Empathy and Iconicity, cont’d

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

My most recent post on Lefèvre’s and Guibert’s The Photographer received some insightful, but contentious, comments that I haven’t had a chance to respond to. And since I don’t have much else to post about at the moment (copies of Chloé Cruchaudet’s Mauvais Genre and Rutu Modan’s The Property are both in the mail), I will respond belatedly to these comments, which came from Noah and Suat, here in the form of a post.

Didier Lefèvre, Le Photographe

Noah’s comment:

I think there’s in general a question about whether empathy in these situations is helpful or useful. I think Suat wrote about this recently; engaging the West’s attention/sympathy isn’t always such a great thing for people experiencing war or human rights violations. Sometimes having us pay attention or having us put ourselves in your place is really dangerous/bad. (I think in general the Middle East probably wishes we’d stop paying attention to them, for example.) So, I guess I wonder whether the combination of photography/comics really changes the ethical calculus all that much. Obviously, failing to help a little girl in front of you is pretty repulsive, but framing the issue in terms of “if you don’t help you’re repulsive” — is that accurate? Or does art’s tendency to make geopolitical issues into a personal “you-must-help!” actually increase our tendency to try to solve other people’s problems by dropping bombs on them?

Probably the biggest thing we could do to help people in need throughout the world is (a) open our borders, and (b) end our crop subsidies. Neither of those really have much to do with representing the suffering of others in comics or photographs…which I agree raises really uncomfortable ethical questions.

Suat’s piece on the Walking Dead does make a powerful argument along these lines and I agree completely that humanitarian aid projects often hide pernicious forms of cultural and economic imperialism, whether you’re talking about immediately harmful cases such as US evangelicals driving hate legislation in Uganda or, more subtly, the way in which humanitarian aid from NGOs in post-conflict states like Sudan and Liberia has eroded their sovereignty by creating economic and political dependency. And certainly much of the funding for these humanitarian aid projects is generated through photography, video, copywriting, and art that aim to draw sympathy from their Western donors. So it is actually important, even necessary, that we be suspicious of cartoonists and photographers such as Lefèvre and Guibert (and while we’re at it, why not add Guy de Lisle, Joe Sacco, and company, to the list?) who deal in ethnographically oriented representations that seek an empathetic response from their readerships. But I don’t think the fact that discourses of humanitarian empathy are co-opted by American imperialist politics should lead us to dismiss or abandon artistic projects that elicit empathy towards those who suffer in faraway places. If anything, it should be the opposite.

However, it also doesn’t excuse artists from being uninformed about the perverse global circuits of “empathetic” Western cultural imperialism in which their work will inevitably find itself complicit. And so I guess another way of saying this is that what I meant by “ethical response” is very different from an impulse to simply donate or volunteer at, say, Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. I mean it in a more absolute sense, I suppose. A fully ethical response would involve exactly the kind of delicate critical concern that Noah’s comment demanded. Of course, one can only fail in the face of such an absolute demand but this shouldn’t stop people from working towards it. I also agree completely with Noah’s point that opening borders and ending crop subsidies (or de-commodifying food) would make a more meaningful impact on people in need throughout the world. But the world of representation and the world of “ethical action” are always caught in a dialectic with one another, so we shouldn’t pretend that they can be thought of separately.

Guy Delisle, Pyongyang

Suat’s response to Noah’s comment:

Scott McCloud’s assertions about the iconicity of simple cartoon drawings are one of his more lasting contributions arising from Understanding Comics but I would also say that they are quite unprovable (how many things are in art?). In fact, from my point of view, the idea is anecdotally false or at least constitutes only a small part of the equation. For example, I found Persepolis thoroughly unmoving but found the Iranian movie, A Separation, considerably more humanistic and emotionally engaging. At least part of this is down to Satrapi’s poor cartooning skills. The idea that readers give life to stripped down iconic forms is nice but fanciful.

Similarly, Noah will be glad to hear that Lefevere and Guibert’s War Photographer stands very little chance of engaging anyone’s empathy. It’s been a few years since I read it but the lasting impression I have of it is my sheer irritation at the reading experience. For one, Guibert goes out of his way to make Lefevere a thoroughly unlikable person especially in the second part of the comic. More importantly, as is made clear in your article, the comic is entirely obsessed with his work as a photographer. It’s very much a “look at me” kind of comic. It has very little time for the people being photographed and one would be better served reading a book on the subject. I think this may be a subset of the self-centeredness elaborated on at length later in the comic.

I do agree that Lefèvre is almost as unlikable as Kevin Carter. But the narrative does insist on outlining a process of self-mortification and eventual transformation, which makes him, at the very least, forgivable. More importantly, I wasn’t trying to argue that Lefèvre is a sympathetic character. I think of him rather as a kind of focal point for the reader’s empathy towards the Afghani war wounded during the Soviet War. I might go as far as to say that it is somehow Lefèvre’s failure to be a good person that opens up a space for the reader’s empathy towards the latter’s photographic subjects. (And of course, the depiction and thematization of this failure is only possible through the addition of Guibert’s drawn panels).

Jean-Philippe Stassen, Deogratias

As for iconicity, I don’t know how to defend my use of the term other than by calling on my own reading experience, which may not be generalizable. I do however believe that a correlation between iconicity and reader empathy might be proven through some sort of psychological experiment. Reader empathy has already been the subject of psychological experimentation, experimental designs are already in place, and it wouldn’t be too hard to add “iconicity” to the mix of variables, so why not? But I also don’t think iconicity is the only mechanism through which readers give life to drawn figures in comics and I worry that I may have sounded as if that’s what I think by opposing photographic realism and cartoon iconicity in such stark terms. And I certainly don’t think that iconicity is necessarily a defining characteristic of comics. Some of the most moving graphic novels I’ve read are those of Edmond Baudoin, which are more painterly than iconic. Let me add that my interest in these questions comes less from the angle of formal definitions concerning the nature of the medium than from the angle of empathetic reading. I’m interested in how it is that artists engage the empathy, and to a further extent, the ethical responsibility, of their readers. So I will need to reframe the question to reflect that better.

