"Hello, lover!" : Haptic Fashion, Savvy Mags, and Hometown Malls

The quote in my blog post title comes from Carrie Bradshaw in the Season 4 finale of Sex and the City, when she spies a pair of confectionary pink Louboutins in a window display. I think it captures the often rapturous affective relationship women have to fashion, which frames many of this week’s readings.

In “Women Recovering Our Clothes,” Young’s proposed schemata of identifying and analyzing the unique pleasure women take in their clothes [touch, bonding, fantasy] creates this internal polarization in me: I am so almost completely in accord, and she captures some of the inchoate but powerful and sensual allures of fashion BUT there are also inflections of near-sentimental womanhood rhetoric that for me, seem a bit antiquated, predicated on notions of essential femininity. “Touch” is one of the especially dualistic categories. Citing Irigaray, Young sets up the ideological differentiation between visuality (with all its associations of patriarchy and western rationality) against the purportedly feminine sensory realm of tactility—as I understand it, this is also the basis for haptic cinema, as articulated by Laura Marks, so Young seems to be proposing something akin to haptic fashion, a pleasure derived not from the rigorously colonized empire of masculine sight and the gaze, but one that is situated in the other senses, “an orientation to sensuality as such that includes all senses. Thus we might conceive a mode of vision, for example, that is less a gaze, distanced from mastering its object, than an immersion in light and color. Sensing as touching is within, experiencing what touches it as ambiguous, continuous, but nevertheless differentiated” (204).

On the one hand, I am wholeheartedly with her on this, and the part on the affective relationship we develop with our clothes rings especially true, “Some of our clothes we love for their own sake, because their fabric and cut and color charm us and relate to our bodies in specific ways—because I almost want to say, they love us back…Some we love with a passion or tenderness, though, and we are sad or angry when they become damaged or go out of fashion” (205). As I’m writing this, I’m staring at some of my new acquisitions, still with their tags on, hanging in my closet—I look at them adoringly with something similar to maternal devotion—13 dresses hanging there, they are my newest babies and I love them, for every brazen embellishment or 80s-revival shoulder; for the slippery touch of the satin or the fish-scale scratchiness of sequins —they may never even be worn this year (which caused a 12-step breakthrough moment that I will recount in another post) but I care deeply for them as possessions, and they seem to return the favor, transforming me into whatever my particular projected fantasy may be (Grecian goddess, Emmy presenter, charming date—never mind that I am none of these things).

This of course ties directly into Young’s third part of the pleasure triumvirate which is Fantasy, “women take pleasure in clothes, not just wearing clothes, but also in looking at clothes and looking at images of women in clothes, because they encourage fantasies of transport and transformation…The fantasy of multiple and changing identities without the anxiety of losing oneself is possible because fashion creates unreal identities and utopian places (208-209). I’ve never felt so validated, and I’m sure we’d reach a general consensus in class that the selection, purchasing, and sensual delight of our wardrobe is tantamount, sometimes even paramount to wearing them—I covet, archive, acquire and collect, all undergirded by fantasies of where and when I may wear these new outfits, what persona I shall assume, what look I will communicate.

So, given those astute observations that codify what we all probably instinctively know but don’t often analyze, I still have a problem with Young’s descent into sisterhood and some of the assumptions about feminine traits. Last week we touched on how Second Wave feminist theory found utility and potency in claiming, detourning, and valorizing supposedly “feminine” traits—taking gendered traits that were historically maligned or derided and reversing the value e.g. celebrating the nurturing, pacifist nature of women, especially in the wake of Vietnam. As Prof. McPherson mentioned, this tactic was particularly useful in terms of rallying and unification, given that this was a period of foment and politicization, not detached, erudite theory, so a rhetoric of sisterhood and feminine values could have a mobilizing effect. However, beyond that historical moment, I wonder how useful it is to continue to ascribe femininity with signifiers likes sensuality and intuition. Young seems to be evoking those concepts when she aligns femininity with sensuality, as if woman is inherently more touch-oriented, instinctual (earthier, more in touch with her body etc). I understand that she wants to juxtapose a masculine visual regime with an alternative or subaltern feminine one, but outside the context of a political movement, these associations just seem touchy-feely and new-agey. I don’t want to be an earth-mother; I am a woman, but I don’t need to roar…

“A Woman’s Two Bodies”

In Rabine’s history and deconstruction of fashion magazines and their continual conflicts, she lists the third factor of postmodern contradiction as the self-reflexivity of the magazines themselves, “Instead of relegating everything about the life of the implied reader and her relation to fashion to the level of implicit assumption, the magazines now not only reflect endlessly upon the reader, upon who she is, what she does, what she wants, and what she thinks, but also invite the reader to be more self-reflexive about her relation to fashion, cosmetic, and beauty, and to reflect upon her body in a new, detailed way” (61).

