The “The Twilight Saga” Saga
February 25, 2009 at 7:31pm | In literature, pop culture, sexuality, year in review | 2 CommentsTags: 2008, conceptual blogging, gossip girl, inability to blog, media studies on acid, new years resolutions, twilight, waxing poetic on pop culture, ya fiction
While Michael Tom was regaling you throughout the month of January with posts about Chris Crocker, Joe the Plumber, and breakdancers kicking babies in the face, I have to admit I felt like a bit of a fraud. 2008 was the year when I finally lost touch with popular culture to a point where I barely know what any of that stuff even IS. I also recently discovered that several of my friends didn’t realize that Michael Tom even wrote for this blog and were under the impression it was all me, all the time. They were pretty confused about why I was writing all that stuff, when my bro is the true pop culture junkie of the fam (if he has his way, I think Lady Gaga will become the largest item in our “tag cloud,” oh shit is she already??).
We believe in new year’s resolutions around here at Tiny Gems; one of mine for 2009 was to get back in touch with popular culture, because I have a feeling it might be kind of ridiculous/awesome right now and I’m missing out. But for now – instead of pretending that I gave a shit about stuff I didn’t even know existed – I’m going to tell you about the two pieces of 2008 popular culture that I completely, unabashedly, truly and deeply GET:
Except that maybe I don’t really get it.
Part One: On the Really Weird Sexual Politics of Twilight
(Spoiler alert, y’all: I read all four of the Twilight books in, like, a week while bored out of my mind at my parents’ house. I’m going to talk about all four here. If you want plot summaries or whatever, check wikipedia… loser.)
I know that – at least according to the many repetitive reviews I’ve read by this point – I’m supposed to think Twilight is this giant metaphor for abstinence or somebody’s half-baked idea of Puritanism or whatever. And it seems, as a “feminist,” I’m supposed to be afraid of its subliminal mental poison and what it’s doing to the selves of today’s teenage girls. The (possibly sad?) truth, however, is that the sexual politics and dynamics that permeate Stephenie Meyer’s supremely weird/fascinating – and yet fucking horribly written – Twilight “Saga” are actually, umm, a lot more complicated than that. OK, OK, I know, they get married. Which is totally lame. But which doesn’t begin to explain away the towering weirdness of everything else that’s going on here.
OK, so I understand the common ‘abstinence’ reading of the first book; before I continued to the others I thought I got it, too. But after that, what sex is both representing and being represented by begins to shift in directions no one is really addressing (maybe because no one except me — as both a voracious reader of children’s and young adult fiction and someone with a degree in “sexuality studies” — would actually bother…..), and that maybe no one – not even the author herself – actually understands.
We Are Not the Same, I Am A Cyborg
February 20, 2009 at 4:30pm | In music, pop culture, sexuality | 1 CommentTags: cyborgs, donna haraway, gender, hip-hop, kanye west, maybe kanye and lady gaga should get together and have crazy high-fashion robo-babies, queer theory, radical feminism
In her famous essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Donna Haraway sets up the metaphor of the cyborg as a new way of thinking about feminism. The “cyborg” – both human and machine, both organic and inorganic, both real and fictional – defies conventional, static categorizations and fixed concepts of identity. The nature of the cyborg stresses the unification of opposites and fluid concepts of gender and sexuality. Cyborgs are products of multiple, simultaneous states of being, and stand in radical opposition to conventional ideologies.
Although he is probably not remotely what she had in mind when she wrote her essay, Haraway’s idea of the cyborg has been incarnated (at least, within the context of contemporary pop culture) in the figure of Kanye West.
The typical persona of the successful, respected rapper/hip-hop producer is tough, collected, egocentric and hyper-masculine. Kanye West’s recent activities, however, actively subvert this image; rather than projecting this conventional masculine persona, Kanye takes part in traditionally feminine (or effeminate) behaviors. He has changed gears to release an R&B break-up album (808s and Heartbreak), collaborated with high-end designers and fine artists on music videos and fashion items, and expressed interest in posing for naked photographs. These behaviors are more typically associated with the female pop or R&B diva than male rapper/producer (Kanye’s interests and activities are much more in line with those of Beyoncé or even Björk than with those of, say, Jay-Z). His choices in clothing (Dayglo colors, tight pants, the famous Shutter shades) serve to further distance him from the hyper-masculine world of contemporary hip-hop; his image is robotic, highly stylized, and (above all) ambiguously gendered. Even his use of Auto-Tune vocals on 808s and Heartbreak underscores his new cyborg identity.
Of course, not everyone has taken kindly to Kanye’s development of this new cyborg identity. Both tabloid media and online pranksters have derided Kanye for perceived homosexuality. Porn trade mag Adult Video News recently printed a false interview in which “Kanye” stated,
I’m open to doing porn. Hell, I’ll even do bisexual scenes – myself, another man and a woman, or just me and two women. I know people will find that as some weird shit, but I am who I am.
Kanye has responded bombastically to these sorts of rumors through all-caps blog rants. This tendency to respond to rumors and accusations with “hysterics” pushes him even further beyond the typical gender binary.
Recently, Kanye claimed to have re-invented the term “gay” itself, transforming it from a fixed (negative) marker of identity into a marker of cultural cachet – the ultimate step toward becoming a post-gender cyborg being. Donna Haraway should be proud to see her cyborg literally personified – not to mention getting to #1 on the Billboard charts.
¡VIVA KANYE, VIVA LA REVOLUCION!
(OK, so I know the title is actually from a Lil Wayne song. Weezy isn’t a cyborg, he’s a Martian, and that’s totally different and probably just as revolutionary. Or, he’s just on too many drugs. Either way, it’s a completely different topic. What do you think, readers?)
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