"A Woman's Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism" Leslie W. Rabine - 1994

Rabine's article is the closest to the writings of the 2nd wave feminists we read last week. She traces a shift in psychology with the actual physicality of the magazines and the shifts in their articles and how this is reflected in culture. Rabine argues that the blurring of boundaries between realistic and fantastic are contained in one flip through Vogue. Now we have learned a fluidity of subjectivity so that we can move through both bodies. Unlike last week's readings where the magazine image is something we imitate that is helping us to participate in our oppression. Rabine is close to Bordo, always returning us to material conditions.

Rabine looks at the contradictions of fashion and women's identity presented in Vogue and other fashion magazines, primarily in how the editorials are juxtaposed to the advertisements. She traces these representations historically. "Fashion does not merely express this self [women's self expression], but, as a powerful symbolic system, is a major force in producing it. Women of fashion become "speaking" subjects of a symbolic system which inseparably entangles signs of oppression and liberation within the images of the fashion feminine body." (p.60) So women abandon heavy, encumbering garments, symbolically freeing themselves from men, but the new clothes are more revealing, making them more likely to be sex objects to men. in one issue of Vogue, 2 separate articles , one talking about a secure, self-reflexive modern woman is placed next to one about domestic violence. "The 'secure,' 'free' woman and the victim of domestic violence are the same 'modern woman.'" (p.62) Then she relates the woman rape victim whose rapist was acquitted because she dressed to sexy, when an article in Vogue is telling her that it is okay to dress sexy and be empowered by your clothes. The jurors "projected upon the rapist the authority to decide the single correct reading of the woman's clothing and to determine the true addressee as himself." (p.62) This happened in 1989. SHIT.

The reader of the magazine is presumed to have a desire for identity, that can be found within the pages of the magazine through "heightened self-reflexivity, a more blatant sexy look, and the voice of progressive social movements." "The contradictory symbolic system of fashion works according to a logical figure that modifies two common views of postmodern cultural logic as either the recuperation and containment of resistance within hegemonic culture or as the indeterminate oscillation between two terms. In the logic of fashion, it is not resistance that is contained, but the conflict itself between freedom and dominance." (p.63) There is a shift in magazines from the 60s to the 80s from telling readers what to wear to offering them a choice of looks. Again there is a relation to fantasy and self production and this shift "represents a shift from assuming a reader who uncritically imitates an established social role to assuming a reader who produces a self through a proliferation of theatrical roles created through a judicious use of costume and masquerade." (p.64)

There is a double language in the magazines, one "in which a woman is free to make her body into an image of feminine sexual power but not to walk her body down the street." (p.67)

--> All of the readings are trying to get at contradictions. Give us different lenses to understand points of contradiction. No one gives an answer. Feminism and cultural studies become institutionalized in this moment. Unpacking contradictions and navigate the production/consumption divide, not fixate it as a divide, but as a place of practice, not a monolith. New exploration of methodology with an engagement of cultural studies is often tied to political activism. Analyzing how power operates as complex, not a monolithic site of oppression (patriarchy is not the one enemy) “personal is political” dovetails with cultural studies creating a feedback loop between feminism and cultural studies.

"Women Recovering Our Clothes" Iris Marion Young - 1990

Young is not quite as optimistic as Berry, but up there. Sharing of clothes and sharing of identity, clothes are often very personal sites of identity expression. She also examines Touch as an under-examined site of feminism. Psychoanalysis fetish with vision and ignores the tactile (and other senses).

Women’s experience of clothing is “saturated with the experience of images of women in clothing” and images have only recently become widely accessible through mass print to middle/lower class.

The dominant pictorial aesthetic is in part represented in film. Associating style and fashions with a cinematic narrative “fuses the unconscious effects of film experience with the very lines and colors of clothing designs.” (p.200)

Young cites Lacan and Mulvey saying “in film both voyeuristic and fetishistic looking deny the threatening difference of the female, either judging her lacking and guilty or turning her body or parts of her body into an icon in which the subject finds himself, his phallus.” (p.201) Yet she is concerned with how women, in the face of this objectification, can still find pleasure in films (and fashion). “When I leaf through magazines and catalogs I take my pleasure from imagining myself perfected and beautiful and sexual for the absent or mirrored male gaze.” (p.202)

“Patriarchal fashion folds create a meticulous paradigm of the woman well dressed for the male gaze, then endows with guilt the pleasure we might derive for ourselves in these clothes. Misogynist mythology gloats in its portrayal of women as frivolous body decorators.” (p.203) Her methodology is to talk from personal experience and hope it resonates with some women (most likely those most similar to her, white, middle class, heterosexual women in late capitalist society) about clothes in relation to Touch, Bonding and Fantasy.

Touch - If masculine desire expresses itself visually (and at a distance) then feminine desire moves more through the intimate medium of touch. Sensual, tactile imaginations and connection to clothes not just visually but through all sensations.

Bonding - Women develop a rapport and bonding over clothes. Exchanging clothes is like exchanging parts of our identities.

Fantasy - “Implicitly feminist critics of media images of women have tended to assimilate all images of women as the object of the male gaze. Clothing ads are split, however, between positioning women as object and women as subject. Clothing images are not always the authoritative mirror that tells who’s the fairest of them all, but the entrance to a wonderland of characters and situations.” (p.207) Women tend to create narratives out of what is implied in the ad and then derive pleasure “in the fantasy of clothes” by “partly imagining ourselves in those possible stories.” (p.208)

"Screen Style: Introduction" Sarah Berry - 2000

Berry is the furthest away from 2nd Wave Feminists of last week. She is involved much more in the celebratory, agency and pleasure aspect of feminist theory. This is easier if you zoom into a micro view like she does with her case study of 1930s fashion. Berry and Young are both relatively optimistic. Berry is complicating the side of production. Men in Hollywood are largely immigrants and their own upward mobility and relation to power is very complex. 1930s are a moment when women are entering the service industries more. Subjective feeling of emancipation often doesn’t take you very far. Rabine and Berry are at odds. Berry’s tone is sometimes refreshing, sometimes optimistic, empiricist and historical, but possibly not as much as it should be. (Refer to Patty's post, I think she has problems with Berry's argument.)

