“The image has no intrinsic meaning. None. Gwen is suddenly insisting there is one true meaning. A male or a female can simply admire the beautiful form on its own terms, and not someone else’s. But this is precisely the kind of interpretive freedom that a feminist like Gwen cannot tolerate. You see, the image MUST mean something about the current political geopolitical context. This is deeply, deeply doctrinaire and hardly a serious attempt to address real people’s perceptions.”

It seems disingenuous to use polysemy as a basis for anti-intellectualism. Non-superficial interpretations of images occur to “real people” too. I mean, education’s been useful for me, and I don’t think it’s useful or correct to diminish reactions other than the most common as less valuable.

This backlash seems to me to be rooted more in a distrust of feminism than anything else, which is kind of ironic given the initial defense of polysemy.

“The irony is that a feminist, one would think, would be about empowering women to let them choose beliefs and perspectives on their own.”

I get this kind of reaction a lot. I laugh when it occurs online because I’m immediately presumed to be a woman, which I’m not. I find that gainsayers read a lot more aggression into feminist analyses than actually exists, which suggests that an unacknowledged emotion fuels the gainsaying. Reactionary “common sense” comes off as awfully insecure.

“just because some simpleton puts a scarf around a woman’s head doesn’t mean I have to accept it or even look at it. Maybe YOU are anchored to the image in such a concrete way, but I am not.”

You must surely realize that willful ignorance saps a lot of credibility and integrity to your opinion of the image. If you haven’t bothered to look the problem in the eye, you haven’t earned your way into a defensible position.

“been reading Said? His work is not without its own deep, systemic biases”

What are Said’s deep, systemic biases? How are they relevant to the discussion at hand? It’s been about a year since I’ve read Said, and I’d appreciate the refresher.

“I think people are far, far more sophisticated consumers and processors of media imagery than you seem to imagine them.”

I disagree. Most people don’t even know how to observe the formal qualities of a poem, a short story, a television show, or a movie – and these are objects that stand out for analysis among the daily stream of images. If these materials aren’t approached analytically, I think it’s far less likely that images grafted into common experience will be.

Try calming down.

Really?

I think that these images do a wonderful job bringing up issues of who is using them and for what. Obviously, they can be thought-provoking teaching tools, but also they can be treated as mere pornography (as was nicely demonstrated above.)

Does the use to which they are put affect the images themselves, or our reactions to them? Should it? For me, for example, the idea that someone might find this arousing or sexy is creepy, but the idea that someone else might find them educational or feminist is wonderful. Would it be appropriate for me to try and determine if the images do more “harm” or more “good” and treat them accordingly?

One of the first things a student is taught in high school is to consider the context of the media that they’re told to analyze. When someone “just ignores” aspects of the image as a whole it reveals more about themselves and their analytical habits. In a history class one cannot “just ignore” the societal context of the events you study; in a literature class one cannot “just ignore” the historical and cultural backdrop that the work is set against. That sort of complacency, benign or not, would get a student marked down up to a full letter grade in class. Just a thought.

- J.

In anonymous blog comments, anyways.

Thanks for commenting. I agree that the various ways of covering women’s bodies can be both empowering and oppressive. Certainly, in addition, the demand to display is it’s own sort of empowerment/oppression. For me, that’s definitely what makes these images so interesting. :)

“I’m a little confused by the idea that we can just “ignore” the parts of images we don’t like–hey, the first one is supposed to bring to mind the images at Abu Ghraib,”

I’m sorry, what was that? What was all that stuff about polysemy? Like so many academics, all that rhetoric about polysemy simply goes out the window the minute her agenda is in danger. The image has no intrinsic meaning. None. Gwen is suddenly insisting there is one true meaning. A male or a female can simply admire the beautiful form on its own terms, and not someone else’s. But this is precisely the kind of interpretive freedom that a feminist like Gwen cannot tolerate. You see, the image MUST mean something about the current political geopolitical context. This is deeply, deeply doctrinaire and hardly a serious attempt to address real people’s perceptions. Gwen may not like an apolitical perception of this image, but too bad. Real people do it all the time. This is why so many people cannot take feminists like Gwen seriously. Far too dogmatic.

