Holiday reading: Bringing Home the Birkin

The basic black Birkin.

Over Christmas i read Michael Tonello’s Bringing Home the Birkin (New York: Harper, 2009) which demystifies the most famous and most expensive handbag – the Hermes Birkin – as much a Holy Grail of luxury as it is a pop culture icon with prices as high as $60,000. A light read but significant in it’s exposing of the marketing myths of luxury brands and their inculcation of consumer desire based on false information. The Birkin probably entered popular culture in the late 1990s when Sex and the City (and later in episodes of the Gilmore Girls, Will and Grace and Gossip Girl) devoted an episode to the most coveted of bags and its notorious waiting list. There are even blogs devoted to random Birkin spotting. My first awareness of the brand name Hermes was the film Basic Instinct in 1992; Sharon Stone’s character uses Hermes scarves to tie her victims to the bedstead. She was a classy killer. The Birkin is copied the world over, often spoken of in relation to the smaller Hermes Kelly Bag (named after Grace Kelly) and mistaken for the larger Hermes Haut a Courrois which was originally for transporting horse saddles as befits the company’s 19th century origin. The Birkin name came about when on a flight sometime in 1984 Jane Birkin was seated next to the CEO of Hermes Jean-Louis Dumason when she bemoaned the need for more space in the Kelly and a design collaboration ensued.

Tonello’s book is as much a story of ebay entrepreneurship as it is the story of how he managed to procure hundreds of the impossible to purchase Birkin bags and sell them on for substantial profit. Anyone who has sold through ebay will recognise the same travails of online selling. Tonello explodes two pop culture fashion myths – firstly, the waiting list and secondly Hermes own claims to producing a limited number of Birkins a year. Even if you have the money to buy an entry level Birkin you can’t just go in to a Hermes store and buy one. It doesn’t work like that since it is the unobtainability that amplifies their desirability. You will be told that there’s a waiting list of approximately two years and that’s even if they bother to ever call you back. However, Tonello discovers what he calls ‘the formula’ for getting the Birkin in nearly every Hermes store he visits. His formula for a ‘same day Birkin’, one that bypasses the waiting list and thus reveals it as a fallacy, is buy lots of scarves and leather goods first, spending a few thousand, and then casually drop into conversation asking if they have any Birkins. With that first offering at the luxury altar the Hermes sales assistant (which he breaks down in to five stereotypes and how to deal with them) disappears in to the back of the shop and magically produces a Birkin. The profit on a Birkin re-sell is so high that Tonello is able to fly the world in search of more Birkins for rich American women and, exposing another fallacy, he alone manages to acquire more than the supposed annual production that the Hermes spiel suggests. In the end Tonello tires of the travel, Hermes and the world of luxury goods and no doubt Hermes cottons on and changes its tactics of sale when it comes to keeping the Birkin shrouded in legends of unobtainable.


Product placement: Carrie Bradshaw appears in Season 6 (Episode 16 - 'Out of the Frying Pan') of Sex and the City holding a Rouge H 30cm Matte Crocodile Birkin.

(photo credits: yumyumcherry; DVD screen grab; permissions)

Feeling Backward (why queer theory still matters)

I recently received a reader’s report for a book proposal in which the anonymous reviewer refers to queer theory as being ‘mid 1990s’ and ‘once cutting edge’. I was struck by the notion that queer theory was over, faddish and outdated and my first response to this was that queer theory will be over when homophobia, the closet, and so on is also over. In order to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of queer theory I would like to introduce a few ideas from a recent ‘queer theory’ book that also helped me make sense of pleasures that might be construed as wholly negative. The question then is why is Brokeback Mountain pleasurable when it also makes me feel bad?

In Heather Love's Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007) she explains why hurtful, melancholic and depressing experiences constitute contemporary queer identity and thus need to be acknowledged, incorporated and negotiated since ‘many of these unlikely feelings are closely tied to the realities of queer experience past and present.’ (147) In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a text that has a backward logic. It uses the past to speak to the present as it narrates a depressing story of historical injury and bad feeling in order to connect to a contemporary audience who may feel that they are still negotiating or finding it difficult to dispel a shameful and homophobic past – homosexuality is problematic! Love continues:

'Backwardness means many things here; shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame. I describe backwardness both as queer historical structure of feeling and as a model for queer historiography.' (146)

Many of the terms in Love’s quote may describe the characters and their narrative situations in Brokeback Mountain, as well as the spectator’s response to the film. It is important that the film does provoke negative and bad feeling. It is not a joyous experience; rather it is a film that leaves one feeling hurt and emotionally devastated in its backward turn. Yet, this is somehow what is rewarding about the film also. Brokeback Mountain’s stress on negative and depressive histories of the homosexual past help to constitute contemporary gay and lesbian identity and subjectivity since ‘the experience of queer historical subjects is not a safe distance from contemporary experience; rather, their social marginality and abjection mirror our own.’ (32)


The backward feeling and the pathos in the film articulate a refusal to see progress in the way it is often imagined by gay pride discourses. Brokeback Mountain demands us to accept that homosexuality is still impossible for many, that it is still permeated by tragedy and melancholia, and that it has a history that is still unresolved and needful of being properly negotiated in the present. Love’s work helps to unlock the process of understanding negative pleasures in political terms especially in relation to films like Brokeback Mountain. The film reminds queers that their modern subjectivity is constituted by a painful, closeted, homophobic history and that feeling backward and feeling bad are also important affective dimensions of queer subjectivity in the present.

