Of Another Fashion

Recommended cultural studies blog:

Of Another Fashion: An Alternative Archive of the Not-So Hidden But Too Often Ignored Fashion Histories of U. S. Women of Color.

Zombies

What’s up with all the zombies? An interesting analysis of the zombie trend at Pop Matters.

Queering Santa’s Workshop

Queering Santa’s Workshop: Gender, Difference, and Elfnicity in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

How does one account for the popularity of the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Clearly, this rather absurd tale of a ruddy-nosed quadruped speaks to us on some deep level, but what is it saying? and why are we listening?

As you will no doubt recall, Rudolph is “the most famous reindeer of all,” made famous not by his heroic nose-glowing sled-guiding as the story would have it but rather by the fictional account of that feat in a song called “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” first recorded by Gene Autry in 1949, a song that became so popular that, according to Wikipedia, it has now sold more copies than all the editions of the Bible ever published combined with the total record sales of the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Madonna.

However, I should state from the outset that this essay is not concerned with the Gene Autry version of the story. Rather, my discussion will privilege the Rudolph story as presented in the 1964 claymation animated television special (the Burl Ives Rudolph, as a number of scholars call it). I recognize that such privileging of one text over another needs justification, and perhaps extensive footnoting, if not excessive use of parentheses, brackets, and colons [and be rest assured: I plan to use all three (3)].

I certainly would agree that the song deserves serious critical discussion, not only the famous Autry interpretation of the song, and particularly the performative elements of that interpretation [not to mention how Autry’s persona as a “singing cowboy” might have shaped the audience’s response (particularly if we consider the narrative within the context of the genre of the western) to that performance], but also the song itself as text, as ecriture, not just as a piece of music waiting to be performed but as an always already complete yet infinite piece (and, by “piece,” of course, I mean “whole”) rich and rewarding in itself before the first note is played. However, although the song pre-dates the animated special, I feel that the combination of visual and musical motifs make the television show the richest text for critical examination.

To refamiliairize ourselves with the basic “story” of Rudolph, we should note that Rudolph, from the beginning, is marked by his difference, by his red nose. As the text of the song states, “you could even say it glows.” The other reindeer do not have such noses, and although we might argue that in a more enlightened society, such a minor physical difference as a glowing red nose would be hardly more notable than, say, a sixth finger or an extra horn growing from the forehead, the culture of the North Pole is not so enlightened as our own.

As Rudolph himself asks, “just because my nose glows, why don’t I fit in?” And it’s a darn good question, but Rudolph’s difference is viewed as a deformity so extreme as to justify his exclusion “from all their reindeer games.”

Life at the North Pole (and we should note that the “pole” is just the first of many phallic signifiers in the masculinized culture of the, er, Pole) is dominated by several patriarchal figures: a grouchy Santa—the Father figure whose name gives meaning to the symbolic order he has founded at the North Phallus, er, Pole; the Head Elf, who essentially runs an elven sweatshop and inculcates the other elves into the dominant ideology (teaching them to sing, for example, “We are Santa’s Elves,” in which they cheerfully embrace their subaltern status: can the subaltern speak? we might ask instead, can the subaltern carry a tune?).

Then we have Donner, Rudolph’s uptight father, who hopes to attain approval from his symbolic father (Santa) by providing Old Saint Nick with another male “descendent,” a continuation of the patriarchal line; and Comet, the coach and testosterone-infused leader (“My job is to make bucks of you”) of the so-called “reindeer games” (and it should be noted that engaging in these games, according to Rudolph’s young companion, Fireball, will “make antlers grow”—all in keeping with the phallocentric culture of the North Pole).

All these patriarchs work to suppress difference. “You’ll be a normal buck just like everybody else,” insists Donner, recognizing that within the symbolic order of the North Pole Rudolph’s nose will signify a lack of masculine control and power. Thus he instructs Rudolph to hide his nose beneath a layer of mud and repress his difference.

Donner hopes Rudolph will be “a chip off the old antlers,” but he finds the red nose unmanly, a distraction from the visible sign of masculine status (antlers), and a symbol of his own failure to father a proper male and thus please his own symbolic father.

The suppression of Rudolph’s red nose is the suppression of what the patriarchs perceive as a feminine characteristic. The glowing red nose is in fact a symbol of the feminine jouissance that the patriarchs have renounced in order to join Santa’s symbolic order, is the very sign of the being they have exchanged in order to have meaning within that order. Rudolph’s red nose endangers patriarchy itself for it reminds the patriarchs of what they’ve lost, the “pure substance of enjoyment,” the dangerous irrepressible femininity (“you could even say it glows”) that they must guard against—within themselves and within others.