While I’m sure most books have adopted this tactic (out of economic pragmatism and social responsibility), I want to use Allure as a case study, since as a fairly new addition to the pantheon of woman’s mags (founded in 1991), it came of age in the postmodern era of self-reflexive savvy consumers and fragmented concepts of femininity, and that oscillation between opposition and recuperation has been integrated from it inception. Allure has always positioned itself in the industry as being the serious journalistic contender of the beauty books (it’s subtitle is “The Beauty Expert”), and under editor in chief Linda Wells, they have always sought to balance whipped cream escapist fantasy with the gravitas of serious journalistic coverage, from detailed interviews with chemists who opine on active ingredients, to an expose on the potential carcinogens of the new Brazilian hair straightening treatments.

It is significant that since 1991, Allure has always been under the creative control of Linda Wells and her team, creating a relatively consistent ethos that pervades the magazine, while other mags had identity crises and had to evolve or make nominal concessions to the changing culture. Allure copy skewers towards the wry and self-aware, stopping just short of cynical, with a measure of self-deprecating humor. When articles introduce a new color palette e.g. purples or a must-have item for the season, the writer will often acknowledge the clichéd fashion editor’s penchant for labeling every new incarnation “the new black” to instill consumer desire and bestow an aura of novelty and desirability, when the look may in fact just be a shopworn return to something we’ve seen.

The Allure staff writers are always quick to turn a self-referential mocking focus onto themselves and their history of breathless excitement, of course only to recuperate that by telling us about what we simply must buy or try, but the fact that they convey the message with a wink gives us at least the sense of agency and that we are on their side. Similarly Allure often runs features called “editors beauty secrets” or “how to shop like a fashion editor,” where the allure staff will give surprisingly candid answers that ostensibly counterpoise the magazines ideal of unified consumer-impulses aided by articles. For example, beauty editors will admit that while they write about rainbow hues being the colors of the moment, they themselves stick to a natural palette of taupes and beigey pinks.

It seems antithetical that they would admit to not practicing what they preach, but that very honesty likely fosters a sense of belonging to a privileged female subculture that will ultimately be economically successful because it creates devoted readers who will continue to buy, read, and see the ads. Speaking personally, I've been reading allure since 2001 (I still have every issue, and I frequently go through them to cross-reference or look at the pictures... pack rat much?), and I realize the hook is aggregate tone: funny, informative, and irreverent. While all magazines have had to adapt, whether it be in content and the look of the layouts, or the anthropological content as Rabine puts, this element of self-reflexivity is a cornerstone of 21^st century femininity.

A quick word on “Things to do with Shopping Center”—I didn’t expect national identity to play so heavily in the exploration of shopping centers and semiotics—Once I realized we were reading about Australian malls, I figured that an English-speaking first-world country’s experience would be commensurate to our own, but on the contrary, I tended to have no bloody idea what Morris was talking about, once she delved into the regional and geographic specifics. Also, if anyone has ever been to the Eagle Rock Plaza (which temporarily became a Westfield but then returned to the old name) you will have witnessed in real-time, the slow death and degradation of an outdated community shopping mall.

It is unable to accommodate Morris’ face-lift in terms of aesthetics, or stay commercially relevant in terms of stores (like the Glendale galleria has managed); it is certainly unable to compete with the themed lifestyle destinations of Caruso (The Americana and The Grove); and it lacks the heralded picturesque charm and history of Old Town. The Eagle Rock Plaza is just about the saddest damn place you’ve ever been—in fact, we residents really just call it Target—that’s its only draw and the only place the middle class families, Occidental students, and east side hipsters go. The rest of the woefully archaic looking mall with its heinous 80s brown tile floors is one bullshit shop after another, most closing after a few months (nothing even close to name brands—I think Payless is as upscale as it gets), a smattering of arcades, and an army recruitment office. The Macy’s that serves as the anchor store on the opposite side of the mall from Target is depressingly down-market and always empty.

