Post-Misogyny is Hilarious

When I started writing about ¡Atame!, which began with a late-night facebook rant (the origin of most academic writing I’m sure) I planned to go through all of Weinstein’s oeuvre and look at the ways he used his privileged access to storytelling and film production to craft and promote narratives that normalized and eroticized sexual violence against women.* By re-watching the films that Weinstein chose to champion and promote, I wanted to understand how popular ideas about what is acceptable, pleasurable, and erotic have been shaped by a serial sexual predator who was as prolific in his filmmaking as he was in his predation.

However, he was not alone in this vision. It is a vision, as recent work is beginning to articulate more explicitly, that is at the core of not only the Western tradition, but others as well. Here I am thinking of the recent essay on “How the Bible Shapes Contemporary Attitudes to Rape and Sexual Assault,” or readings of Beauty and the Beast that suggest traces of what we now call Stockholm syndrome.** There is no end to the work that needs to be done to draw attention to the centrality of rape and sexual violence against women at the heart of Western culture. Weinstein’s own filmography would present an obvious place to start, and my article on ¡Atame! is meant to begin that conversation, but it’s not the only one I want to have.

For too long, due to the requirements of a patriarchal canon, women and other marginalized people have had to read stories about their oppression written from the perspectives of their oppressors.

I was talking about this in a class in the context of Lavinia’s rape in Titus Andronicus, a re-telling of a retelling of a retelling going back to Ovid, wondering how the story might have been told from Lavinia’s perspective.*** A student asked me a really great question: What was the first story about rape written from a woman’s perspective? I figured it was probably a female slave narrative, if we’re talking about published texts in English, but I didn’t know for sure. How could I find that out?

So I decided, rather than watch every Almódovar film with rape or sexual coercion in it (which is a lot), I’d spend my time on women’s stories about their own experiences because they’re better sources. Objectively.

What’s amazing for me is that a lot of this work is being done by comedians, and it’s hilarious. Women like Maria Bamford, Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, Margaret Cho, Tiffany Hadish, Beth Sterling, and Cameron Esposito are foregrounding self-representation in lieu of self-deprecation, and actively encouraging other women to do the same. I call their works post-misogynist*** because they expose misogynist tyranny and how it operates across systems and lifetimes, while also creating spaces or genres for others to tell their stories. This is often done in a very self-conscious turn away from the zero-sum headliner economy typical of the stand-up world.

This project started to be about Harvey Weinstein and the tearing off of a centuries-old veil normalizing sexual violence against women, a veil woven by a bunch of rapists and would-be rapists. But it became something else. In it, I argue that the urgency and audience of #MeToo is the golden age of women’s storytelling: raw and open, stripped bare of faith and facade. You can eat mushrooms and still there’s no festering hidden underbelly. These stories are transparent.

I present my first paper for this project at MLA 2020 in Seattle in January, y’all! And it’s about my girl, Maria Bamford! Seattle is amazing in January; you should come!

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*I learned from that conversation that though Miramax distributed the film in the United States, they were not involved in production, an important distinction. Thank you, Sasha Berman for pointing this out.

**A claim that has spawned a genre of rebuttals, including close readings of the DSM requirements for a true Stockholm diagnosis, or dissertations on the 1973 kidnapping and the clear historical anachronism that makes any connection between the two ludicrous. All intended to dismiss the suggestion that Belle being held captive by a creature whose motivations and intent she could not fully discern may have had an effect on her judgment. In my dissertation I described this clinging to facts as “empirical decadence” which I thought of then as an almost charming excess trying to desperately ward off the Rashomon-like fear that multiple perspectives render objectivity impossible. The Beauty and the Beast declarations are more bullingly syllogistic because their fear is not ontological uncertainty. It’s that one of those perspectives was totally right, and it wasn’t the one they thought or could ever inhabit. To avoid that realization, let’s talk about why you’re wrong about Stockholm Syndrome.

***Ursula K. Le Guin took this perspective in her 2008 Lavinia, a book I started to read and couldn’t get into.

***I use post-misogynist in the same way post-colonial literature is now used, not to define the end of an era, but rather to describe both a state in which misogyny has become inexorably visible; and the cultural work necessary to understand its legacies by centering women’s stories.

Why Are You Showing Me This?

I started my current project on ¡Atame! because my Spanish 1 professor said it was her favorite movie, and Almodóvar seemed like the kind of director I would love: antic and irreverent. Andy Warhol, Luis Buñuel, John Waters.*

Then I watched it. In early 2018. A terrible time to watch a film about a kidnapped woman who eventually “falls in love” with her captor. An even more terrible time for that film to continue to be labelled a “Dark Romance.” Then I found out that Miramax distributed it in the U.S. And sued MPAA to fight the X rating.**

So, naturally, I had to find out everything. One discovery is that most criticism of Almodóvar’s work, which includes an incredible amount of rape, treats the preponderance of rape, sexual violence, and coercive sexuality as subversive. Or camp. Or postmodern.

In these contexts, “postmodern”*** seems to mean the absolute elimination of politics where politics means an engagement with social reality and the lived experience of material beings in a specific spatio-temporal context. Which is apparently what it means for critics. It’s essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card.

What’s even more galling is that Almodóvar is also lauded as the greatest storyteller of Spanish women’s stories.

The essay I’m writing looks at the film, its production and promotion, and its reception. But it also makes the connection to the now-disgraced Harvey Weinstein, who distributed the film in the U.S. and whose choice to sue the MPAA helped frame the viewing of the film. According to the Miramax argument, the film’s representation of sexual violence against women isn’t problematic, it’s just that Americans are too puritanical.