Because his red nose represents all those terrible / wonderful uncontrollable things that the patriarchs have excluded from their identities in order to focus exclusively on one type of marker of identity (antlers, poles, etc.), Rudolph, abject figure that he is, likewise must be excluded from the reindeer games that form the very fabric of Santa’s patriarchy.

Like the does, Rudolph can only watch as the bucks compete with each other for status, as playing “reindeer games” is merely a prelude to competing for Santa’s favor and being chosen to pull his sleigh. When Clarissa seeks to join with Mrs. Donner to hunt for Rudolph, they are both told, “This is man’s work,” and they are left behind while the men wander aimlessly and uselessly in search of the runaway reindeer (although Clarissa and Mrs. Donner ignore the male orders and demonstrate that does can wander just as aimlessly and uselessly as bucks).

Each subordinate group in Santa’s patriarchy has its own version of “reindeer games,” a system of practices and rituals through which the individual elf, reindeer, or toy is interpellated as the subject of Santa’s ideology.

Akin to “reindeer games” is “elf practice,” where the elves, among other things, practice “ear wiggling.” However, the very idea of “elf practice” points to the circular reasoning of ideology. Elfnicity is supposedly natural to one’s being as an elf, so why would an elf need to practice being an elf? In practicing what is supposedly innate, one becomes the elf that he already is. Like gender, elfnicity is a cultural construction rather than a product of nature. Otherwise, nature would take its course and both “elf practice” and “reindeer games” would be unnecessary, but Santa’s patriarchal order needs Elves and Bucks, and he must make them by suppressing and excluding other identities—and thus the cruel rituals of “elf practice” and “reindeer games” as a means of reproducing those identities and winnowing out the “misfits.”

We might articulate in abstract form the structure of Santa’s symbolic order by means of a schema from Jacque Lacan’s Encore.

The arrows in this schema, as Slavoj Zizek observes in Looking Awry, mark “the process of symbolization of the imaginary,” with the three objects on the sides of the triangle operating as “nothing but the three ways to maintain a kind of distance toward the traumatic central abyss,” the absence of meaning that always threatens to erode the symbolic systems we create to cover over that abyss (135).

As Zizek writes, the “object small a is thus the ‘hole in the real’ that sets symbolization in motion; the capital phi, the ‘imaginarization of the real,’ is a certain image that materializes nauseous enjoyment; and, finally S(A), the signifier of the lack in the big Other (the symbolic order), of its inconsistency. . . . The abyss in the middle (the balloon encircling the letter J—jouissance) is of course the whirlpool of enjoyment threatening to swallow us all” (135).

Applied to the social order at the North Pole, we might adapt Lacan’s schema thus:

Of course, the “whirlpool of enjoyment” at the center of the narrative (without it, there’d be no story) is Rudolph’s red nose, the jouissance that threatens to swallow us all—at least, that’s the way Santa and his patriarchs respond to Rudolph’s glowing difference. For the capital phi we substitute the abominable snowman, whose “nauseous enjoyment” is exemplified by his salivating mouth; for the S(A), we substitute S(A)nta, who is the signifier of his own lack. He institutes tyrannical oversight and a blustery management style to conceal his own inefficiency and inability to perform his duties without a vast force of elves and reindeer—who do all the actual labor while he broods and complains. S(A)nta’s lack necessitates the creation of the hierarchical social structure that he erects to conceal that very lack.

As Rudolph’s story is an allegory of gender difference, his friend Herbie’s story is one of sexual difference. Although one might interpret Rudolph’s red nose as a sign of queer subjectivity, Rudolph is precociously heterosexual (and bonded with Clarissa shortly after entering puberty). Herbie, on the other hand, bonds exclusively with other males, not only Rudolph but also Yukon Cornelius. But Herbie’s queerness extends far beyond a preference for male companionship. Not in the least bit interested in closeting his identity, Herbie skips elf practice, hates being an elf, disparages making toys, and makes no secret of his unacceptable desire to become a dentist.

Herbie also expresses his sense of difference through his physical appearance. While all the other male elves are completely bald, this misfit elf has blonde wavy hair (much like the female elves) and red full lips (whereas the other male elves seem to have found a way to constrain such expressive lippiness in favor of thin black lines for mouths; perhaps they have surgically altered their lips to remove any sign of feminine voluptuousness, or perhaps part of the cruelty of elf practice involves body-altering exercises to produce lip-thinning).