"[Hollywood-Style Center of the World (1939)] represents mass-market fashion as a democratic leveling of social distinctions" where the film acts a shop window of the latest fashions to small town, rural America. (p.xii) Industrial revolution and catalogs, department chain stores allowed for wealthy women's Paris fashion trends to be adopted by lower class much faster. Looking at popular fashion in the 1930s "as an aspect of women's negotiation of modernity and post-traditional identity (the shift from hereditary caste systems to capitalist social divisions)." (p.xiii) Also marks a time when shift (according to Marxists) from people being identified by what the consume vs. what they produce, but women have always been identified with symbolic forms of beauty more so than their domestic labor, which was never given as much significance as men's labor so the impact of this shift on women's identities is more complex.

Women are seen as primary consumers and targets of Hollywood films. Social status was presented in these films as a matter of appearance, not breeding, and could therefore be imitated. Fashion was the way to be upwardly mobile as the "self-made men" of Hollywood's studios were. "Popular fashion discourses of this decade emphasized the demystification of upper-class glamor in ways that underscored the economic basis, rather than the inherent social superiority, of upper class culture." (p.xix) Reflecting the American ideal of meritocracy vs. aristocracy. Chapter 2 talks about fashion related to Stars, performance and gender. Chapter 3 is about make-up and Chapter 4 is about women adopting men's fashion for upward mobility.

"Femininity" Susan Brownmiller - 1984

Brownmiller has her own painstaking way of dismissing and embracing some aspects of femininity and not others. She carefully works out her anxieties in the text of her book and has a simplistic tone.

Prologue
"Femininity, in essence, is a romantic sentiment, a nostalgic tradition of imposed limitations...To be insufficiently feminine is viewed as a failure in core sexual identity." (p. 2-3) It also is bred of competition with others and with self. Brownmiller is attempting to link femininity to female biology, sometimes she finds connections and sometimes she doesn't. Often times the origins of femininity lie in the "historic subjugation of women through sexual violence, religion and law, where certain myths about women where put forth as biological fact. (p.5) goal of the book is to raise awareness of femininity so "one day the feminine ideal will no longer be used to perpetuate inequality between the sexes..." (p.6)

Body
Current erotic standards change over time and across cultures, but their is usually one model to which all must strive for. Women should be shorter than men, but in the majority of species, females happen to be the larger species. Chinese foot binding and the "exquisite feminine beauty contained within the deforming violence..." (p.17) "The truth is, men have barely tampered with their bodies at all, historically, to make themselves more appealing to women." (p.19) The corset fits the beauty is pain mantra and signifies the "submissive, self-conscious values of the feminine sphere." (p.21) She talks endlessly about breasts and how their containment throughout history has been viewed. She ends talking about dieting and how it is a competition between women that takes the form of denial of food.

Clothes
She is very bitter about skirts and talks about throughout history how women have been bound and restricted by skirts. She talks very personally about her refusal to wear skirts now that she can get away with wearing pants. She talks about historical women like Joan of Ark and Marlene Dietrich that have dressed in men's clothes and the historical implications of such. "Erotic attire has often served as a smoke screen to deflect the female consciousness from a lasting understanding of the nature of oppression." (p.69) Dolls train women to be fashion consumers.

Skin
Skin condition is related to cleanliness, hygiene and age. Youthful, smooth and pale is the usual type societies aspire to. 'Sunburnt' and 'red-neck' are a symbol of the working class, performing manual labor under the sun. In the 60s the California tan came in, but went out when skin studies said nothing ages Caucasian skin more than sun. She talks about biological differences between the sexes don't affect skin color or distribution of hair. Gendered biology does affect amount and degree of hair between men and women though and women should want to remove or contain their hair as much as possible. Again her personal stories make her biased against shaving, using perfume and even make-up. " This is the central contradiction of make-up, and the one I find most appalling. Cosmetics have been seen historically as proof of feminine vanity, yet they are proof, if anything, of feminine insecurity..." (p.123) The artifice of cosmetics has been historically seen as luxury and to "tell people not to do something that makes them feel better is always suspect, and to suggest that women throw away their mascara and file down their nails in the name of liberation cast the femininst movement in a repressive light." (p.124)

"Femininity and Domination, chapters 3+5" Sandra Lee Bartky - 1990

Bordo and Bartky (feminist philosophers) are more nuanced as not everything is painful, there can be pleasure and agency. They situate their critiques within a history of ideas, Foucault etc.

Bartky has very Utopian idea of what women should be but can’t really locate it. She comes up with a revolutionary aesthetic of the body, a radical body - 6 years later she flushes out nuances of conflicting aspects of feminism, but the radical body becomes more like the natural 70s body, which many of us don’t feel more powerful in. (For example, Tara feels more comfortable in her constructed, performative body that her natural one.) Bartky and Doane both deal with female narcissism.

Chapter 3: Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation
"One of the tasks that socialist feminists have yet to accomplish is the alteration and elaboration of Marx's theory of alienation." (p.33) "For Marx, labor is the most distinctively human activity; following Hegel, he regards the product of labor as an exteriorization of the worker's being, an objectification of human powers and abilities. But under capitalism, workers are alienated form the products of their labor as well as from their own productive activity." (p.34) Summing up Marx as arguing that separating workers from the product of their labor causes fragmentation and prohibition of the exercise of typically human functions which causes workers to be like condemned prisoners. (Men are still responding to this in escapist movies like Wanted, and superhero movies in general as looking for the means to escape the new incarnation of Marx's capitalist society in which everyone works in tiny, divided cubicals at a computer all day creating virtual "products.")

