? Unfortunately, as with most things in life, including quality pop culture and pop culture criticism, it's a combination of inspiration and hard work:

He did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, where he initially planned to be an art history professor. But on Sunday nights, when the dorms didn't serve food, he would eat takeout in front of the TV. He found that he chose "CHiPs," with Erik Estrada, over PBS, and became fascinated with the question: "Why do smart people watch dumb TV?"

He did his thesis on Dante's "Divine Comedy," but came to believe that "art could be something that came out of a TV set." That led to a broader interest in popular culture. "I realized that to understand TV you needed to understand the network radio era. And vaudeville. And the circus. And comic strips. Every year I would binge on something." [...]

Thompson, who's written or edited six books of his own, gets up each day at five to read; he consumes three new books a week, not to mention uncounted hours of TV. (He also has a family that he spends time with.) He's constantly becoming enamored with new areas of pop culture.

A couple years ago, for example, he realized he didn't know enough about Shakespeare -- a pop culture figure of his time, after all. He decided to watch all existing plays on VHS or DVD. In three months he watched 113 plays and read 25 books on the bard. "I was crazed," he says contentedly.

In case you think his interests aren't diverse enough -- or that he's all about TV -- it's good to know he's also gone through an obsession with aluminum lawn chairs, which he believes are "really taken for granted."

That's not something that's likely to happen to Mr. Thompson any time soon.

A new Henry Jenkins' book -- "The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture" -- came out this past December, and we never like to pass up an opportunity to promote one of our favorite academics -- and one of the most original and nuanced cultural critics. And that's even true when his book is simply a collection of previous essays.

As Mikita Brottman of PopMatters notes, while some of the essays are less insightful than others, the mix between the popular, political and the personal (who knew Jenkins was a fan of superheroes, Lassie and Pee Wee -- all subjects of distinct essays?) creates a fresh critical approach.

Instead of seeing the emotional response to pop culture as a symptom of pop culture's appeal to the lowest common denominator, Jenkins justifies the joy and wonder that pop culture often elicits by revealing what the "wow" means (pdf):

Most popular culture is shaped by a logic of emotional intensification. It is less interested in making us think than it is in making us feel. Yet that distinction is too simple: popular culture, at its best, makes us think by making us feel .... Popular culture can generate a fair amount of effortless emotion by following well-trod formulas, but to make us go "wow" it has to twist or transform those formulas into something marvelous and unexpected .... To fully appreciate a piece of popular art, you need to have seen enough other examples to observe the ways it builds upon and breaks with existing formulas. The ability to fall back on the tried and the true frees the best popular artists to take risk with their audiences and experiment with their materials in search of the more elusive wow.

Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post spent two weeks living inside the YouTube world -- and she discovered, instead of it being a cesspool of low culture as she has presumed, it is a place of a dynamic aesthetic and endless potential -- at least as represented by its most inventive manifestations.

Yet she still feels the need to offer some "guiding principles" for the artists of this new online universe. Here's a sample of her advice:

Resist facile irony.

In other words, snark is easy, satire is hard. YouTube may be the ultimate postmodern medium, and as such it falls prey to postmodernism's greatest failing: pastiche. For every attitudinal teenager proving how well he can imitate "Jackass," YouTube has also allowed -- albeit in smaller numbers -- gifted artists-slash-essayists' work that both exploits the medium and engages the world. Take Ze Frank, whose site is a veritable trove of games, Web casts and dada-esque ephemera that comment on everything from politics to online culture to Frank's own peripatetic travel schedule.

Other principles include "Your limitations are your strengths" and "Indulge the arcane."

Her ability to recognize the best and the worst tendencies of such a new medium makes her analysis fresh and worthwhile. But the best part is her selection of what might be called YouTube's greatest hits. Just when you think you've been e-mailed them all ...

I found myself profoundly disturbed watching James Frey defend his "memoir" entitled A Million Little Pieces on Larry King last week. He squirmed through an explanation that his book, a recent Oprah selection and a runaway bestseller, could still be called a memoir and still has validity as an inspirational story of recovery from addiction even though he now admits (after he was exposed as a sham by The Smoking Gun) that some of the more dramatic moments weren't exactly true.

(They might, however, have had an element of truthiness)

Frey's most jaw-dropping admission was that he first tried to shop the book around as a novel, but no publishers were interested. Memoirs were hot -- so he just changed tact.

Michiko Kakutani echoed my disgust over the Frey case in today's New York Times, and she went further: putting it, appropriately, in the largest possible political and philosophical context: "It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth." Warming to the task, she continues:

We live in a relativistic culture where television "reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the "reality-based community," can assert that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Phrases like "virtual reality" and "creative nonfiction" have become part of our language. Hype and hyperbole are an accepted part of marketing and public relations. And reinvention and repositioning are regarded as useful career moves in the worlds of entertainment and politics.

Who could argue with her decrying the increasingly blurred line between "entertainment and politics"? Who doesn't want to cheer when she lumps in the spin doctors of the Bush administration with Frey?

The problem with Kakutani's assessment of "relativistic culture," however, is she doesn't make the distinction between those who manipulate the truth to sway the populus and those, frequently in the academic world, who want to raise awareness about the slipperiness of truth in order to give consumers and citizens the power to continue to make informed choices.

As she and knee-jerk conservative commentators often do (going back to the days of "political correctness"), Kakutani sets up an academic straw-man: "Postmodernists do not merely acknowledge the obstacles that stand in the way of objectivity but also celebrate those obstacles, elevating relativism into a kind of end in itself. They strive to be imaginative, inventive or creative, instead of accurate and knowledgeable."

I know very few sincere cultural critics who "celebrate" relativism, even if they believe in it. When most "academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history," they are rarely playing identity politics for identity politics sake. They are trying to present a "truer" history by including voices that have been silenced.

You can believe in the pursuit of the "truer" -- and believe, consequently, in justice and the necessity and responsibility of social action -- without believing that you will ever reach an absolute truth.

I agree with Kakutani when she states that Frey and the relativistic culture that spawned him "all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in" the latest selection for Oprah's book club: Elie Wiesel's Night, his own memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

But for memory to be sacred it does not have to be absolutely, wholly true. As much as Wiesel asserts that what he writes about is "what I lived through" (and I have no doubt it is), that still doesn't change the fact that we are experiencing those moments through his eyes -- which are limited by the limits of human perception. Even a book as brutally honest as Night does not tell us everything about the Holocaust, Auschwitz or even the very moments Wiesel describes.

There is always more to see.