Herbie is a Lacanian hero in that he refuses to cede his desire (to be a dentist) to the desire of the big Other (that he be a proper thin-lipped hairless toymaking elf). He refuses to integrate into North Pole society on its terms, and, whereas Rudolph is excluded from the games he wants to join, Herbie has no interest in joining Santa’s games and practices, and he refuses to take up the subject position that the symbolic order demands that he occupy, refuses to subject himself to the Name of the Father [aka, S(A)nta], and leaves the North Pole to seek out a place more accepting of dentistry.

Oddly enough, the most seemingly masculine character in the television show, Yukon Cornelius, with his whip, gun, and facial hair, may provide the most important model of an alternate identity for the young misfits. He has not subjected himself to S(A)nta’s Law; he respects the otherness of the other, accepting both Herbie’s dentistry ambitions and Rudolph’s nose. He provides community, companionship, and nurturing (feminine qualities, all of which are notably absent or present only in highly masculinized forms at the North Pole). Although he does defeat the abominable snowman (with the help of Herbie), he does not kill the beast but tames it, in effect encouraging the snowman to abandon its violent hypermasculine ways in favor of a more feminized, less abominable, snowpersonish identity.

Yukon Cornelius has learned the value of both masculinity and femininity, and, by the end of the episode, S(A)nta seems to learn something about the value of difference as well. However, only when feminine difference offers an important way—becomes the only way—that patriarchy can carry out its functions does the patriarch recognize the value of Rudolph’s difference. Only then does S(A)nta state those famous lines: “Rudolph, with your nose so bright / Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight.” We should note, finally, that it is only when Rudolph is accepted into the patriarchy, when he subjects himself to the Name of the Father by answering S(A)nta’s hail, that he is told, “you’ll go down in history.”

Visual Pleasure in Millennium

A familiar and important text in film studies since the 1970s, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” argues that “the magic of the Hollywood style at its best” derives from the “skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure” (449). The film experience, especially as that experience is constructed in the classic Hollywood film, reproduces the hierarchical divisions of a male-dominated society. The traditional narrative film assumes a male spectator and structures the film-going experience with his pleasure in mind. As viewers, we identify with the primary male character in whom we recognize (or misrecognize) ourselves. We don’t so much look at him as we look with him. We share his gaze–and share in his pleasure in looking. Central to the “erotic pleasure” of that shared gaze is “the image of woman” (449). As narrative film constructs men as gazing subjects, women are “looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (451).

Of course, film is not the only entertainment medium that posits Woman-as-Object-of-the-Gaze, as the opening peepshow scene of Millennium makes clear. The very architecture of the peepshow constructs an experience sharply divided between viewing subject and looked-at object. The viewing booths are darkly lit, so that it is difficult to see into them, while the stage where the women perform is just the opposite, brightly lit and slightly elevated so that the whole body can be observed. The appearance of the women is obviously coded to have “strong visual and erotic impact,” emphasized by clothing (or lack thereof), stylized “dancing.” The filming of this scene, however, seems to be designed to undermine the “erotic impact” of the dancers ( a point that I will return to).

From a Lacanian perspective, the place of the peepshow, seemingly underground, dark, disgusting (all we need to see is someone in the background with a mop to know what the floor is like), claustrophobic, is not only a site of perverse (voyeuristic) sexuality but also a perfect illustration of the construction of “normal” masculine sexual identity. As Coats writes, “The male as a split subject couples with the objet a, that is he couples with a fantasized object that he projects onto an other who (or which) serves as a prop” (101). Of course, the difference between “normal” sexuality and the peepshow is that in the peepshow the male only fantasizes about coupling with the fantasized object before him. Also, the structure of the peepshow is such that there is little danger that the male subject might actually “encounter a woman in her particularity, a woman who is not his symptom,” whereas in the normal relationships between men and women there is at least the possibility (to think positively for a moment) of recognizing in one’s partner “her particularity” as another subject (okay, okay, Lacan would call me a crazy romantic, what can I say?)(106). The scenes of the women talking before going on stage, calling home to check on a child, etc., establish the women as subjects in their own right.

The peep show, like the black house that Zizek discusses, is an “empty space” where men “articulate their desires” (9). The contrast between the brightly lit space of the dancers and the dark booths, the performances of the dancers, assist in transforming the women from particularized individuals who have lives and problems (as revealed by the backstage conversations) into objets a. As Zizek writes the “objet a is precisely that surplus, that elusive make-believe. . . . In ‘reality,’ it is nothing at all, just an empty surface” (8). The women in the peepshow, in terms of their function, do not exist except as screens onto which the men project their fantasies–although perhaps “prop” is a better word than “screen,” as the women, in exchange for money, perform so as to enhance the fantasy. “Tell me what you want,” they say repeatedly. The desire they articulate is not their own but that of the male watchers.