Bartky extends Marx's definition of alienation to women. Women are alienated in cultural production (men have control) and sexual objectification of women (as passive subjects meant to be looked at) fragments women. The difference between Marx's alienation of labor and femininity as alienation is that "many women seem to embrace with enthusiasm what seem to be the most alienated aspects of feminine existence." (p.36) if objectifier and objectified become the same woman we get feminine narcissism. "How is feminine narcissism possible, i.e., how is it possible for sexual objectification, which is profoundly alienating, to produce narcissistic states of consciousness, which are profoundly satisfying? We can understand the interest women have in conforming to the requirements of sexual objectification, given our powerlessness and dependency; less easy to explain is the pleasure we take in doing so." (p.37) She uses narcissism by its original definition in psychoanalysis (infatuation with one's bodily being). She wants to argue that "feminine narcissism is not the rock on which the idea of femininity as alienation must founder. On the contrary, a fuller disclosure of this phenomenon can help reveal the nature of self-estrangement which lies close to the heart of the feminine condition itself." (p.37)

"Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in the feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised." (p.38) The "Other" can take on many forms (mother, self, lover) but becomes "an interiorized representative of what I shall call the "fashion-beauty complex"...a major articulation of capitalist patriarchy." (p.39) This is the same idea that all the articles articulate: keep the standards of beauty so high that women are constantly found lacking and need to make up for their lack by purchasing goods to better themselves. "All the projections of the fashion-beauty complex have this in common: They are images of what I am not...We can now grasp the nature of feminine narcissism with more precision: it is infatuation with an inferiorized body." (p.40) Like the church, that creates anxieties about bodily appetites and then presents itself as the only way "to take away the very guilt and shame it has itself produced" the fashion-beauty complex creates anxiety and lack that only it can fulfill through body care rituals and products. These are "false needs" that are "produced through indoctrination, psychological manipulation, and the denial of autonomy; they are needs whose possession and satisfaction benefit not the subject who has them, but the social order whose interest lies in domination." (p.42) They are repressive satisfactions. Her solution is that women must work together to expand the notion of what is beautiful. The problem seems to present itself as a catch 22, how can we have pride in our body and have self-esteem while denying the dominant idea of beauty that usually lends itself to self-esteem and positive self-image?

Foucault, Femininty, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power
Panopticon - the perfect prison where, under constant surveillance, each inmate becomes his own jailer, internalizes self-surveillance which is the genesis of "the celebrated 'individualism' and heightened self-consciousness which are hallmarks of modern times." (p.65) Femininity is an artifice and Bartky examines 3 things that are recognizably feminine: (1) sculpting the physical body, (2) movement and gestures and (3) display of the body as an ornamented surface. All these three things are based on women being deficient, passive and highly constructed. "Femininity as spectacle is something which virtually every woman is required to participate. Second, the precise nature of the criteria by which women are judged, not only the inescapability of the judgment itself, reflects gross imbalances in the social power of the sexes that do not mark the relationship of artist and their audiences. An aesthetic of femininity, for example, that mandates fragility and a lack of muscular strength produces female bodies that can offer little resistance to physical abuse..." (p.73) "The absence of formal institutional structure and of the authorities invested with power the power to carry out institutional directives creates the impression that the production of femininity is either entirely voluntary or natural." (p.75) This is different from Foucault's ideas about discipline of the body being tied to social institutions like the school, the factory or the prison. Now the media and visual representations are taking over these roles to create internalized self-critique; isolated and self-policing subjects. Images in the media create a normative image of femininity. She doesn't really present a solution to the problem. She suggests a better understanding of cultural messages.

"The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema" Mary Ann Doane - 1989

Feminist theory situates women as the "object of exchange rather than its subject" making her the commodity. But women also buy and has been situated by capitalist economy as "the prototype modern consumer." (p.23) Have to rethink the absoluteness of dichotomy of object of commodity and consumer to include ways that " a woman is encouraged to actively participate in her own oppression. (p.24) She compares the "passive spectator" in cinema to the "passive consumer" seduced by the beauty of ads to mindlessly consume.

The 3 "instances of commodity form in its relation to the cinema and the question of the female spectator-consumer:
1.Narcissism - "The female spectator is invited to witness her own commodification and, furthermore, to buy an image of herself insofar as the female star is proposed as the ideal feminine beauty. (p.25)
2. Product placement - "This process serves to mediate the spectator's access to the ideal image on the screen. It disperses the fascination of the cinema onto a multiplicity of products whose function is to allow the spectator to approximate the image." (p.25)
3. Distribution - "the film itself and its status as commodity in a circuit of exchange." (p.25)

The movie theater was the ideal space to exhibit the ideal image of consumerism: "an homogeneous population pursuing the same goals - 'living well' and accumulating goods." (p.25)

"If the film frame is a kind of display window and spectatorship consequently a form of window-shopping, the intimate association of looking and buying does indeed suggest that the prototype of the spectator-consumer is female." (p.27) - making cinema addressed specifically to the female spectator and a star system dominated by women. Uses Benjamin to argue that film brings the things to be consumed closer to the viewer and also to each other, eliminating distance which is more like narcissism (opposite of voyeurism in which one person watches another from a distance). "Commodification presupposes that acutely self-conscious relation to the body which is attributed to femininity." (p.31) --> Less distance, narcissistic relationship. Fragment body (just as adds fragment TV shows?) so that each part can be improved.