This echoes, in some way, critical responses that treat all of the sexuality in Almodóvar’s films as subversive and liberatory. People who can’t celebrate and enjoy it, are mocked as scolds.

But now that #MeToo has made it impossible to forget that people living in female-gendered bodies have a different experience of the violation of those bodies, and that people like Harvey Weinstein have a vested interest in normalizing sexual violence, it seems important to look back on these works and ask: Why are you showing me this?

It is difficult, and according to New Critics a horrible fallacy, to try to suss out a filmmaker or producer’s motivation. But when the producer of hundreds of films turns out to be a serial sex predator, it strikes me as very important work.

*I know that all of these directors whose work I’ve loved for so long depict women in problematic ways. Someone has to look at that. After watching all of Almodóvar’s movies as a part of this project, I can tell you with some certainty that it’s not going to be me.

** That rating was not for violence against the female lead, or the eroticization of violence, but about a scene where the female lead masturbates in the tub, but let’s bracket that for now because the fact that the people who have been elected or chosen to protect us do not have our best interests in mind is going to be a major theme of this blog.

***I get the irony of putting “postmodern” in scare quotes.

Our Camino

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people walk the Camino de Santiago, a sacred pilgrimage to the remains of one of Jesus’ apostles. For many pilgrims the 500 mile walk represents a return to basic human values: simplicity, strength, and solidarity. Along the way, pilgrims commonly greet each other by saying ¡Bueno Camino! which means good path or way, but also acknowledges that the pilgrimage is part of an internal search that doesn’t end with the Compostela certificate.

I’ve considered flying to France and walking the 500 miles of the Camino, but I’ve never thought of going to Alabama. I’m not one of those blue staters who thinks the entire South should secede. It just didn’t seem like a place for me. I only have to look at the electoral map to see that.

But when a lynching Memorial opened last year, I had to go. When we arrived in Montgomery from Los Angeles, it was clear that others felt the same pull: we parked next to a family that had driven from South Carolina. Outside the museum that accompanies the memorial tour buses idled. Inside, there was barely room to move. We later met people from Houston and Halifax at the Dexter Avenue Church. They were visiting the Church, but they were in Montgomery for the memorial.

The memorial’s name, The Memorial for Justice and Peace, is purposefully generic. The Equal Justice Initiative, which built the memorial, wanted to avoid negative attention as the memorial was being built. If the name sanitizes a brutal history, the memorial does not. Throughout both the museum and the memorial, the crimes being remembered are called not just lynchings, but “race-based terror lynchings.” In addition to memorializing victims, the memorial very consciously modifies the language with which the story is told to more accurately capture the entire apparatus of violence and control.

But that terror does not get to give the memorial its name.

If the title eschews the word lynching it is perhaps because the people for whom this suffering is a birthright have borne the name of this particular crime, always in the face of maddening denial or craven skepticism, for long enough. Because African-American communities lived through the horrors of lynching and very self-consciously did not turn into the monsters they faced.

The memorial commemorates over 4,000 victims of lynching with hanging metal columns, one for each county where a lynching has been recorded. The plinths, carved with victims’ names, are ordered alphabetically by state first and then county in a descending spiral. The columns begin at eye level, but as the floor slopes down they start to hover above you—threatening weather, strange fruit.

Like other memorials that attempt to honor the individual life when thousands were lost the design is simultaneously intimate and overwhelming. As you walk below the plinths, the the individual names can no longer be read, yet the weight is unbearable.

Outside of the memorial, rows of these same steel plinths lie on their sides, duplicates intended for each county to take home to commemorate their dead. Inert, these columns do not have the buoyancy of the suspended blocks inside the reflecting area which amidst the sound of falling water seem weightless.

The prone columns are an invitation to other counties to extend the memorial’s reach, to become stops on a trail. Our Camino.

If other counties do claim their columns, the Memorial will no longer be a single site, but an albergue on a distinctly-American pilgrimage. When we asked our tour guide Michelle Browder whether she thought the Memorial was changing things in Montgomery, she answered without a beat, “You’re here.”

The Memorial is a call from people who stayed in Alabama in spite of the terror that turned six million African Americans into refugees in their own country. It is a call from the people who continue to stay in spite of the insidious racism of a twenty-year old white man referring to the grown black woman who works at a local shop as “girl,” or the man in a truck who flipped off Michelle at an intersection, or the church where the Montgomery Bus Boycott came to an end falling apart in a neighborhood of abandoned houses decimated by the 85 freeway. Graffiti on one of those abandoned houses reads: We care about you, black Montgomery.

Jim Crow-era “Confederate” monuments around the rest of the city, and the country, concretize specific views of historical events in the name of memorializing. This Memorial does not commemorate peace and justice. It enacts it. It begins another story that doesn’t end here. It is our Camino. It requires pilgrims.

And they’re coming. People are making pilgrimages to this memorial, and the living city is providing succor for visitors. The Memorial for Peace and Justice is one of the most recent and urgent additions to the Civil Rights Trail, an interactive rhizomatic collection of a hundred locations across fifteen states that requires people to go. With each visitor the trail is written and re-written. Different guides produce different narratives, which layered on top of each other and braided through, combine the extemporaneous and everyday with the considered and curated.

We’re in a new era of memorialization that calls for memorials that are experiential and embodied. The Memorial for Justice and Peace is a call for pilgrims to cut a trail through Montgomery, the rest of the South, and the rest of the country. It is part of our Camino. Go.