Edmond Baudoin, Éloge de la poussière

Godzilla: The Emotionally Reticent Engine That Could

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Rahawa Haile

Spoilers ahead!

Pacific Rim. Star Trek: Into Darkness. Godzilla. Poor San Francisco can’t seem to catch a break come blockbuster season. The lure of icons such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Chinatown (and their distance from 9/11’s New York) inevitably beckon destruction-oriented filmmakers to its western shores. This time, Godzilla director Gareth Edwards has crafted one of the most visually stimulating and unabashedly iconic action films of the decade, largely through repeated juxtapositions of scale and an avoidance of familial tropes. As far as cinematic wonder goes, more than Pacific Rim, more than any of the recent crop of superhero films, Godzilla is this young generation’s Jurassic Park. And it is far, far better.

After an ominous opening scene in the Philippines the film cuts to Bryan Cranston’s idyllic Japanese home. Among the first words we hear from him is the name “Takashi” (a nod to Gojira’s Takashi Shimura). It is 15 years in the past. Both Cranston and his wife, played by Juliette Binoche, are engineers, and Cranston is arguing on the phone with a co-worker at the nuclear power plant. There have been recent unaccountable seismic tremors. Inevitably, disaster strikes. While Cranston survives, Binoche does not. Their final, poignant exchange is the first and last emotional buoy offered by the film.

In the present, Cranston and his estranged son Ford (played by Kick-Ass’s Aaron Taylor-Johnson) return to the now-quarantined location that fractured their family. The underground tremors have started again, and the cause they discover that night is the first of two towering MUTOs, “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms,” this one fitted with wings.

Counter to popular opinion, I found Cranston’s early death to be one of Edwards’s shrewdest decisions, because by far the most atypical — and highly productive– aspect of this blockbuster is its near-total disregard for family. To put it in other words, no one really gets to have one. First Cranston watches his wife die. Then Cranston’s son watches him die. Ford, now an orphaned Navy lieutenant whose specialty is disarming bombs, essentially navigates the film alone. While several of his lines involve an obligatory mouthing of the words “my family,” referring to a wife and son, we get all of five minutes of screentime with the three of them sharing the same frame. They are a distant hope in the movie rather than a constant, screeching, helpless, about-to-die-and-must-be-defended presence.

As a viewer, the above is a kindness, but it also means our hero needn’t spend the majority of his time awkwardly trying to win or protect anyone of emotional value; for two hours, he is simply trying not to die. There is no need to “get the girl”; Ford is already married. He needn’t win his father’s approval; his father wins his and then perishes. For all intents and purposes, Godzilla is two things: the hero and the monsters. It invests emotional resonance almost exclusively in its harrowing action and suspense, and it is understandable why this may not be enough for many. I’ve previously touched upon the difference in action of blockbusters devoid of romance (e.g., G.I. Joe: Retaliation, White House Down). Briefly, it provides fewer action-unspecific opportunities for the audience to cringe (recent Spock/Uhura dialogue) or dismiss the film outright due to “a lack of chemistry.” It untethers the action of the film from the failings of skeletal characters, who are in Godzilla unfortunately abundant.

By far the film’s biggest failing is its dismissiveness of supporting characters. Ken Watanabe, here playing the Resident Asian, is reduced to a series of inane sound bites and furrowed brows. That Ford, our cookie-cutter American hero, temporarily adopts a Dominican Bucky does nothing to ease the discomfort of viewing a San Francisco somehow lacking in people of color.

However, while Ford is a product of the military, in Godzilla he is not a propagandized vehicle for the military. He stands alone, unattached to the brothership of kin or a military unit. There are guns, of course — pointless, pointless guns — but the film lacks the overt thrust of previous years’ draft-baiting behemoths; it makes people shooting at the unfamiliar look both useless and boring.

What the film does well is thrill unarmed. Men lie supine on elevated train tracks as a MUTO observes them from below. We watch others leap out of planes and into the statistical improbability of their survival. In short, there is an emphasis on the power of individual scenes rather than narrative sequences. Paired with tremendous sound design, these moments are nothing short of poetic. Shots of a train derailing and sailing into black waters, for example, are closer in nuance to Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping than any number of Godzilla’s cinematic peers.

Which is to say the following: sound saves this film. (As does humor. What else can one make of the dystopian-“When Doves Cry” music video outtake of one MUTO courting another with a long-stemmed hydrogen bomb?) Akira Ifukube’s Gojira score is one of the most widely revered auralscapes in the arena of monster films, which makes Alexandre Desplat’s triumph as Godzilla’s composer 60 years later all the more jawdropping. Counter to my complaints last December about the homogenous low-end belching of recent action scores, Desplat employs diverse, frequently non-Western instruments and motifs from start to finish. On the technical end, there are countless aural rack focuses between the sound effects of mayhem and the subtle devastations of the score. While the majority of the conversation regarding juxtaposition of scale has been of a visual nature, the aural interplay of diagetic catastrophe and nondiagetic grace is its own cinematic achievement, particularly in a genre so ensconced in turgid walls of noise.