"The cinematic image for the woman is both shop window and mirror, the one simply the means of access to the other. The mirror/window, then, takes on aspect of a trap whereby her subjectivity becomes synonymous with her objectification." (p.32)

Stella Dallas – A touchstone for popular texts as a feminist in the 90s. Stella is self-sacrificing for motherhood. Works nicely with Doane’s text, which is linked to Bartky in understanding narcissism. Doane’s piece is situated in cinema. How we come to see ourselves. Increasingly less and less distance between consumer and consumed. (Is this true or false when the consumed is virtual on the internet? How is virtual space articulated?)

"The Beauty Myth" Naomi Wolf - 1991

The Beauty Myth is the cultural ideology that women strive to be beautiful as a way to be pacified and controlled. A response to women gaining some control and power in the workplace is to create an image of beauty where the "gaunt, youthful supermodel supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood" using food and weight to strip women of their sense of control (p.11)

"The quality called "beauty" objectively and universally exisits. Women must want to embody it and men must want to posses women who embody it." (p.12) The beauty myth is about "men's institutions and institutional power." (p.13) Using beauty to make women competitive and pit them against each other to win a man. After the women's movement "inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work took over from inexhaustible but ephemeral housework." (p.16) "When the restless, isolated, bored, and insecure housewife [ideal consumer] fled the Feminine Mystique for the workplace, advertisers faced the loss of their primary consumer...Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that they will buy more things if they are kept in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring "beauties...The beauty myth, in its modern form, arose to take the place of the Feminine Mystique, to save magazine's and advertisers of the economic fallout of the women's revolution." (p.66)

She then talks about the role of advertisers and editors in women's magazines; magazines that are meant to offer women power yet promote masochism. Women internalize the beauty myth as do the magazines that must sell the products that they have convinced women that they need.

Most articles this week are not interested in difference - like much of first wave feminism. All articles this week assume that femininity ties women to their bodies. The body becomes the site of our productivity and women learn to work on the body.

"Unbearable Weight" Susan Bordo - 1993

"But what remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom...) and as undermining the best efforts of that self)." (p.5)

Bordo is concerned with gender's role in the mind body/dualism notion, saying the body has been gendered female, weighing down the male/spirit etc. Women as the femme fatales are the temptresses, causing men to lose control of their bodies. Women internalized this ideology leading to shame and self-loathing. Bordo considers issues of race (unlike the other readings) citing that "all black men are potential rapists [animal-like] by nature" and black women are stereotyped "as immoral Jezebels who can never truly be raped, because rape implies and invasion of personal space of modesty and reserve that the black woman has not been imagined as having." (p.9)

Representations homogenize and normalize, creating a standard. Yes readers can have multiple interpretations (lesbian vs. straight woman seeing Madonna), but there is an "everyday deployment of mass cultural representations of masculinity, femininity, beauty or success." (p.24) Aging in Hollywood is subject to endless plastic surgery to look 10-15 years younger.

Bordo – embodied post-structuralism. Like Bartky she picks and chooses aspects of post-structuralism, but doesn’t buy it all. Resistance isn’t priority because how to do you fight a decentralized power, diffused over a network? "Within a Foucauldian/feminist framework, it is indeed senseless to view men as the enemy: to do so would be to ignore, not only power differences in the racial, class and sexual situations of men, but the fact that most men, equally with women, find themselves embedded and implicated in institutions and practices that they as individuals did not create and do not control - and they frequently feel tyrannized by." (p.28) How to woman come to terms with agency and power that causes them to fall within the paradigm of a repressive system? It is the system that causes women (and men) to feel that they are lacking and must obsess over their bodies to be empowered.

Catwoman: The Dark End of the Street and Crooked Little Town

Well, this is the kind of inspiration for my comic webseries that I have been looking for. Dark, complicated, shades of gray and moral ambiguity and a woman who absolutely kicks ass with no explanations or qualifications. She is nimble and quick and kicks the shit out guys twice her size without batting an eye. Brubaker is known for noir and crime and that is one thing that makes this gritty comic feel so timeless and yet so real. The noir lighting and crime genre could be straight out of the 40s if it wasn't for slightly more modern cars, gadgets and cell phones. Using Slam Bradley as a P.I. investigating Catwoman/Selina Kyle's life and death was great. We got some interesting backstory about her character and origins without sheer exposition. I felt like I knew her as a person before she even appeared in the comic. Genius.

What really drew me in was a few pages into part one of "Anodyne" the relaunch. Selina is reflecting on what happened to her as Catwoman in the past, how she lost sight of her altruistic goals and just became a petty catburgular, caught up in high society. She alludes at some drugs and losing herself until she "offs herself" to let it all blow over. We still don't know what happened, but this keeps the interest necessary for a serial. Give some information but not all. I knew this book was smart when she said "There's nothing like the universe to make your problems feel small...if only for a moment or two." Referring to the sunset. And the casual appearance of Batman the next few pages really hit home. "Of course when night falls there is always something to help you lose perspective...Him. Of course. Gotham's own guardian angel. In his black and white world...with his brightly colored adversaries. Such a joke...Is this my world, too? With the boyscout...and the obsessive compulsive? The violence sure feels like my world. Without him I wouldn't have become who I am. And I owe him so much...But we've been at odds from the start...Because my world is all just shades of grey, Batman. That's why you'll never understand me. It's about good people being forced into bad situations. That's my territory...In between right and wrong. Which is a place you can never go. And we both know it." And she is. In the first story she is fighting a man who is killing prostitutes. The cops don't really care and so Catwoman becomes the voice of the disenfranchised, mostly women and some kids. She protects the women that can't protect themselves. And she isn't afraid to cross some lines of right and wrong to protect her friends. In the second book the 4 part sequence is titled "Disguises." The whole first part is Holly Robinson's point of view. Holly is Selina's new assistant, trolling the streets looking for dirt that Catwoman can clean up. Holly talks about her past and we really get a good characterization of how she ended up a prostitute, later in a convent after Selina left her for high society and then a drug addict. We feel for her and rejoice when she gets her girlfriend back (yay a lesbian) and then really feel for he when she gets shot and becomes the dirty cops scapegoat. Without this characterization we wouldn't have felt for her or understood why Selina goes to such links to save her. It is all very believable and well done and I understand her violence. It makes sense and it kicks ass.

