Some feminists back in the day, viewing Madonna as a figure of female empowerment, argued that her hypersexualized videos were not conducive to male heterosexual fantasy. The question you could ask is, "How do you know?" This is pretty easy to falsify. You could just survey male people of this orientation and ask if they found this imagery conducive to their own fantasies. You would probably get a variety of answers, ranging from, this is hot, to this is off putting, and everything in between. Instead of surveying people and concluding that 20% (or 80%) of men found it hot (or not), they followed a chain of reasoning. "Because I want to make a feminist argument, and I believe men don't like powerful women, then I am going to assume men won't find this display of female power alluring." To me, it seems obvious that a lot of men wanted to **** Madonna. That should at least be the null hypothesis. But then again, I don't know that empirically, so to argue that, I would just be incurring in the same elementary mistake: trying to resolve and empirical question with speculation based on ideological presuppositions.
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This also assumes that all male fantasy is the same, unidirectional. We know, though, that there are fantasies of powerlessness, or role reversals, etc... In fact, the nature of fantasy is to be reversible, so exhibitionism and voyeurism are part of the same dynamic, not opposites. The same with domination and submission, or attraction and disgust. So not only does the conclusion not benefit from a representative survey, but it also ignores the strange illogic of desire, prohibition, and fetish. The man who hires a dominatrix is not actually disavowing his power and privilege, after all.
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You've got to find a more challenging bad argument to criticize, this one is too weak. What is "feminist" and what is this b.s. about "empowerment" -- ¿? My Christian country boy students point out that there were powerful women in traditional patriarchal societies, and women do not need feminism, or to be feminists, to get "empowered" by being a famous pop star, attracting men, and so on. Feminism, say these boys, would involve pay equity and a whole lot of other mundane things that really would be bothersome. They are better informed than these academics are.
I'm working on the fallacy "magical realism is liberating because it breaks the bonds of 19th century realism" (a fallacy which builds ignorant critics in at least 12 ways).
That's low hanging fruit, I admit.
The sorts of cases that Andrew uses are ones that are revealed more or less definitively to be false after publication but, on closer inspection, were flawed even in their research design ("dead on arrival," he calls them). When you think (critically) about it, the conclusions simply can't be drawn from the study, no matter what the data shows.
I wonder if we can find cases like that in the humanities. I can find many in humanities-inspired social science, especially work done in business schools. But the relevant kind of critical thinking is simply not welcome in those corners of academia.
Somewhat hopefully, lip service is usually paid to it.
There was one on NPR today, I think. "Josephine Baker's early performances, that traded in images from minstrelsy and so on, were parodies of those genres--because I, the critic, want to claim all of her, all of the time, for antiracism, feminism, etc."
That would be a sort of debatable point, right? I mean, you could argue seriously that those elements are parodies. Or you could take the position that a lot of people used "minstrel" elements in that period simply because they were part of the expressive language, and that they wouldn't have been seen as particularly bad at the time, etc... You would have to look at the historical record. Did people criticize her at the time for this? Did she express herself on these kinds of questions?
My idea is: don't get attached to particular interpretations of things in the absence of clear evidence. Always ask the question: "how do I know?"
The scholar said Baker was documented as criticizing this stuff from 1930 forward, but not in the 20s. But we can extrapolate, she said: since Baker was critical of it later, the actual performances of the 20s must have been parodies.
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