No argument for or against this film can avoid the topic of destruction. Its last half hour is dedicated almost exclusively to the anticipated fight between Godzilla and the two MUTOs. Amid fires and the rippling sheets of falling buildings, Godzilla appears to viewers as a sentinel of impenetrable ash. The difference between this final battle and the Kryptonian-on-Kryptonian demolition-braun of Man of Steel is in the absence of millions running for their lives. San Francisco’s victims are prepared, desperate for their shelters to make it through the night. Do any of these people believe a nuclear bomb can destroy monsters that feed on radiation? Probably not, and neither does the audience.

Despite an engaging display of hand-to-hand monster combat (hey, it’s harder than it looks), Godzilla’s lack of motive for saving humanity comes across as poor writing gone worse, the inevitable oversight in plot symptomatic of so many CGI erections (every action film has one). After Godzilla saves the city and lumbers back into the sea, any frustration with Ford as a character playing a human — rather than the other way around — is replaced with frustration over Godzilla used as a deus ex machina in his own film. Endings aren’t easy, but laziness with a titular character is just begging for criticism, especially after coming so far.

Men, Women, and Virgins

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Much of the discussion around the recent murders at Santa Barbara has centered around the fact that the killer, Elliot Rodger, was a virgin, and wrote a manifesto in which he linked his rage and violence to the fact that he had not had sex. Some media outlets have labeled him as the “virgin killer”, and others have talked about how virginity weighs on men.

As somebody who was a virgin into my late 20s, I agree that virginity can be painful for men. But I think it’s important to realize that it doesn’t just weigh on men. The idea that men, in particular, are diminished when they are virgins, or that men, in particular, are sad and lonely in their teen years, risks falling into Rodger’s warped view of the world, in which women are only important, or only thought of, in relation to male desires — as sexual objects who satisfy men or make men miserable, but don’t have any desires or problems themselves.

The truth is, there are many women, just like there are many men, who are virgins into their late teens and beyond. One of them was my friend, Megan (a pseudonym). She and I talked last week about virginity, gender, and miosygny.

Noah: So, I guess I thought I’d start by asking you why you don’t like the term “virgin”?

Megan: It’s just horribly binaristic. Women are this and men are that, women’s bodies do this and men’s bodies do that. What does “virgin” MEAN, anyway? One who has never had vaginal sex? That’s the common definition. But there are plenty of situations in which a person could be sexually active, sexually FULFILLED even, without vaginal sex being involved.

Basically, I feel like I “lost my virginity” 5 years before I started having vaginal sex.

At about 13-14 years old, I reacted to my first understanding of misogyny, and what it does, and how I didn’t do a fucking thing to deserve it, by thinking that I could slip the noose if I just distanced myself from femininity, as far as I possibly could. I think a lot of girls do that. Some women keep doing it their whole lives. I just tried as hard as I could not to be perceived as female. I remember something that happened when I was about 16–I made a comment about a guy, somebody I thought was cute, and a male friend of mine who was a couple years older was just horrified at the idea that I actually had a sexuality. So I guess I did a pretty good job going full tomboy. The end result was, I didn’t fuck anybody as a teenager, or in college. I went on a couple of dates. I let a guy see my tits once. He didn’t really like me that much.

Then, when I was 22, I went to get my first pap smear, and found out that I had a hymen that was basically made out of Teflon, and would have to be removed surgically, under general anesthesia, if I ever wanted to have vaginal sex.

So it was just as well I’d always been uncomfortable with my femininity and clueless about how to interest guys sexually.

I went ahead and had the surgery, when I was 22, but then–this sounds so stupid–it took me five whole years to actually figure out how vaginal sex worked. How to get it in, you know? I just had no experimentation period whatsoever before that point. I could never even wear a tampon.

So, the way I feel about it is, I stopped being a virgin when I was 22, pre-surgery, and had an orgasm for the first time with somebody else in the room. That’s basically my working definition of virginity. But if that’s the definition, then virgin birth is actually really common.

I mean, obviously we need words to explain our sexual history to each other. But I think “I have no sexual experience” or “I’ve done X but not Y” are perfectly good replacements for “I’m a virgin.”

Noah: Talking about how you feel that the term “virgin” doesn’t fit your experience reminds me of my own struggles with terminology around being a virgin. Specifically, through college, and into my 20s, I would wonder, somewhat idly, if I really counted as heterosexual, or if the term fit. I wasn’t having sex with anyone, it didn’t feel like I was every going to have sex with anyone, did I count as heterosexual? Obviously you look back and say, well that’s ridiculous, but I think it gets at the way that labels, and narratives about how identity works or what you should be can produce lots of anxieties in lots of different ways when you don’t fit into the mold the way you’re supposed to.

I was curious about that too, from your perspective. I’ve talked a bit in my pieces about this about how a lot of anxiety around being a virgin, for me, was less some sort of physical or emotional need per se and more about feeling like I just wasn’t doing things right, like I wasn’t being a man correctly. And I suspect that’s why it’s hard for guys to acknowledge often in these conversations that female virgins even exist. or that girls can’t have sex anytime they want, automatically. Failing to have sex in the right way seems like it’s so tied up with not being a man in the right way, so then, girls don’t have to be men, so how could they have a problem here?

I guess I’m curious what pressures you felt in terms of having sex. It seems sort of complicated, since you were saying that at least for a while you were actively trying to not be a girl by not being sexual, or by being a tomboy. Was there some point where that stopped and you felt like you weren’t performing femininity correctly? Or were you anxious or depressed about not having sex until your twenties?

Megan: Oh God, yeah, so anxious and depressed!