This is what I am looking for in my webseries, although I can't film Catwoman's high-flying tricks on a budget, (or any stunts for that matter) the part with Holly gave me a good idea. It could be very realistic to have the series be about the sidekick. Digging up dirt, getting into trouble and wanting to be a hero, being strong, yet vulnerable. I'll have to see what I can film. Noir, crime and seediness is all very cool if you can pull it off, but if you don't it looks cheesy. I want a comic book, Sin City feel, but with some kick-ass ladies (and lesbians). I'm really liking Catwoman for its depth and ambiguity and I'm hoping that my series could achieve the same. I'm definitely going to keep reading this series. I feel like I might have to re-watch the Halle Berry Catwoman trash if only to learn from their mistakes.

Geography Club by Brent Hartinger

Well, I'm not quite sure why is Bill is having us read cliche, overly stereotyped teen fiction. Is gay content really so hard to find that we are starved for anything? Especially when it comes to gay teen fiction. Yes it was a quick read because it was written in first person, as if it were the main character's journal, and he addresses the reader on several occasions and even references what he has written about previously, like (see chapter one section one) so it makes it seem like a very genuine account of someone's personal experience, written in very casual language. But I just couldn't get over the fact that everything was a caricature or a stereotype. The whole high school scenario was an over simplified, black and white battle ground of cliques. With well defined names like The Jocks and The Cheerleaders and The Left Wing Radicals and The Nerdy Intellectuals, etc. Your stature of popularity was all that mattered and well defined from your clique, Land of the Cool Respectable and The Outcasts. A school with 800 kids has one outcast that everyone actually throws food at and picks on? That doesn't really happen. And people transcend their cliques and their lives aren't defined by popularity. And popularity certainly isn't as fickle as one day you are the school hero for hitting a home run and the next day you are eating with the one loser and shunned. Sometimes those are aspects of high school but it isn't real high school in its entirety. That is TV, over-simplified stereotyped high school. It is so much more complex than that and making high school that one-dimensional just makes generic characters and story points.

I just don't see how a book that writes everyone as a stereotype and speaks in generalities and cliches can ever hope to do something real. It was a struggle to find a real genuine moment with these characters that would allow me to connect with them. Maybe it is hard for me because I didn't feel like that in high school because I wasn't aware of my sexuality so explicitly, but I do know that actual high school wasn't like this book. I suppose the few moments that held some truth for me were the moments when Russel spoke in his plain language about his feelings. Like when he described what it was like to kiss Kevin compared to Trish and then said he wasn't going to tell us what happened because it was none of our business, but then backtracked and said, actually if he was reading this book and someone said that it would make him mad so he would give us more details after all. That felt like a high schooler writing a book, not an old man pretending to be in high school again.

It seems that reviewers on amazon found the book cute and could identify with some of the situations. Maybe gays do just need something a little more familiar sometimes?

The Man Who Folded Himself

First all, I have to comment that reading this book while traveling from Boston to DC was about the first time I have experienced, or remembered what I was thinking when I came up with "hypertravel" all those years ago. I was so involved in this book that time (and space) literally flew by in an instant. Perhaps I should revisit this story/concept.

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold is without a doubt the book Jim told Eileen and I about years and years ago about the man who, through time travel, was both his mom, dad, and child all at the same time. I have spent countless nights and years contemplating how that paradox is possible. It has always intrigued me from the moment he said it and I never forgot it. Well the book definitely lives up to my expectations. It was genius. It ask all the questions about time travel that I ever have imagined and more. Gerrold tackles whole time/space mythologies and conundrums in a paragraph or even a sentence. Daniels that go crazy, Daniels that are homosexual, free will, identity, everything. How would you define yourself if time and space were not part of the definition? What sort of existence would you have? In essence, what is at the core of our identities? The possibilities are endless and indeed, infinite. That is how Gerrold views time, as infinite. It isn't linear, but a million different strands that cross each other. I'm not quite sure how more than one Daniel can exist in each strand, but that seems to make sense in the universe he has created. It is his rationalization of the mother, father child paradox that is still impossible. He talks about changing the sex of the child at birth, but this could never happen if he wasn't a girl to begin with at one point, which of course could never happen because if he was a girl to begin with then he could not inseminate himself as a boy. Although once there was a boy and girl version of him he could go on folding himself forever, theoretically. The only way I imagined this happening is some sort of futuristic gene therapy sex change operation, which could work, but not at birth the way the book describes it. The book isn't really about the paradox, but what it means, psychologically, to be your own entire world.