And capping it all off, the death knell of the mall-as-a-mall, a third of the downstairs real estate is given over to a specialty food mart called Seafood City, so now the entire interior of the mall reeks of crab and fish. I’m definitely guilty of some nativist snobbery here, since the market is really popular with the pacific islander and Philippino contingent of Eagle Rock/Highland Park/Glassel park, and I’m probably just resentful of incursions, but I also remember going there as a child when it was a prototypical mall experience with movies, anchored by thriving and “classier” department stores, with a sense (at least in my admittedly romanticized remembrance of the past) of community and shopping as an event…..I’m becoming a grumpy old person. Of course now I work at The Americana, that eternal paean to an imagined nostalgic past full of pastiche referents to a aspirational high culture aesthetic, and that’ s whole new can of worms….

A quicker word on “Pedagogies of the Feminine”: who is Brudson’s intended addressee?—while interesting, this piece strikes me as having the tone of a department circular or inter-office memo, where she just wants to alert her colleagues to some pressing concerns. I’m curious about her intentions, and how we’ll use her work in our class.

On the Liberating Possibilities of Fun and Fantasy in Fashion

This week’s readings take us from the arguments of second wave feminists who critiqued the fashion-beauty myth as patriarchal inscriptions on the female body, to writers from the late 80’s and 90s who seek to articulate specifically female pleasures in beautifying the body. I particularly appreciate Young’s article, “Women Recovering Our Clothes” for her attempt to break away from the limiting perspective that women who took pleasure in fashion and beauty did so because they had uncritically imbibed the patriarchal pleasures of the male gaze. As she writes, rather beautifully, “If I simply affirm this, I must admit that for me there is no subjectivity that is not his, that there is no specifically female pleasure I take in clothes” (202). This statement, for me sums all my difficulties with last week’s readings particularly by Brownmiller and Bartky – necessary as they were in that highly political period in which such militancy was called for to consolidate the momentum necessary for the women’s rights movement. To disavow legitimate feminine pleasures in beautifying and adorning the body is to ignore genuine female pleasures, whether or not these have some basis in making one’s own body an object of male desire.

Indeed, as Young writes, “the subversion of patriarchy…requires that women speak our desire, not as it has been formed in the interests of men but from and for ourselves” (203). She looks for an approach to feminism which departs from the militancy of earlier forms and moves towards acknowledging and taking seriously the desires and pleasures of the subject in question themselves – women. Though I would add that the distinction Young makes between men versus women pleasures are not always clear cut and in fact, merge in complex and often indistinguishable ways (an idea I need to think about more before putting it down), I appreciate her efforts to make space within feminist criticism for women’s pleasures in clothing. She identifies these as touch, bonding, and fantasy.

The notion of fantasy and role-playing is particularly interesting and is also taken up in Rabine’s article. Rabine notes how fashion erases the boundary between the “private escape of fantasy and public intercourse” (63) and she sees the pleasure of looking at the images of fashionable women in fashion magazines as “one part of a continuum with the pleasure of re-creating the body and the pleasure of masquerade”. Which reminds me of an idea that was gestured at in the Bartky article last week which I wished she had pursued further. At the bottom of page 43 she notes how we need to expand our ideas of beauty which, “will allow and even encourage fantasy and play in self-ornamentation”. Could fashion as play and as whimsy be empowering and liberating? The ability to play with fluid identities, as Young describes is liberating because it subverts a world in which rationality supports domination (209). In addition, Rabine describes the notion of fantasy and play through fashion as a means of working through male vision and desire, without it being controlling.

Fashion also allows women to play with multiple and ever shifting representations of femininity and female identity without being dictated by them. Indeed, the fun in fashion is being able to slip into imagined multiple identities not in a frivolous manner but one which is reflexive about ones own femininity. Some designer collections evoke these moments of play. Louis Vuitton’s wasp-waisted silhouette of Fall 2010 evoked (yet again) constrained yet excessive 50’s femininity, in which part of the pleasure lies in the “liberated” modern woman’s ability to play with the image of the archetypal housewife. In the image above, the models are absorbed in their own reflections, possibly out of narcissism, but also possibly out of fascination with their performance of archetypal 50's femininity. I love vintage because (aside from it being cheaper than regular labels) being able to put on an item from the 50s or the 70s lets me “perform”, at least in my head, a vision of different ideas of femininity over the decades and referencing them against my own notions of it. A similar pleasure is found when I’m doing costume changes backstage for dance concerts – jazz shoes and a dress or Nike high-tops and sweatpants evoke a very different performance. And as Young writes, these role-plays do not leave one with a sense of dismay at one’s inevitable “failure” to attain the fantasy because “in such fantasy we do not seek to be somebody else. Fantasizing is not wishing, hoping, or planning; it has no future” (208). In fact, it problematises and lays bare the constructed and artificial nature of feminity itself.