The most interesting moment in the peepshow sequence is when we see the screen in one of the booths come down and block out the spectator’s view. As the television screen goes dark with the shutting out of its onscreen counterpart, we have, ironically, a moment of enlightenment, a little bit of truth in a situation otherwise devoted only to fantasy. This is the equivalent to the moment of rolling down the car window in the story Zizek discusses:

“It is as if, for a moment, the ‘projection’ of the outside reality had stopped working, as if, for a moment, we had been confronted with formless grey, with the emptiness of the screen, with the ‘place where nothing takes place but the place’” (15). The “projection of the outside reality” in this case is the projection of the watchers’ fantasies onto the bodies of the women, and what we see, for a moment, is the real: an empty screen, a nothingness, a lack, that will almost immediately be concealed by the renewal of the fantasy.

Since its 1975 publication, Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been thoroughly critiqued and her ideas revised, expanded, and complicated. Mulvey’s article works well for describing the peepshow itself, but director Chris Carter complicates the depiction of that peepshow in multiple ways. It’s highly unlikely that we identify with any of the watching men in this scene, whose activity is clearly marked as pathetic (“they would clap, but it takes two hands”). Also, the camera shifts back and forth between two perspectives, and the watchers are also watched—by us and by the dancers. By sharing the dancers’ perspectives (both visually and from what they say backstage and to Frank Black), we are encouraged to know them in their “particularity.”

Note the difference in the exchange between male observer and female performer when Frank Black is in the booth. The music that accompanies the other scene is gone, the moving camera is gone, and the dancer’s opening comment (“hi, you caught me. I was thinking something nasty”) is delivered with evident lack of enthusiasm. We are closer to reality than fantasy here. Frank is not invested in the same fantasy as the watchers in the earlier scene, and that difference is revealed to us by the difference in the way the scene is filmed. Frank has a different fantasy, perhaps. Ultimately, the dancer does give him what he wants—the clue that he has been seeking.

Let me posit a few questions, which you should feel free to respond to via the comments function or in a blog post of your own:

Zizek discusses the story of a professor who falls asleep and has a dream in which he becomes involved with an attractive woman and all sorts of sex and violence ensues. Zizek suggests that dream and reality shift in this story, and that “the professor awakes to continue his dream (about being a normal person like his fellow men), that is, to escape the real (the ‘psychic reality’) of his desire.” The real of his unconscious is that he is a “murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is just a decent bourgeois professor” (17).

Think about this observation in terms of the character Frank Black. In the episode we watched, what is dream and what is reality? Doesn’t Frank lead two lives (the gentle father, the detective tracking the most brutal of killers)? How are each of the two worlds that Frank lives in represented on screen?

Also, we might think about the episodes in terms of the way it depicts “sex in public,” the way it presents spaces organized around sexual activities (the peepshow, cruising in the park).  The peepshow doesn’t quite seem to fulfill the same function as the counterpublics described by Warner and Berlant, and although public spaces where men go to meet other men for sex certainly fits with their description of spaces where counterpublic discourses can begin to emerge, I’m not sure we see that happening in the episode.  The episode’s portrayal of gay men in some ways strikes me as problematic. They remain “other,” never emerging as subjects in the narrative; they function as the opposite against which Frank’s heteronormativity is underscored (between the straight men at the peepshow and the cruisers in the park, Frank, by contrast, appears “normal,” although his “difference” from both groups is questioned at various points). I’m not quite sure where I’m headed here in terms of a question other than, what did we think of the representation of these public spaces devoted to sexual activity?

Blog Assignment (Karen Coats)

Blog Assignment  (Looking Glasses and Neverlands)

500-600 words

Due date:  Thursday, October 14

In your post, I would like you to explain one key idea from the chapter from the chapter you were assigned (e.g., the relationship between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, the Name of the Father, symptom, etc.). Base your explanation around a quotation from Coats in which she addresses that idea. You might, for example, focus on a term from Lacan that Coats uses. Then, summarize her explanation of a children’s story that she uses to illustrate that key idea. Finally, find your own example (from children’s literature or from another text) to illustrate the same idea.

