Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies

Acknowledgments

Our collection eme rged from two conferences, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2011) and Console-ing Passions (2012). We were excited by the diversity of perspectives and topics taken on by young feminist scholars at the events, and we decided to organize a collection around some of the provocative work presented. We send our appreciation to our contributors for their enthusiasm with the project as well as their timely submissions and responsiveness to our feedback.

We also would like to thank Dr. Ayoka Chenzira (Spelman College and Ayomentary Productions) HaJ (Urban Chameleon Media) for permission to use an image from their project, HERadventure. Our thanks as well go to Nettrice Gaskins, one of our contributors, for connecting us to the artists.

Our sincerest gratitude is also extended to Cynthia Haynes, Jan Rune Holmevick, and David Blakesley for supporting our belief in a collection that ranges across genres, methods, and points of view. We were delighted to find editors who recognized that cohesion often is invoked in the service of ideological rigidity. Our hope was that a break from formulaic structure and theoretical uniformity would lead to a more robust dialogue on the urgent issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

The labor of bookmaking is not often remarked upon and yet, like any text, the formal and conceptual elements are inextricably bound. Indeed this link between form and content is a key theme of the collection. Thus, we offer our sincere thanks to Jared Jameson for his keen eye and thorough work copyediting the manuscript. We also acknowledge the excellent work that takes place in the summer HASTAC event, the Feminist Scholars Digital Workshop (FSDW). The FSDW provides a space, unbounded by geography, where feminist scholars can share their work with like-minded individuals. Indeed, one of us received excellent feedback via the FSDW for her contribution to this collection.

1 Introduction

Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn

This collection sketches several possibilities for future texts—those alternative languages and writings that imagine new pathways through the forms and formats used to express contemporary questions of race, gender, and identity. The collection’s area of investigation is situated within popular culture, not as a place of critique or celebration, but rather as a contested site that covers an increasingly splintered terrain. Our use of future texts was inspired by and an intentional nod to Alondra Nelson’s introduction to the special issue of Social Text on Afrofuturism that dismantles the utopian trajectory of the digital world founded on an erasure of history and racial difference via technology and tacit assumptions about its liberatory potential. As feminists who imagine a space of dialogue that resists old binaries and imagines new paths across a variety of divides, we are also mindful of the array of histories, voices, bodies, and technologies that have not been served by the dominant narrative. Thus, following Nelson, we see the value of Ishmael Reed’s conception of synchronizing , of mixing disparate artifacts within a single timeline, since, it is only by viewing them simultaneously that the gaps and contradictions in a heretofore seamless through line can be viewed. The essays in this collection address such synchronized texts as they confront the possibilities of new media. Likewise, the collection itself enacts a form of synchronization as it unites two groups of texts: those which problematize race as a first concern, addressing the ways in which emergent digital formats may unsettle hegemonic structures, and those which primarily focus on sexuality and traditional narrative form in general and, specifically those that, in some way, betray the impact of digital technologies.

Indeed, the impetus for this collection came from two events: The first one was a presentation given at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies that focused on Afrofuturism and emergent media. The panel, which included several of the authors in the first part of this collection, speculated about the possibilities for a revitalized approach to identity politics that might offer a space for intervention, primarily in issues of race, though we also considered the complications of adding gender to the equation. The second event came a few months later during the twentieth anniversary of the Console-ing Passions conference, in a panel centered on emergent media and, primarily, its implications for issues of gender equity. This panel, which included many of the authors in the second section of this volume, speculated about the liberatory potential of the breakdown of inherently patriarchal narrative structures. Both panels, we felt, touched on issues that are absolutely vital to consider in the context of contemporary culture, they both demanded further investigation and, combined, they would create a whole that is stronger than its constituent parts. In other words, we felt that putting these essays into conversation with each other, synchronizing them, would enrich each and every one.

While there is a valuable and established tradition that runs through feminist writing founded on avant-garde and experimental types of expression that counters classical narrative lines, and by extension, disrupts patriarchal culture, that approach has far too often failed to consider fully issues of race and class. This is especially evident in the dilemma faced by black feminists who, alienated from dominant feminism’s failure to consider their experience, have been forced to choose whether they were black or women first. Indeed, as bell hooks recounts the white feminists who did not welcome our questioning of feminist paradigms that they were seeking to institutionalize even as many black people simply saw our involvement with feminist politics as a gesture of betrayal, and dismissed our work. There was simply no room for conceptualizing or practicing a black woman’s full identity.

In an attempt to push back against such myopic splintering, this collection begins with the politics and aesthetics of Afrofuturism, only then turning to recent feminist explorations across an array of media forms, from music video, to games, to global journalism. In concert, these future texts create a discourse that is both within and outside formal history, within and without conventional storytelling and its attendant formats. The essays enact a type of polyvocality that honors commonality as well as difference, the political and the personal, convergences and divergences. This approach is intended to offer enough structure to demonstrate and illustrate the intransigence of inequities, while simultaneously avoiding the trap of over-generalization that can become simply another form of rigidity, one that becomes as alienating as it is inclusive.

