Girlpower

Matt’s post on subversive readings made me want to bring up the attempted reclamation of the word ‘wingman’ that is currently occuring on our campus. The word, typically signifying a man who helps a male friend get some ass from a female, has been reclaimed by the Sexual Health Educators as part of a project to recognize men who are supportive of women. These men, chosen as often as there are new editions of The Student (i have no idea how often this happens) are rewarded with prizes and publicity:

“Is there a man in your life who has recently committed an act of chivalry? Do you know a man who makes women feel safe, respected and beautiful? Write and tell us about him!

Every other week we’ll recognize another winner who will be named an Amherst College Wingman. He’ll get a limited edition Wingman T-shirt and an article printed about him in The Amherst Student.

E-mail she@amherst.edu with your name, your Wingman nominee and a description of the outstanding act attributed to him. “

To me, this seems blatantly patronizing to men (pardon the irony) because it assumes that they are all buffoons who deserve praise if they treat other people nicely, and the idea of chivalry seems quite outdated and patronizing, itself. Where’s the wingwoman award?

In The Audience Studies Reader, Jacqueline Bobo’s article on The Color Purple introduces (for me) useful but almost common-sense concepts for thinking about the way a text is recieved. Specifically she uses the different reactions of audiences to the movie to understand how this mainstream film, produced by the traditional (white male) Hollywood establishment “drawing upon their own background, experience, and social and cultural milieu,” can signify such different things to the many who consume it.

I was still mulling over Bobo and Walkerdine when we started discussing Hudson, Banks, and Knowles today. We were quick (and right, probably) to critique the way that these women were being represented and used. Whether or not we thought that the photographers, publishers, etc. consiously or unconsciously realized what they were “doing” in the images of these women, we came came down pretty hard on them anyway. I don’t think that they shouldn’t be held responsible if they create images that are somehow demeaning, or playing to a stereotype, or whatever. And– yet– can they? As Bobo brings up, meaning doesn’t inhere in an object. It’s mapped onto it by the consumer’s particular history. So what are we doing with our excited, perhaps just criticism of the ways that women are being represented? If an object doesn’t mean anything in itself, but only signifies to us as consumers, why go endlessly around criticising what it does or doesn’t do for a certain group (for the most part, our own (selfish?) tastes and sociopoliticoculturalwhatever expectations): we’re never going to reach the end of an object; such an end doesn’t exist unless we know that author’s specific agenda or prejudices– which can be subverted anyway.

I can’t present this very clearly, and I’m sorry. The question I asked after class was, what are we doing by criticizing? Are we being simply deconstructive, or are we constructing anything? Well, we’re making a conscious, intellectual externalization of the “interdiscursive space” in whcih we encounter cultural products and representations. We’re building a vocabulary to critique and consider with each other the meanings of the things we come into contact with every day, the commodities by which we are taught to define ourselves. Popular culture forms us, as Walkerdine insists in “Subject to Change without Notice.” It provides us with narratives, ways of dealing with oppression, ways of thinking, beliving, and hoping, ways of coming into contact with the world (or not) and one another (or not).  I think, with Paolo Friere, that there is something necessarily empowering in this naming and understanding of popular culture, society, and culture on the whole. Keep this in mind for a sec.

Let’s consider the field of cultural studies itself. It claims to have “democratized” concepts of culture in that it declared popular culture worthy of consideration. But how is this democracy? Has it empowered cultural consumers, or simply opened up new paths of careerism and self-serving crapademia within the Academy? (Sorry for being harsh, but I promise I have a point.) Why is the habit of analysis still reserved for the profit of few?

My point is this: Why are we letting criticism of popular culture stay inside the Academy? And I mean criticism in the sense of empowering, explanatory vocabulary and concepts, not conservative reaction to whatever it is regular people are doing. I propose a curriculum of culture and criticism for children. I realize that this in naive (who the hell am I, I don’t know what’s going on in educational research at the moment, how would you do this, can children learn anything a la Bruner or are they locked in Piaget’s stages of development), but it’s something that I care very much about: for the sake of the children, as Walkerdine poignantly explores. Why do we not empower children, indeed working class adults, with the same volcabulary and possibility of analysis? Why not give them the tools to challenge and examine the forces shaping their own lives? Especially considering the impersonal, ruthless, hopeless, often loveless landscape of modernity that they must face and survive in.

 In short: put cultural studies to work.

 Please tell me if this makes any sense. Jeers welcome.