I liked the Timestop and Timeskim features. Daniel breezes through thousands of years of history we all wish we could see, observing (but never participating in) countless event of humanity (50-54). He knows the truth and destiny of the human race. History is the ebb and flow of life, the study of humanity itself, the triumph of individuals that never quit. He is a temporal ping pong ball. He also realizes that he doesn't have to be subjected to his own mistakes anymore because he can just go back and change them. Well not for himself, but for a another Dan, and then when "excises" something he changes his world again, as he sees fit. So it truly is only his world and he is the god of it. It makes sense then that he would be his own father, mother and uncle. He can always go back and change things, until he cannot, and that is the tragedy of Diane and old Dan going back to meet her. He is all powerful, but he is alone and only has himself. His sexuality is something he does despite the warnings of other Dans and Dons. He sleeps with himself willingly and is happy about it, believing he has a choice in what he does. But is sexuality a choice? Dan believes he has free will, but then says that he is merely living one strand and that other Dans live all the other possible strands of time and so they ultimately have no choice because they are all each living one strand of infinite possibility. Dan believes that he is the cumulative effect of all the other Dans' changes, but all the Dans perceive themselves to be at the center in the same way. Really the whole story is about identity and choice vs. fate and what defines us with sexuality making up a small component of this discussion. It will be interesting to discus this book in the context of the class.

"Respect for Acting" Uta Hagen (Part 1)

Hagen had constructed a mask behind which she would hide throughout the performance, using "tricks" which were representations used convey emotions. She lost the love of make believe. Harold Clurman was the one who refused the mask and demanded Hagen in the role. She felt this broke down the wall between her and the audience. (p.8)

Representational vs. Presentational - illustrating a characters behavior vs. complete human embodiment of the character. "Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting-intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen" (p.13).

What I don't understand about "Presentation Acting" is yes, it makes sense to embody the character, but people become who they are by living through their lives and developing traits and emotions and unconscious reactions to events that show in their face and their expressions and their mannerisms. How can someone who is attempting to believe they are someone else in order to act as them going to know all these mannerisms? They have, after all, only lived their own life and if they are copying someone else's mannerisms, no matter where their psyche is, that is still representational. Is it possible to develop these mannerisms accurately and in a short time so as to truly act Presentationally? Perhaps my Alex experiment will shed light on this dilemma.

Well fortunately for me, Hagen has described how this works in the remaining portion of Part 1. Chapter 2, titled Identity is about getting to know yourself as a person and a human being in order to use your own experiences to identify with the character you are playing as opposed to illustrating the character. Becoming self-aware does not mean understanding a pigeon-holed preconception of who we think we are, but understanding how we respond to all different sorts of emotions in all different sorts of situations. Like in David Antin's class when he talked about all of us as being actors because we all behave in different roles depending on who we are talking to. Our assignment was to explore what happens when this roles collided and fractured. I chose to do myself playing the role of the daughter back in Colorado meeting my new found self as an independent woman in college. It seemed pertinent at the time when I was struggle to break free and these 2 roles I played collided in a confrontation with my Mom. All part of growing up, but I didn't know so at the time. Hagen describes it the same. We may not consider ourselves as a person who would look down on others, but "if a drunken, bigoted doorman gives me a hard time, I appear snobbish and pull rank" (26). So it is important not only to recognize all facets of of our feelings, even ones like greed, selfishness, envy, panic, but also to connect these emotions to the "behavior which ensues...The continuing job of learning to find out who you really are, of learning to pinpoint your responses--and even more important, the myriad, consequent behaviorisms which result--will help you begin to fill your warehouse with sources upon which to draw for the construction of character" (26). Do not put ourself behind a mask of someone else's behaviors on stage. This is representation! People stare at a cat on stage because it is focused, strong-willed and spontaneous where an actor can be predictably busy. As adults we may not be vengeful people because we have learned to control desire for vengeance, but that doesn't mean we have not felt the need to be vengeful and this can help you play a vengeful character (Ingrid Bergman expl). If we are limited in our time and social standing we can imagine and be curious (as children do) and out ourselves into stories, other times, paintings and other people's shoes. Curiosity and imagination can go a long way in discovering who you are and in creating characters. --> I always do this so perhaps I'm as far behind as I thought thanks to my crazy imaginations scenarios.

Chapter 3, Substitution, is about how to take what you know from your own experiences and transfer them into what the character you are playing is feeling. She wants "to find herself" in the part. "Once we are on the track of self-discovery in terms of an enlargement of our sense of identity, and we now try yo apply this knowledge to an identification with the character in the play, we must make this transference, this finding of the character within ourselves, through a continuing and overlapping series of substitutions from our own experiences and remembrances, through the use of imaginative extension of realities, and put them in the place of the fiction of the play" (34). Example of the girl snatching her "soiled panties" and hiding them behind her back. The director cannot help you with your substitutions because she doesn't know your life experiences, but "(S)he will help you with the character elements she is after, dictate the place, the surroundings, the given circumstances, and define your relationship to other characters in the pay, but how you make things real to yourself, how you make them exist is totally private work" (37). Each object on stage or set needs to be made particular, with a history and a connection to your character so you react appropriately when you see it. Objects also need substitutions from your life, every moment on stage does. Perhaps you will have to combine a dozen different relationships with a dozen different people to create the relationship with your "sister" on stage if you do not have a sister or a single relationship to stand in for it. But you can combine different moments from different relationships for each moment in the play to build that relationship. Process is always in flux, from the beginning of the homework to the end of rehearsals. This is how you build a "sense of reality and faith in the character" but she has not yet connected this to actions, what the character will do (39).

Think about the meaning behind the words. Daniele always talked about this, and this is why the exercise we did with the same dialog, but different meanings was so important. Saying "I hate you" could actually be a cry for attention from someone you love. It is the directors job to dictate the relationship and meaning and the actors job to substitute and bring it to life. But ou must transfer the essence of the substitution to the play so you are using it to live he realities of the scene. You must take "the substituted psychological reality and transfer it to the existing circumstances and events of the play: transferring the essence of the experience (not the original event) to the scene" (40). Use your life to understand how the character is feeling in that moment and then make it real for that character and you. --> I believe we are all actors in everyday life and this awareness of self, substitutions and eventually actions, when we get to that part of the book, is an essential part of everyone's self awareness, not just an actor, but especially important for a director or writer to understand. I think experimenting with this in my everyday life as well as to an extreme through "Alex" can only make me a better creator/director.

