Feminism in Architecture

So I was in Chicago over Thanksgiving break and saw this building. I asked my friend what building it was and she told me it was designed by a feminist architect who had wanted to design a sky scraper that incorporated a more feminine form because skyscrapers are considered phallic and masculine. Now I'm not sure if the intent of a skyscraper is to be a phallic representation or merely an efficient structure for big cities, but I thought this was applicable to class. It shows a concrete way in which to incorporate feminine characteristics to previously patriarchal (literal) structures. I thought this was a cool idea and it was something that I'd never even thought about before (maybe because I'm not an architect) but it does seem that there are a lot of masculine traits in architecture and it is definitely arguable that men have dictated a lot of our physical world as well as intellectual, political, and philosophical.

Patriarchalism in Advertising

In case you're interested in commenting on something other than poetry, there is never a lack of sexist content in the world of commercial advertising.  The two that have most recently caused a stir come from two of America's favorite brands, the Chrysler Group LLC, and Dr. Pepper/Seven Up Ind.

Dr. Pepper's ad is meant to promote their new Dr. Pepper 10 (with 10 calories) to men, with the thought that low calorie drinks are normally tailored to women.  The slogan "It's not for women" has received an ample amount of critique, though Dr. Pepper's CEO Larry Young is apparently thrilled with the product’s reception thus far, even saying that moms are picking up Dr. Pepper 10 for the kids. 

As for the commercial from our friends over at Dodge, well... just watch.  Apparently the time has come for men to break out of the matriarchal system or something like that.

Fortunately, Dodge's commercial has received quite a bit more critique than Dr. Pepper's, possibly because it more directly attacks gender equality and even goes as far as to say that men are the oppressed gender. There are many response videos made by feminist groups about this one, but I found the following clip to be most amusing.

THE TREES THE TREES Heather Christle

I think I'm a feminist in the fact that I truly believe that women are writing almost the best poetry today in America.  I believe that they're extraordinary. That for some reason, this has happened.  It has not been true forever.                                   
                                                                                               - Barbara Guest


One of the most exciting young woman poets of the day, Heather Christle, is the author of two full-length poetry collections: The Difficult Farm (2009), and The Trees The Trees (2011), as well as a chapbook, The Seaside! (2010) and a third forthcoming collection What Is Amazing (2012) from Wesleyan University Press.  She received her MFA from the Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her BA from Tufts University.  Her poems been anthologized in The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present, right between works from Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman. 




from Octopus Books


THE TREES THE TREES, by Heather Christle

Christle's newest book, The Trees The Trees, is a wonderful collection of prose block poems, in which she addresses several socio-political themes, including feminism.  Poet Nick Sturm has to say of the book, "The Trees The Trees is a wrecking ball covered in flowers. These poems by Heather Christle make me feel, often simultaneously, all of the following things: that I am riding a fucked-up carousal in the middle of the woods, that I am an animal pulling out my own wires, that my skin is a new kind of candy, that my brain and my heart are in a tree and that, somewhere up in that tree, they are kissing, calling each other the wrong names."


Here are some of the most overtly feminist poems in the book:




                    YOU ARE MY GUEST


I will call you man      man man man man      it is a
recipe     it is not that expensive       I will have you 
over for dinner        and I will not take your clothes
off     you wear clothes like a man man    you are a
tightly wound bundle             when we think of the 
woods     the woods are the same       but the rabbit 
between them is different              eat up your soup
little man         little man man          there is no food
coming later




                             MY ENEMY


I have a new enemy    he is so good-looking    here
is a photograph     of him in the snow     he is in the 
snow     and so is the photo     I put it there because 
I hate him     and because it is always snowing    in
the photograph      my enemy is acting      like there 
are no neighbors      but there are always neighbors
they just might be far away             he is 100% evil
and good-looking     he looks good      in his parka
in the snow         if you asked        if would call it a 
helmet           all he ever does is lie       he does not 
breathe      or move    or glow     he is not that kind
of man     it is not that kind of snow




POEM CONSISTING ENTIRELY OF ADVICE


you must not look        at what may be a man     or
may be his empty car     what if he asks you   what
are you looking at    what if you still do not know

What I love about Christle's work is that it blends the theories of feminism with the realities of her own life in a way that is almost memoiric.  The bluntness and wittiness of her poetry is what makes it unique and exciting, and is certainly the quality of her writing that has led to the success of this book, despite being published by a small, independent publisher.  Christle confronts heterosexuality from within it, critiquing, but also embracing it, as in "My Enemy."  


To see more of the amazing Heather Christle, visit her on tumblr: http://heatherchristle.tumblr.com/ or buy one of her books at Innisfree Bookstore.