Bags of Blood

As you’re thinking about your response to the psychoanalytical theory assignment (see the previous post), you might consider ways of using these concepts without necessarily being strictly Freudian (or Lacanian or Cixousian). The idea of the “uncanny” seems to me to have more general applications. In some ways, we might even regard the uncanny from a kind of formalist perspective—as a sort of mirror universe version of defamiliarization. For Shklovsky, defamiliarization results in aesthetic pleasure, but the uncanny, which also involves the unfamiliar familiar, evokes a different set of emotional responses (revulsion and fear, perhaps, but also other less intense kinds of unease).

For me, there are two moments of the uncanny in the “Angel” episode. When Darla opens the fridge and shows the bags of blood hanging there, that’s a nice moment of the unhomely. Something that is familiar(a refrigerator)  is made unfamiliar, and, by extension, Angel’s normal-looking home becomes similarly a suddenly unhomely place, and we realize as well that Angel, as familiarly human as he may look is not really so. A strictly Freudian analysis of this scene would look for some connection to repressed infantile experience, particularly to primal sexual experience (and blood might suggestion castration, or, for that matter, menstrual blood and thereby a fear of female sexuality), but I don’t think we necessarily need to go there to describe this moment as uncanny, as an occasion  of the familiar and homely made unfamiliar and unhomely in a disturbing way.

The other uncanny moment, which might be more easily interpreted through a strict Freudian lens, is Angel’s transformation into a vampire as he’s kissing Buffy. This is certainly a moment of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar in a distressing way. If this were Buffy’s dream, we might interpret it as having Oedipal overtones. The much (much much) older man she is kissing is a father substitute (and you noticed that Buffy is without a father), and the transformation of the familiar and attractive Angel into a monster might be interpreted as a kind of self-punishment (she is the one doing the dreaming) for breaking—even in a fantasy, a dream—the incest taboo.

As you are thinking about your posts, be thinking of ways you might illustrate the psychoanalytical ideas, but you also might be thinking of ways to apply those ideas more flexibly than, say, Freud does.

Blog Assignment: Psychoanalytical Theory

Blog Assignment 2 (Psychoanalytical Theory)

Length: 500-600 words

For your blog assignment this week, I would like you to explain a key idea from one the psychoanalytical theorists we have read (Freud, Lacan, Cixous). Then, I would like you to illustrate that idea by applying it to a reading of another text, which could be Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (episode title: “Angel”) that we watched, or some other text of your choice. You might take a look at this post published by a student a couple of years ago as a good model of psychoanalytical interpretation: The Uncanny in Mulholland Drive.

Whether or not Freud is right about castration anxiety, the Oedipal complex, or even the superego, ego, and id, his ideas have been particularly influential on 20th century artists and writers. Thinking back to the Buffy episode and to Zizek’s comment on Psycho, the repetition of using the architecture of the house (2nd floor, superego; ground floor, ego; underground, id) to visually represent the human psyche suggests that artists are drawing on Freud’s ideas (consciously or unconciously).  The fact that artists are using those ideas doesn’t necessarily mean that Freud is correct in his understanding of the human psyche, but it does point to the necessity of knowing a little bit about Freud in order to see how modern and contemporary artists have shaped their own understanding of psychology.

All entries should be published by Monday at the latest.

Semiotics of Advertising

In her article “A Gentleman and a Consumer,” Diane Barthel looks at the way advertising in the last part of the 20th century tackled the task of selling beauty products to men—by taking what would traditionally be unmanly consumer items (perfumes, etc.) and associating those products with conventionally masculine traits. Barthel observes that “different cultural attitudes toward both the social person and the physical body shape the gender roles of men and women” (172). Advertisements directed at either group can provide a kind of snapshot of gender roles in a society at a given moment. In a time when attitudes about gender are in flux, advertisements may also be revealing of new identities in the process of being  formulated.
Building on the work of semiotician Jean Baudrillard, Barthel observes that because advertisements directed at women sometimes use male imagery (and vice versa) we might more accurately speak of “two modes” of advertising that “do not result from the differentiated nature of the sexes, but from the logic of the system. The relationship of Masculine and Feminine to real men and women is relatively arbitrary” (172).

Barthel continues:
The feminine model encourages a woman to please herself, to encourage a certain complacency and even narcissistic solicitude. But by pleasing herself, it is understood that she will also please others and that she will be chosen [because of her beauty]. . . Whereas the feminine model is based on passivity, complacency, and narcissism [on making herself into a beautiful object that will be chosen], the masculine model is based on exactingness and choice. . . . The key words are masculine terms: power, performance, precision. [In car ads], the car is not simply other; it is also an extension of the owner. . . . Its power is his power. (172-73).
As a group of traits, or, as what we might call the signified content of advertising, power, performance, and precision appear as selling points for a wide variety of products (shampoo, bath soap, etc.) directed at male consumers. The trick of the ad is to associate a particular signifier (e.g. deodorant) with a particular signified (power). Not only can “powerful odor protection” mask our natural human scent, but the power and prestige associated with the product becomes ours as well.