(image: screen grab; permissions)

Dunlop to Dsquared: The Return of the Wellington Boot

This year has seen a conspicuous number of designers and luxury brands offering their version of the Wellington boot. Chanel (with rubber camellias attached), Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Vivienne Westwood (in iconic squiggle print), Dsquared (with built in socks), to name only a few, have all launched rubber boots, or rain boots as some prefer to call them. Even shoe designer Jimmy Choo, a name popularised by Sex and the City, has teamed up with the British brand Hunter to offer a fake crocodile print pair. What interests me here is that, as far as I am aware, this is the first time top-end designers have ventured to offer a type footwear that most would assume is antithetical to high fashion and luxury. Can Wellies actually be a fashion ‘statement’?

It is difficult for me to disassociate the Wellington boot from memories of childhood. I vividly remember that on rainy days I was always forced to wear a pair of black Dunlops to school. The rubber seemed really tough and it was necessary to keep your trousers tucked in. Annoyingly, your socks always seemed to fall down and get crumpled up making them even more uncomfortable to wear. They were rain proof but somehow Wellies always made you want to jump in puddles or anywhere water gathered, testing their effectiveness.

riginally a leather boot, the Wellington is so named after the Duke of Wellington who ordered from his shoemaker a pair of boots in the style of the German military officer’s Hesse boot – as a note they are also the basis for the cowboy boot. As a dandified figure, the aristocracy emulated Wellington’s style in the eighteenth century and they in turn popularised the style of boot that we still call the Wellington. The popularity of the boots was soon translated into a cheaper rubber form through the recent invention of vulcanisation, a process of heating natural rubber discovered by Charles Goodyear the tyre manufacturer in 1839. The rubber Wellington boot became a cheap alternative to more expensive leather footwear. The rubber boot also became an important element of military wear during the first and second world wars because of its waterproof qualities and still continues to be a staple of industry and farming. For such a ubiquitous and rather unglamorous piece of footwear why should it prove to be a popular choice for fashionistas?

I have two speculations that may account for the emergence of the designer Wellington boot. Firstly, the recession has hit the designer and luxury good sector quite hard. [1] Take the Gucci Wellington boot as an example – it retails at £175, which makes it one of the cheapest items you can purchase from Gucci except maybe a key ring. Gucci Wellies do not require the boots to be made by craftspeople in the protected Italian shoe and leather industry: a pair of leather boots from Gucci normally starts at around £550. Therefore, rubber is probably the cheapest fabric that a designer can currently offer. Having just bought a pair of Raf Simon’s neoprene high-tops, I can tell you that neoprene (usually reserved for diving suits and sports), surprisingly, is astronomically priced! The New York Times recently reported that a number designers (such as Vera Wang) are also opting for cheaper fabrics for their collections during these leaner times in order to keep costs down and customers still buying. [2] The designer Wellington offers an affordable alternative to leather boots and means one can still go Gucci at a third of the cost.

My second speculation is a bit more ropey but I do think the increase and popularity of music festivals, especially their endless airing on BBC3, makes Wellington boots the ideal choice for the fashion-sensed as they wade through muddy fields and grassy raves: the fashion blogs were full of summer festival snaps this year. The designer Wellington and fancy rain boot perhaps gestures towards the ongoing gentrification and trend-factor taking root in music festivals (with their more expensive VIP areas). As music festivals increase in number and increase in price they are attracting a new type of festival-goer who cares what they have on their feet, not to mention those who likes to flaunt the fabric bracelets given upon entry that says ‘I went to such and such a festival…’ because going to right festivals in the right fashions now seems to matter.

[1] Though not all designers and luxury brands it would seem. The past few years have actually seen the re-emergence of a number of almost dormant couturiers offering ready-to-wear collections designed by cutting edge designers. Balmain, Balenciaga, and Lanvin have all recently made a return to fashion producing some of the most creative, expensive and desirable items.

[2] Cathy Horyn (2009) 'High Fashion Faces a Redefining Moment', New York Times, September 11th.

(Photo credit: lomokev, permissions)

