Posts Tagged ‘The Problem of Susan’
Thursday Night Links!
- The local AAUP’s fundraiser for an independent audit at Marquette funded so quickly I barely even had a chance to promote it.
- Meanwhile, Marquette in the news! Demographic Realism and the Crisis of Higher Education.
- The attack on the humanities, especially at less selective universities, is a violation of some of the basic premises of undergraduate education, argue Mary Beth Norton and James Grossman.
- The Academic Concept Conservative Lawmakers Love to Hate.
- As Colleges Strive for a Return to Normal, Students With Disabilities Say, ‘No Thanks.’
- Why Doomsday Hasn’t Happened. Most colleges averted financial disaster. But the pandemic will still have a lasting impact.
- Alison Clark Efford describes the value of setting aside time in each class with her graduate students to discuss the humanities, careers and the good life.
- Look who’s being deprofessionalized now? Phylicia Rashad named dean at Howard University.
- Faculty Moral Distress about Pandemic Teaching.
- Journal of Posthumanism has launched. CFP for issue two!
- Failed state watch: Target to Halt Pokémon Card Sales ‘Out of an Abundance of Caution.’
Drastic as the decision may seem, particularly given that Pokémon cards aren’t the only things people wait in line for hours to buy, it comes days following a fight in a Brookfield, Wisconsin Target’s parking lot in which four people attacked a man, who then pulled his legally-owned gun on his assailants, prompting them to flee before later being arrested by the police. Target’s decision also comes just weeks after the company implemented new policies to curtail people camping out overnight at their stores. Beyond telling people not to line up like this, an alleged note to employees asked them to consider calling the police in order to force people to disperse.
- Elsewhere in my failed state: Wauwatosa PD’s high value target internal investigation.
- You and me both, kid. Bunny, the dog that can “talk,” starts asking existential questions.
- These days, he argues, most of Israel’s leadership falls into what he terms the “annexation” camp or the “control” camp. Israel’s Violence Shows Why Now Is the Time for BDS. The end of the green line.
- This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy.
- Breaking. NBC News confirms: The CDC will announce that Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID no longer need to wear masks or physically distance, indoors or outdoors in almost all circumstances. Elsewhere on the COVID beat: a hilarious troll.
- A century of research has demonstrated how poverty and discrimination drive disease. Can COVID push science to finally address the issue?
- The Real Reason Behind the Misinformation Epidemic in Online Moms’ Groups.
- A GOP Civil War? Don’t Bet On It.
- Joe Manchin’s surprisingly bold proposal to fix America’s voting rights problem. Reminds me a certain other Joe…
- Humans Need to Create Interspecies Money to Save the Planet. Only if it turns out after a few years that it’s made up of ground-up animals and after a few more years of transactions will take up all the biomass of Planet Earth!
- The Intelligent Forest.
- 2050 Is Closer Than 1990.
- How the computer broke the human body.
- Once more for safety, the Problem of Susan.
- Untitled Earth Sim 64.
- Who Should John Mulaney Be Now?
- Dark Souls in the dark night of the soul.
- Cory Doctorow mega-thread on The Ministry for the Future.
- All of man’s dreams turn to ash: The Jenga sublime.
- The only CEO I trust.
- Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out.
Wednesday Is Now Trumpnesday, All Hail Trump
* CFP: 42nd Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, Memphis, TN.
* Fascism happens fast: First look at Biff to the Future, the alt-history comic chronicling the BTTF universe.
* Trump and disaster capitalism.
* Dissenting from Within the Trump Administration.
* Delusional Democrats Yearning to Prove They Can Work With Trump. From Jonathan Chait, no less!
* “The White House is deploying a network of advisers to the top of federal agencies as a direct line to stay on top of Cabinet officials.” “U.S. Government Agencies Go Silent, May Have Been Swallowed By Black Hole.” “Trump Health Care Plan Would Take Medicaid Coverage Away from Up to 31 Million People.” “Trump Aides Can’t Stop Blabbing about How He’s a Madman.” “Donald Trump’s stock in oil pipeline company raises concern.” Oh, no, not concern! “American Carnage.” “The Resistance.” Nailing it.
The bad press over the weekend has not allowed Trump to “enjoy” the White House as he feels he deserves, according to one person who has spoken with him.
* Almost certainly our next president, ladies and gentleman.
* Within minutes of each other: Trump Revives Keystone Pipeline. Canada oil pipeline spills 200,000 liters on aboriginal land.
* Bill would end Virginia’s ‘winner take all’ electoral vote system.