Well, I suppose what I’m getting at after all this rambling is that notions of femininity are not stable, nor do they, as argued in Brownmiller and Bartky, always embody an idealized endpoint in a process of continuous self-renovation. Sometimes, it is just enough to play with the many ways in which femininity is performed and represented – problematically or otherwise – through fashion.

Nadine

Picture this!

Both Sarah Berry's piece on Hollywood fashion in the 1930s and Iris Young's article on the connection between the meaning of clothes and pictorial representations of the same got me thinking about the relationship between Bollywood films and sartorial styles which, of late, has transcended the screen-style influence to enter the zone of celebrity fashion i.e. what the stars are wearing in their daily lives.

Historically speaking, much like its western counterparts, Indian cinema has enjoyed a semi-reverential status where on-screen fashion is concerned, especially in the eyes of its female audiences. It was not uncommon for an entire generation of college going women to embrace the prevailing style of popular actresses with little concern regarding uniqueness. As Hindi cinema progressed, costuming and wardrobe evolved to an extent where it started functioning as a promotional vehicle for the film in question --the 1994 film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun proudly publicized the $3500 price tag for one of the outfits worn by its female lead, Madhuri Dixit; Devdas (2002), touted at the time as the most expensive Bollywood film ever to be made wowed audiences more for the extravagant costumes donned by the leading ladies rather than the film itself. As an attestation to the increasing participation of the upper social classes in popular film culture, the 2003 film Chameli (the story of an unabashed prostitute essayed by glamorous Kareena Kapoor) spawned off a veritable flood of Chameli themed parties for women where all the guests would turn up attired in versions of the kitschy outfit that Kapoor wears in the film, in open defiance to the fact that they were, through their clothes, enacting the role of a prostitute!










Kareena Kapoor as Chameli in the 2003 film of the same title.





As Indian fashion enters the big league, professional styling in mainstream cinema is fast becoming the norm. The garish, often bordering on outlandish, costumes are disappearing in favor of a contemporary, chic sensibility that demonstrates an awareness of the film's theme and setting in costume designing. Acting has acquired somewhat respectable overtones and today's actors & actresses are an educated, well traveled bunch, well in tune with the prevailing global sensibility regarding fashion and appearance. For some this means recruiting personal stylists while for others a much greater attention to dressing in general, whether for film related functions or not. Fashion brands across the world have come calling to this new breed of stars who have the need to be seen as 'with it' and the money to afford it.

An offshoot of this is the numerous blogs that have popped up on Bollywood fashion. My personal favorite is www.higheelconfidential.com-- a sassy, irreverent take on Bollywood celebrity fashion that spares no punches when commenting on unfortunate fashion choices. The blog is popular in part because it gives users a forum to air their opinions on Bollywood stars, putting them on pedestals one moment while relegating them to the fashion trenches in another. The sense of community this fosters reminds me of Irigaray (qtd. in Young) who speaks of community building as a response to male patriarchy. I wonder what light would this blog be viewed in, considering that the dominant form of pleasure gained from this online community of women (who are clearly fans of fashion and films) seems to be the unequivocal right to voyeuristically consume and criticize.

Kate Gilmore

from whitney.org

Kate Gilmore’s work explores themes of displacement, struggle, and female identity. She is the sole protagonist in her performative videos, in which she attempts to conquer self-constructed obstacles.

For this work, Gilmore’s obstacle is a tall column made of sheetrock which she tries to climb by kicking and punching holes into its walls. As in most of her work, Gilmore’s attire is at odds with the brute physical labor she performs. She works through the limitations imposed by her feminine clothing—high-heels and a polka-dot dress—with sheer muscle power and desperate determination. Shot in one take, the outcome of her endeavor is unknown before the performance begins. Gilmore’s tragicomic displays posit physical situations as metaphors for conflicts and social obstacles women face today.

links:
http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial/KateGilmore
http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/gilmore.php

Rachelle Beaudoin's Cheer Shorts

Rachelle Beaudoin is my colleague and sometimes my art-making partner. She did a body of work called "Cheer Shorts!" while we were both students at the Rhode Island School of Design.