Re-Reading a scene from Red River

Retrospectatorship after Brokeback Mountain

Patricia White in her book unInvited proposes the concept of retro-spectatorship. Retro-spectatorship is a way of negotiating the history of Hollywood through contemporary practices of spectatorship and the identities and cultural politics we now bring to our viewing of the past. Through retro-spectatorship, Brokeback Mountain solicits us to re-view the classical Hollywood western ‘that belongs to the past but is experienced in a present that affords us new ways of seeing’ (97). Therefore, as a contemporary western Brokeback Mountain’s helps us to shape a retrospective reading of older westerns, particularly those westerns such as Red River and Calamity Jane that have either struggled to disavow their homoerotic underpinnings or made obvious a range of queer possibilities. Its not that re-reading the classic western is an appropriating practice or subversive re-imagining rather, no reading of the text is the correct one its just that straightness is the default position of culture that we have all some point internalised as a practice. The point here is that Brokeback Mountain answers the call to all those elided and hinted at stories of same sex desire in the Hollywood western by retrospectively prompting a return back to films like Red River from a vaulted position of contemporary spectatorship. Brokeback Mountain engenders a privileging of being able to un-think assumptions about westerns in relation to sexuality. As Patricia White brilliantly demonstrates in her re-reading of lesbianism in classical Hollywood cinema, our spectatorial vantage point as queer subjects is steeped in knowingness about how Hollywood edited out homosexuality and cast it to the realm of the merely connotative. D. A. Miller in his analysis of Hitchcock’s Rope, suggests that the eliding of homosexuality’s denotation ‘exploits the particular aptitude of connotation for allowing homosexual meaning to be elided even as it is also being elaborated’ which, explains how homosexuality by its absence is made meaningful throughout classical Hollywood cinema.

A contemporary viewing of Red River, armed with the knowledge that one of its central stars Montgomery Clift was gay, provides the insight that retrospectatorship reveals in the films homoerotics that are barely contained in ‘the shadow kingdom of connotation’. (Miller: 125) The spectator’s first introduction to Montgomery Clift’s as the Matthew Garth character is startling in its invitation to look at his handsome boyish looks, standing aloof he seems to be gazing down towards John Wayne’s crotch while sucking on a piece of straw (shot 1).

Shot 1

The camera cuts from the medium shot to a close-up of Clift’s face as he looks towards Wayne that instantly constructs him in relation to a relay of desiring looks. In the facial close-up Clift looks on, tonguing the single piece of straw that dangles from his mouth.(Shot 2 and 3) The shot of Clift’s face seems to linger for an extra beat but it’s the minor detail in the piece of straw where a queer reading of Clift’s body and performance values such minutiae as it suddenly jumps out retrospectively as a signifier of Clift’s queerness, his character’s desire for Wayne and our desire for him. He plays with the piece of straw in a way that hints and suggests sex, an oral tease, delicately phallic but undeniable in its capacity to be read as homoerotic.

Shot 2

Shot 3

Steve Cohan also discusses Clift’s performance in Red River describing how he ‘uses physical gestures to draw attention to his presence in a shot, rubbing his face, caressing his nose, holding his chin, sitting side-saddle on his horse’ to the extent that it ‘implies Matthew’s passivity as erotic spectacle’. (216) Cohan’s reading of film emphasis ‘the trope of boyishness’ in Montgomery Clift in contradistinction to the manliness of John Wayne as the film sets out working through its opposition between the soft boy and the hard man. Clift’s softness in Red River helps to define his erotic appeal and Cohan points out that its precisely this aspect of his performance which challenges the hegemonic forms of masculinity typified in the film by John Wayne.

References
Steve Cohan (1997) Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. New York and London: Routledge
D. A. Miller (1991) ‘Anal Rope’ in Diana Fuss (ed) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London and New York: Routledge.
Patricia White (1999) unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

(Images: screen grabs; permissions)

"Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache"

While researching my book on Brokeback Mountain I am also exploring the multiple connections between the western (as a genre) and the West (as a mythic concept) in relation to gay culture. The concept of the West as a space of homosocial freedom and the fantasy of the cowboy are ongoing fascinations and it’s interesting how they are transformed and made meaningful in relation cultural identity. ‘The West’ in US gay culture is also a reference to the movement Westward to California in the 1970s, San Francisco in particular, and is a migratory moment resonant in the history of American post-Stonewall gay male identity; it’s the implicit subject of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and the recent film Milk. This idea also finds its widespread expression in the Village People’s over-exposed disco anthem Go West (1979) that explicitly connects discourses of liberation and self-discovery with the movement Westward, in fact, their very first release was titled San Francisco (You got Me). Go West reworks the nineteenth century expression ‘go west young man’ coined by US politician and newspaper editor Horace Greeley. While the sentiment of Greeley’s phrase is rooted in colonial conquest and expansion in the move Westward along the Mississippi River, the Village People’s lyrics instead signify that other movement of men West, the so-called 1970s ‘gay flight’. However, the Village people are a rather problematic group when it comes to sexual politics and it’s a misnomer to think of them as in any way ‘a gay band’ or even properly representative of disco despite their self-conscious fashioning through the iconography of gay machismo and the four-to-the-floor beat. The genesis of the band was a response to an advert in a music paper that read "Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache". As an eventual pop realisation of disco the Village People were eschewed by gay culture proper and would rarely if ever be heard in the legendary discos because the Village People was actually a bit naff and rather embarrassing. More importantly, the Village People were often tight lipped on homosexuality in interviews (most of them it turns out were straight) despite being sold as an idolatory vision of popular gay macho stereotypes. Thus, despite being explicitly if parodisitic in their visual presentation of gayness and macho vocal posturing, a band name that alludes to New York’s Greenwich Village, and suggestive lyrics focusing on gay culture (Cruisin') and gay positive expressions (I am what I am), the Village People’s apparent homosexuality (which I imagine is axiomatic of how most people interpret the act) was nothing more than smoke and mirrors with good musical production.