* Some details on the shooting at the Milo Yiannopoulos talk at U Washington.
* Science corner! Badlands National Park Twitter account goes rogue, starts tweeting scientific facts. The Science of Sean Spicer’s Compulsive Gum Swallowing Habit. How long would a liberal have to cry to fill a coffee mug with tears? Flint water is fine again, also it was no one’s fault, trust us.
* Standpoint theory doesn’t say we can just make shit up; it says we need a clear-eyed understanding of power relations in order to understand and evaluate knowledge-claims. In other words, pomo feminists didn’t create “alt facts”; it’s pomo feminists who have given us the tools to oppose them.
* In Discarded Women’s March Signs, Professors Saw a Chance to Save History.
* Minnesota bill would make convicted protesters liable for policing costs. N.C. state lawmaker says shouting at current or former gov’t officials should be punishable by 5 years in prison.
* Interesting little story about Dan Harmon’s work on/against an early version of Dr. Strange.
* Like someone peeled open my skull and put my inner monologue on the Internet.
* The arc of history is long, but white women are going to prison at a higher rate than ever before.
* Wisconsin lawmaker wants Sheriff David Clarke booted from office, immediately.
* Further Thoughts on the Problem of Susan.
* Whitefish, Montana vs. the Nazis.
* This is how American health care kills people.
* Going back to the old days on health insurance, a first draft.
* Potential Trump Science Adviser Says 90 Percent of U.S. Colleges Will Disappear. I’m amazed they think a full tenth will escape the Sentinels.
* Arrested Development Season 5 rumors.
* Columbia University Releases Report on School’s Ties to Slavery.
* The Other Buffett Rule, or, why better billionaires will never save us.
* The Web Is a Customer Service Medium.
* And this truly is the darkest timeline.
Tom the Dancing Bug 1322 view from trump tower 2
Notes Towards a Miss Reading of Kimmy Schmidt
Seeing this review of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt at the Los Angeles Review of Books has inspired me to finally write up some somewhat idiosyncratic thoughts I’ve had about the series that I haven’t seen reflected anywhere else. (And thanks to the people who have indulged me about this on Twitter, especially @millicentsomer and @evankindley.) I definitely agree with the reviewer that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a “woman out of time” story, but I really think the interpretive emphasis on “Unfrozen Middle Schooler from the 1990s” should be on “middle schooler” rather than “from the 1990s.” My take is that the 1990s nostalgia is largely driven by the Millennial audience the show is pitching itself at — it’s an engine for jokes but not really the center of the project. “Unfrozen Middle Schooler,” in contrast, is the actual heart of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, at least the way I want to read it as a feminist work.
One of the things I talked about with Lili and Evan on Twitter was whether Kimmy’s abduction is taken seriously as an event or if the bunker is taken seriously as an actual lived environment. Having completed the series now, I still don’t think so: I think “the bunker” essentially functions in the series like being in a coma, or being shot with a Grow-Up Beam, or making a wish to be Big. It’s a magic spell to get Kimmy from middle school to adulthood without having to go through high school and college, which is the source of her power in the series, from her refusal of the usual rules of society to her love of backpacks and bright, mismatched clothing. You can see this utopian imaginary working really clearly in the incredibly infectious theme song, where the removal of the girls from the bunker and a closeup on Kimmy’s ecstatic childlike grin over the lyrics “Unbreakable! They alive, damnit! It’s a miracle!” quickly gives way to a montage of nostalgic, home-video-style images of childhood (and specifically girlhood), which express the same unvarnished joy but also absolute self-confidence (thumb’s up), total mastery of their environment (the dancing, the hula hooping, the monkey bars), and maximum resilience in the face of adversity (the baby plopping down face first).
We return to the in-universe “autotune the news” frame only once during this thirty-second sequence, to be told that “females are strong as hell” — the clear implication to me being that we ought to draw an interpretive connection between the claim of female power and childhood, specifically, girlhood: before sex, before even puberty, before the male gaze, before pervert teachers and abusive boyfriends and quasi-consensual sexual encounters and ubiquitous street harassment and the too-familiar host of other abuses inflicted upon women from the moment they enter young adulthood. What the magic spell of the bunker allows Kimmy to do is pass over the moment in which girls are forcibly conscripted into becoming “women” (somewhat or entirely against their will) and emerge instead as an adult who has not internalized our society’s misogyny or its mean, psychosexual aggressivity. So much of what is delightful about Kimmy is precisely the fact that she has retained the aspirations, expectations, confidence, and general affect of a precocious middle-schooler without having had to temper or diminish herself through unhappy experiences with patriarchy. If the show has a moral or utopian message for women, it’s Let’s all go back to thinking about ourselves the way we did before society told us we were worthless, and it’s a pretty damn good one.