The whole thing about being a tomboy was that maybe it helped me avoid the gaze of some sexual predators in high school–I know they were there, they preyed on my friends–but I was still (mostly) heterosexual, and I wanted male attention, and femininity was all guys seemed to look at. I was invisible, for better or worse.

But I wasn’t completely invisible. There were a couple of guys who did look at me. They weren’t the guys I wanted. I think that’s the case with almost everybody, even the UCSB shooter–there’s probably someone in the world who’ll fuck you. You might not see them, for whatever reason. They might not be up to your standards. You might have completely unrealistic standards, like most misogynists do.

The unrealistic standards that the PUAHate crowd think women hold men to are nothing in comparison to the stringency of their own fantasy standards for women.

It occurs to me that the PUAHate crowd are projecting their own hatred of femininity onto women, by assuming that hypermasculinity is the only thing women desire. They have no idea what women want. How could they know? They can’t even hear us when we talk.

I never wanted an alpha male. I never wanted money or a nice car or great big biceps. I like smart guys who wear glasses and care about art and can make me laugh.

Noah: Ha! I don’t think that’s especially unusual.

I think for me at least it wasn’t just about the wrong standards. There was a woman or two maybe who was interested in me who I wasn’t interested in, but there were also a number of women who were interested, who I thought were attractive and would have been happy to date.

But I just couldn’t figure out the cues. Like, not with great frequency or anything, but a few times, a woman would ask me out, and we’d go out, and we’d have a good time…and that would be the end of it more or less because I was too shy to try to kiss them when I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. You sort of talk about this a little, but at some point the actual physical mechanics, and not knowing how they work, becomes this huge barrier. Which I think has a lot to do with the expectation (self-expectation as much as anything) that you’re supposed to know what you’re doing, and the fear that you don’t and will somehow make a fool of yourself if you give it a try and it doesn’t work.

So was there something of a double bind for you? You felt that if you were feminine, you’d end up getting stalked and treated as a sexual object only, but when you presented as a tomboy you became asexual and unwanted?

Megan: The double bind is a good phrase… I feel like that’s the essential state of being female within patriarchy, you’re always in a double bind.

Noah: Julia Serano in Excluded talks about double binds as the basic way that all prejudice works; you get marked as other, and then no matter what you do, you’re wrong because you’re marked. If you have sex you’re a slut, if you don’t have sex you’re broken or wrong.

I think for men it’s not really a double bind; more a measure against an impossible standard, where you always fail to one extent or another. Less about losing whatever you choose, and more anxiety about hierarchy.

Megan: I think women get a little more leeway in the “knowing what you’re doing” area… We’re allowed, culturally, to let men take the lead, sexually. But that was a moot point when I was invisible.

I don’t know if this is relevant to anything… The first experience I had with a guy who did look at me went pretty badly wrong. It didn’t amount to sexual assault, but he just kept touching me in ways I didn’t want. Even when I bluntly told him I didn’t want them. I wound up fending him off with a chair. He left me alone after that. This was when I was about 15.

He presented as a male feminist. Sometimes he wore skirts. He was Different From The Other Guys. Except not where it really mattered.

Noah: Christ. I think it’s really relevant to a discussion of virginity to think about the fact that for a not insignificant number of women especially, a first sexual experience is of some form of sexual assault. That can happen to guys too, but it seems much less frequent. I could be wrong, but my sense is that guys who are virgins can feel completely desexed and unsexual in a way that doesn’t tend to happen to women in the same way. But the flip side of that of course is that women are never quite desexualized in that way because they’re always objectified and seen as fair game for sexual violence.

I don’t know. Does that ring true to you?

Megan: I think there may be women who feel that way, desexed and unsexual, because they can’t get laid… But I may not be understanding you correctly.

I remember having a vague desire during my tomboy phase to have breast reduction surgery, not just because being a D-cup interfered with the way I presented, visually, or because of male reactions to my breasts, but because they didn’t feel appropriate to the state of my soul, in some way. I felt like I was meant to be an A-cup.

I also remember having a feeling that I was going to rot, curdle, go wrong inside, if I stayed a virgin. I wrote bad teenage poems about it.

Noah: The breast reduction surgery for the state of your soul kind of fits with what I was saying, maybe, though I probably went too far in talking about internal states — I’m sure as you say women can feel desexed too. I think it’s true though that femininity is seen as inherently sexual, so it makes sense that people’s reactions to being desexed, or feelings about being desexed, would be affected by their relationship to gender. Which sounds like what you’re talking about; feeling desexed and so wanting to be less stereotypically feminine physically as well.

Megan: Yeah, I guess you could look at that as an indication that the female body is always coded as sexual. Therefore, if I felt desexed, I needed to change my body. Did you ever feel a disconnect between the state of your body and the state of your sexuality?

Noah: That’s a good question. I think the answer is basically “no.” I wasn’t having any sex, and I felt like my body was awkward and hopeless and undesirable, so everything was as it should be, in that sense.

There was this one instance where there was a party (I never went to parties; this one was unavoidable for logistical reasons I won’t go into) and our very drunk female swim team assistant coach looked up at me and said, “you have really nice legs, Noah!” I was completely at a loss; being a sexual object was more or less utterly at variance with my self-image, so I just sort of ignored her. I don’t think she’d ever spoken a full sentence to me before, and I didn’t put myself in a position where she could later.

I’d imagine that that sort of drive by sexual objectification happens to women more frequently, and often in ways that are considerably less pleasant. Not that it was unpleasant; it was just odd, for me. Lord knows what I would have done if anyone ever actually tried to hit on me.

Megan: Oh man, yeah, I’m just thinking about that scene with the genders reversed. I think a lot of women would find a way to flee the scene as soon as possible if a male acquaintance they weren’t interested in suddenly complimented their legs while very drunk.