The meaning of the Village People’s later songs were expressed in a double-voiced strategy (lyrics mean different things to different people) but the group were certainly anchored through the stereotypical way in which different iconic forms of American masculinity such as the cowboy become a fancy dress version of gay erotica in popular culture writ large. However, when images of cloned up cowboys are couched in lyrics that celebrate the West as a gay utopia it continues to foment the West and the cowboy through liberation and freedom. California was the new frontier for gay America and it just so happens that some of those men were free to dress in ways that channel the apparent freedom the cowboy represents recasting the horizon as a sexual frontier. What is important here is that the Village People’s song that suggests going West ‘where the air is free, we'll be what we want to be’ is grounded in discourses of the West and the cowboy thus bringing together a historical moment in American post-stonewall gay identity, the continuing movement of men westward, and an ongoing tradition of a male-male relations in Western lore. Furthermore, this western dance music fantasy continues well after disco to include Divine’s Walk Like A Man (1984) Erasure’s Who Needs Love Like That (1985), and more recently the knowingly homoerotic rodeo styling (clothes by Dsquared - S/S 2006 picture below) of Madonna’s Don’t Tell Me (2000).

(Image Credits - Casablanca Records; Dsquared; Permissions)

A Conference Report on American Independent Cinema

At the beginning of May (8 -10th) an international conference on American Independent Cinema organised by Yannis Tzioumakis (University of Liverpool) and Claire Molloy (Liverpool John Moores) took place at the Liverpool Screen School. American Independent Cinema was the first conference of its kind devoted to the subject and not surprisingly it turned out to be a highly focused, intellectually stimulating and hotly contested topic that provided many friendly disagreements on what might constitute the independence of the title. If anything the debate over definitions and discourses proves what a vibrant subject area this is and no doubt will be for years to come. The conference also served to house the launch of the book series American Indies that I co-edit with conference organiser Yannis Tzioumakis.

The conference was spread over three days with parallel panels punctuated by keynotes from a roster of scholars on American cinema including Janet Staiger (University of Texas – Austin), Peter Kramer (University of East Anglia), Warren Buckland (Oxford Brookes), and Geoff King (Brunel). Conference paper topics and keynotes were diverse in their topics and methodologies from poverty row Tarzans to mumblecore, archival research, data mining, and good old-fashioned textual analysis. Most participants topics gestured towards a number of tensions and topoi upon which the future study of American Independent Cinema might find direction. The major, yet overlapping, division was between on the one hand, a perspective that sees American independent cinema in terms of art and authorship, and the other hand, one that sees American Independent Cinema as inseparable from industrial and institutional machinations. Of course both positions have their own merit and synthesize quite well although the latter was where the mature scholarship was mostly demonstrated. What did surprise me most was the waning of identity politics since the cultural and ideological framing that once defined independent luminaries like John Sayles and Todd Haynes (neither it turns out were mentioned) seemed no longer on the agenda therefore, nothing on New Queer Cinema, only two papers on race, a few on women and feminism; but maybe that’s because the identity issue is fairly exhausted in relation to this topic. What the conference did suggest is that there are so many different accounts of what independence means, that its not just industrial, political, and aesthetic but also epistemological since the meaning of American Independent Cinema and what constitutes knowledge about it is always shifting. In many ways the conference also proves that the concept of American Independent Cinema is a bit like the way we think of genre – a triangulated field of meaning between text, audience and industry that (depending on your position) either aligns awkwardly or monolithically.

Goldilocks (aka Amanda Holden) and the Three Bears.

Last night (Friday 29th) I was privy with millions of other television viewer’s to a camp spectacle on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent. This spectacle was called The Dreambears. Three twenty-something chubby gay men camping about on stage doing all manner of pirouettes, arrières, and changement de pieds; all this is choreographed to the Weather Girls Its Raining Men. Why is it worth blogging about? My answer is not The Dreambears attempt at ballet (or burlesque or Bob Fosse) which of course is fine rather, I’m bothered by the way in which prime-time television negotiates and mutes the subcultural aspects of their bear-ness in order to make gayness hyper-legible to the audiences through terms they are more familiar with. The Dreambears are not off the hook either since they are in part complicit in their own camp debasement as the first prime-time bears. This legibility in their performance is achieved through the erasure of the bear’s subcultural aspects that then work to contain the potential of bear masculinity to be viewed as completely ordinary, unfussy, and ultimately boring for TV. The way Britain’s Got Talent erases the bear, except in name, was manifold in three strategies that disrupt the bears’ literal masculine definition of themselves as the man’s man version of gayness. Here are a few observations.

Strategy 1. Make them look as camp as possible. Dress all the bears up as Daffyd from Little Britain in ultra tight PVC shorts and sparkly union jack vests. The Dreambears mention the costume department’s role in bringing us this tired vision. As an extra note one should observe that known gay presenters on television (the BBC holy trinity of Graham Norton, Dale Winton and John Barrowman) are compelled to wear sparkly, glittery, reflective, and garishly patterned suits as a semiotic articulation of their prime-time gayness which otherwise remains unspeakable.

Strategy 2. Deal with their fatness. Since the bear’s chubbiness is considered to be erotically appealing within the subculture it’s important to disavow this central aspect of bear identity by making them look silly as fat bodies out of place. Put them in camp outfits five sizes too small and make them do ballet that ought to do the trick. Did I mention that the connection to the Weather Girls It’s Raining Men is not just about music also but also corpulent excess?

