Post by Elana Levine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The editors at Antenna graciously have invited me to contribute a series of posts upon the release of a new book I’ve edited, Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century (University of Illinois Press). The book explores a range of recent media and cultural forms associated with femininity, including investigations of the social and economic forces that shape this culture, the ways such products speak to and about feminine identity, and how audiences, readers, and users engage with and experience such culture. This post focuses on the genesis of the project and its central claims.

The origins of this project come from my experiences as a teacher and researcher. Over the past few years, I have taught a graduate seminar on gender and popular culture several times. While the course inevitably considered some questions of representations of gender IN popular culture, I have always structured it more specifically around how and why various popular cultural forms are gendered and how and why the audiences and users of such forms do or do not identify along gendered lines in their practices of cultural consumption. To me, these were the more interesting and pressing matters, the broader “so what?” to which inquiries about gendered representation point. One trajectory of the course had been to read, contextualize, and extrapolate from the history of feminist scholarship on gendered cultural forms—foundational work on the woman’s film, romance novels, and soap operas, as well as studies on masculinized culture such as sports and video gaming. As the course shifted into the present and the contemporary context of postfeminist culture, however, it was hard to find as substantial a body of work on gendered forms and the experiences of their audiences and users.

At the same time, my research on the history of the U.S. daytime television soap opera was leading me to think about the decline of the soaps industrially and culturally. My hunch was that, while the soaps might no longer be as meaningful to as many viewers as they once were, the needs they fulfilled and the pleasures they delivered had not disappeared—they had shifted into newer cultural forms and experiences. I had my pet theories about where that might be (lookin’ at you, reality TV and social media), but I wanted to know more.

I also wanted to understand how the influences of postfeminist culture, neoliberalism, digital culture, post-structuralism, multiculturalism, queer theory, and transgender theory had shaped feminized popular culture, user experiences of it, and scholarship on it. These were big questions, and the potential sites of inquiry were vast, given the rapid proliferation of media in a digitized and niche-ified world. There was no way I could grapple with all of it on my own. So I sought out colleagues across the worlds of media and cultural studies to help me understand it. Their contributions make Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn a provocative start at reopening this once robust arena of scholarly inquiry.

While I hope you will read the book to better understand my argument about what may have occasioned the scholarly shift away from analyses of gendered culture, suffice it to say that I see two opposing forces at work. One of these forces is the insidious dominance of a postfeminist sensibility, one so powerful, and so common-sensical, as to turn even feminist scholars away from conceiving of culture as gendered. Indeed, the postfeminist sensibility assures us that gender specificity is old-fashioned, that it re-inscribes inequalities that have been overcome. While there are of course notable exceptions to this tendency (I see studies of girl culture as a prime example), I think it has affected scholarship as well as shaping popular culture itself.

The other influencing force is wholly different, in that it is the progressive impact of post-structuralism, queer and transgender theories, and intersectional feminism that have helped us to understand how impossible it is to talk about women or even a more flexible category like femininity in any definitive way. When we accept that a gendered identity is as variable as occupation, skin shade, body shape, personality, and a thousand other traits, both individual and social, it is rather paralyzing to consider it at all. While we need the provocations of these theoretical and political interventions, we might use them not to avoid considering gender as an experiential category but rather to push us to imagine gender differently.

While I went into the project with these principles in mind, as well as with a list of objects for analysis that I was determined to include, it was only through the scholarship of the contributors that I really began to see the ways that early 21st century feminized popular culture was being circulated and experienced. Their work helped me to recognize the three chief ways in which this period of feminized popular culture has been developing. While I have categorized in this way, the book as a whole demonstrates how intricately these categories intertwine.

The first of these is “Passions,” meant to characterize the intensive affective and identificatory aspects of feminized cultural experience, whether labeled as fandom or simply as pleasure. This section includes chapters on readers of Fifty Shades of Grey (the “ladyporn” of our title), Scandal fans, Lifetime Television, and celebrity gossip media.

The second category is “Bodies,” given the ongoing conception and experience of femininity as an embodied state, a situation that provides both constraints and freedoms for differently embodied people. This section explores pregnancy apps, fashion and nail polish blogging, and somatic experiences of spirituality.

