Literature: an Acquired Taste?

On the first page of the final chapter of Rita Felski's Literature After Feminism, a chapter entitled "Values," Felski claims that "Those who value Shakespeare and Shelley, Dickens and Dickinson, have learned to do so." At first blush, this statement rang true for me. I remember first reading Shakespeare in eighth grade and finding myself frustrated by its complexity, getting nothing out of it, until my first class period in which we discussed it. It was only after explanation and elaboration by my teacher that I could appreciate the beauty in what I now truly believe to be a literary masterpiece.

Our class discussion on this chapter in Felski, however, provided a different perspective. Multiple classmates recounted their first experiences with Shakespeare, citing an immediate appreciation and even awe for the bard's wordcraft, even before they had learned anything about Shakespeare or his reputation and place in our canon of "great literature." The class seemed to be torn on whether any of our literary tastes are inherent to our personalities or if they instead solely products of our backgrounds and educations. While many said that their appreciation for works like Shakespeare was pre-educational, I still would contend that predispositions toward certain literary qualities have to originate from some manner of life experiences. Surely a fetus, taught to read, would not prefer Shakespeare over See Spot Run, or vice versa. Later conversation with a classmate, however, made me consider that there may after all be certain qualities that all humans are hard-wired to appreciate. It has been proven that the eye reacts positively to certain ratios in images such as the Golden Rectangle, complementary colors are more pleasing than other combinations, and certain intervals between musical notes sound better universally than others do. Perhaps then, there are qualities that are universally more pleasant in literature as well.

Chaz Bono in Dancing with the Stars

A recent Huffington Post article announced that Dancing with the Stars has accepted its first transgender contestant ever: Chaz Bono. For those who don't know, Bono, the child of singers Sonny and Cher, is a "female-to-male transgender man" described by Wikipedia as "an American transgender advocate, writer, actor, and musician."

For the producers of the show, this is a bold move--intrudocing a transgendered sexuality into a show which has predominantly focused on the sexual tensions between male and female dancers. The show's producer, Conrad Green, declared that the show is "always looking to introduce viewers to new stories and perspectives"-- an idea that is coincidentally very similar to Felski's ideas of bi-textuality. This has interesting implications for the canon, suggesting not only the necessity of a "bi-textuality," but also a "multi-textuality" that extends beyond simple male-female dichotomies to explore liturature that perceives gender and sexuality itself as fluid entities--an idea I'm sure will recur in our explorations of homosexual and trasgender literature.

The article notes that the show has received a lot of backlash for its decision, which promted Bono to respond, "You know, it just kind of shows why for me it's important to be on the show, because so little still is known about what it means to be transgender...And there's so many just completely inaccurate stereotypes and thoughts that people have." This seems very reminiscent of the feminist challenge to the male canon/patricarchy; however, here it is not male patriarchy that is threatened but heteronormativity. In light of class discussion on the perception of feminist "affirmative action," we can see the show's choice to accept Chaz as a contestant as a progressive, political move that challenges viewers to re-examine preconceived biases that some sexualities are inherently more valuable than others by forcing them to view sexuality through a new perspective.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/03/chaz-bono-dancing-with-the-stars_n_947718.html

Gender roles in Disney, a surprising thought.

I was going to blog about Pactor's Chapel talk and how he regarded women and assumed all men that went to Wabash must play a certain gender role and be heterosexual... but something more fascinating happened as I was reading Felski. The girl that I have been seeing the past couple of months and I were talking about Disney movies. I brought up a few things in Felski (pp. 96-104) that regarded Disney movies and the view of gender and sex in those. I brought up Cinderella and the need for external forces to empower her to find happiness; a happiness that can only be found by marriage to a prince. She said that she had never seen the movie. My jaw, naturally, fell to the floor. As I scrambled to find my missing mandible, she told me the reasons why. Her father, who seems to be quite a quizzical figure, believed that the film had a devious moral. (Come on, Cinderella with an ulterior motive, right?) She told me that her father believed that little girls should not watch such films, especially Cinderella, because they messed up what he called "normal" gender roles. Cinderella, by being granted a wish by her fairy Godmother, was able to leave the home and seek out the excitement of the ballroom. In doing this, Cinderella forsakes her "womanly" duties of tending to the house chores. Thus, as she leaves her domestic sphere to venture out, albeit in masquerade, to the public and social sphere of a royal ball, she sloughs off her passive gender role for an active one in which she tries to find happiness.

Wow, that blew my mind. I mean, I see the typical passivity in her situation: pushed into adoption by step-mother, forced to do the housework by her step-sisters, only able to escape with the help of magical or unnatural external forces, bound even then by a set of rules, finding happiness only by riding off into the sunset with a Prince Charming to be married and live happily ever after; however, I did not see a reversal of gender roles at all. Cinderella, actually, is not just a passive character, but takes such an active role to leave the domestic sphere that it causes a father to not want his daughter to watch this movie in fear that she may do the same and become an "unnatural" type of woman.

Seriously, blew my mind.

"Gay Veterans Face Hurdles In Re-enlisting"

Before class today I grabbed an issue of yesterdays New York Times to read in my spare time. I was struck by the article on the front page discussing the issue of gays within our military. I can remember this issue bringing about very contentious and heated debate when the "don't ask don't tell" rule of the military was first brought under fire, but i did not realize that this issue was still one we are dealing with in today's society. We are in the middle of a war, and recruiters are constantly scouring college and high school campuses for eligible young men and women to join the military. Yet, we are turning people away because they are gay. I personally see this as wrong. I understand that some people may have trouble working next to someone who considers them self gay, but for goodness sakes its war, suck it up and fight the damn war and get back home where you can live comfortably under your own roof without having to worry at night. I think sometimes we as a society make a bigger deal out of things than we need to, instead of looking at the big picture, and at what really needs to be done.