With vehicle ads in particular, we might note that “toughness” is another valued masculine quality. This ad is from 2001, taken from Men’s Journal.

Like the owner, this truck is “built tough,” able to take a beating and keep on going. The photograph of the truck shows it in action, emphasizing not only toughness but power.

Take a closer look at the copy—what’s with the completely gratuitous France-bashing?

There are real men who drive Ford trucks, and then there are wimps who shave their legs. The wimps are in France.

Compare this ad to another 2-page vehicle ad, this one for a Dodge, which appeared the same year in the magazine Shape.

“Slip into something more comfortable” this ad suggests, and, to make that comfort clear, we have the juxtaposition of the red-tinged photo of the women wearing bunny slippers with the photograph of the red Dodge Stratus. The passivity of this feminine mode ad is indicated by both the stillness of the car (not photographed in motion as in the truck ad) and the comfortable stillness of the model in her bunny slippers.  Women in feminine mode ads are often depicted seated (or reclining);  masculine mode ads often emphasize action.

And speaking of action, check out the advertising copy for Old Spice’s Red Zone “Swagger” body wash:

The Red Zone is a bleak, maze-like environment where lasers fire in random directions and the sky is always filled with lightning. Odor never dares enter the Red Zone. The Old Spice man, on the other hand, flourishes in the Red Zone, throwing touchdowns, doing recon and saving females from danger, all while smelling great.

Power and performance indeed!

If perfume can give a man swagger, we shouldn’t be surprised at what his sandwich can do for him. This Subway ad emphasizes the tough guy boldness of its new sandwich, associating it with such traditional signifiers of masculinity as motorcycles, tattoos, and desert landscapes. One version of this commercial that I saw ends with the voiceover comment, “It’ll burn the wimp right out of you.”

Remember when Subway ads featured the bespectacled gentle-looking Jared who lost all that weight eating subway sandwiches? I guess Subway is going back to Old School traditional masculinity over new models of masculinity represented by figures such as Jared.

So, here comes the assignment part of the post. Over the next couple of weeks, start looking around for advertisements. Find two advertisements to post and discuss. The ads could be posted as videos, or you could provide links to an on-line advertisement, or you might upload a photo (as I’ve done above). Analyze those ads in terms of Barthel’s observations, discussing the way the ads employ masculine or feminine modes, the way they deploy signifiers of masculinity or femininity to associate those qualities with the products being sold.

For the two ads, you might choose one ad directed to men and another to women. Or, you might choose two ads directed to the same sex but that use two different modes (e.g., one ad directed to men using the feminine mode, the other ad, also directed at men but using the masculine mode). Or, you might even try for two ads that use the opposite mode for the gender of the audience (a feminine mode ad for a male consumer, a masculine mode ad for a female consumer).

Your final blog post should be between 250-500 words. The due date is floating. Publish your post at any time once you’ve finished, but I would like to have all posts published by September 24. The Diane Barthel article is not one of our reading assignments, but I can provide you with a copy of it if you’d like to see the whole piece rather than just the excerpts above.

See the How to Publish Your Post page (the link is on the bar above the header) for instructions on using the WordPress interface. If you have any trouble figuring out how to post, just email me or stop by during office hours, and I’ll give you a quick overview.

Diane Barthel. “A Gentleman and a Consumer.” Signs of Life in the USA. Ed. Jack Solomon. Boston: Bedford, 2003. 171-180.

Roland Barthes and Politics of Electoral Photography

Below is a post written during the Fall 2008 version of English 455. We’ll be reading a few selections by theorist Roland Barthes for our second class meeting. In general, the type of semiotic analysis that Barthes applies to popular culture (everything from political photographs to soap detergent advertisements) will provide a model for some of our work in Literary Theory and Culture Studies. Likewise, the post just prior to this one, The Semiotics of Moxie, applies Barthes’ method to an analysis of the advertising associated with one of Maine’s favorite beverages.

From 2008:

As I have been revisiting Roland Barthes’ classic work of cultural criticism, Mythologies, it strikes me that in this time of a national presidential election, the essay “Photography and Electoral Appeal” is particularly relevant. Although Barthes is writing specifically about the French electoral process, his more general observations about the way political campaigns use photographs seem completely applicable to the current American context. As Barthes observes, the use of photographs in campaigns “presupposes that photography has a power to convert,” and despite the importance of video, the single arresting still image remains the trump card in the political deck (or the wild card, as a photograph of a candidate can also have the power to convert potential voters in the other direction) (91).