Likewise, we felt the need to enact a polyvocal approach in this introduction that is meant to contextualize and historicize the often implicit through lines of the collection. Thus, much of the introduction is constructed as a dialogue. This format not only allowed us to exert our individual voices, but it also helped us to conceptualize an appropriately contingent and situated academic intervention. This is fitting, particularly when considering the perpetually shifting discursive events that coalesce around popular culture. But this approach also forced us to consider our own imbrication in the (semiotic) systems that dominate the cultural landscape, forcing the sort of self consciousness that is key to critical consciousness and is incumbent upon academics, without exception, to consider. As feminists though, we hold ourselves doubly accountable, for it is not enough to critique structural inequity, we must also offer alternatives, however fleeting they may be.

VC: It seems as though we are at a time when people are once again seeing a new wave of feminism, on the popular culture front but also with a renewed vibrancy within academic discourse. On one hand, we might see this as another generational wave ready to make its contributions to gendered equality and human rights concerns. We might also attribute the resurgence to the rise of networked feminism through social media; the numerous blogs, Facebook groups, and dynamic feminist Twitterverse that have connected and extended the discussion on issues around gender and sexuality, representation, identity formation, and structural forms of oppression. There is a certain immediacy, and indeed even effectiveness, in the transmissions of information along social media channels that have brought urgent issues and events into the public discourse, such as birth control and health care (Sandra Fluke’s Congressional testimony, Wendy Davis’s filibuster in Texas Assembly); representation of women in media (Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate harassment); and domestic violence (Ray Rice’s videotaped assault on his then fiancée and now wife, Janay). Each of these began as personal efforts or dramas that quickly entered into the public sphere and sparked larger debate and directed campaigns for change.

However, in some sense, one is tempted to ask, what is the new in this wave. The issues above are certainly not new issues and there is a certain repetition in the patterns that is daunting and dispiriting from an activist perspective.

Feminist theorists have long noted that any real change must be accompanied by reimagined personal, social, and political possibilities, but as Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out, thinking the new is extremely difficult since we must move beyond established systems of knowledge and power (16). Rosi Braidotti more directly asks, where does the new come from? (Nomadic Subjects, 3). Both thinkers, Braidotti and Grosz, point to strategies or poetics of movement (Braidotti’s nomadic subjects and Grosz’s becomings) as a way out of our fixed locations and intractable roadblocks. The question for our collection is, how can mediaworks contribute to the new and this poetics of change?

VK: The Eugene Lang College at the New School recently conducted a series of conversations with prominent cultural critic bell hooks in order to address the current state of gender and racial issues in the US. In one aptly named conversation—Are You Still a Slave?—hooks maintained that contemporary assaults on feminism nearly always issue from visual media. She then adds that she finds pop singer Beyoncé to be, in many ways, anti-feminist, since her images comprise one such assault, making her a terrorist, and this is especially true when considering the impact of these images on young girls. hooks notes that the tirades against feminism are rampant in the image making business, and Beyoncé is a main offender.

VC: Beginning a discussion of Beyoncé at the level of the image rather than her musical style or lyrics is a good place to start, as it brings to mind Braidotti’s essay on posthumanism, in which she notes that this era has turned visualization into the ultimate form of control, arguing that it marks not only the final stage in the commodification of the scopic, but the triumph of vision over all other senses (204). To be specific, Braidotti is not asking us to discredit our visual senses as flawed or deceptive, but rather to understand the structure of looking that is integral to our ways of thinking and knowing. That is, a system of disembodied viewing that sets out an all-knowing and unbiased subject that objectifies and consumes all that is before it. Bringing this back to Beyoncé, and specifically to her 2014 VMA performance, that’s where Braidotti’s argument hits home for me. Musically, we had a series of greatest hits snippets aligned with Beyoncé’s textbook performance of classic scopophilia—and here I mean the explicitly male subject pleasure of looking at the female body as object as well as the female pleasure or rather participation in this regime by her own pleasure to be looked at (as an object). This culminates with the stage going dark and the giant text of FEMINIST etched across the stage with the shadow of the singer standing in front. Now the spectacle of the star’s body and the spectacle of the word, feminist, collapse, melt together. There is nothing in the performance, in the visual structure of the segment that does anything to disrupt the disembodied viewing that we have known for far too long.

VK: Yes, exactly. And the very pairing of this particular word with this particular image demonstrates both the power and the danger of disembodied viewing: the word need not justify its pairing, the spectacle need not situate itself in history, nor make any claims capable of being interrogated, nor is there any nuance or finesse to the word/image pairing. It’s little more than a visual soundbite, emblematic of the increasing paucity of contemporary cultural communication and the attention economy that, by its very nature, encourages hyperbolic headlines and engenders binaries. Indeed, in response to bell hooks’s rather nuanced discussion of Beyoncé’s imagistic assault on feminism, the online headlines screamed bell hooks calls Beyoncé a terrorist. (Although I must confess that part of me would love to see that VMA moment rewritten, Guerilla Girls style, with the word TERRORIST replacing the word FEMINIST.)

