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.