Strategy 3. It’s really got nothing to do with sex. Bear subculture is also predicated on a sexual hierarchy based on age, size and ways of communicating within those hierarchized relations through terms such as ‘daddy’ and verbs like ‘to paw’ and ‘to maul’. In the first instance, The Dreambears look like cubs to me and have not yet graduated to being fully-fledged big daddy bears. If you didn’t know already bears tend to be stout gay men, preferable hirsute but not essential, accommodating of a wide but hierarchical age range (which is then divided into cubs, otters, wolves, polar bears etc). An oversimplification of their self-promotion would suggest that bears often shun the apparent narcissistic, sissified, slender, fashionable, and consumption-led gays that have often come to represent the stereotypical gay as if bears themselves were not just as regulated as the next queer.


What ITV’s strategies do here (but not forgetting the complicity of The Dreambears) is to work against the potential for these prime-time bears to destabilize normative assumptions between certain alignments of homosexuality and masculinity. In turn, Britain’s Got Talent confirms what people already think they know about homosexuality on television, light entertainment in particular, that is, its only meaningful and acceptable as risible de-sexed camp spectacle (with soaps being the alternative). Something Richard Dyer once wrote is applicable here – “In taking the signs of masculinity and eroticizing them in a blatantly homosexual context, much mischief is done to the security with which ‘men’ are defined in society, and by which their power is secured” (167). It’s precisely this potential for mischief that Britain’s Got Talent attempts to contain in its camping up and desexualisation of a modern gay subculture.

Though Amanda Holden does make a good Goldilocks!


Reference: Richard Dyer (1992) ‘Getting over the rainbow’ in Only Entertainment. London: Routledge.

(Photo credits: frame grab; pinups mag; permissions)

Remembering Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009)

Two brilliant women sadly passed away in April after long battles with cancer. The legendary small screen actress Bea Arthur (1922-2009), whose obituary was of course well publicized, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009), the scholar and activist who revolutionised gay and lesbian studies. Gary Needham and Liz Morrish both pay their tributes to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

It’s now significant that I remember reading Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999) while looking after the grandmother who raised me and who was fading away from (the then unknown) rapid metastasis from breast cancer. I never thought of that affective link between these two influential figures in my life until now. I came to Eve Sedgwick and queer theory on my own in my first year as a postgraduate in Glasgow (in 2000) since it was something that was never taught to me so I never knew what to expect from it, yet, I knew that I ought to start exploring it. Well, I can honestly say queer theory transformed my academic life and purpose, namely the relationship between my identity and what was really the point of being an academic in the first place; a real transformation where film studies (my discipline) was usurped by queer and LGBT studies. I’d probably be writing histories of Italian cinema and obscure movies (not that they aren’t important things to write about) if it wasn’t for the inspiration and insight that I owe to Eve Sedgwick and her books Between Men (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1993), and Touching Feeling (2003). I’m sure we all secretly have our favourite scholars but Eve was different in that she never seemed to be writing from the measured distance of most scholarship. When she wrote, especially in Tendencies, you got the feeling that a good friend was telling you this stuff. There was something about Eve’s writing that felt more like an act of sharing and the joy of her writing and thinking was not only that it was smart, in fact really smart, but that it was heartfelt and honest. So when I read that on the 12th of April Eve had passed away from the same thing as my grandmother I was deeply saddened. Even though I’ve never met Eve Sedgwick, the experience was as if a friend had somehow passed away; that’s the kind of effect that Eve’s writing has on you. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t be the scholar I am without Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. (Gary)

Eve Sedgwick was for me the Martina Navratilova of queer theory, dominating all over the place and queering the disciplines, but mystifyingly, she was not quite entirely queer herself. She leaves a husband of some 40 years. Well, that’s how the straight world might see her, but then Sedgwick’s entire project was to disrupt our expectations and conventional readings, even of the category queer. Perhaps the work which shocked the most was an essay “Jane Austen and the masturbating girl” (1989) which challenges the traditional interpretation of the behaviour of Austen’s characters. Sedgwick was rapidly elevated to queer diva status even as she was reviled by the Right in the US during the ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s. This was a time of divided campuses, when individuals were obliged to take sides. Just admitting to having read Epistemology of the Closet or Tendencies marked you as a queer radical committed to the downfall of Western civilization. Stanley Fish opened up space for alternative literary approaches at Duke and recruited Sedgwick, and she soon gathered around her a group of young thinkers and together they carried queer theory forward to its accepted position in critical theory today. (Liz)

(photo credit: David Shankbone, permissions)

The culture and politics of roller-skating. (Part 2)

Following on from part one on the culture and politics of roller-skating in the 1970s, Gary Needham examines the short-lived roller disco movie.

