Opinion: This Is What a (tumblr-wave) Feminist Looks Like

I am so over the third wave! Let's adopt tumblr-wave feminism, because that's totally effective.

Major concerns:

Silencing the homophobic assholes who say things like "stop stalking and sending death threats to the wife of the actor who plays a character in Supernatural because you're convinced that he's actually gay with the actor of another character in the show who you're convinced has a hidden gay relationship with the first character."

Reasoned Debate:

Animated .gifs and passive-aggressive hash tags should be more than enough, but telling people to "die in a fire" or to "kill yourself" is always appropriate for those really difficult cases of "people might disagree with you."

Terminology & Rhetoric:

Pick something you have/are/like, and then add "-shaming." Be sure to write in a stilted fashion that suggests equal parts breathless exasperation and smug disdain. Finally, make sure you put a trigger warning in your post for every possible mildly upsetting thing. After all, who cares about watering down the significance of trigger warnings for people with PTSD?

On Books:

Accuse people of class privilege if they suggest you read some feminist literature, then go back to playing your $60 Xbox 360 games.

On Activism:

Remind those feminist activist naysayers that you have more followers than they do. All they do is pointless stuff like "volunteer at a rape crisis centers" and "organize teach-ins, rallies, and protests." You've got a sarcastic post that got re-blogged 3000 times.

Opinion: iOS 7 isn't a threat to masculinity, masculinity is a threat to masculinity.

I like Apple products, and like the good tech nerd that I am, I was quite excited to see what Apple would announce for iOS 7 at WWDC 2013. What we got was a rather significant visual change. From a graphic design perspective, I have some major qualms about certain elements of the new look. I think that readability suffers in certain things and that the typography is a mess in places. Overall, I think that it is disjointed and in need of unification. The functionality seems to be on point, however, and I expect Apple will refine the look and feel over time. It may not ever be something that fully agrees with my personal design sense, but I do think that it will eventually be more coherent.

Reading about reactions to the announcement through tech blogs and forums, I've seen something come up rather consistently - a fear that iOS 7 is "too feminine." Too girly. Not a man's operating system. Blogger Jim Lynch went so far as to call it "An Estrogen-Addled Mess Designed for 13 Year Old Girls." I wonder whether or not his article is simply link-bait, so rather than link it here I've simply reproduced it in full after the jump. Whatever his intentions though, this seems to be a common sentiment.

This says several things to me.

First, is that men clearly think that women have no taste if they think that iOS 7's visual appearance is meant to appeal to the female brain. (It's probably located in the uterus or something, I don't know.)

More seriously, though, there is the assumption of masculine universality and feminine subjectivity. This attitude is embedded in a great deal of Western society. Male writers purportedly write universal literature and female writers write women's literature. Movies centered around men are geared towards both men and women, while movies centered around women are almost exclusively geared towards women. Men's opinions, thoughts, political ideologies, and creative output are deemed are deemed unbiased while those of women are considered inexorably tainted by subjectivity. And so, iOS 1-6 are masculine by their absence of femininity and yet, the masculinity of these operating systems should not be a deterrent to their use by the women who comprise a considerable proportion of its userbase.

If, then, iOS 7 is considered feminine, it is marked by subjectivity. The presence of femininity undermines not only its masculinity but also its universality. A "feminine" operating system should not be used by men, while a "masculine" operating system should be acceptable to women.

That leads me to my point. It is no secret that I consider masculinity to be a farce, albeit one with dangerous and often deadly implications. The celebration of strength and power within the contemporary imagination of masculinity is belied by a perpetual nervous fear of its dissolution. The slightest traces of cultural femininity are treated as major threats. The notion that one's sense of being could be compromised by bright colors and Helvetica Neue Ultra Light says less about the femininity of iOS 7 and more about the utter fragility of masculinity. But how else could a  masculinity that precludes any trace of femininity operate? Masculinity is always vulnerable by virtue of its conceptualization.

Men who feel emasculated by iOS 7 are emasculated because of their understanding of what masculinity is. Not by their phone.

Opinion: On the Second Wave

A common misconception about the second wave of feminism in the USA is the notion that intersectionality – or, before Kimberle Crenshaw, the concept that there are multiple axes of oppression – simply did not exist. This misconception is oft-repeated even within feminist pegagogical spaces. Second wave feminism, it is said, was exclusively the province of the white and middle class and its participants allegedly did not see any power structure outside of sex. Yet this notion is problematic not only for its inaccuracy, but also for its stunning erasure of the countless women of color and poor women that were engaged not only in feminist movement but also in the creation of feminist thought and theory. This is not a denial of significant issues of racism and classism within the movement, but rather a call to steer away from the eradication of marginalized voices for the sake of facile distinction between second and third wave feminisms. Although the terminology of intersectionality did not come until later, women were still cognizant of the multiplicity of oppressive forces on their lives. They have expressed this awareness in a variety of ways.

The Combahee River Collective’s 1977 “A Black Feminist Statement,” now a staple of introductory-level Women’s Studies classes, is an excellent example of early contribution to corpus of feminist theory that explicitly outlines an approach to women’s movement that simultaneously seeks to address racism, “heterosexism and economic oppression capitalism.” They simultaneously address the threatening nature of feminist movement to Black Nationalist movements and the appalling racism (or racist ignorance) of white feminists.

In La Chicana, Elizabeth Martinez writes of the Chicana experience with “triple oppression… the forces of racism, imperialism and sexism.” There is some irony to be drawn from the fact that Martinez eschews open identification with the “women’s liberation movement” because it is concepts of multiple oppressions that have carried forth and dominated modern feminist discourse. In fact, there are increasingly significant segments of the modern feminist population that are hesitant to explicitly describe gender as a hierarchical organizational category of domination.

