Garland's 1950 Was Britney's 2007: Last Core Post

In Dyer’s chapter on Judy Garland and the gay community’s interest in her and love for her, there are several extremely interesting points of analysis that I think apply to other, more modern musical stars and their LGBT following. As Dyer pointed out, the gay community enamored with Garland was a primarily white, male gay community, and I think this remains true when we look at the demographic of LGBT-identified people who also identify as deeply loving certain pop icons (for the purposes of this post, I will be focusing mainly on Britney Spears). However, though there are several potent similarities in terms of the types of cultural moments that these stars’ gay following reacts to, I am also interested in assessing the ways in which the behavior and expression of the gay community is different post-gay liberation movement.

            I want to focus on the aspect of Garland’s career that Dyer assesses in the reading as ordinariness. When referring to “ordinariness”, Dyer specifically addresses the idea that MGM crafted and imaged Garland in a way that implied a spectacular ordinariness, the quintessential “girl-next-door”. However, it was her split from MGM in 1950 and the subsequent media blast coverage of her woes that ultimately connected her to the gay community in such a strong and lasting way. Essentially, the implication is that Garland “came out” as non-ordinary after being “raised” to be the most ordinary, which relates to the gay narrative in a very clear way.

            This narrative also reminded me of the infamous 2007 breakdown of Britney Spears, especially because of the way that the gay community cherishes that cultural moment to this day. I also think it’s super important to mention one of the first truly viral videos that I can remember, which was made by a white gay male in defense of Britney at this time: Chris Crocker’s video entitled “Leave Britney Alone”. This video features Crocker in full-blown hysteria crying about all that Britney had been through up until her breakdown, with poignant lines in the video such as, “All you people care about is making money off of her, she is a HUMAN!” He is obviously referring to the way that the public and media outlets had a field day with photos of Britney shaving her head and (seemingly) hitting a car with an umbrella.

When Dyer talked about the way that gay writing about Garland changed throughout the gay liberation movement, he mentioned that the emphasis changed “from Garland representing gay men’s neurosis and hysteria to her representing gay men’s resilience in the face of oppression.” While this video is clearly an exhibition of hysteria, I think it is an example of the gay linking of theatricality and authenticity. It is camp in that it balances on a line between parody and earnest plea. I think the clear point to take away is that this gay man is so invested in specifically defending Britney’s humanity, and I don’t think he would have been this invested had her “ordinariness” that was so intentionally crafted by her management and labels hadn’t been so completely obliterated.

Jessie J, Lady Gaga, and the faux-bisexuals of Pop (last supplemental post)

So, I have some beef.

I really love Jessie J as a songwriter and an artist, and I think that she has a very strong sense of self that always comes through in her performances. I remember finding her on YouTube back before "Party in the USA", when she had a full-on shaved head and wore hoop earrings all the time. And I also distinctly remember watching her music video for "Do It Like A Dude" and feeling so excited when I did some research and found out that she was openly bisexual. I was so excited to see someone living their truth and putting a face out their for bisexuals (who are so often made invisible in this day and age).

Anyway, recently my girlfriend linked me to an article in the Guardian entitled "Jessie J Says Her Bisexuality Was a Phase. What a Shame." What a shame, indeed! I found myself feeling a lot of real anger towards Jessie, like she had personally betrayed me. After spending some time reflecting, I was able to articulate why. 

I mean like...c'mon now. This is queer af.

I feel like there are so many artists out there who want to exploit the LGBT community to build their fan base, and that is to be expected. But it's even more offensive and harmful to claim membership to the LGBT community and then renounce it whenever you find it convenient. Bisexuals are often told that the way they are is in fact "just a phase", that they are "really just gay but scared" or "really just straight but want attention". For Jessie J to come out as bisexual and later say it was just a phase only adds to the cannon of misunderstanding. 

I wanted to bring this up because I feel that it isn't just a one-time thing, but more of a cultural phenomenon. In 2013, Lady Gaga spoke out and said that her bisexuality was "not a lie", but at the Pride Parade in 2014, she posted this picture on Instagram with this caption: 

First of all, straights "unleashing" their "gayness" doesn't even make any damn sense. Second of all, to retract your queer identity in such a cavalier way is beyond disrespectful to those who are authentically queer. 

Both of these experiences have taught me to be wary of celebrities who claim bisexuality, which honestly saddens me. I want to trust and believe in people's identities, but I've definitely become jaded due to multiple instances of feeling betrayed and exploited. 

Core Post #4: Madonna and Death

As we watched Truth or Dare: In Bed With Madonna, there was one moment in the documentary that was of particular interest to me, and that was the legal kerfuffle in Toronto. Before the show, a crew person informs Madonna that Canadian policemen are at the stadium and are threatening to arrest her if she performs the masturbation scene. While Madonna feigns fear and anxiety about the situation, it is fairly obvious from the way that her eyes light up that she is experiencing pure excitement at the prospect of her arrest.

            In a way, I understand this. Much of Madonna’s career was predicated on the fact that she could provoke and cause controversy, particularly the kind of controversy that would demand press coverage. However, there is a certain aspect of her behavior in the face of imminent legal action that seems to me to be deeply revealing in terms of her white privilege, and ultimately, in terms of the lack of potency to her political statements.

            The fact is that of course Madonna would not be afraid to be apprehended by policemen. Madonna is a white woman, and a blonde white woman at that. There is no history of brutality and murder of her people at the hands of North American police officers. On the other hand, it might have been quite a different issue if her back up dancers had been threatened with arrest. I would be willing to wager that most of her back up dancers had a family member or friend who suffered at the hands of the criminal justice system and its servants in their lifetimes, and would not have taken the threat of arrest so lightly.