In Rachelle's words, "In Cheer!Shorts I wear explicit versions of butt-print shorts that mimic the implicit style shorts popular with young girls.  I wear these shorts around the city and to the mall."

www.rachellebeaudoin.com

Michelle's Closet

Today's New York Times published the op-ed "Boosting America, in Her Own Fashion," in which Kate Betts tried to justify Michelle Obama's wearing a British-designed dress for the state dinner honoring the chinese president Hu Jintao. For Betts, a journalist who is currently writing a book about Mrs. Obama as a fashion icon, the first lady has been a sort of people's princess who has "rewritten the dress code for women who work." She argues Mrs. Obama has freed American women from the prison of high heels and heavy jackets, choosing light cardigans and flats instead. But, "most important," she has taught them to "dress for ourselves, something the first lady does so effortlessly it's hard to imagine that there had ever been any dress code for her position." And more: "she's not afraid to flaunt her femininity - so why should the rest of us be?"

Besides reading like a frivolous piece of Pollyannaism, the op-ed (re-)articulates the notion that it takes courage to express one's femininity, suggesting that an "equal rights" agenda has, shamefully, put femininity in some sort of closet (built by the dirty hands of dykey feminists) -- out of which it should come out. This idea fails to consider the role of undergirding and mirror-like re-inforcer of masculinity that "the feminine" occupies. It assumes a femininity completely independent of the patriarchal masculinity that actually founds it, fetishizes it and seizes it. The fact that Betts thinks women can now dress for themselves reveals a naive understanding of how the feminine guarantees the masculine and could never do away with its internalized gaze of the Other, which is its very existential pre-condition (and vice versa). No one, girly or butch, gender-conformant or non, could ever dress or walk or talk or dance for herself. This is one of the most basic pillars of comprehending the human psyche and its subjective division: ID, Ego, Supergo. One's fantasy is always already the fantasy of the other. Following Lacan, when we speak we are immediately in the realm of the lie -- how could the act of dressing be immune to that logic?

"As we are with all first ladies, we are subconsciously invested in her looking good -- it's almost as if there's some sort of pride at stake." One can easily spot the psychoanalytically uninitiated when they refer to the unconscious as the "subconscious." Besides, our interest in Mrs. Obama looking good is very much a conscious one, as Betts herself suggests in her article, since the better the first lady looks in an American-designed dress, the more American designers can do business with, say, China. And as for the "almost pride" at stake in the first lady's appearance, I'd like to suggest that "pride" is the least of it. There is, instead an almost ontological need to re-articulate certain notions of gender (and race) when we allow her looks to wow us and when we trash her. As well as the business opportunities that arise depending on what brands Mrs. Obama endorses through her sartorial choices.

Most problematic of all, I see the constant re-production of the feminine as body and body alone in the figure of Michelle Obama. If one watches her interviews from a few years ago, she reveals a kind of political rhetoric and intelligence in par with Barack Obama. But since 2008 or so she has really embraced the role of adornment with a cause: childhood obesity, which despite being a social preoccupation, also has everything to do with the body. How does this apologetic mix of J Crew and Prada garments serve as a veil to mask the presumption of an "angry black woman" lurking behind it? Is "the angry black woman" also trapped in some sort of closet that needs to be constantly made up and put on display for surveillance so it can pass for something other, so it can assuage the anxiety that assumes the black anger behind the taffeta? What role does race play in one's inability to ever "dress for oneself"?

Thinking about plastic surgery

Following on our brief discussion of plastic surgery, here's a story with some interesting (if slightly depressing) stats...

On the Lust List .. sigh!

I may never be able to afford but I sure as hell will covet :)

http://www.mulberry.com/#/storefront/c5870/5625/category/

What about my femininity?

Going through the readings for this week's class inspired a much unanticipated trot down memory lane, serving up a veritable sampler of conversations & images, uprooting sepia toned flashbacks of some fiercely embedded reminisces of my teenage years.