The third category is “Labors,” the one that I see as most noticeably reflecting the altered social, economic, and political contexts of early 21st century femininity. The chapters cover “chick lit” and economic precarity, reality TV figures Bethenny Frankel and the Kardashians, Pinterest and the “mamasphere,” and the cupcake craze. These cases point to the imbrication of labor and leisure, pressures and pleasures, in the feminized popular culture of the early 21st century.

We now live within and beside all of these cultural forms and experiences; Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn aims helps us to understand them a bit better. In subsequent weeks, several of the book’s contributors will offer examples of the kinds of analyses the book offers. Stay tuned for the delicious details . . .

The Middle East Today (BBC News)

Two competing forces shape mass media. On the one hand, there is the creativity of writers, directors, journalists and editors who transform ideas into content. On the other, there is structure. Despite the infinite creative capacity of producers, their work is inevitably circumscribed by the economic imperatives, technological limitations and ideological biases inherent in the business of media. The careful media critic thus aims to give credit (or blame) when due, but also keeps a close eye on the factors that shape authorial control. It is an imperfect science, but it is also what makes the study of media so fascinating.

Thus, this series aims to provide a dual perspective on one of the most controversial areas of new media production. Focusing on blogs about contemporary Middle Eastern politics, The Middle East: Inside, Outside and Online pairs together a blogger with an academic critic. The bloggers have been charged with providing insight into the way they work.  The academics have been asked to analyze the site for which the blogger works, drawing attention to factors beyond the realm of pure authorship. It is not a point/counterpoint and the authors have not read each other’s pieces. Instead the two pieces are meant to provide distinct but intimately related perspectives.

This first pairing is one certain to provoke strong feelings in readers. Emily Hauser blogs for Open Zion on The Daily Beast. Professor Helga Tawil-Souri studies media in the Palestinian territories and Israel. Certainly there is much to say about the politics of each contributor. But, just as importantly, these two essays come together to help paint a deeper and more nuanced picture of Open Zion and online media.

Writing for Open Zion
By Emily Hauser

I’ve been writing commentary about Israel/Palestine since 2002, and while the world of opinion publishing has changed dramatically in the ensuing decade, I believe that the writing itself has not (or at least, not much). I was a reporter out of Israel and the Palestinian territories for a big chunk of the 1990s (having moved to Israel in 1984), and then pursued my masters degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, graduating in 2001. These facts had enormous bearing on the writing I did for the op/ed pages of newspapers, and continue to have enormous bearing on the writing I do for blogs.

There are, after all, a lot of opinions out there about Israel/Palestine, much of it ill-informed or informed entirely by ideology. While my blogging certainly reflects my politics (pro-two-state, anti-occupation, anti-settlement), I try very hard to make sure that I’m building a case and can source it, so that readers come away feeling not just supported in their own opinions (or angered by mine) but having learned something in the process.

I don’t believe, however, that it’s my job to convince my ideological opposite numbers, nor is it my job to prove them wrong to the n-th degree (two things I’ll never be able to do). My job is to advocate for the shared humanity and dignity of Israelis and Palestinians, support political solutions that I believe will promote that humanity and that dignity, and provide readers with a few more tools to reach their own conclusions and do their own advocating. What this means is that it’s not enough to say that occupation is bad – I have to provide facts and figures. It’s not enough to say that Palestinians are people, too – I have to sketch that humanity.

Likewise, it’s not enough to say “Israel is wrong” – Israel is many things (not least, the many Israelis who advocate for a just peace every day) and if I really want to have an impact on policy and behavior, I have to focus on the policies and behaviors that contribute to the conflict. It’s not enough to say “occupation is bad for Israelis, too” – I have to demonstrate why, and why that matters.

All of this largely because the audience I see myself writing for is primarily those American Jews who feel somewhat or mostly uncomfortable with Israeli policy, but don’t know how to articulate that discomfort, or feel unequipped to do so. This is where sourcing comes in, and it points to one of the changes that’s taken place in the actual writing process since 2002: Whereas once I essentially had to say “look, trust me on this, I’ve seen the numbers,” now I can embed links and folks can continue the discovery process on their own.

The other audience for which I imagine myself writing is Palestinians. Palestinians are so infrequently given a platform in the West, particularly in the Jewish community, that to the extent that I can channel their stories, I feel compelled to do so. Indeed, many American readers immediately discount any opinion attached to an Arab name – my hope is that with my by-line, a few more people will read a little more about what conflict and occupation mean for the Palestinian people. (And the fact that I’m Israeli-American who’s an active member of a Conservative synagogue and identifies as a Zionist doesn’t hurt).