We’ve been working with children’s stories a lot in my “magic as literature” course this semester, and one of the oppositions we’ve really been focusing on (especially as we’ve studied Disney, and Frozen, recently) is the opposition between what mythographers call “the girl’s tragedy” and what we’ve been calling instead the utopia of childhood or (here more directly) the utopia of girlhood. The girl’s tragedy is the female answer to “the hero’s journey,” but the narrative doesn’t work the same way: instead of the boy hero who sets out from home, masters the outside world, slays the dragon, and then returns home to become king, the girl’s tragedy is a story about being ripped from safety and forced to accommodate oneself to the whims of adult men, particularly their sexual urges. The happy ending for the girl’s tragedy — the happiest one available — is that she accepts her role as wife and mother and gives birth to a male son who will then inaugurate the next cycle of heroism; girls and women who refuse to play the proper role are typically cast out of the realm of the human altogether, turned into animals or plants or stars or foam. The utopia of childhood describes those comparatively rare stories that are exceptions, where the girls are neither forced to become mothers nor punished, but allowed to remain what they were without transformation by instead bending the adult world to their will (as in Brave, or Moonrise Kingdom, or arguably Frozen, though in most of these the girl-heroes seem only to buying themselves time rather than enacting a full and permanent transformation of their circumstances).
Of course the utopia of childhood can itself be deeply retrograde, and is frequently misogynistic in its way — we spent a lot of time on “The Problem of Susan” in the Narnia books precisely so we didn’t fall too in love with the impossible fantasy of never growing up (when in the end we all have to). Nor can we safely imagine childhood in such uncomplicatedly rosy terms, both because childhood can also be a time of fierce frustration, competition, and intense pain even when it is not actively shattered through the cruelty and abuse of adults. But all the same there is something undeniably appealing about the idea of returning to a childhood that is both happy and which never gives way to something else, a desire that structures so much of our culture (particularly the middle-class culture of “good parenting”) that it really almost goes without saying. And in the case of Kimmy Schmidt‘s feminist politics of course the idea is not that women find some fantastical way to literally de-age themselves so much as they look to their younger, effortlessly capable and supremely confident selves as inspiration in the present.
There’s one more thing to say about Kimmy Schmidt, which is again about the abduction and the bunker, which would seem to be a rather large problem for my reading of the series. Isn’t Kimmy’s entire situation itself a literalized girl’s tragedy, insofar as she is abducted as a child and put into radical seclusion, all the while being fed obscenely misogynistic lies by a woman-hating male adult? Well, yes! The question of Kimmy’s abduction, and the horrific sexual violence it inevitably implies if thought about too much, is a pretty thorny one for the series: fixated on too much, it threatens to derail any potential for comedy in the show at all. (UPDATE: Someone just sent me Emily Nussbaum’s review, which talks a lot about this issue.) The series cleverly solves the problem by opening the door just a crack — “yes, there was weird sex stuff in the bunker” — and then simply leaving it there. Something happened — perhaps, as Evan suggested in what has become my headcanon, it was all between the girls and not involving the preacher at all — but it hasn’t changed Kimmy, or defeated her. And she emerges from Hell neither pregnant with the monster’s baby, nor transformed into a weeping plant or into sea-foam, but just as unflappable and unbreakable as she was when she went in.
And in any event the treatment of the bunker doesn’t really work the way the ten-second summary of the setup would suggest. The presence of the preacher is actually a further occasion for Kimmy to refuse to internalize her sexist training, precisely because it is now located within a single, odious man against whom she can fight. The button at the end of the first episode demonstrates precisely this: Kimmy proves he is lying to them, he says he’s going to break her someday, and she replies no, he never will. It’s easy to see why, in contrast to the microaggressions and little indignities — alongside the very big ones — that make up girls’ training to be women in our society, which is constantly delivered by parents and siblings and friends and trusted authority figures and widely celebrated mass culture texts, Kimmy’s more direct training in misogyny at the hands of the Reverend never really takes. In the bunker she had an obvious enemy, someone she could tell she was feeding her poison, and so she could reject it. It’s actually outside the bunker where the true brainwashing takes place, which is all the more insidious because it seems like education, like help, like love.
Gerry Canavan 