I read Brownmiller's article, alternating between vociferous head-nods, disbelieving grimaces and outright alarm. Large parts of it resonated with what I felt, but what I was left with at the end of it was a sense of heavy, impending doom --a certainty that with my life as a youthful twenty-something now way behind me, the only way my body can go is southwards into a slow, steady decline. While I share the author's concern over the escalating pressures on the female form to constantly strive for a virtually unachievable body type -complete with flawless skin and shining, glossy hair (compounded in terms of the seriousness attached to it some thirty years after she wrote the article)- I am not entirely in sync with her perspective on the overwhelming male influence that brings about this pressure in the first place.

Let me confess right off the bat that I lived most of my life as the proverbial ugly duckling, glumly watching on the sidelines as one schoolmate after the other went the boyfriend way while all I got was earnest requests to be 'study-mates'. Perhaps because my mother has never exerted any sort of pressure on me to conform to any socially conditioned version of preteen or teenage femininity (barring, of course, an expectation that I was always neatly dressed, uniform ironed to an inch of its life, not a hair out of place etc.), I never really felt the need to partake in any beauty rituals of sorts pretty much all the way up till my undergrad days (even then it was only a lipstick --a terrible, unflattering, muddy dark brown shade--and the occasional eyeliner clashing with my baggy tshirts and jeans look).

With my two long braids that fell, heavily, uninspiringly, all the way down to my waist and hideously thick eyebrows I wasn't quite the cutesy type. Looking back though, I seem to recall that amongst most of my schoolmates, makeup really was not much sought after; instead an expression of femininity centered more around short hair (most of us started with really long hair; my mother cried actual tears when I cut my hair a measly four inches for the first time and actually got back my cut hair in a plastic bag to preserve. Thankfully she has discarded it since), short skirts and (the ultimate) tweezed eyebrows. However, unlike Brownmiller's contention that historically female fashion and body image has largely existed in response to a male desire, I remember the entire focus of our rather pathetic attempts to appear prettier was to get appreciative comments from our girlfriends. Boys came into the picture much later.

I still make an extra effort to look good when I go out on a lunch date with my girlfriends; I also still play dress up when my husband is not at home (perhaps because I never did it as a teenager... making up for lost time!) and I spray perfume liberally especially when at home (makes me feel a tad glamorous even amongst the unwashed dishes)--and I am the same person who can wear sweatpants for a week straight, who usually wears a clean, scrubbed face (with all its acne scars on display) on a daily basis and who, on certain days, in my mother's words "makes an extra effort to look ugly". My point being that while, doubtless, I regard myself as significantly evolved from those cringe-worthy high school days, my motivation to play up my feminine appeal does not necessarily come from a desire to please a man. And I know several women who feel the exact same way.

This does not mean that I disregard fashion, grow endless hair on my armpits or wear clogs with Leger-esque bandage dresses (gasp!). I am a voracious consumer of everything fashion and I love my shoes just as much as the other girl. What I find missing in both Brownmiller and, to an extent, Doanne is the classification of a middle space of sorts. Why does a woman have to be either a tree hugging bra-burner or a Birkin loving fashionista? Is there no space for the reality of women who are, amazingly enough, for the most part comfortable with what they look like, yet love dressing up to the nines every now and then and, on a normal, daily basis, are reasonably put together without being obsessive about it?

My other gripe with the readings has to do specifically with Doanne's arguments on the commodification of women. While I agree with a lot of what she says (especially the of film as a woman centric space), I find it hard to believe that men have not been beholden by women with the same motivation of secondary sexual pleasure derived from the act of looking. The pressure on a male body to be taut and fit without an ounce of spare flesh evident might be recent but there is no doubting the excitement generated from the visual of a charismatic, good looking man taking off his shirt on screen has a certain age old resonance to it. The earlier notion of 'only pretty men dress up, use cosmetic products or revel in an obviously groomed sexual imagery' is changing right before our eyes as semi-naked men sprawled languorously on billboards invite you to consume products ranging from underwear to cologne, artfully placed drops of perspiration dotting their smooth shaved chests, an unmistakable invitation evident in their eyes.

