theARCHIVES: Yeah...about that 'Feminist Criticism & Television' by E. Ann Kaplan

On E. ANN KAPLAN's
“Feminist Criticism and Television”
nineteen eighty-seven, 4/2009

I think it interesting that to merit critical attention one must still engage these very rigid identities. Because while the conversation of Madonna—and salutation given to her “Blond Ambition” phase—at the conclusion of the essay is meant to point to her obstruction of the presumably (patriarchally) gendered lens, and complete awareness of the ‘televisual apparatus’ and the politics it engages, there’s still, ultimately, a reification of the identity she’s employing as an ideally desirable identity.

To return to the discussion of signs, specifically Ellen Seiter’s reference to connotation and denotation, I feel it useful to repeat her breakdown of connotation:

“On a connotative level, shades of hair color (the first level of signification)
are used to produce signifieds such as ‘glamorous,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘youthful,’
‘dumb,’ or ‘sexy’ on the second level of signification. These connotations,
widely known through their repeated use in film and television, are ones that
have a specific history in the United States, one that stems from glorifying the
physical appearance of Anglo women (based on their difference from and presumed
superiority to other races and ethnicities). But they are also subject to change
or revision over time” (p. 40).

Seiter also points to Madonna’s music videos citing an instance “in which she deliberately ‘quoted’ Marilyn Monroe’s hairstyle and what it connotes: sexiness as a costume).” Which is really to confirm the ‘signifieds’ associated with the connotative significations: shades of hair color, shades of lip color, shades of skin color, etc.

(My first beef)
I am in no way a Madonna-hater, and actually would echo Kaplan’s sentiments about the ways in which her ‘filmic’ literacy constructs her performances as a violation of hegemonic patriarchy at work on the so-called idiot box. I would especially echo Kaplan’s statement that Madonna “challenges constructs of both genders because it understands gender as a sign-system that does not necessarily coincide with identity.” And I would go on to say that this statement is where I wanted Kaplan to go much sooner in her breakdown of feminist criticism of television—an awesome essay in such a short space of Allen’s complete text.

As a Black female (wannabe) filmmaker, already interested—if not necessarily competent—in the convergence of sexual politics, film and television, and what that convergence means, I will say I missed Kaplan’s reference to ‘womanism,’ coined, actually, by Alice Walker, and entering the lexicon of at least wom(e/y)n-of-color feminist thought(s) in the 1980s. Womanism came to be viewed as a necessary space for Black women in the absence of a feminism that spoke to their plight at the intersection of race and gender and non-normative sexual identification in an only recently post-Jim Crow era at that time. While these feminisms have their shortcomings and do overlap with the feminisms Kaplan has already laid out, I think I’ll still use ‘womanism’, Kaplan’s (Althusserian) Marxist-feminism, and the concept of post-structuralist feminism (specifically because she identifies post-structuralist feminism as an anti-essentialist theory) to build my response to her essay on the whole.

Kaplan references Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” piece in order to recast the ideas of ‘fetishism’ and ‘voyeurism.’ She uses these to give us a way of understanding the “three basic ‘looks’” that Hollywood uses to satisfy desire in the male unconscious. The first voyeuristic look is entirely dependent on the ‘scopophilic’-indulgent presumably male camera technician; the second is the perspective of the males in the narrative, meant to objectify the women within their gaze; and finally the look of the actual spectator, which is forced to mimic either previous gaze. A few sentences later (p. 263), Kaplan would go on to identify the whole female body as “’fetishized’ in order to counteract the male fear of sexual difference, that is, of castration,” and if the spectator is female, these are positions she is forced to inherit.

This would be all well and good if it weren’t for the fact that we are assuming a lot about the spectator and the film-er. For one, we’re assuming they identify as ‘heterosexual’ and; two, in assuming a female objectification, we are forced to dis-imagine a non-heterosexual-male objectification. We haven’t fully problematized patriarchal-hegemonic constructions of the masculine side of the binary in our (albeit revolutionary, but short-sighted) feminist-analyses. While ‘womanism’ might recognize and beg an account of the racist-sexist lens (and likely include an analysis of the otherization and fetishizing of any woman-of-color presence, and non-every-American-is-middle-class presence), and (Althusserian) Marxist-feminism may recognize how these constructions obey the maximum-possible-return rules of capitalism even as they inform these identities and are informed by ‘real’ manifestations of these identities (Kaplan’s and Meehan’s “goodwife, harpy and bitch display[s]”), it appears to me that the post-structuralist-anti-essentialist approach is missing.

The very thing Kaplan will praise MTV and Madonna for is lost, because we’re assuming the very gender-specificity that Kaplan argues MTV and Madonna destroy. Perhaps, the root of the problem is what language “won’t allow” us to do when we’re having these conversations about these kinds of ideas. However, I’m feeling there’s an awesome body of work that’s been left untouched by television critics because of these same conservative bents and assumptions.

For example, I would greatly appreciate a similar analysis of Sri Lankan singer/rapper M.I.A; Even more dangerous, an analysis of rapper, Lil’ Kim or Jamaican dancehall DJ Lady Saw. These women, through their performances, and by their identification as women of color already ostracized by dominant forms of media and culture, are excellent examples of what Madonna may never be able to do for little girls of color, like myself, where reclamation of agency is discussed. How these women work the televisual-apparatus—with all of its rules and presumptions, and faithfulness to normative significations where race, historically/racially/morally constructed sexualities, and colonial relationships between the U.S. and the so-called Third World are concerned, and constructions of Black masculinities and men of color masculinities are concerned (something that Kaplan completely ignored, but was entirely relevant to her discussion of Madonna’s Cleopatra performance (p. 275))—is an area of ‘feminist’-deconstruction of film and television that I would love to see.