In transferring the substitution, Hagen gives the example of swallowing a lie from her husband and then getting him a glass of water. She substituted dragging her insubordinate daughter to the sink and forcing her to drink and this made her realize that her husband, in that moment, was like a child to her. She did not need to substitute anymore, she had used the substitution to find the reality on stage (42).

She warns a director against using generalities or essences like colors, textures or music to describe what they want because those are very personal and likely mean something different to the director than they do to the actor because their life experiences differ. (Same thing when writing, be careful how you describe a character. She gave the example of "suggests a moth" which completely blocked her sense of who the character was, because she imagined too vividly the character as a moth.

Don't share your substitutions!

Chapters 4-10 continue t o discuss different kinds of substitutions and then how to take these substitutions and make them actions that the audience can see, since it is a visual medium we are discussing. I will give some highlights, but the meat of the book was in the aforementioned 2 chapters. Emotional memory is the recall of a psychological or emotional response to an event which produces sobbing, laughter, screaming etc. Sense memory is in dealing with physiological sensations (heat, cold, hunger pains, etc) (46). Both of which can be used for valid substitutions. Emotion in life happens when we momentarily suspend our reasoning and lose control because we are unable to cope with an event logically, but humans don't want to lose control and are constantly fighting to regain control of our emotions (as adults anyway). She says there are trigger objects to emotional pain, little things that you unconsciously associate with the pain of an event that will immediately recall that feeling for you and it's these little objects that will catapult you to extreme emotions on stage. They should never wear out for professionals because you have to make the object synonymous with on on stage, not anticipate when the emotion should come and not transferred it to the experience of the play or you are fearful that it won't come.

Sense memory: "the body has an innate sense of truth" and we must learn some "physiological facts to help us avoid the violation of the physical truth" (52). If you must be in a deep sleep then simulate how the body acts in a deep sleep, lie down, concentrate on your hips, or a specific body part, center your eyes under your eyelids, focus on an abstract object and then jump to thoughts as you wake, what time is it, have I over slept? Your body will be heavy and slow as if you just awoke from a deep sleep. Yawning to get oxygen to your brain, or shivering to increase circulation, know these things will help you to reproduce them. She believes sensations occur most fully at the "moment we are occupied with the attempt to overcome it" (56).

Be alert to all of your 5 senses. We don't actually listen to the words, but the intent behind them. We also listen with our eyes. We see someone's intent through their unconscious actions (if we aren't busy being insecure and looking away). But even when looking way, we are thinking about inner objects, what we will say next, how we feel. Think is much faster than talking ans much can go on throughout the course of a conversation. You can't write out your thoughts ahead of time because real thinking is active. It "precedes, is accompanied by and follows action" (65). Example of putting on her coat to go to the grocery, unless there is a problem with the coat she is compiling her grocery list in her mind or thinking about the friend coming to dinner tonight that she is cooking for. These inner thoughts have influenced her actions. If she is angry at the friend she might be aggressive with her coat. If she loves her, she might caress the coat. These are the actions the audiences sees, influenced by the thoughts in her head. I think it is the directors job then to tell her that she is thinking of and anticipating the friend's arrival in this moment, and also her current relation to the friend and then it is the actors job to think and make real the moment.

Hagen talks about what Daniele always talked about. All movement must be connected to a motivation. A person never moves without intent and so an actor should never move without an intent. Even if s/he is wandering aimlessly, it is because s/he is restless or nervous or anxious and trying to calm the feeling. There is always intent to movement. An actor is just an actor and his movements are affected when s/he moves without purpose. Clothing also influences character just as it influences our actions or confidence in everyday life. One outfit may make me fit right in to a given crowd so I will act comfortable and confident. The same outfit somewhere else might make me feel under dressed or like a child who wants to hide. Just as Daniele said, we must learn what a character wants out of any given situation and under what conditions s/he wants it so that the blocking can be organic because the actor/character is propelled into genuine verbal action that comes from the needs of the character. This is the subtext between the dialog!

Reality is often times unbelievable. Also we must not forget that what is on the stage or screen is an illusion of reality. Real snow will melt, real steam could scald you, and distract the audience. The actor must see past some realities of life and set to create the illusion of the stage reality. This is where my suspension of disbelief paper comes in. How does the illusion of reality presented on screen become reality in the minds of the spectator and at what point is the audience distracted by the "how did they do that" of the special effect or explosion? This is a balance in action films that I want to explore.

This book is incredible, not just for actors, but for living everyday life and self-awareness. The next section is about training yourself as an actor and I will attempt to implore these techniques in my everyday life and write about them throughout the summer.

Birds of Prey: Between Dark and Dawn

I chose Birds of Prey because it was a group of women, led by a woman and, written by a women, Gail Simone. The book I read was issues #69-75. What struck me most about the comic was that it did not feel different from the other comics I read that were written by men. Eventually the women seemed to have more "friendship/bonding" scenes than I would expect in a male written book, but it was surprisingly similar as far as action, sexplotation in the costumes and drawings and overall feel of women kicking ass for pleasures sake. Especially for Simone who is apparently famous for being a feminist and pointing out how women have been used in comics only to provide fodder for men to be triggered to action (got this off wiki). At one point the girls seem to be bonding over lunch in a rose garden where they comfort "Babs" over the loss of her sentimental photos in the explosion of her secret hideout, the clock tower. They have a moment of silence before an angry Babs says, "Healing time's over. Let's kick some ass." It almost felt as if she was overcompensating for women's "vulnerability" by making them super tough. At points Babs has to cope with being cripple which no longer allows her to be Batgirl and losing the love of her life, Nightwing, but this emotional challenge is always put in the backseat to her strength and triumph. Over all it just felt like these characters that were supposed to be so flawed and real were overly strong and resilient, at least for the kinds of super-heroines I want to create. The Huntress was supposed to be overtly angry and troubled, but she just walked all over the men and her anger never presented a problem, it just gave her strength. Again, I think I want more moral ambiguity. Good and evil, strength and weakness are always so black and white in this series.