Lastly, I want to comment on what I realized is a failing on my part, with definite shades of hypocrisy. Brownmiller's vivid depiction of the Chinese bound foot led me to youtube some gruesome videos, inciting an indignant reaction on how women still cause themselves (voluntarily now!) grievous physical harm in order to look good happily choosing to go under the knife without a moment's hesitation (7 minutes of watching Bridalplasty out of curiosity and I was retching like a mad woman). Yet, somewhere, don't we all submit to a certain level of physical discomfort differing in degrees to enhance our self-image? I own about 50 pairs of high heeled shoes and sandals and I am miserably flat footed & suffer from plantar-fascitis yet I do not believe my 'glam going out look' is complete without wearing them. So who's to say that what I do is fine but a woman getting a nose job is kinda desperate (which is how I have always felt about plastic surgery)? I'm lucky to be free from any bodily defects (even luckier to possess an attitude that blissfully lets me ignore my super huge, bordering on ginormous, nose!) but would I be so chipper about the whole thing had things been different? Not an answer I readily possess is all I can say.

I will end this massive rambling with a link to an interesting article a pregnant friend of mine forwarded the other day; an assertion to Brownmiller's observations as to how even the pregnant are no longer spared!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/style/katrina-onstad/spanx-for-nothing-maternity-shapewear/article1877273/

The first step is admitting you have a problem

My current obsession:

http://www.forever21.com/twelve/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=FOREVER21&category%5Fname=12x12%5Fsomething%5Fchic&product%5Fid=2068655616&Page=1

I, like most Western women, have a shopping addiction, and my acquisitive desires can take on extreme proportions. An example: it's dawn on Sunday morning. I have to get up soon and get ready for a 10-hour shift as a hostess at The Cheesecake Factory. I'm still exhausted from last night's shift. But I'm willing to get up even earlier than necessary to drive to Old Town Pasadena before work. Why? The Pasadena Forever 21 is the only store that has this amazing feather cape in my size. I planned on buying it on-line afterwork last night, but by the time I got home, they were sold out, leaving me with a (ridiculously) inconsolable sense of loss and regret--how could I let it slip out of my fingers! So in 4 hours, I plan on getting, up, getting dressed, hauling-ass to 'Dena to search for my query, and then using all my cosmetic mastery to look like something vaguely presentable at work, and smile all day for my guests, because that what nice girls are supposed to do.

Bodily Control and the Perils of Academic Objectivity Or, "Where's My Concealer?"

While I definitely appreciate Bartky’s exploration of femininity as alienation, and her crucial acknowledgment of our paradoxical pleasure in beauty rituals, I have some doubts about her celebration of the supposedly redemptive quality of unfettered femininity— it strikes me as too utopian, too sweeping and assumptive or even poetically philosophical, but not grounded in reality.

Bartky (and Brownmiller to a certain extent, in claiming that cosmetics are proof of “feminine insecurity, an abiding belief that the face underneath is insufficient unto itself” [123]), seems to romanticize the beauty we already have and the topical markers that come with age, equating wrinkles and stretch marks to a lived, experiential maturity, and extolling the virtues of “real” un-adorned faces, “Repressive narcissistic satisfactions stand in the way of the emergence of an authentic delight in the body too: The woman unable to leave home in the morning without ‘putting on her face’ will never discover the beauty, character, and expressiveness her own face already possesses” (42).

Sorry, I don’t buy that—I assume she’s referring to inner beauty or some kind of ineffable radiance that exists independently from socially imposed ideals of perfect facial ratios and immanent beauty standards, but honestly, that doesn’t mean anything in particular and it’s far too generalized. Are we to conflate an unmade-up face with an intrinsic wealth of character, knowledge, intelligence and expression? And who's to say that this theoretical woman has character?—she may be wan, wrinkled, and defiantly exhausted-looking without makeup, but that should not be elided with a political stance or a marker of superior interior qualities. The suggestion that I will never “discover” my true beauty because I need my daily eyeliner seems to exclude me from being a self-aware individual, and that I am somehow missing out on my true inner potential.

I think Brownmiller takes a more measured and less totalizing approach to the make-up-or-not-to-make up debate that situates the issue in the praxes of daily female life. Despite her avowed “anti-make-up bias” (122), she is fully aware of the both the pleasures and the imperatives embedded in putting on makeup, and she wisely does not deny woman than choice, “of course there is nothing wrong with wanting to look attractive (123), or “as it happens, some women look good in makeup—in society's terms I will even say that they look better in makeup (123).—more important to her work is identifying the difference between option and obligation, and being cognizant about the illusion of voluntary and naturalized beauty rituals.