Donna Kate Rushin’s The Bridge Poem describes the frustration and heartache of serving as a forced intermediary between the component portions of her communities and personhood. Although she does not overtly discuss multiple axes of oppression, her lines describing unending explanation provide a self-evident awareness of the variability of consciousness along those multiple axes:

“I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister / My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists / The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks / To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the / Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friend’s parents… / Then / I’ve got to explain myself / To everybody”

Those lines, and her poem as a whole serve as a powerful reminder of the need for approaches to feminism that can fully integrate people’s entire personhoods. It also contains a warning about the simultaneous danger of tokenization as she examines her frustration and fatigue at being used as little more than a political figurehead.

Although second wave feminism should by no means be immune to criticism, it is problematic to act as if intersectional awareness did not exist, albeit if not in name. The women of second-wave feminism were more diverse and aware of racism and classism than they are typically given credit for. It is important that the desire to promote intersectional theory and praxis not become an inadvertent tool of erasure against the very voices that its adherents wish to honor in the first place.

Opinion: Pop Culture Analysis

Once a person has been trained to apply a feminist critical lens, it is relatively easy to find examples of the ways that pop culture and the media in the United States maintain the status quo. One needs look no further than in the poses adopted by men and women within advertisements and compare them against the associations with culturally normative views about masculinity and femininity. Even in the age of boisterously “post-feminist” neoliberalism, women and femininity are marked by weakness and vulnerability, while men and masculinity are marked by strength and domination. People of color are curiously absent from the vast majority of popular culture – and then, when they are presented, it is often in a diminutive, tokenizing, or downright stereotypical manner that reflects the centering of whiteness within a systematically racist society. Yet, this post seeks to move beyond simply analyzing pop culture and instead speculate about why pop culture analysis bears such popularity within feminist dialogues and discourses. Although there are no overt answers because the voices engaged in critical analysis of media are diverse and come from a broad spectrum of intentions and positionalities, this post will offer some of the problematic aspects to pop culture and media analysis that exists without anti-oppression activism and follow-through.

Feminist discourse has thoroughly demonstrated the complicity of pop culture and media in simultaneously producing and reproducing hegemonic norms about gender, race, class, et al. An intersectional, problematizing lens can easily be applied to popular media. Rebecca Brasfield’s Rereading Sex and the City: Exposing the Hegemonic Feminist Narrative demonstrates the means by which certain master narratives can be complicated beyond single axis statements about empowerment and disenfranchisement. In Media Magic: Making Class Invisible, Gregory Mantsios dissects the ways that media is responsible for the centering of wealth and the wealthy as well as the erasure and symbolic annihilation of poverty and the poor. Isabel Molina Guzmán and Angharad N. Valdivia examine the Latinadad and the specificites of Latina representation and exotic sexualization within US media in Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in US Popular Culture. These are but a few examples of the broader field of feminist works that analyze pop culture. Entire magazines (like Bitch Magazine), a vast ocean of blogs (about just about every facet of popular media, from books to movies to television to video games) and countless books (like Feminism and Pop Culture) have been dedicated towards this end. It occupies a substantial amount of time and energy within feminist academic spaces, and is given significant attention beginning with introductory classes and continuing well through post-graduate work.

Why?

It feels necessary and prudent to examine why it is that media and pop culture are so obsessively analyzed. While there is undeniable value to demonstrating its underpinnings and preventing an entirely uncontested presence of pop culture discourses, there is a great deal more to feminist movement(s) and critical analyses of culture. Perhaps is it because popular media either presents easy (consider a series like Two and a Half Men) or provocative (see also, the reaction to any criticism of Disney movies) targets that simultaneously attract and maintain the public’s attention more easily than, for example, discussions about how BRCA-1 “genetics” tests successfully direct public anxieties about breast cancer against individual bodies rather than economic and industrial interests. Perhaps it is because they possess a lower barrier to entry than do certain other feminist discourses – knowledge of the problematic elements behind BRCA-1 screenings requires a certain degree of feminist scientific study as well as a willingness to indict capitalist interests, for example. Yet, it is simply untrue that all feminist work is impossible for most people to engage with, and countless works have been published with that particular barrier specifically in mind. Perhaps for some, it is attractive because it can be a form of feminist engagement that doesn’t involve any particular sacrifice or activist effort, and while this can bring people to the cause on a superficial level, it bears a particular danger of trapping discourse at that point of analysis. There is limited utility to stating, for example, that the (amount of/lack of) clothing displayed in magazine advertisements and covers featuring women is sexist. To truly challenge this, one must first look at how white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, channeled through commercial interests and market forces, has systematically constructed a femininity that is vulnerable to this form of (mis)representation, and then actively work against the formation and reformation of gender.

While there is certainly no need to completely demolish the field (because as stated, there is value to it), it is troubling that it remains over-represented within the broader spectrum of feminist discourses. Its ubiquity may, on some level, simply be explained by the ubiquity of popular media within our lives. It also cannot be overlooked as a basic form of recruitment to feminism – by highlighting and naming elements of media that people might find problematic but not be able to articulate, people have another approach vector. Yet, is vital that it remains merely a stepping point rather than an obsession. Unveiling the sexism, racism, and homophobia in Sex and the City might be interesting to a broad(er) audience, but without an overt pathway with which to engage in anti-oppression activism, it is of little use to feminist movement(s).