VC: These pop cultural moments, which much like the Emma Watson HeforShe UN speech/campaign, were praised by many as a breakthrough moment for feminists, suffer from the same point of departure, which is in fact a string of uncontested binaries that a disembodied, detached, objective, male observer is essential to the acknowledgement and well-being of the object, female.

VK: The Emma Watson campaign I find particularly interesting given its reactions, parodies and semi-tenuous links to the infamous 4Chan’s leak of celebrity nude photos. On the one hand, my experience with undergraduate students who are often resistant to seeing sexism as a contemporary issue—and this has been especially true of white females—persuades me that any time a young woman in the public eye invokes the mantle of feminism and includes men in the struggle, it can’t help but be productive. On the other hand, as has been eloquently argued by Mia McKenzie among others, Watson’s discussion of men not being invited to the conversation, along with the ways in which they also suffer from patriarchy ignores the very real struggles of women worldwide while consolidating the centrality of men in one of the few spaces not previously occupied.

VC: It is at these moments, which are accompanied in the press by incessantly cheerful proclamations about the new generation of feminists that Donna Haraway’s informatics of domination is particularly instructive. By this phrase, Haraway is underlining the intersecting systems of power of race, class, gender, and nation, which are of course standard categories for feminist analysis, but also asking us to reconsider the very categories themselves. Something has changed in the circuits and networks of power that has altered the scopic regime’s impact on discourses of difference. This is not to say that difference is erased, insignificant, or ineffective, but that the language we employ (visual, textual, spoken) must find new ways to confront the old binaries, even including the binary of patriarchal set against feminist since the term feminist itself faces appropriation through the spectacle of the commodity and celebrity culture.

VK: But is it a case of something actually having changed in the circuits and networks of power? The informatics of domination is one of the foundational concepts of Haraway’s prominent Cyborg Manifesto and one that she has refused to edit in the nearly quarter century since its publication. She finds the concept’s usefulness, however limited, in its refusal to a-historicize information, while also acknowledging that the networks are not all powerful, they’re interrupted in a million ways and, although they sometimes look like nothing more than a house of cards it’s because they are neither and they are both.

While there is no denying the profound impact of the turn to the visual on issues of difference, the dangers and potentials are both present. In adopting bell hooks’s view of feminism as a verb, a movement, Haraway brings the possibility of nuance among these contradictions. And it seems to me that this view of feminism as verb—similar to Braidotti’s nomadic subjects and Grosz’s becomings— proves especially useful in mobilizing the informatics of domination, since as a conceptual frame it is particularly helpful in its acknowledgement of both the power of names and naming, but also the systemic nature of semiotic dominance, as well as its vulnerability.

VC+VK: With movement in mind, the future texts in this collection attempt to break the scopic regime’s disembodied viewing by examining feminist texts and feminist works that operate within, across, and against the informatics of domination, adding performance and play via strategic synchronizing. Sampling and remixing are powerful techniques in all cases, and history and aesthetic precedent provide insight into efforts to configure truly new forms for language, culture, and identity. With a paradigm of remix as linguistic play and reconfiguration, the book’s chapters confront the question of narrative codes and conventions. More specifically, they examine the ways in which emergent platforms, such as YouTube and web-based TV, as well as cross-platform storytelling (from books to film to games) alter or abet gendered conventions. Most importantly, we argue these new forms and formats re-write the relationship between hegemonic and resistant texts so that each iteration from either side of the spectrum cannot be easily segmented into binary understandings of race and gender. The effect is truly uncanny, that is, the familiar (divides) are made strange. Thus the collection closes with an essay that explores the return of the repressed as an uncanny female body turned back against the post-racial and post feminist mythology.

Works Cited

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.

—. Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology. Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006). 197-208. Web. 4 Oct 2014.

Eugene Lang College, New School. Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body: A Public Dialogue with bell hooks. Online video. YouTube, 7 May 2014. Web. 15 September 2014.

Gane, Nicholas. When We Have Never Been Human, What is to Be Done: Interview with Donna Haraway. Theory Culture Society 23 (2006): 135–158. Print.

Gross, Kali. Black Women are Already Dead in America. HuffPost Black Voices. 15 Sept. 2014. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ed. Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999: 15–28. Print.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Nelson, Alondra. Introduction: Future Texts. Social Texts, 71 20.2 (2002): 1–15. Print.

McKenzie, Mia. Why I Am Not Really There for Emma Watson’s Feminism Speech at the UN. Black Girl Dangerous. 24 Sept. 2014. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.

Robinson, Joanna. Watch Emma Watson Deliver a Game-Changing Speech on Feminism at the UN, Vanity Fair. 26 Sept. 2014. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.

Part 1: Afrofuturism in Popular Culture

In his essay Black to the Future, Mark Dery notes that African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its core, [c]oncretizing [William] Gibson’s shibboleth, ‘The street finds its own uses for things’ (185). The authors in this section examine an array