Gaga's new persona.

As the curtains lifted and the smoke settled, audiences were greeted with a figure dressed in an Elvis-impersonating-black-pants-and-white-shirt, greased-hair, and thank-you-very-much attitude. After the first, poorly attempted manly masking of voice, the audience meets “Gentlemen Gaga,” as many on Twitter have dubbed the character. The character is that “cool, Nebraska guy” from her quintessentially masculine jam “You and I.” The fourth single from the Born This Way album, “You and I” is an expression of love from a “New York girl” to a “cool, Nebraska guy.” The song flips gender roles from every bound of classic, head banging, Southern, and Hair rock. In a quick explanation, the song is deconstructive of bands from Queen to Journey, the manly embodiment of music. Gaga uses the stomp-clap line from Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and its guitarist Brian May in exclamatory fashion. What sport-loving, hairy-chested man can’t recognize the stadium anthem’s signature stomping? However, by using the classic sing-a-long “Don’t Stop Believing” theme of small-town girl and city boy reversed into a “city girl, small-town boy” motif, Gaga takes possession of the chase. She takes the masculine go-get-the-girl role for herself, but still allows her alter ego to yell emphatically “sit back down where you belong” to the female Gaga. She completely blurs the lines of control and desire, and she uses herself, in the video, to play both roles. She took on the persona of the whiskey-breathed male for the MTV Video Music Awards further extending her gender-blurring masculinity to the “real world.” Her message, as she’s been trying to do for years, finally reached a main-stage audience, and soon enough, ripples will reach those who are still simply writing off the behavior of Gaga over the years to her “weirdness.” There is a goal, and from imaginative to reality, Gaga will slowly turn gender from the he-she-it mentality. However, there is criticism. As one Camille Paglia claims in an article from the Sunday Times, Gaga and her gender-blurring behavior will cause, as the title claims, the “Death of Sex,” a sexuality that Madonna, Bowie, Elton John, and Warhol all worked desperately to create. What will Gaga’s new masculine image, her mainstream attempt at gender redefinition do for the he-she-it world?

Bi-textuality in the Canon

I think it was our own Scott MF'ing Walker who brought up Senior Colloquium the other day in our discussion of gender bias in the great English literature "canon." Since I happened to be in the archives Friday afternoon, I decided to take a quick peek into the past book lists of this class. (I would emphasize the word "quick" here--I mostly ignored the most recent history, deferring to Prof. Rosenberg's firsthand knowledge, and as for what I did examine I did so rather briskly).

I would highly recommend any other student who is interested in colloquium (it's not too late for spring semester you guys, and certainly Wyatt can take both) or simply in the history of the college to look through these folders. I was amazed by the professor's names I read as I went farther and farther back in time--names like Trippett, Powell, Fertig, Placher, and Campbell, seeing first where they began and then where they stopped. While these names changed, those of the fall semester reading list remained remarkably the same. Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Aquinas, Augustine, Machiavelli and others have persisted through the decades. (I noted with sadness that Milton didn't survive his freshman year, though perhaps he was brought back on the team at some later date). All of the names on those reading lists were, and remain on the list today, male. The spring semester started off the same way. Great names were included of course, such as Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Tolstoy, and of course Burke and Paine (which you might remember from C&T). But again I noticed all were men. This remained the same from the 1947-48 school year until the spring of 1964 when Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was added to the list. Then in 1978 Wollstonecraft made a one-year appearance, bringing the number of female authors up to two. Virginia Woolfe was added in 1979, but in the following year Stowe was dropped. Thus the "status quo" of having just a single woman author was preserved. From around here on out I began to see Prof. Rosenberg's name, and given that this was Friday afternoon and I didn't want to spend the entire day in the basement of the library, I put the file away. I assume Prof. Rosenberg can fill us in on more recent developments.

So is this an example of gender bias? If Stowe was worthy of being on the list, then why was she removed one year after Woolfe was added? Was it simply because of her gender? (Note that there certainly were other changes--but the timing here does seem suspicious to me). What names would you have added?

Two other things 1) Bi-textuality has official made the list of my favorite words and 2) Here is a quote I found about what makes a good Senior Colloquium student: "he is not afraid to attack the ideas of others...[and] he knows that occasionally he's going to be made ridiculous."

The Topsy-Turvy World of Male vs. Female Pronoun Usage

While for most of my life I've considered the use of the male pronoun "he" as opposed to the female equivalent "she" to be a matter of course, our class discussions of late have caused me to reexamine my views. As a young child within the admittedly conservative environment of a Catholic school, my fellow students and I were taught that there was no situation in formal writing where the substitution of "she" for "he" would be appropriate (and the nuns teaching us had no problem driving that point home with their yardsticks). So, over time, one could say that I became conditioned to drop the female pronoun "she" from my formal writing altogether.

However, after reading Felski and reflecting on her frequent use of "she" where I would reflexively use the pronoun "he," it seems to me that her overall implication encourages her readers to consider the marginalization of female authors and audiences that my original training has led me to perpetuate. Considering all of this (and hopefully without engaging in too much of a debate on semantics), I am left with the questions: "Am I truly being gender-insensitive when I use "he" anytime "she" would serve just as well? And is my old-school thinking and writing style indicative of a deeper chauvinism that has been subtly built into my psyche, or am I just working within the confines of my earliest instruction in the art of writing?"

...Thoughts from the peanut gallery, anyone?

-Josh Mitchell