{"id":1456,"date":"2009-01-16T09:54:01","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T14:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1456"},"modified":"2009-01-16T09:54:01","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T14:54:01","slug":"reading-ms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2009\/01\/16\/reading-ms\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Ms."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\"\"First, thanks to Aviva over at Fourth Wave for posting a roundup of links to the Great Ms. Cover Debate of 2009 (“Super-Feminist Obama to the Rescue!<\/a>“), and to Yondalla, who writes in reference to the image of Obama as Super-Feminist-Man in comments here at GWP, “A man who is a feminist would not be someone who would rescue us. It would be someone who walks beside us.”<\/p>\n

Having read the critiques, I get it now.\u00c2\u00a0 And I respect the dissent.\u00c2\u00a0 But I stand behind my original praise of the cover.\u00c2\u00a0 I agree with Jill over at Feministe<\/a>, who writes,<\/p>\n

“Obama has reportedly self-identified as a feminist, and has the legislative record to back it up. Is he a perfect feminist, or a perfect progressive? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Is he going to disappoint us over and over? Yeah, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s already started. But he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still pretty damned good, especially for a mainstream, center-left politician elected to the highest office, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really see the point in kicking him out of the club just yet.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The brouhaha over this cover is not generational, nor is it necessarily PUMA-related (as Megan at Jezebel snarkily and dismissively asserts<\/a>). The controversy is over the rescue narrative, and how one reads visual imagery, which is often more polyglot than it seems.<\/p>\n

Looking at the current cover next to the famous 1973 cover featuring Wonder Woman, a bunch of questions come up for me.\u00c2\u00a0 First, wasn’t this cover perhaps intended <\/em>as satire?\u00c2\u00a0 Because next to the cartoonish Wonder Woman cover, the current one certainly strikes me as having an element of fantasy to it too.<\/p>\n

Second, Ms.<\/em> is a magazine that has tried to reinvent itself over and over again.\u00c2\u00a0 Its current readership skews older, and I imagine engaging younger readers is now key.\u00c2\u00a0 In putting Obama on the cover in this way, are the publishers sending a message that the feminism of Ms.<\/em> is big-tent enough to encompass younger Obama-supporting feminists?\u00c2\u00a0 Was this a move to get beyond the stereotype of Ms.<\/em> as “your mother’s magazine” that some younger women continue to hold?\u00c2\u00a0 If so, I laud the extending of this generational olive branch.<\/p>\n

In the end, I get <\/em>the critiques about how men can’t save feminism.\u00c2\u00a0 I really do.\u00c2\u00a0 But bottom line over here: I like<\/em> the playful, subversive idea that inside the most prominent man in the world right nows lies a feminist ready to more publicly engage.\u00c2\u00a0 Time will tell whether or not it’s true.<\/p>\n

(Paging Marco, my laid-off graphic designer husband who thinks a lot about superheros and blogs about the narratives behind images<\/a>!\u00c2\u00a0 Weigh in, my dear Clark Kent?!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, thanks to Aviva over at Fourth Wave for posting a roundup of links to the Great Ms. Cover Debate of 2009 (“Super-Feminist Obama to the Rescue!“), and to Yondalla, who writes in reference to the image of Obama as Super-Feminist-Man in comments here at GWP, “A man who is a feminist would not be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[245,21351,85,5007],"class_list":["post-1456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-feminism","tag-feminist-history","tag-politics","tag-pop-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}