Photography, Barthes writes, reveals “something deep and irrational co-extensive with politics” (91). Photography constitutes “an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being,’ a socio-moral status” (91). To put this in the parlance of American politics, the presidential election is about “character” (a “manner of being”), or at least that’s the way it’s presented in the media. Although during elections citizens often say they wish they knew more about a candidate’s stance on the issues, the emphasis in campaign coverage (and in campaigns) tends toward the issue of character (“judgment,” “toughness”) over the nuts and bolts of policy—thus, the inane “which candidate would you rather have a beer with” debates. Photographs serve the function of reinforcing that socio-moral status, and we often see campaigns wrangling to define the meaning of a particular image (do photographs of Barack Obama speaking to crowds in Germany convey “the gravitas of a world leader” or merely reveal the “superficiality of his celebrity status”?).

Barthes goes on to note that the “conventions of photography . . . are themselves replete with signs” (92). That is, in addition to the actual content of a particular photograph (candidate stands with chest decorated with military medals, signifying patriotism, courage, valor), the conventions of portraiture itself convey meaning. Here I want to share a long quotation from Barthes on how and what particular photographic conventions signify:

A full-face photograph underlines the realistic outlook of the candidate. . . . Everything there expresses penetration, gravity, frankness: the future deputy is looking squarely at the enemy, the obstacle, the ‘problem.’ A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common, suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost nobly in the future, it does not confront, it soars, and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined. Almost all three-quarter face photos are ascensional, the face is lifted towards a supernatural light which draws it up and elevates it to the realm of higher humanity; the candidate reaches the Olympus of elevated feelings, where all political contradictions are solved. (92-93).

Interestingly, Barthes does not discuss photographs that emphasize the profile. Perhaps they do not exist in political photography? A profile might suggest that something is being hidden?

Barthes provides us with a starting point for examining the rhetoric of photographs used in the current presidential campaign. Just guessing, I would say that most of the Barack Obama photographs that are used officially in the campaign will follow the three-quarter model, and I would guess as well that “straight talk” John McCain would favor the full-face photograph (and, if memory serves, such full-face photographs have dominated the Bush presidency).

American politics, however, does have it’s own rhetoric, and I’m not quite sure what Barthes would make of this photograph of Sarah Palin.

The image of politician as successful hunter has a long history in American politics. For example, note this drawing of Theodore Roosevelt, from the frontispiece of his 1885 book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Roosevelt had just finished 3 terms in the New York State Legislature and was preparing to run for mayor of New York City (a race he lost, although he would eventually become Governor of New York, and eventually Vice President and then President of the US).

Roosevelt’s book about his western adventures was all part of his reinvention of his image, using the imagery of the frontiersman to add some pioneer spirit to his actual background–member of a wealthy New York family. Other drawings in the book depict the various animals he shot during his hunting trips in the Dakotas.

In Roosevelt’s book, this drawing was titled “Head of Bull Elk,” and had a caption that read, “Shot Sept. 12, 1884.”

The photographs of Palin demonstrating her hunting skills (which were disseminated by the Alaska Office of the Governor) belong to this well-established branch of American political imagery, one that has perhaps developed its own set of conventions and symbolic meanings.

As the first blog assignment for the class in Fall 2008, I had the students in the class choose and analyze a photograph of one of the candidates for President or Vice President. Click here on the Politics link to see a selection of responses to that assignment.

Semiotics of Moxie

Inspired by Roland Barthes’s landmark study of popular and mass culture, Mythologies (first published in French in 1957, translated into English in 1972), I decided to look more closely at the “myth” of Moxie, to investigate the “message” of Moxie soft drink’s seemingly simple graphic design, and perhaps to find out a little more about the “mystery” (as the advertising copy above calls it) of the “Moxie Boy.” Moxie’s trademark image has remained remarkably consistent, with the exception of a few changes in hairstyle, over the soft drink’s history. To use Barthes’s terms, if we regard the Moxie Boy as a “signifier,” as something roughly equivalent to a unit of speech, what does this boy have to say for himself, about himself, and, more importantly, about why he is an appealing icon for the consumer of Moxie–for that consumer is the intended recipient of the Moxie Boy’s message.