The irony is that a feminist, one would think, would be about empowering women to let them choose beliefs and perspectives on their own. The dilemma this produces is that freedom and independence are neutral, and we have the classic problem of the woman who chooses reactionary goals (I want to stay home and raise babies). But if one defines feminism as choosing only the RIGHT goals this leads to the often bullying, puritanical self-righteousness of so many academics, which we also saw in these very comments at the start. It’s a pickle! But back to her words…

“but as long as the lighting is nice and I find the physical form attractive, the repetitive use of a certain type of woman’s body in clearly objectified poses”

Ok, slow down there. The first photo is just a standing woman. Objectified? Not really. Again, I will merely state one more time – just because some simpleton puts a scarf around a woman’s head doesn’t mean I have to accept it or even look at it. Maybe YOU are anchored to the image in such a concrete way, but I am not. How is that for a feminist! It is in your self-interest to belittle my imagination and volition and intellectual agility in the name of feminist liberation! Can you perceive the irony of your position, Gwen? I doubt it. You are married to your own intellectual impotence to keep yourself a victim. I am not so trapped and do not see myself a victim. Oh how odd.

“that are meant to evoke ideas of violence just isn’t meaningful. We may not ACCEPT them, we may not AGREE with the imagery, but to pretend the public at large can just dismiss parts of images and, therefore, they don’t exist, seems naive. These images play into a long history of the exoticized Other woman who is sexually available but silenced, and I think that’s a cultural history than can’t just be shrugged off by saying “well, if you hold your finger over that part, the rest isn’t so bad.”

And how do you know, Gwen, that this exalted ‘cultural history of the exoticized Other’ (been reading Said? His work is not without its own deep, systemic biases) affects mainstream interpretations? Again, you speak in gross generalities. And let us just agree to disagree on a former point – I think people are far, far more sophisticated consumers and processors of media imagery than you seem to imagine them. I’ll just move on for now.

”And sociologically, “rhetoric” isn’t used in the way it’s used in more popular speech to mean manipulative or empty speech. But from reading the comments, and the clear familiarity with media studies, I suspect everyone who’s been posting knows this distinction.”

I would believe that if you didn’t respond in such hyperbolic fashion. Unfortunately, it was the emotional, self-righteous groupthink displayed here that clued me in to the fact that you are, in actuality, probably using rhetoric in PRECISELY its meaning as empty, manipulative speech.

”We in general don’t really respond to comments too much on the blog–we’re just putting these images up there for people to use as they will, and we’re more interested in finding new stuff (I keep hoping we’ll run out, but we never do). I found these images and they particularly depress me because I face, on a nearly daily basis, students who believe that women in other countries are unambiguously oppressed, that they have no agency, and that we are enlightened and sophisticated.”

Yet you are singularly invested in minimizing my own intellectual agency to make your points! I hope you can see this contradiction. My goodness, here you are coming down from the mountaintop to teach your students that we are not so free and other women are not so enslaved. But while you are undercutting one rigid, false dichotomy (us-free, them-enslaved) but you are simultaneously reinforcing another rigid, false dichotomy (these images MUST be seen as oppressive, an enlightened person could find no interpretive flexibility here, the hermeneutic situation is a light switch of barbaric ignorant patriarchy/enlightened feminism with no experiential plasticity to muddy the issue). The breathtaking simplicity and incoherence of this framework is disappointing in a university setting.

“And we are not humorless. We are comedic freaking GENIUSES, I assure you. Or anyway, I am. Lisa is just comedically GIFTED.”

Perhaps you are. But not when the One True Faith is threatened, I gather. I found very, very little humor in your posts, mostly just miffed self-righteousness. I would suggest a true intellectual thinks to better comprehend reality, not to force it into some conceptual one-size-fits-all straitjacket. Leave dogma to the Bush years, may they rest in peace.

You told me about yourselves, so a little about me. I am a mother. I have a doctorate and am excellent at my job. I have a loving husband. I am an atheist, firmly support abortion rights, and have never voted anything but Democratic. But it is sloppiness such as this that keeps me from identifying as a feminist. At any rate, I am potty training my daughter as I write this, and I must be going now. She is quite the handful.

The “burqa”, which is in fact a cultural practice with a name specific to Afghanistan (the Islamic practice is called “hijab” which is covering the hair and the body and leaving the face and hands open and “niqab” when the face is covered as well) can be both oppressive and empowering to women.

The discussion of the Scarlet Johanson picture is especially revealing. The writer presents two kinds of images: of oppressed women and of hyper-sexualized women.