The Girl Effect

Hey everyone,

I stumbled upon this project in my research for our final paper (I'm not that connected to the internet so many of you may have seen this already...). But I thought just in case i'd go ahead and post it considering how much we've discussed the concept of girl and its effect in poetry and language in general. Enjoy

http://youtu.be/WIvmE4_KMNw

BRING RECYCLOPEDIA TO CLASS ON THURS.

If possible.

Thanks,

wdbo.

A hard argument to make...

I came across this article through GOOD magazine online, and thought you all might be interested. It is interesting to see what happens when science takes on matters of feminism--we have talked about this before with studies of genetics and procreation (discourse). The science here seems like a bit of a stretch. Testing mental and physical awareness in various states of undress...

http://www.good.is/post/the-upside-of-sexual-objectification/?utm_content=headline&utm_medium=hp_carousel&utm_source=slide_4

In my opinion, this is presenting old ideas in a new, "scientific" way. No matter how it is supported, I have a hard time believing that I am more moral if I am an object of sexual attention. Still, this is area of sexuality/gender that science is exploring, so I thought I'd throw it out there.

"Hell is a Teenage Girl."

So I also wanted to open the discussion about the Gurlesque, Tuesday's visit from Danielle Pafunda and what everyone else’s thoughts were.

(I apologize, I was not in class on Thursday so hopefully this isn’t just repeating what’s already been discussed)

I thought it was an interesting concept that was discussed, however, I questioned what it really means to place “girl” as the subject. I think what felt ambiguous was what defines a “girl” and in what context (for example, Arielle Greenberg’s idea of girl or the perspective of a white middle-class girl and how that differs). Also, what is the importance of “girl” as opposed to “woman”—what and where are the distinctions and why is this important to feminism?

What really struck me was when Danielle stated that: “A girl is the silliest thing you can be”.

I honestly had never thought about this in a feminist framework before, but when you separate girl into its own category, aside from feminism, there definitely is a stereotypical persona of what a teenage girl is and should be. This also goes back to that question about whether its socially constructed or its some biological factor that makes them erratic, dramatic, angry, stupid, shallow, slutty, etc. etc. etc. emotional messes from about 13-19 (obviously that’s arguable).Yet, every problem she faces seems to be a testament to her hormones. There is hardly any validity in what a teen girl feels or has to say, especially if she goes in say “like” and ‘whatever” every 3 words like Danielle mentioned in class ---you wouldn’t go try and bass a legislative bill talking like that. So what I’d really to ask is“why”? This is the question I keep asking myself and though it seems ridiculously obvious "like, of course being a girl is silly,duh", I just think it’d be really interesting to deconstruct why the subject of teenage girl is seen as so “silly” in society, and what does this genre of Gurlesque do as a response? What are the consequences of how teenage girls are perceived in society and literature to feminism?

Also, this is somewhat off topic but episode 4 of Parks and Recreation this season was a great discussion on gender conflict. If you don't already watch the show I'd definitely recommend watching this episode! But anyway, these clips are just for fun.

Quick recap: there is rivalry between a Pawnee Rangers (think boyscouts) that Ron Swanson leads and a troop called the Pawnee Goddesses that Lesley Knope has started because when she was young she wasn't allowed to be a ranger. She wants Ron to admit her group is better and more fun, but he won't. Until one of the boys decides that he would rather be in the goddesses than the rangers (uh oh, the gender line is bent), leslie says no at first that it should be just for girls, but then they of course have a "public forum" and the girls argue that isn't this the same reason she started the Goddesses, to be treated equally? So now, boys start joining the goddesses and declare themselves as strong self-empowered women. How do you deal with that scenario? I personally thought this was a great answer to the whole feminist dilemma. This episode really has great material for discussion on the issue of gender.

Watch these clips below:

The Pawnee Rangers:




The Pawnee Goddesses

Toddlers & Tiaras

Toddlers & Tiaras is an American reality series that debuted on TLC in 2009. The show is a sequence of narratives, which follows the stories of individual beauty pageant contestants without outside commentary. There are boys and girls on the show, but there are less appearances by boys. The boys are usually accompanied by their mothers. I believe the age of the contestants ranges from 2-6 years old.

I just watched this show today and the concept reminded me of Gurlesque because girl is the center of the show. The girl as a woman. The girl as a beauty queen. Since gender is what "we" perform, Toddlers & Tiaras seems to be the ultimate performance and is, due to the nature of beauty pageants. As Pafunda mentioned in class, the construct of girl is what is sold to girls--the image of the beauty queen.