Noah: Right; she was older too; in her early 20s and I was a sophomore I think.

Megan: It might be useful contextual information for this whole thing that I grew up in a fairly liberated, feminist household. My father never made me feel less-than because I was a girl, not even once. I had a pretty crappy relationship with my mother but she was openly feminist and did manage to inculcate me with a lot of her values. When I was about 12 I even read through her copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves when she wasn’t around. I had plenty of information; I just never knew why the heck I couldn’t insert a tampon.

If nothing else, it illustrates that even openly feminist parents have a really hard time preventing internalized misogyny from developing in their daughters

Noah: In their sons too, I’d imagine.

I was wondering if you were at all affected by the idea of female virginity as valuable? There is some cultural weight there, and it seems like it could provide some sort of counterbalance to the feelings of worthlessness you talk about, but it doesn’t sound like it did?

Meagan: Re: female virginity and value: I never really felt that. I think, being raised feminist, I associated those ideas with the repressive olden days when my whole worth and function was as a vessel for some man’s heirs. It seemed pre-suffrage, pre-modern and I felt like I was beyond that. I definitely didn’t feel like there was any special allure or cachet in my being a virgin at 22.

Noah: What do you think about discussions of virginity related to the shooting?

Megan: I haven’t read very many. What I have read has been partly focused on male nerd culture. The thing about that culture is that a lot of people within it absolutely refuse to understand that there is such a thing as female nerd culture: “There are no girl gamers.” “Girls don’t read comic books.” They can’t imagine a woman who’s had experiences similar to theirs–rejection, persecution, humiliation. They can’t imagine empathizing with a woman. But every single one of my teen girl friends had a deep internalized sense of rejection, which they got from teen boys. Teen boys are vicious to the girls they don’t want.

That’s not exactly an answer to your question, sorry.

Noah: No; I think it’s an answer! You’re saying that virginity can be linked to male nerd culture in a way that excludes women, or that suggests that women can’t experience pain or sadness. So erasing female virginity becomes a way to erase women’s humanity.

From the Dawn of YA to the Present, By One Who’s Been There

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Nora Olsen

There have always been books about teens—Jane Eyre, for example, with its eighteen-year-old heroine. Wuthering Heights—it’s just like Twilight, minus the vampires! But as a marketing category, YA (Young Adult) has only existed since the late 1960s. Prior to that, books that were about teens and very popular with teens were not actually marketed to teens. Catcher in The Rye, Chocolates for Breakfast by Pamela Moore, Lord of the Flies, and A Separate Peace were all literary fiction for adults. On the other side, the Nancy Drew books, the Hardy Boyhe s books, and Helen Dore Boylston’s Carol and Sue Barton books were all technically children’s books. Some series, like Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series or the Little House on the Prairie books, followed a character from childhood through the teen years to adulthood and (of course!) marriage. Books that today we would think of as YA, like Beverly Cleary’s Jean and Johnny or The Middle Sister by Lois Duncan, would have been shelved in the children’s section when they were published in 1959.

In 1967 one book changed everything—The Outsiders, a novel about sensitive, misunderstood Oklahoma gang members. Written when its author Susie Hinton was only sixteen, The Outsiders literally has everything a good book could have. This novel was so successful it launched YA as a new marketing category. S.E. Hinton wrote three more killer novels and then—either because she burnt out, was intimidated by her own fame, or simply wanted to do something else like any normal person does—took a long hiatus. Nine years later she came out with a YA novel called Taming The Star Runner which was pretty great but lacked the incandescent power of her earlier novels, and went on to write two picture books, a novel for grown-ups, and a short story collection. The Outsiders has stood the test of time, selling 14 million copies so far, and I imagine it will stay in print until civilization collapses completely. Starting in 1967, there was an explosion of great YA books that you will still find in the library (such as Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender and Paul Zindel’s The Pigman.) Some novels originally conceived for adults, such as Robert Cormier’s incredibly disturbing, violent, awesome, but sometimes misogynist novels, were redirected to a YA audience.

I was lucky enough to grow up during what many call “The Golden Age” of YA, the 1970s and 1980s. (And, to be fair, the late 1960s, before I was born.) The titles alone were amazing. (They’ll Never Make A Movie Starring Me! A Hero Ain’t Nothing But A Sandwich. The Fog Comes On Little Pig Feet. I’m Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down. My Darling, My Hamburger. Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! Why Did She Have To Die? And I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip.)The cover art was fabulous. Of course there are great covers today, but no matter how nicely you art design your stock photo, it still looks like a stock photo.

And what was inside these inventively-titled, beautifully-packaged books? Mind blowing stories! “Problem novels” reigned supreme, with the result that sheltered shut-ins like myself got to read about all sorts of lurid topics. Go Ask Alice was the real diary of an anonymous teen drug addict who died of an overdose—except of course it turned out to be fiction. (I did always marvel at how the girl managed to keep such a meticulous diary when she was traveling all over the country stoned out of her mind.) Want to read about a girl becoming an exploited sex worker? Try Steffie Can’t Come Out To Play by Fran Arrick. It was not uncommon for the main character to die at the end, especially if the book was about running away from home. See Dave Run by Jeanette Eyerly (who was writing YA before it was called YA) and Runaway’s Diary by Marilyn Harris were two in particular that broke my young heart.

In 2011 the Wall Street Journal, a periodical that’s always looking out for the best interests of young people, ran a very controversial piece suggesting that contemporary YA was too dark and teens should be offered more upbeat fare. People replied with sensitive, well-reasoned arguments and many teen bloggers offered heartfelt responses about how much YA fiction had helped them when they were struggling with things like suicidal feelings, self-harm, bullying, and eating disorders. But my reaction was, “Where were you in the 1970s, O literary guardians of the wellbeing of the young?”