            In bell hooks’ essay “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?” she states, “White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure.” (hooks, 28).  Today, there is a term that floats around the inter-webs on Tumblr and Instagram that has been appropriated from Black American culture, and that term is “giving me life”. It is used in the presence of a certain type of performance mostly, as in “that pose is giving me life”. I would assert that this colloquial phrase that I’ve seen so many white people use without anything remotely resembling deep thought exists because of white supremacy, and white supremacy’s assertion of the imminence of Black death.

Venus Xtravaganza, a dancer featured in the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, was found murdered in a New York Hotel Room 2 years before the documentary made her famous. 

            As Cvetkovich touches on in her article on Truth or Dare and Paris is Burning, Madonna’s performance of progressive identities have drastically lower stakes than the performances of the men and gender-queer people of color on Paris is Burning. While Madonna might be dancing to keep the camera on her, the people who are forced to live in a society that demands their labor and ultimately their death are literally dancing for their lives.

Core Post #3

Katie Gavin

3/31/15

Paul Robeson, Black Masculinities + Popular Culture

The other day, I was hanging out in the garden next to the Roski School of Art and I stumbled into the garden that commemorates Americans brought to trial at the House of Un-American Activities Committee. I knew that Robeson was one American charged with being a communist, and sure enough, I found his stone and a quote next to it. At the time, Robeson was angry, but un-ashamed to speak out as a communist. I don’t feel like I know enough on the subject to say definitively, but I can imply from Dyer’s reading that it was Robeson’s overt position as a communist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist to which we can attribute his irrelevancy amongst the youth of America.

The Standing committee for the House of Un-American Activities existed from 1945-1975, which is the period directly after that which Dyer covers in his chapter on Robeson. During the period that Dyer covered, which was roughly from 1924-1945, Robeson was a major star; in fact, he was considered by many to be the “first major black star” and one of the first “crossover artists”, or artist who is grounded in a subculture but who appeals to an audience beyond the confines of said subculture.

I am interested in analyzing, to a certain degree, the ways in which Dyer’s discussion of white views on Robeson might be interpreted. In the chapter, Dyer posits that “Robeson represent[ed] the idea of blackness as a positive quality, often explicitly set over against whiteness and its inadequacies” (78). More specifically, there is a discussion of blackness as being associated with naturalness or “animal vitality” and whiteness being associated with constrained emotions or unnaturalness.

This concept is really intriguing, but if one views it through the lens of Robeson’s eventual turn away from capitalism and towards communism, I would like to think about the ways in which white audiences might have believed in the possibility of acquiring or attaining the desirable qualities that Robeson “embodied” through economic transfer. In other words, I am speaking about the notion that white people might be able to gain access to the internal life of “Negroes” through the consumption of the all-encompassing performances of Robeson.

I think this question is extremely relevant today when one thinks about hip-hop music, particularly the fact that the number one demographic of hip-hop consumers is adolescent white males. Could this be part of the way in which subversive ideologies embodied by powerful Black celebrities are robbed of their revolutionary potency?

Core Post Number One, Week 2 Readings ("To-Be-Looked-At-Ness and What Not")

The series of essays in this weeks readings by Staiger, deCordova, and Hansen were all challenging and interesting in their own ways. As a music student, I find myself with hardly any working knowledge of the film industry and film history, so it was helpful to read both Staiger and deCordova's revisionist histories of the formation of the star industry. In my opinion, Staiger's was a little more difficult to comprehend because it assumed more prior knowledge on the reader's behalf. I found that deCordova's language suited itself much better to  my way of learning and understanding, and I was left with some very interesting concepts to chew on in relation to the formation of the "star system" (which, by the way, sounds a little too similar to the "solar system", in my humble opinion).

deCordova referred to the emergence of this system as the emergence of a particular type of "knowledge", with the site of this knowledge being the actor. It is very relevant and important that this knowledge was "produced" and propagated through different mediums such as magazines, posters, and picture reels, as today these changing mediums alter the forms of knowledge that we may hold, and therefore may change the upper structure of our star system.

I really appreciated deCordova's laying out of the three forms of knowledge that emerged to produce the picture personality. First, the circulation of a name. And what's in a name? Well, apparently, the concealment or revelation of a name could tell you a whole lot about a person. It was fascinating to me that a major reason for concealment of an actor's name was that they were a "legitimate" stage actor who feared being "discovered" in the cinema world, the irony being that not knowing an actors name might in fact mean that they were well known. The second form of knowledge is intertextuality, which necessitates a regular audience who can see one actor in multiple films and grasp the essence of that actor's personality through their performance in these films. The last form of knowledge is "discourse on acting" or discussion of previous stage experience, which for me really stressed the fact that picture personalities were people whose professional lives were up for discussion. Beyond this, deCordova made evident that the main mark of transition between a picture personality and a star was whether or not their private lives were also on the table in terms of public discourse. I find the "reel hero/real hero" wordplay very interesting because of this concept that a star's private life needed to resonate on a moral level with the actions of their characters. I wonder if people think this belief is upheld today or has been turned on its head.

I was very surprised by the Hansen reading because I wasn't expecting to see a discussion that involved Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" so deeply. I personally love that essay because it (quite literally) opened my eyes and taught me a lot about being a critical spectator, but I appreciated Hansen's critique of some of Mulvey's points, as well as her willingness to explore Valentino as a possible contradiction to Mulvey's thesis. I have to say that I can't help but think of Valentino as more of a tool for exploitation of female moviegoers than as a result of the recognition of women as a "socially" significant group. As a music student, this situation reminds me of record companies development of race records after realizing that they could take Black people's money if they simply recorded a couple of Black musicians on vinyl. However, I am definitely interested in learning more about female desire and how it has played out in cinema and in the star system.