Another thing I noticed was just how wrapped up in the comic book universe this series was. There are so many superheores and references to other comics that it was hard to follow at times for the casual comic book reader. Superman shows up as an ambulance, the Justice League is name dropped, Batman is joked about, random superheroes are mind controlled and used as martyrs. It is all very integrated in the mythology. I need to keep this in mind when I make my own series. Is this a world where superheores run rampant or are these people just regular ladies inspired by comics or movies? This could be the points of humor, as inside jokes, these references, but they can't make up the whole world. I just couldn't follow since my comic knowledge is so thin. What is the audience you are trying to reach and how can acknowledging comic heroes be addressed without isolating those that don't know the whole canon of superhero history?

Overall, I don't think I'll continue to read this series, despite the fact that I am leaning toward an ensemble webseries with 3-4 ladies as the lead heroines and this seems similar in that regard. Ultimately it is just not the direction I want to go in. I'm still interested in watching the short lived TV show, if only to learn from how they failed.

The Authority "Relentless"

My first real foray into the world of comic book reading, I went to Meltdown on Sunset yesterday and asked a very helpful young man for some comics with "women who kick ass." I'm doing research for my comic book inspired, LA lesbian webseries I want to make and so I figured I need to finally do some proper research. I watched Sin City for the gritty comic book aesthetic and I immediately thought, I must buy the graphic novel to see how this was translated. I want this feel from my webseries, but obviously I won't be CGing everything on green screen. I'm thinking of integrating artwork into the show as Sin City did, but I want the series to have more of a Girltrash feel than a CG feel. Anyway, most of my experience with comics is through cartoons or movies. Despite having bought some excellent X-Men books at comic-con last year I still haven't gotten around to reading them. What struck me most was just how cinematic the panels were. It felt like a storyboard for a movie, in fact I could almost picture it moving just like a film. No wonder they have become such rampant fodder for films.

Aesthetically, what struck me most that I want to incorporate into my webseries is the use of color. Often times whole pages where tinted either red or blue or orange to separate emotions, locations, etc. I think a mix of black and white and stylized color schemes like this will really sell that comic book feel I want in the webseries. Ultimately the show is about women superheroes so I don't want this to be a gimmick, but rather linked to the psychology of the characters. It could be flashbacks or during their superhero moments only. I don't know yet, but I want these women to be as real and complicated as possible. No Sydney Bristow where everything is hunky dory after you kill 5 people. Will it have a camp feel like D.E.B.S. or Girltrash? I don't know, but that seems to be the way to make it engaging on many levels. Must have humor, action and drama to work within that click-away happy medium.

Ok, back to The Authority. My Meltdown informant was right on the mark. Jenny Sparks, the leader of The Authority (a superhero group not unlike the X-Men) is one tough cookie. She is 100 years old and can harness the power of electricity. She smokes like a chimney and all the men are terrified of her. She wants to make the world a better place and will kill hundreds to save thousands. At the end of the first book, "Relentless," The Engineer, also a woman and a genius scientist with computer nanotechnology for blood, (that she created, like a self-made superhero in a world where many people are born heroes) says "We just did something very frightening...we changed a world" and Jenny replies by saying "maybe we just did what we said we would, all along. Changing things for the better. "One earth down, one to go." So I thought that they were calling it "frightening" because they were essentially playing god. They wiped out the entire population of Italy to remove the evil leaders there and give the world a second chance without the evil regime controlling it. I thought it would get philosophical as to whether they were entitled to judge what was right and wrong, but this wasn't an issue. Evil and good are black and white in this comic book, even when the good guys have to kill countless innocents to change the fate of millions. It was all about body count. They were happy to trade and barter lives as long as the net was positive in their favor. I'm not sure this moral certainty can be so easily achieved. I'd like more struggle as to whether it is okay to kill to save and whether or not they are fit to judge right and wrong and what is "better." Humans certainly aren't this simple. Jenny Sparks does appear to question herself once. After the first big battle she is talking with Apollo and says she doesn't like leadership, but then says "Bad things happen when I run teams. And bad things happen when I don't run teams. All this is a hellish gamble for me Apollo. But there had to be someone left to save the world. And someone left to change it." Very altruistic, with doubt and vulnerability that she never shows again. I think exploring this doubt and the psychology of superheroes and murders who claim to save lives is fascinating and definitely a struggle worth exploring. Would I kill one person if I was told it would save 2 others? I don't know if I could. This is why superheros are so fascinating to me.

Another void I felt in the book was that of the humans they were claiming to save. They were faceless children and regular people. No where do we see what it is like to live in a world where half a city is obliterated by super humans and thousands of people are killed by the good guys so that millions can be saved. What kind of climate and quality of life would that create? I'd like to explore the psychology of real people who live in this world. Are they grateful for the help? Fearful? Does it lead to riots and fear and terrorism politics? Who gains what from superheroes? What if a saved person isn't grateful? That could be funny and campy. Lots of panels were devoted to fighting and much less on the characters. I want this ratio to be reversed. To me fighting isn't cool unless we know why and what is at stake for everyone involved. Plus less fighting is easier to shoot. I'm sure with some practice I can keep things exciting with much less action. It will all be about balance, and refining the YouTube medium.