The Roller-Skating Movie

Like all pop culture fads it was not long before cinema responded to the culture of roller-skating in an effort to quickly cash in and so the roller disco movie was unveiled and three films were quickly produced - Skatetown USA (1979), Roller Boogie (1979), and Xanadu (1980). There had already been films with roller skating sequences such as Shall We Dance (1937) and a few films about roller derby like Kansas City Bomber (1972) starring Raquel Welch but nothing until these three films were about roller-skating as culture. However, the experience of pleasure and speed through roller-skating explored in the first part is really quite difficult for cinema to convey since it’s an embodied feeling rather than something tangible that can be represented in the image like say the thrill of a car chase; in filmic terms we would say that speed is non-indexical. Therefore, the feeling of being liberated through the experience of movement is not something that can be properly signified but the roller-skating films do try to produce for us a feeling of transcendence that equates to the feeling we might imagine the onscreen skaters are experiencing. Cinema thus has to try and create ways in which the speed and pleasure associated with roller-skating can be conveyed to the spectator as transcendent and utopian.

One of the key influences on thinking through this aspect of the topic is Richard Dyer’ s ‘Entertainment and Utopia’ from 1977 (in the collection Only Entertainment). For Dyer, forms of entertainment such as musicals help us escape from the everyday, to quote ‘alternatives, hopes, wishes – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other that what is can be imaged and maybe realized’. While Dyer suggests that entertainment does not really present us with models of a utopian world, rather a text’s utopianism is contained in the feelings it creates for us – the function of certain forms of entertainment like the roller skating movie is to present how a utopia on skates might feel rather than how it might be organised and brought about. Furthermore, in Dyer’s argument utopian qualities (also like that of speed) are often beyond the realm of representation in things such as colour, sound, movement, rhythm, and camerawork all of which are integral components of the roller movie.

While Skatetown USA and Roller Boogie attempt to capture a skaters’ paradise they ultimately fail to suggests what one might do with that utopia now that its reached, and so what begins as an experience of social and gender liberation through speed, is ultimately ground to a halt through the conventions of romantic plotting and an attempt to shoehorn the roller skating picture into the then out-dated romantic conventions of the Hollywood musical. Both films begin with a representation of skater’s utopia but end with the formation of a couple and the loss of the utopian community and symbolically the loss of the female skater’s independence. Her freeform skating style that began as unique bodily expression is soon quashed in favour of a traditional romantic pairing in which she follows the man’s lead in what is effectively a ballroom dance version of roller-skating as she no longer harnesses her own speed but has to willingly depend on the momentum and energy generated by her male partner.

Yet, the opening of Skatetown USA comes as close as possible in capturing the look and the feel of a utopian space; it’s one of the most exciting first five minutes of any movie. Importantly, intensity is created through not just what is onscreen but also what is heard (Patrick Hernandez’s amazing disco stomper Born to be Alive) and how that seeing is in effect organised through highly unusual editing patterns. The film’s opening sequence also draws upon the iconography of science fiction and fantasy in order to render roller-skating and Skatetown as literally out of this world. The editing is unconventional involving at first match cuts and jump cuts on the skater’s body (accompanied by a synthesized popping noise) but also another kind of editing eschewed in Hollywood and mostly used in experimental and avant-garde cinema called strobe cutting. Strobe cutting, in which portions of movement are missing, actually make it appear as if the skating is faster than what the camera can actually capture thus expressing through film those non-indexical sensations of speed.

Like Roller Boogie the film draws on oppositions between the earthly and the otherworldly, transcendent speed and grounded immanence, which, when we think about these films as forms of the musical, is the narrative/numbers tension. This other world, not the utopia but not a dystopia either, is that of the narrative defined as the everyday of work, domesticity and family and where young people are confronted by reality, rules and restrictions. The narrative aspects of these films really slow down the energy and speed associated with skating with deadening immanence; the plot literally grinds skating to a halt since skates are never worn indoors. The romantic scenes, key to the narrative and the formation of the couple (what in the musical is called the dual focus structure), are also off-skate sequences with down tempo music; often removing all other skaters from the scene. Romance becomes exclusive and intimate and seems to be oppositional to the all-inclusive skating utopia suggested at the start of the film. The finale to Roller Boogie also reveals how this dilemma plays out in a conventional manner since the narrative/numbers tension is really something the film cannot work out because of the way the skating numbers are difficult to integrate and progress the narrative component. Therefore, the film ends with recourse to conventional structures of dancing (on skates of course) in which the heterosexual pairing produces movement based on a powerful visual and physical difference in gender that’s more strictly come dancing than skater’s paradise.

I’ll finish here with one critique open for debate that goes something like this - when the woman allows the man to lead in dancing (emulated here on skates) this lays the foundations for an eventual and ongoing gender disparity – letting the man lead and depending on the man for physical support during dancing and skating is a way of establishing a first instance of dependency through movement and the body that may pave the way for other forms of support, i.e. economic. Certain forms of dancing (mimicked in the roller skating pair-off finale) can also be used to regulate gender and sexuality in normative ways and when one gender has to assume the lead and the other gender follows we see in its very logic how inequality is fashioned through pleasure. Its no surprise that these film offer the perfect bridge between the 1970s and the 1980s (a tension they perhaps try to work through) as liberation dissipates in pleasures experienced in wholly solipsistic and apolitical terms.

(photo credits susan miller: permissions)

The culture and politics of roller skating.