On a personal note, there has been an unintended side effect of reading Barky and Brownmiller before bed: it has served as a reminder of additional acts of control correction and containment that I can (should?) be doing—how can I read about unmarred skin or National Geographic breasts and not want to improve myself? Both authors write about the sisyphean scope of female beauty practices—the constancy, the dedication and above all, the unattainable endpoint that engenders constant upkeep and scrutiny, “The female body is revealed as a task, an object in need of transformation…Every aspect of my bodily being requires either alteration or else heroic measures to conserve it “(Bartky, 40).

While reading about the tyranny of feminine ritual, the "daunting" perpetually incomplete task, the arduous combat of perceived lack, it has made me ironically, or more likely comically, even more hyperaware of my usual rituals; but far from diluting their pull, it makes me strive harder, so in addition to the internalized unquestioned nightly ritual of washing, exfoliating, toning,(occasionally masking or pore-stripping) and applying an anti-wrinkle or anti-acne serum (the paradox of 25), I’ve incorporated some supplemental practices. Unless I’m coming home at dawn or on a sleep-inducing drug the former are a given, but the content of the reading, and the fact that I'm awake and seem to have the time, has allowed me to address slightly more specific “problems”, i.e. putting scar gel on the small surgical keloid on my hip--I don’t like it, but it’s not as visible as the face so I often forget to apply the clear goo heralded as a miracle fixative. Similarly I’ve been remembering to apply Certain Dri, a product that claims to eradicate excessive sweat as effectively as botox injections (which I've also considered); ditto applying firming self-tanner (address two problem in one!) which I do occasionally but usually don’t have time to wait for it to dry. In fact, all of these applications require a lengthy drying time and must be used at night, so the reading has actually facilitated these ablutions—I’ll read a section, apply one, and stand like a newly shellacked piece of furniture waiting for them to dry while reading, and feeling extremely satisfied that I’m taking an (imagined?) agency in my own goals of self-perfection which obviously, as our reading and our own experience as women has proven, is a battle that is never won but typified by and framed by the the constant striving.

These augmented rituals and my beauty regimen in general is undeniably internalized to a Foucauldian extent, but I don’t see it as necessarily sinister—insidious, sure but complex. I appreciate that both authors (Brownmiller to greater extent) acknowledge the very real and potent pleasure of femininity—to ignore that would be doing a great and somewhat condescending injustice to women everywhere. We are not all insecure masochists helpless under the unrelenting pressure of gender roles and ingrained social construction. As Brownmiller notes, there is immense pleasure in the “trivial’ rituals—a spritz of perfume may ultimately serve to mask the natural human scent and efface our bodily selves, but just as importantly, it smells really really good and I love inhaling my favorite scent as I put it on. As the authors admit, if these acts weren’t at least occasionally pleasurable, we wouldn’t do them.

Of course there is the aspect of coercion and the sense of being obligated if not by an external motivation that by our own sense of what should be done i.e. I don’t want to shave: I hate it, as many have mentioned, it is time consuming annoying and fraught with problems—there is nothing pleasurable about the experience except perhaps the (maddeningly temporary) tactile pleasure of smoothness or the anticipated touch I might receive from a male (giving credence to everything the readings claim about women making themselves appealing to the opposite sex). So the pleasures of femininity are definitely counterbalanced by the more obligatory acts that feel arduous rather than effervescent and fun. Still, I love being a girl...

Welcome to the CTCS 673 Blog!

You've found the blog for CTCS 673: Consuming Femininities. You will use this space to post your required course responses. To recap from the syllabus, you will be required to post at least 15 times to this blog during the semester. At least five of these posts should be in the form of weekly reading responses (approximately 300-400 words). These responses should engage critically with the course reading for that day and should demonstrate both a grasp of the material and your own considered response to the same. Simply saying you liked or didn't like something or providing a straight summary of the readings is not sufficient; you should demonstrate careful, analytical thinking, engaging the readings but also moving beyond them. Feel free to draw on class screenings or materials outside of the course as well, integrating them into your discussions and analyses, but these five posts need to engage the readings at some level. These 5 responses should be posted by 10 p.m. on the evening before class. Your other 10 posts can take the form of responses to other posts, shopping tips or diaries, links to interesting fashion sites, etc. Ideally, this blog will become a communal space for the class, one used to address and ponder course themes and to point your peers to interesting materials. You are, of course, expected to read it regularly and are encouraged to post more frequently if the spirit moves you.