In the Gurlesque introduction Glenum writes, "the Gurlesque describes an emerging field of female artists now in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s who, taking a page form the burlesque, perform their femininity in a campy or overtly mocking way. Their work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends." (11)

With that said, I wanted to start a discussion with a couple questions: do you think Toddlers & Tiaras is gurlesque? Is the center of Toddlers & Tiaras the girl's voice or the mom's voice? Pafunda said in class that the center of Gurlesque is the girl's voice.  These toddler pageants seem to be a parody of real pageants, yet the children's parents are completely serious about them.

Overall, is this show a positive or negative step in feminism?

Cuteness

In response to this week’s discussion on the Gurlesque, I think it is necessary to discuss the concept of “cuteness,” of being cute. I take issue a bit with the definition of “cuteness” that Glenum gives us in her introduction. I had questions about this when I read it and was surprised/interested when Danielle Pafunda chose to focus on this in class. Glenum writes:

“Cuteness, then, far from being a harmless aesthetic category, reveals a state of acute deformity.” (p 16)

Glenum and Pafunda seem to agree that cuteness reflects the deformity and (insecurity, incompletion, grotesque) of the girl. I think there is something more to cuteness. I am surprised how quickly Glenum dismisses cuteness—she makes it sound like something to shun, to be ashamed of—because to me, “cuteness” contains as much potential for feminist activism as the girl.

On one level, cuteness is a “harmless aesthetic category.” As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, to be “cute” is to be:

“Attractive in a pretty or endearing way: a cute kitten.”

To me, this means that that cute means nothing at all, that it is entirely subjective. Like “girl, “cute” is that which is both extremely stereotyped—think baby animals, baby humans, dolls, pink things, little things—and completely undefined. Girls are cute. Boys are cute. Cupcakes are cute. Grandmothers are cute. Restaurants are cute.



Wikipedia defines cuteness as that which is associated with youth. I have heard this definition before: that people are naturally drawn toward the infantile—that we think puppies are cute because they remind us of babies. This definition may draw closer to Glenum’s definition of the deformity –or, at the very least, the helplessness and innocence—associated with cuteness.


My question: What is “cute”? Do you agree with Glenum and Pafunda that to be cute or to “love” cuteness is to reveal “a state of acute deformity” of the self? Are Glenum and Pafunda shunning the cute? Is the girlish love of cute things only a revelation of insecurity or, even, the grotesque. Is cuteness limited to the girl? Can cuteness be inverted and used to liberate women, to fight patriarchy? Or by trying to be cute or drawing towards cuteness, do we contribute to that which confirms our supposed or constructed subordination?

Performing Woman

Going along with the themes of performance and using the body as a source of liberation for women, I wanted to take a look at the role of performance art in feminism.

Feminist performance art came about in the 1970s because "it was personal, immediate, and highly effective in communicating an alternative vision of women and their power in the world."

Cheri Gualke, an L.A. performance artist said: "Performance is not a difficult concept to us [women]. We're on stage every moment of our lives. Acting like women. Performance is a declaration of self--of who one is...and in performance we found an art form that was young without the tradition of painting or sculpture. Without the traditions governed by men. The shoe fit, and so, like Cinderella, we ran with it."

Here are a few examples of what she means.

This piece done by Eleanor Antin is called "Carving: A Traditional Sculpture" (1972). Antin put herself on a strict diet and literally carved herself into a sculpture in order to critique "the social pressure women feel to make their bodies conform to an aesthetic or cultural ideal."

In "The Mythic Being," Adrian Piper put on a drag performance in the streets and subways of New York City. She meant to "incite public reaction to issues of race, gender and class."

How does performance art differ from poetry in conveying feminist theory? How do the two work together? If everything is a performance (according to Butler and the Gurlesque poets), what makes this art? Overall, is performance art successful--does using the female body in this way liberate women or exploit her and detract from the feminist agenda?

(Citations drawn from: http://www.walkerart.org/archive/C/B473811508113F0F6169.htm)

what is a self

As we have slid, quite reasonably, from questions of "women" and sexism to questions of subjectivity and struggles against all forms of oppression (especially those related to class), I post this. Not about the second matter, but about the first.

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/this-extended-mind-again-we-dont-know-what-a-human-being-is/#more-5594

By the way, for those philosophically minded, the larval subjects blog is the next best thing to Lisa Robertson as far as joyous exploration of crucial matters goes (to me).

Keep your blogging up and unless there is a weather disaster, be ready to discuss and ask questions about the Gurlesque tomorrow.