Although many of these novels were extremely heavy-hitting, they also had more leeway than today’s YA to be “literary” or take their time winding up to the conflict. A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Patton Walsh, a historical novel about the Plague ravaging a 17^th Century English town, spends Lord knows how many dozens of pages talking about sheep and rural life before anyone so much as coughs. It makes it so much more disturbing when you finally reach what the book is “about.” Silver by Norma Fox Mazer (rebranded as Sarabeth #1 so it can be part of a series like all the cool books) is very typical of its time in its hyper-realistic, picaresque style. It’s all about a working-class girl who lives in a trailer park with her fun young mom and then transfers to a different school where she makes new friends. About two thirds of the way through the book, the “issue” is introduced. That would never fly today. Today aspiring YA writers are trained to “grab the reader by the throat” in the opening sentences. This is not because experts discovered that young people like to get straight to the point. It’s because in today’s competitive market, agents don’t have time to read more than a page of your novel before deciding that it’s not what they’re looking for.

The line between YA and middle grade (for 8-12 year olds) was blurrier back then too. Silver isn’t really a YA novel by today’s standards, with its twelve-year-old protagonist. Another wonderful classic YA/MG novel with this old-fashioned feel is The Summer of the Swans by Betsy Byars, a contemplative, character-driven novel about a girl whose intellectually disabled brother goes missing. Today only a successful veteran writer like Lois Lowry (The Giver) can still afford to use the slower-paced style from the 1970s that gently wraps you up into a fictional world, and even then typically in middle grade books rather than YA.

But I’m not sorry that the “Golden Age” is over, as much as I loved it. (Pretty much every time anyone starts to get nostalgic for a time gone by, I need to pause and reflect whether me and my friends would have been able to get birth control or kiss the person we liked, just for a couple examples, in those bygone days.) Contemporary YA books have a lot to offer that classic books don’t—like more characters who aren’t white, or LGBTQ characters who make it through the whole book without being raped, beaten up, humiliated, or dying.

Promoting diversity is the battle in YA today. There are little milestones all the time. 2004, the first YA novel featuring a teen who is transgender (Luna by Julie Anne Peters.) 2009, a Latino author (Francisco X. Stork) makes the New York Times list of annual notable children’s books, with his awesome YA novel Marcelo in the Real World, which features a Latino teen on the autism spectrum. 2010, the first YA novel to make the (children’s) bestseller list with a gay main character (Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.) 2014, the first YA book showing two boys kissing on the cover (Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan.)

Sure, it’s fun to read a YA novel about an Olympic athlete that has a coded subtext of same-gender love (Zan Hagen’s Marathon by R.R. Knudson, 1984,) but now you can read a YA novel about an Olympic athlete where the straight-up text is same-gender love (The Next Competitor by K.P. Kincaid.) Why read a YA novel about boarding school life where the idea of being a lesbian makes students vomit and cry with shame (The Last of Eden by Stephanie S. Tolan, 1981), when you can read Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg or Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle series for some queer boarding school fun?

YA publishing today is not a shiny Plato’s Republic of respect for diversity. YA novels with LGBTQ main characters or themes represent less than 1% of all YA novels. YA and middle grade books starring people of color make up about 5% of all YA/MG titles. At least on the LGBTQ side, this represents a huge increase over years past. The fact that it’s getting better at all is for the usual reasons, activism and the dedicated hard work of some people in the industry. Every time some damn fool thing happens, readers and professionals rally and push back. Usually without having to put down their phones, because all the dialogue seems to take place on Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

When viewers of the Hunger Games movie began tweeting that it was “awkward” or upsetting or made them lose interest to see the character Rue portrayed by an African-American actor, there was an outpouring of support for diversity in YA novels. (Writer Suzanne Collins clearly described Rue in the novel as having satiny brown skin, but many readers were unable to take that in. What I took away from all this in terms of writing is that it’s a waste of time describing what your characters look like since no one pays any attention to it anyway.) In 2011 when writers Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown came forward with the story that an agent considering their manuscript had asked them to de-gay some of the characters, the outcome was a campaign called #yesgayya which brought the issue of LGBTQ themes in YA into public discussion amongst the Twitter set.

There’s also a continual outcry against whitewashing, the practice of putting a white face on the cover of a book about a person of color. (What you more frequently see, but it’s harder to say it’s not simply for artistic reasons, is a book about a person of color that has a silhouette or any image that is not a person.) The most publicized example of this was Justine Larbalestier’s Liar in 2009. The original American book cover featured a white teen while in the narrative the teen is African-American. The uproar was so huge that Bloomsbury apologized and changed the cover to a similar image featuring an African-American girl. The probable reason they did such a dumb thing in the first place, against the wishes of the author, was they believed they would sell more copies with a white face on the cover.

The bigger problem is that some people in publishing not only think a cover featuring a person of color won’t sell, they think a book featuring a person of color won’t sell either. And this is also an industry where agents and then editors have to feel mad, overwhelming passion for a book in order to take it on. If there’s anything about a manuscript that makes an editor feel uncomfortable, or makes them feel that they can’t relate to a character, that is a reason to pass.

Lucky me, as a writer I no longer have to worry about any of this. I write for a small press that specializes in LGBTQ books, Bold Strokes Books. 30% of all the not-very-many LGBTQ YA titles published each year are published by small presses like this, as well as some publishers who are not part of “the Big Six” but are still quite big from my worm’s eye view, like Disney Hyperion. My only concern would be if I ever wanted to write a YA novel about cisgender heterosexual teens, because then how would I ever get it published? But not all writers are as lucky as I am. Some of us are still toiling away in the foothills of mainstream publishing, hoping that one of those godlike creatures will smile down.