Roller discos are back! Most of the main UK cities now offer monthly roller disco nights as an alternative to clubbing. Despite tapping into a day-glo nostalgia for the 1980s (mainly for those to young to remember that decade) the roller disco is really a product of the 1970s. Here Gary Needham explores the culture and politics of the original roller disco culture and its relationship to liberation politics.

PART 1.
One of my current research interests is concerned with the cultural politics of speed and how the experience of speed in the 1970s enabled the production a kind of utopian movement for two oppressed groups; women and gays. In particular, I’m thinking about the relationship between roller skating culture and 1970s liberation politics – how the act of skating and the pleasures of skating can be conceived of as an expression or consequence of a political shift that is embodied through the pleasure of speed, here produced in roller skating activities – the freedom of four wheels is also about freedom in political terms; sexual revolution becomes the revolution of the skater’s wheel; freedom to be yourself (as in gay liberation); freedom from oppressive structures (as in women’s liberation) – thus I want to consider the sense in which these two political revolutions, the women’s movement and the gay movements of the 1970s, literally involve physical, pleasurable and sensational experiences of moving and mobility. Therefore, I want to propose the idea that the emergence of a roller skating phenomenon or craze in the mid to late 1970s, especially among women and gay men, can potentially be read as symptomatic of other process of movement in politics; liberation politics are conceived of in terms of the freedom to move and be seen enjoying the pleasures of movement - the speed of the movement, velocity and energy, the outcome of which is pleasure in varying degrees of intensity can be read politically.
This suggestion is also rooted in need to map out the pleasures of speed in relation to feminist and gay politics; speed as something that is also relevant and essential to thinking about (old fashioned) identity politics and representational strategies; speed as something that can be embodied or at least allows one of its affects to be an embodied pleasure that relates to how one feels gendered and sexually orientated (orientation the word itself suggests a movement to get into the right position or place). I am not arguing that roller-skating is a political activity (although it has been used for breast cancer and AIDS fund raising), or that being on skates one somehow feels feminist rather, I’m suggesting that skating is related to a kind of latent political feeling that things were getting better and moving in a forward direction, that is, the politics of liberation has momentum for gender and sexuality and this can be experienced directly in the body’s actual freedom through movement.

In the experience of roller skating speed is harnessed for speed’s sake. Speed is the consequence of going fast. It is not about getting somewhere or someplace quicker and although it can be used as a method of transport it is more often not. A destination is not the outcome of speed in this instance; speed is not goal orientated, the goal is movement in itself. Speed which is often associated with labour and productivity is here allied to pleasure not product. Emphasis would seem to be on ‘being in the process of speed’, pleasure in movement for the sake of itself. Roller skating produces a form of pleasure in speed that is rapturous, transcendent and liberating because that’s all it needs to be.

Part of this research is also response to the way in which speed is often aligned with masculinity, modernity and certain ways of theorising speed that are implicitly masculine in their undertaking, discursively speaking. Even as a generalisation, in popular culture the car-chase is often constructed as a specifically male pleasure of the cinema and speed is often experienced in ways that have a tendency to favour masculinity; in general things that go fast are often thought to fascinate boys. This implicit gendered division can often be seen in the way female students often guffaw at their male peers extolling of the pleasures of Top Gear. Technologies of speed are often coded as masculine or made readily available to men and the harnessing of speed (in the film of the same name) becomes another macho narrative of mastery and control. In addition to this there is a long history of anxieties around women’s mobility that dates back to the suffragettes on their bicycles and women’s unprecedented visibility in moving through public space (the underlying subject on an early silent film called Traffic in Souls uses the theme of white slavery to keep girls indoors). In The Wizard of Oz we should know Miss Gulch is the wicked witch because during the tornado her bicycle transforms in to a broom as she transforms from spinster to witch; a symbolic precursor for the dykes on bikes movement. Despite being an oversimplification one of the consequences of patriarchy is to restrict and control the movement and mobility of women in order to maintain distinctly gendered division between the private and the public, home and work, masculine and feminine, productivity and leisure. In short, speed and movement have political implications that are intimately tied to gendered and sexual identities. The emergence of roller skating as a phenomenon in the 1970s seems to be a particular liberatory response to a long history of anxieties and pleasures around movement, speed, the body and identity.

In Part 2 Gary Needham examines the roller disco movie.

(Photo credit Hilly Blue: permissions)

Work in Progress Papers: Diva Debts

Gary Needham will be presenting a paper entitled 'Diva Debts: The "Value" of Queerness in I Seen Beyonce at Burger King'.

This work in progress paper examines the videos of queer hip-hop artist Cazwell in order to demonstrate the ongoing relevance and diversification of queer theory. The value of queerness here is in a critique of capital’s reification of homonormativity yet, this effect also relates assimilative identities to the question of value in terms of capital. The outsider Cazwell is interesting because he also demarcates queer and homonormative forms of music culture through his mocking of Beyonce and the unquestioned politics of diva worship and the theme of diva debt.

What underpins this work is a larger interest in how queer theory can make sense of capital’s relationship to homonormativity, especially the potential for queerness and queer cultural production to act as a disorganising process that takes to task the economic factors that produce more than willing homonormative cultures and subjects.

The paper takes place on Wednesday March 18, 12.00-1.00pm in GEE219, Clifton Campus, NTU.
(Photo credit: Osei Thompson. Permissions.)