In the essay “Myth Today,” Barthes asserts that “myth is a type of speech,” and by “myth” here he means a concept that is something in addition to our more commonly understood definition of mythology (as in “ancient myth,” “classical myth,” the “myth of Sisyphus,” etc.) (109). For Barthes, myth is the means by which contemporary mass society “naturalizes” ideology, conveys messages that are not necessarily inherent in the “obvious” or common sense meaning of an image, phrase, or even an event. One of the insights from Mythologies that has been particularly influential is Barthes’s argument that anything (not just words) can be made into language, that is, can be used to communicate ideas and concepts: “We shall therefore take language, discourse, speech, etc., to mean any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual: a photograph will be a kind of speech for us in the same way as a newspaper article; even objects will become speech, if they mean something” (111-12). Thus, among the many essays collected in Mythologies, Barthes advances his “ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture” through clever analyses of wrestling, soap-powders and detergent, toys, steak and chips, striptease, Greta Garbo, and the use of photography in elections (9).

As an example of the difference between what we might call the “common sense” meaning and the ideological meaning, Barthes writes of a trip to the barber’s, where he thumbs through a copy of Paris-Match: “On the cover a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors” (116). The seemingly innocent photograph serves a larger ideological purpose, as visual evidence in support of a particular political point of view.

Among the more interesting oddities related to the soft drink Moxie is that its name represents one of the few examples of a proper name changing over to become a noun in the English language. Thus, Moxie is not only a trade name, but it is a also a word that means: “1: Energy, Pep 2: Courage, Determination 3: Know-How, Expertise” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). As a noun rather than a proper name, it is a perfectly legal (and potentially high-scoring) word to use in Scrabble. Thus, although the Moxie Boy is a visual image, he already is associated with a verbal meaning, as he is supposed to be the very embodiment of the qualities Moxie purports to offer. And, if we look more closely into the history of Moxie, we can see quite clearly that one of the selling points of the soft drink is the promise, explicit in its early days, more implicit as time went on, that Moxie has the ability to impart those very qualities to the consumer who purchases it.

Moxie Nerve Food, as it was originally called, was a “tonic,” a medicinal concoction intended as a cure for those who were lacking in such qualities as pep and energy. In the late nineteenth century, when Moxie Nerve Food first went on the market, Americans were worried about a disease (primarily affecting men) called “neurasthenia,” a “nervous disease” no longer recognized as a medical ailment, the symptoms of which might be simply stated as “not being manly enough.” When Moxie dropped the “Nerve Food” from its title and its (rather spurious) claim to medicinal power, it nonetheless kept the concept of “manliness” as part of its marketing (and, thus, the Moxie Boy and not the Moxie Girl).

And the approach worked quite well. Until the 1920s, Moxie was the most popular soft drink in America, although it has receded to being a New England favorite, and the grocery stores here in Maine are well stocked with it.

Of course, it was invented by a Mainer, Dr. Augustin Thompson, who sold it initially as a cure for “loss of manhood, paralysis and softening of the brain.” And here we might pause and look more closely at Moxie Nerve Food’s first marketing campaign, and unpack exactly what “loss of manhood” meant to late nineteenth century consumers. Well, it’s not difficult to guess, but “loss of manhood” was a polite (or coded) way of saying “erectile dysfunction.” In short, Moxie was (or claimed to be) the Viagra of the late-nineteenth century.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a pointing finger is just a pointing finger, but it seems to me, anyway, that the imagery of Moxie still contains a hint of its original meaning, presented implicitly through visual imagery rather than explicitly through verbal text. Even the dictionary definition of the word Moxie is suggestive of a gendered meaning. Although we might now regard words such as “energy, pep, courage, determination, know-how, expertise” as gender neutral, coming out of the nineteenth century, those qualities would be primarily associated with masculinity. Moxie is a virtual synonym for “virile” (which is defined as “energetic,” “vigorous”), a word specifically associated with male qualities: “having the nature, properties, or qualities of an adult male; specif: capable of functioning as a male in copulation.” The mythology of Moxie, which we have uncovered here, refers back to its earliest days as a “nerve food,” and although that original meaning of Moxie (as cure for “loss of manhood”) has not been an explicit selling point for over a hundred years, a hint of that original meaning remains in the image of the Moxie Boy and his vigorous finger pointing. Perhaps that’s why the “Moxie Boy” logo, which has gone through many variations over the years (and is currently a Moxie Man rather than Boy), almost always features Moxie Man’s pointing finger (or other prominently featured phallic objects).

I think I can safely leave it to you, dear reader, to “decode” the phallic imagery here.

For more about Moxie and its history (and more samples of Moxie ads), see http://www.moxie.info/.

Posted by Dr. Johnson.