Finally, the speed with which information now spreads and with which bloggers have to produce copy must, inevitably, have an impact on the writing itself. The challenge is to write quickly but not in haste, and to trust that the extra five or 30 minutes spent nailing down sources or clarifying language is ultimately more important than posting as quickly as possible. At the end of the day, commentary writers (which is what most bloggers are) are chipping away at the outermost edges of public opinion. If we want to be effective, we have to use best tools we can find. Facts and unabashed humanity are pretty powerful tools.

Open – and close – Zion
By Helga Tawil-Souri

Open Zion seems at first glance a clever play on words: in techno-legal terms it alludes to the shift towards open source software, creative commons, and invitation for non-expert digirati to share opinions. That is not the case however. Content is copyrighted and most conversation is between the blog’s editor, Peter Beinart, his commentators, and scholars who have written reviews or responses to Beinart’s publications. Perhaps the title alludes to an ideological opening of Zion and Zionism? Yet, as the site states, OZ seeks “an open and unafraid conversation” based on a belief “in a two-state solution in accordance with the liberal Zionist principles articulated in Israel’s declaration of independence.” Certainly Zion (i.e., the state of Israel) is not being opened here, and taking a two-state solution and liberal Zionist principles as axiomatic doesn’t strike me as openness either.

One way to understand OZ then is as an attempt on the part of journalism and a journalist to remain significant in a technological-media landscape which renders ‘traditional’ journalism’s future uncertain. OZ is part of The Daily Beast, the companion website to Newsweek, which will cease its print publication in 2013 and become all-digital. OZ underscores the challenges of maintaining profitability in an environment when news no longer follows a daily, let alone a weekly, cycle, and an environment in which news readers are likely to land on an article through a friend’s Facebook post or Twitter feed without necessarily caring where it is being published.

Politically, Open Zion is an echo of Beinart’s own perspectives – even if commentators come in different flavors. OZ does not add complexity to an understanding or a critique of Israel or Zionism or “the Jewish future” but simply – albeit fastidiously – describes their contemporary political landscapes from the perspective of an individual embedded in American Jewish political institutions. Thus OZ fails at an extremely important level: the recognition that neither the US’s, nor Israel’s, nor Palestine’s purposes and futures can be understood or decided through only an American Jewish lens. Yes, Israel as it stands is the state for the world’s Jews – and so American ones too – but that ‘borderlessness’ or openness (for only some) of Zion should itself be opened for discussion.

Beinart is most often labeled a ‘center-left’ American Jew; despite also being called a ‘radical’ by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren after Beinart argued that products from Israeli settlements should be boycotted. The moniker of ‘center-left’ however needs to be problematized and connected to an open and unafraid conversation about ‘liberal Zionism.’ I certainly recognize Zionism and liberal Zionism’s successes and appreciate their ideological borrowings from socialism, Liberalism, the valuing of human rights and freedom. There is nonetheless an inherently colonial and racist core to (liberal) Zionism itself and the creation of the modern state of Zion. The Israeli Declaration of Independence cannot be divorced from historical actualities of what happened to Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, and others – in 1948 as well as before then and thereafter. These realities, histories, narratives and perspectives should be what are opened to conversation. That’s what the notion of open(ing) Zion should suggest – and while we’re at it, we can also drop copyright and trademark notices.

When historical creations are framed as intrinsically liberal, without addressing their illiberal and oppressive aspects, the result is a closing off of new perspectives and futures – Jewish and otherwise. This sleight-of-hand is what allows Beinart, OZ, and others, to make a two-state solution axiomatic: Palestinian statehood is supported only insofar as it permits the sanctity of a Jewish democratic state. Such an equation does not in actuality rest on the belief of human rights and freedoms for all, and certainly does not open a critical conversation to be had of why democracy and Jewishness continue to be framed in sync. As such, OpenZion purports a kind of friendly Zionism, as oxymoronic as ‘compassionate capitalism’ and as self-righteous as ‘civilizing mission.’

If I end up at an OZ story through a Facebook post, so be it. But I won’t purposefully open OZ until real openness takes place. There’s much better analysis on the web already – whether you think the Palestinians never existed, or the threat in the Middle East is Israel, or a new state ‘Isratine’ should be created.