Swimming in Queer Theory - Judith Halberstam@Warwick (Part 2)

Following the queer theory workshop and lunch (Part 1), Liz Morrish and Gary Needham attended a formal presentation by Judith Halberstam on the subject of the cut and collage in queer/feminist art.

This paper followed of from some of the issues and artists previously discussed in Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005). Halberstam offered an analysis of several feminist/queer artists including Kara Walker and Yoko Ono. What interested Halberstam was the way in which collage, re-inscription and cutting are central devices in these artists’ practice. What drew Halberstam to cutting and collage is the way in which the practice re-organizes meaning through juxtapositions and absences which could be thought of as queer. Halberstam urged us to consider through various works the moments when subjects become illegible thus unreadable, unknowable, and resistant, subjects who refuse to cohere and subject who embrace passivity as a form of agency. Gary thinks some of this connects quite well with some earlier 1990s queer work in photography (namely Della Grace Volcano and Catherine Opie) in which the subject’s gender becomes illegible and unreadable and includes in the canon images of Judith/Jack Halberstam. The conclusion drawn from Halberstam’s presentation also returned us to the queer theory workshop from earlier that morning, in that, Halberstam asked the audience to consider the possibility of embracing negativity and passivity as viable political acts of resistance for queers. The larger framing of Halberstam’s new work in queer theory would seem to suggests that queerness is (and should be) “the problem of the subject itself”.
(photo credit: Arbitrary.Marks/Colleen Keating)

Swimming in Queer Theory - Judith Halberstam@Warwick (Part 1)

Liz Morrish and Gary Needham participated in a day of queer theory events on the 16th February organised by Cath Lambert and led by Judith Halberstam; these included a queer theory workshop, lunch, and a formal paper on queer and feminist art.

The morning session workshop was on trends in queer theory in which Judith Halberstam identified several new avenues of exploration that she saw as the vanguard in recent queer scholarship. The workshop was structured around three readings that the participants (about 20 of us) had been given in advance. These were the introductory chapters to Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Rod Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique (2004), and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer Theory (2007). Usefully, Halberstam effortlessly teased out the main arguments from each of these introductions in order to pose much broader questions about the direction queer theory might be heading over the next few years. We feel they are worth summarising here.

Edelman’s No Future is by now a well-rehearsed critique of the normative effects of temporality that reveals how the figure of the child functions as the lynchpin of a future defined solely in reproductive and familial terms. Queerness occupies the side of those ‘not fighting for the children’ thus queers are defined as future-negating. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black proposes critique of US sociology that defines as aberrant everything which lies outside of the white family. Queer theory, then, must acknowledge its genealogy and affiliation with women of color feminism in order to develop a queer of color analysis. Ferguson’s work not only racializes queer theory’s implicit whiteness but also seeks to undo the rigid disciplinarity that has often kept the study of race and sexuality separate from one another. Finally, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward suggests that is too early for queers to turn away from the shame, and recommends we engage in a ‘backward looking’ as a way to investigate the shame which is part of our history and identity. Even in an era that celebrates gay pride, there are those traces – structures of feeling – that leave an indelible trace of shame. Shame thus “lives on in pride” despite attempts to appropriate it as a reverse discourse.

Judith Halberstam prompted us into group discussion in order to think about how the future of queer theory (paradoxically based on concepts of backwardness and negativity). The questions that came out of these complex arguments were to get us thinking about how we (as queers) might embrace a negative impulse in directly political terms as a form of resistance to the prevailing social order. Halberstam also asked could we find a way out of melancholia, shame and negativity – and what are the political alternatives and what are the other legacies we can activate? How can we imagine a queer future in the absence of ‘the Child’? Can we also speak of a queer affectivity? If the goals of queer theory have been to shatter, resist, disrupt - what other projects can we claim for queer theory?

While the workshop did raise more questions than it could possible answer it proved a useful overview of some recent trends in queer theory and the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves especially if we are to maintain queer theory as a distinctly political and relevant form of critique and analysis.

Liz found Judith Halberstam terrific and likewise Gary was impressed by the effortlessness with which she brought together these three distinct debates in queer theory. Unlike so many queer theory divas, Judith was approachable, unselfconscious, interested and extremely skilled at managing a discussion with participants at different levels of understanding. Over lunch Liz discovered, much to her delight, that Judith was a major swim-head with an obsession about water that rivalled her own. Given Liz’s readings of Halberstam’s Female Masculinity and Drag King Book not to mention the various articles on butchness, FTM and transgender – indeed, given Liz’s reading of Judith super-cool masculine physical self-presentation – Liz was intrigued at the idea of negotiating a pool with Judith (what swim attire would she wear?) and of course the women’s locker room. Cursing herself for not bringing her cozzie, Liz realised she wasn’t going to find out experientially, so she asked Judith instead. They discussed the practices, paradoxes, concealments and confoundings of gender in the swimming environment. Fascinating stuff. What a duo and what a challenge to gender normativity. Liz will always regret not swimming with Judith Halberstam. And off Judith went to turn heads in the Warwick pool leaving Liz to debate Warwick’s campus cuisine with Gary.
(photo credit: Arbitrary.Marks/Colleen Keating)