Earlier this month there was a very popular Tumblr campaign called #weneeddiversebooks, in which people posted photos and statements about why everyone benefits from kid lit about people from diverse backgrounds. This happened partially as a response to the announcement of an all-white, all-male panel of “luminaries of children’s literature” at Bookcon (which is a big deal NYC publishing event.) There were many moving and funny statements. My favorites: 1) Two guys holding signs that said, “I’m not him, but I’d like to get to know him better.” 2) ‘#WeNeedDiversesBooks because “my sister has Down Syndrome” followed by “my sister has a black belt” shouldn’t catch everyone so off guard. Books show casing people with disabilities excelling or kicking butt would educate the general public, and show others with disabilities that being the star, saving the day, or being the heroine is something they can also strive towards.’ 3) “#weneeddiversebooks because if I’d ever seen myself in fiction, I might’ve understood myself better and not have been driven to suicidal-depression and self-harm as a teenager.” 4) A tall boy with a basketball holding a sign saying “Because I like pink too!” 5) “#WeNeedDiverseBooks because i’m black, queer, fat, and a bunch of other marginalized and oppressed identities. And I want to be the hero and ride a fucking dragon in books too.”

The natural corollary of campaigns like this is encouraging people to support diverse YA by buying it. If the industry think diverse books don’t sell well, prove them wrong. If you say you want to read books about a more diverse swathe of characters, prove it. If you don’t have money to be buying all these new books, put them on hold at the library—trust me, those librarians are keeping track of what books are popular.

It’s still true that most readers of YA (Young Adult) books are teens. But just barely. Almost half of YA readers are over eighteen, with the 30-44 year olds accounting for 28% of sales. If you picked up The Fault in Our Stars or the Harry Potter books, you were reading YA too. There’s a new genre developing called “New Adult” that aims to appeal to this older segment of the readership by combining the magic of YA with more adult things, like explicit sex. New Adult books mostly feature college-aged protagonists because otherwise, ick!

What is the enduring charm of YA? I think it’s simple. YA delivers more reliably than literary fiction, which can be so awful. YA needs a strong storyline to keep teens’ attention otherwise they will put the book down. And it must have heart and authenticity, because young people are exquisitely calibrated bullshit detectors. If you haven’t read any YA since you were a youngster, think carefully before you try it. You might be hooked for life.

Performance Piece

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Julia Serano

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. It was reprinted in Julia Serano’s book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Communities More Inclusive which everyone should buy, damn it. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
__________

If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance” I think I am going to strangle them. What’s most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn’t” sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that every person in this room should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another and with the external expectations that other people place on us.

Sure, I can perform gender if I want. I can curtsy or throw like a girl or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why some behaviors and ways of being come more naturally to me than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes I experienced when I hormonally shifted from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same — wore the same t-shirts, jeans and sneakers that I always had — yet once people started reading me as female they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, it seems to me that we let the audience — with all of their interpretations, prejudices and assumptions — completely off the hook.

I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like “all gender is performance”, “all gender is drag” and “gender is just a construct”. They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations. And of course, this is a convenient strategy, provided that you are not a trans woman who lacks the means to have her legal sex changed to female, and who thus runs the real risk of being locked up in an all male jail cell. Provided that you’re not a trans man who has to navigate the discrepancy between his male identity and female history during job interviews and first dates. Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists that he doesn’t see race. It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you are not fully in touch with all of the ways in which you are privileged by it.

Almost every day of my life I deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake. People who make a point of calling me effeminate rather than feminine. People who slip up my pronouns only after they find out that I’m trans, but never beforehand. People who insist on third-sexing me with labels like MTF, boy-girl, he-she, she-male, ze & hir — anything but simply female. Because I’m transsexual, I am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when I am simply being myself. So it seems to me that this strategy of fictionalizing gender will only ever serve to marginalize me further.

So I ask you: Can’t we find new ways of speaking? Shouldn’t we be championing new slogans that empower all of us, whether trans or non-trans, queer or straight, female and/or male and/or none of the above?

Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let’s recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It’s an amalgamation of bodies, identities and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others of which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of arguing that gender is any one single thing, let’s start describing it as a holistic experience.

Instead of dismissing all gender as performance, let’s admit that sometimes gender is an act, and other times it isn’t. And since we can’t get inside one another’s minds, we have no way of knowing whether any given person’s gender is sincere or contrived. Let’s fess up to the fact that when we make judgments about other people’s genders, we’re typically basing it on our own assumptions (and we all know what happens when you assume, right?)

Let’s stop claiming that certain genders and sexualities reinforce the gender binary. In the past, that tactic has been used to dismiss butches and femmes, bisexuals, trans people and our partners, and feminine people of every persuasion. Gender is not simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.

Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let’s talk about all of the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn’t feel like drag when you’re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn’t feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you finally feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn’t feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let’s stop trying to deconstruct gender into non-existence and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound and intricate.

So don’t dare dismiss my gender as a construct, drag or a performance, because my gender is a work of non-fiction.

Utilitarian Review 5/31/14

Posted on May 31, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

News

You can preorder my Wonder Woman book for 20% off! Bondage, cross-dressing, pink ectoplasmic goo…what are you waiting for?

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Subdee on Saint Young Men, hipster Jeuss and hipster Buddha.

Joy Putney on the Wicked Witch of the West as superhero.

Tyler Wenger on Superman and Christ.