J

ORLAN

in response to the below post, i thought i'd mention Sant-Orlan. certainly one of the most incredible performance artists ever. basically her art is getting plastic surgery so she looks like the 'ideal woman'. some people say that she is anti-feminist, some people say she's the perfect feminist for exposing the construction of beauty.

this brings the same kind of questions i posted about earlier: which is which?

http://www.orlan.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/whoisorlan.htm

I choose to share some of Cindy Sherman's photography, one of the artists listed as an influence to the visual artists included in the Gurlesque anthology. The website I've included gives a description of her life and work and provides dozens of her images. I enjoy the fact that she uses herself as a model throughout her work, and find this provokes questions concerning identity. Some of the images have a definite grotesque quality and it's easy to see how she's an influence on the artists in the anthology.

Toward the bottom of the webpage a commentator writes:

"Here is an artist who obsessively photographs herself yet does not celebrate herself. In fact, she goes out of her way to obliterate signs of herself and creates in her performances and her images women who reveal no sense of self, women who seem objectified and stereotypical.

It is the lack of narrative and the lack of the unique and particular that deadens empathy and objectifies the women. Sherman in each image uses herself as an object, like a chair or a room that is constantly reworked by aspiring decorators. In each image of her performances, she creates a still life - in which the major element is a distressed woman instead of the usual bowl of fruit or white porcelain water jog.

So much of Sherman's attitude is antiphotography. To begin with, there is the fact that she does not consider herself a photographer or her work photography. Secondly, she does not always take the photograph herself. Then there is the heroic scale of the larger pieces, 6 1/2 by 4 feet - more reminiscent of wall art than of art photography. Also, by purposely making her pictures visually uninteresting, she is telling us that the fact of her photographic documentation is more important than what is in the image. By calling each of her images "Untitled" and by divesting each woman of any characteristic details, Sherman keeps the information to a minimum, and dismisses photography as the art of the specific and unique. The same lack of detail restrains the viewer's memory and limits the nostalgia that the viewer typically brings to photography.

On the other hand, by creating performance pieces that only exist for the camera and only last as long as the exposure, she has appropriated one of the photography's oldest functions - documentation. Looking at the images of Cindy Sherman, one has to wonder if its author's phenomenal success has to do with the misogynistic objectification of women that this documentation embodies."

Her style, as the commentator suggests, does seem to emphasize the act of documentation over the specific content of the images. To me, all of the images have a strange placid quality, even when the scene may suggest a moment of distress. After looking through several of Sherman's portraits, I found myself paying less and less attention to the scenes she's portraying, trying, I suppose, to find Sherman herself--or at least to wonder at the who more than the what. In that regard, her work seems to use the traditional way images objectify women to prompt the viewer to consider the humanity that might be embedded in the objectified.

How about everyone else? Any thoughts, feelings, or impressions on Sherman's work? How it may relate to some of the visual artists in the anthology, or the poetry?

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/photography/Cindy-Sherman.html

horizontal/vertical.

first, some articles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-protest-reaches-a-crossroads.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/david-graeber-the-antileader-of-occupy-wall-street-10262011.html

the first link is for an nytimes article about the current state of occupy and its history. the second link is for a sort of bio of david graeber, who the times article refers to. he's an anarchist and is credited with initiating the horizontal structure of the protesters. don't read all of the article on him unless you really want to. skim it for stuff about occupy, etc. all you really need to get from these is the way horizonticality and verticality are contrasted.

i think we're at a point in theory similar to the state of the protests. we've undergone a sort of massive deconstruction (of the vertical) to the point where the theories are entirely horizontal. that is, feminist theory has gone from anti-gender to anti-hierarchy in general.

it's a postmodern paradigm. we are everywhere, we are nowhere, we are the 99%. an unorganized mob without specific goals, all of that. my question is: is the occupy movement (charged with being ineffective due to it's horizontality) really ineffective? is it actually the sort of rhizomatic, horizontal movement in a perfect state: spreading without a heart or a head, without an axiom, i.e. a weak spot. is it actually subsuming the structures that it opposes?

shameless self-promotion

Okay well, since Stephen used the blog to call for Walkabout submissions, I'm going to do it for Honors Journal.

I hate to yell here, but YOU SHOULD ALL SUBMIT TO HONORS JOURNAL.

We are a student-run interdisciplinary journal that publishes outstanding, original work done by undergrads at CU. ALL undergrads are eligible to submit work and we accept work from all disciplines. No really, if you are an undergrad, literally anything you do is eligible. In the past we have published poetry, fiction, research (natural & social sciences), creative nonfiction, architecture/engineering projects, essays (humanities, political science, economics), music, film, math proofs, etc. We even publish foreign-language pieces.

The deadline is next Friday, 11/11/11. (We may extend our deadline, but if we reach our goal for submissions we won't.)