Julie & Julia

With next week's UK release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, Joanne Hollows reflects on the movie's roots and what the cookery writer and TV cook Julia Child might be able to offer feminism.

The first blog I ever read was The Julie/Julia Project. I can no longer remember how I found it – I may have read about it or I may have been idly googling Julia Child. But I spent hours messing around on a rather unforgiving website following Julie Powell’s epic quest to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. A ‘government drone by day, renegade foodie by night’ in a ‘crappy outer borough kitchen’ with a fondness for Buffy and a nice line in digs at the Bush administration, Julie may not have pleased the purists but she made me a hell of a lot more interested in Julia Child and gave me a significant number of laughs along the way. And when I read about Child’s death, Julie’s site was my first port of call where (with a developing tear in my eye) I read Julie’s response to the news and her celebration of what Julia meant to her.

'Julia was so impressive, so instructive, so exhilarating, because she was a woman, not a goddess. Julia didn’t create armies of drones, mindlessly equating her name with taste and muttering ‘It’s a Good Thing’ under their minty breath. Instead she created feisty, buttery adventurous cooks, always diving into the next possible disaster because, goddammit, if Julia did it, so could we.'

If this was my introduction to blogging, then I now find myself blogging about next week’s release in the UK of the film (Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia) of the book (Julie and Julia) of the Julie/Julia Project. Not being the kind of blogger who gets invited to movie premieres I haven’t seen it – and I fear it because its a Meryl Streep star vehicle which might threaten to be more about the actress than Julie or Julia.

My own route out of the Julie/Julia Project was rather different. I’d been thinking about why second-wave feminism had refused domesticity rather than attempting to re-think what it might mean for feminism. One of the most obvious answers (although not the only one) lay in one of the foundational texts of second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), published two years after Mastering and the same year Child first appeared on TV in The French Chef. Both Friedan and Child had clear, but very different, ideas about the role of domestic consumption but were unified in their dislike of the figure of the housewife. So (in a Carrie Bradshaw-esque way) I got to thinking about whether feminism could learn something about domesticity from Julia Child (and – at the risk of product placement - a rather more extensive comparison of the two women appears here).

Although Camille Paglia has called Julia Child ‘a great feminist’, my interest in her was how she imagined a form of domestic femininity that could inhabit the kitchen without being a housewife. Child’s opening gambit in Mastering is: ‘This is a book for the servantless cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, timetables, children’s meals, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.’ (Beck et al: 13) In this way, Child disidentifies with the need to care for others and maintain an appropriately feminine body that characterized the work of the housewife.

Betty Friedan attacked the trend (closely associated with Child) for ‘elaborate recipes with the puréed chestnuts, water-cress and almonds take longer than broiling lamb chops’ (p. 231), arguing that it not only sapped the housewife’s energy but also tied her more closely into what she saw as the housewife’s key role, consuming. But while Friedan saw gourmet cookery as a means of masking the drudgery of housework, Child saw it as its antidote. Rather than a form of alienated labour, Child saw cooking as a labour of love of cooking itself rather than love for other people. Whereas Friedan saw people like Child as catering to the housewife, Child strongly disidentified with the role. When asked to reflect on her early audience, Child denied that she had been addressing what she called ‘the stupid housewife’, claiming that ‘my audience is not la ménagére, but anyone interested in cooking, no matter the sex or age or profession.’ (cited in Fitch: 293). Indeed, she also claimed on another occasion that ‘our programme is for people who really like to cook… plain old housewives get plenty of encouragement and recipes from the daily newspapers.’ (cited in Drake Mcfeeley, 122).

Nonetheless, Julia Child differs from second-wave feminist constructions of domesticity. While she presents a mode of femininity based on a refusal of the housewife, she does not refuse domestic femininity. Furthermore, through her conception of culinary practice, she blurs the distinction between public and private, and between labour and consumption, divorcing domestic practice from the singular gendered identity of the housewife. Betty Friedan was clearly an important figure in shaping assumptions about domestic consumption within second-wave feminism. However, if contemporary feminism is to find a means of thinking about domestic femininity and domestic consumption without continual recourse to the figure of the housewife, then we might have something to learn from Julia Child.
(Photo credit: mamichan. Permissions)

Summer Reading: Bad Girls Go Everywhere

In the first of a new series of pieces which we've called Summer Reading (our thoughts on things we're reading during the 'vacation' which inform our teaching and research rather than tips for the beach!), Joanne Hollows discusses Jennifer Scanlon's new biography of Helen Gurley Brown.


As I try to ease myself into a new research project about second-wave feminist identities, I’ve been reading Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere (Oxford 2009), a biography of Helen Gurley Brown (author of Sex and the Single Girl, long-term editor of the US edition of Cosmopolitan). While the story of Brown’s life is a great read, there is also another story here about histories of feminism. Identifying herself as a feminist, Brown nonetheless has been written out of histories of second-wave feminism and Cosmo, along with Brown herself, was frequently represented as the ‘other’ of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s. The book therefore represents an important intervention in debates about feminism and/in popular culture. While many narratives of ‘popular feminism’ identify how feminism entered the mainstream from the 1980s onwards, Scanlon identifies how many of the issues associated with feminism were promoted within Cosmo in the 1960s. The kind of popular feminism developed by Brown might have been deeply problematic in the eyes of second-wave feminists but it also managed to bring feminist concerns – about the workplace, sexuality and financial independence - to a much wider audience (and this makes good reading alongside Megan Le Masurier’s recent work on the history of Cleo magazine in Australia).

Scanlon also identifies a clear relationship between the Gurley Brown brand of feminism and more recent forms of ‘girly’ feminism, identified with the ‘third-wave’ and located in what are often referred to as ‘post-feminist’ texts such as Sex and the City. From such a perspective, while Carrie and her friends might represent ‘feminism undone’ to some feminist critics, they might also represent a continuation of the earlier forms of ‘popular feminism’ that have their roots in publications such as Cosmo. While this might not meet the rigorous demands of second-wave feminism – and Scanlon clearly identifies some of the more problematic aspects of Brown’s politics – Brown had a key role to play in the mainstreaming of feminist demands for reproductive rights, equal pay, independence and the right to sexual pleasure. Furthermore, Scanlon suggests that Brown’s imagined audience of ‘Cosmo girls’ reached a wider audience – in terms of class if not perhaps ‘race’ – than more ‘official’ forms of feminism did in the period.

There is some useful stuff here too for people interested in feminist debates about sexuality, the magazine industry, fashion and beauty (and there are productive parallels between Scanlon’s position and Linda Scott’s arguments in Fresh Lipstick on the latter). I found the chapter which compared Gurley Brown’s brand of feminism with Betty Friedan particularly illuminating. A lot has been written in recent years about Friedan in feminist cultural studies but Scanlon not only made this fresh but she also made some great points about the different women’s positions in relation to both consumption and domesticity. While Friedan’s critique of consumer culture is well-known (and became something of a commonsense in second-wave feminism), Gurley Brown advocated that women should enjoy the rewards of working in their ability to spend money on themselves (although she was far more strict about how single girls approached money management!) In many ways this parallels some of the debates currently taking place within feminist media studies about consumer culture and post-feminism. Some of these pieces are currently on my ‘to read’ pile (e.g. McRobbie’s recent article, ‘Young Women and Consumer Culture’) alongside Scanlon’s reflections on Gurley Brown’s legacy in Feminist Media Studies and Women’s Studies.

But given that this is also a really readable and enjoyable biography, you could also probably take it to the seaside too!
(Photo Credit: SwanDiamondRose. 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)

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)