R.M. Rhodes on Vasari, Kandinsky, narrative art and comics.

Isaac Butler on Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” and 9/11.

Robert Stanley Martin has an exhaustive history of Steve Gerber’s struggles with Marvel over legal control of Howard the Duck. You can find documents relating to the post here.

Qiana Whitted on Joel Christian Gill’s Strange Fruit and the representation of racist speech in comics.

Chris Gavaler on poet Tim Seibles, Blade, and race.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I had a post about the Elliot Rodger shootings and building masculinity on misogyny.

I was interviewed about the essay on HuffPost Live and also on Take Two.

Also at the Atlantic I wrote about the Great Greene Heist and how we need more diverse mediocre children’s books as well as more diverse great ones.

At Salon I have a list to prove that 2000s R&B was the greatest music ever.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

— how the Orange is the New Black TV show jettisons the memoir’s political commitment for cheap thrills.

— the cover of the Great Green Heist and seeing and not seeing race.

At the Chicago Reader

— I preview the CAKE Chicago Comics Expo, which is happening right now as you read this.

— I have a brief review of orchestral indie folksters Mother Falcon.

Other Links

Mary McCarthy on living out her stripper fantasies, very briefly.

Amanda Hess on how misogyny is bad for everyone.

Eloise James on the stigma against romance novels.

Jonathan Bernstein on why ideological political parties are a bad thing.

Superman Will Seduce You to The Good

Posted on May 31, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Sex and violence go together. Working fist in caress, they can help boost a film from PG to PG-13 and on up into R. They’re both adult, both corrupting, both potentially dangerous. That’s why it made sense when bell hooks looked at a Time cover with Beyoncé in her underwear and declared, “I see a part of Beyoncé that is, in fact, anti-feminist—that is, a terrorist—especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” Beyoncé’s sexuality is violent and damaging; it hurts people, especially young people. Sex is a weapon.

So sex and violence, in media, are commonly seen as continuous. But should they be? A little bit back I was talking with a class at Lakeland College about superheroes and violence. The teacher (and sometime HU writer) Peter Sattler, showed some clips from The Man of Steel, and asked the students to talk about the treatment of violence in the film. But the first reaction when the lights came up had a different focus. Taylor Levitt, one of the women in the class, pointed out that Henry Cavill was something special. “Wow,” Julie Bender, agreed, “I didn’t know Superman was so fine!”

Henry Cavill’s fineness is widely agreed on (students weren’t even shown jaw-dropping image of him wandering about with his shirt off.) But what’s interesting in this context is the extent to which that hotness is superfluous to, or off to one side of, the film’s violence.

The genre pleasures of Man of Steel largely involve the usual action film devastation — things blowing up, cities being leveled, good guys hitting bad guys and vice versa. There is also, though, a line through the film about Superman restraining himself; gallantly refusing to use his powers, or refusing to fight back. And a lot of the energy, or investment in those scenes seems to come from Henry Cavill’s hotness; the pleasure of watching this perfect physique in spandex rendered all restrained and submissive. Superman even allows the authorities to put handcuffs on him, supposedly to reassure them, but perhaps actually for the pleasure of a clearly enjoyably flustered Lois Lane, acting as audience surrogate. You may go to the movie to see Superman commit hyperbolic acts of violence in the name of good. But you can also go, it seems like, to see Henry Cavill be sexily passive — to witness an erotic spectacle that is about seductive vulnerability, rather than destructive terror.

William Marston, the psychologist and feminist who created Wonder Woman, deliberately tried to exploit (in various senses) this tension between sex and violence. The original Wonder Woman comics are filled with images of Wonder Woman tied up elaborately with magic lassoes, gimp mask, and sometimes pink ectoplasmic goo. The point of all this, as Marston explained in a letter to his publisher, was to teach violent people the erotic benefits of submission

“This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.”

Marston believed women were better at erotic submission than men, and that therefore women needed to rule so that men could learn from them how to submit. In his psychological writings, Marston referred to the women who would erotically lead the world as “love leaders.” Love leaders would use their sexuality to seduce the world to goodness and peace — just as the soulful-eyed, bound Henry Cavill guides viewer’s thoughts away from the super-battle plot and towards gentler pastimes.

Of course, Marston was kind of a crank, and, in any event, it’s quite clear from Man of Steel that you can have eroticized submission and uber-violence both; you don’t have to choose one or the other. Still, you can choose one over the other if you want; it is possible, to use the erotic to undermine a narrative of violence. This is what happens in Twilight, for example — and it’s part of the reason that many people find the series’ ending so frustrating.

Stephenie Meyer wrote about super-powered vampires, and builds her series towards a climactic, brutal, all out battle. But the focus of Twilight is on the romantic relationship between Bella and Edward; on love, passion, and sex. As a result, Meyer doesn’t feel she needs to follow through on the genre promise of violence — the big all out battle never happens. The series has other interests, which makes a non-violent outcome possible. It’s not a coincident that Bella’s vampire power is literally to neutralize other violent powers, just as Marston hoped erotics could neutralize force. In Twilight, romance and conflict are set against each other, and romance wins. Sex trumps violence.

Vampire_bella_cullen

It’s tempting to conclude hyperbolically by calling Beyoncé a love leader whose command of the erotic will bring about world peace. But that’s no more convincing than calling her a terrorist. Sex isn’t going to save us anymore than it’s likely to doom us. Still, eroticism remains a powerful thing. It seems worth thinking about it not just as a danger, but as a resource — a way, at least, to imagine a world in which heroes don’t always end up hitting each other.

You can keep your hammer, Thor.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Yearly Archives: 2014