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Don’t speak of your transformation using human resource jargon. Use business language—language that your potential clients will understand (Graham, 1998).

Don’t seek perfection. Make a judgment about how much change an organization can handle. Don’t try to sell HPI … just start asking the right questions. Don’t take on too large or too small of an initial project. You want a project that will have significant

organizational impact and attain some visibility, without exceeding the capabilities of your young organization.

Don’t ignore the naysayers—especially those within your own department. There is almost always value in listening to the objections of others. Some degree of truth is typically

expressed and ought to be addressed. Don’t spend time selling the process of HPI. Focus on selling the potential for results. Don’t assume that having the support of the vice president of human resources will assure the support of

line management. Don’t try to make the transition overnight. A change like this will take years to occur.

Success Stories

Many companies can serve as examples where a traditional training organization has been transformed into a full-service HPI organization. There are many more in the process, and still more that have yet to begin this adventurous journey. This section will share the transformation experiences of four companies that have successfully migrated the path to HPI.

Mallinckrodt, Inc.Mallinckrodt, Inc.

Mallinckrodt, Inc. manufactures health-care products that diagnose disease, sustain breathing, and relieve pain. The training function at Mallinckrodt completed their transformation to a performance improvement organization over approximately a one-year period. Recognizing that their greatest challenge was to gain management’s support and confidence, they began their transition by building relationships with managers in the field.

They asked managers many questions and listened carefully to their answers. They asked such questions as, “What are your issues?” “What have you done about it?” and “If you could change things, what would you change?” They did not try to sell a program or a process. Their intention was to convey that they were credible and wanted to be partners in business success. It was not long before they had managers valuing the new services and making new requests. Instead of getting phone calls asking for training, the department members were getting calls asking for help to achieve business goals.

The new Organizational Development Department (formerly the Individual and Organizational Development Department) attributes some of their early success to their consistent use of an eight-step process, which they developed early in their transition. Additionally, they partnered with their clients to measure their success at both Level 3 and Level 4 (see Figure 7-3).

As the demand for the department’s services grew, so did the department. The new, growing organization was staffed strategically. Practitioners with varied backgrounds and experiences were sought so that the overall organization could provide an array of services to the organization. This breadth of talent, together with the HPI department’s client-centered focus, has sustained its reputation within the company as a valued partner for success.

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Prudential Health Care SystemsPrudential Health Care Systems

Prudential Health Care Systems made the transition from training to performance over an approximate two-year period. The key to the success was the dedication and support of the internal staff and upper-level management. The fledgling HPI function, however, suffered several setbacks in its progress due to management changes. Each time a change occurred, new managers needed to be educated and convinced of the merits of the new direction. Despite these challenges, the HPI function has successfully completed many projects.

SteelcaseSteelcase

Steelcase is the world’s leading manufacturer of office productivity furniture and services dedicated to providing high-performance work environments that help people work more effectively. A few members of the Corporate Learning and Development Department had the passion and determination to transform themselves into an HPI service organization known as Performance Planning Services.

Their transition took approximately two and a half years. There were many challenges. One was ongoing clarification about how HPI could benefit and work

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costs, such as the value of internal consultants and other resources used in the project that would be productive in other ways in the organization.

Communicate to such key stakeholders as managers and affected employees both the improvement in performance that occurred as well as the results of the cost-benefit analysis. Organizational leaders must recognize that HPI practitioners can produce measurable results in the workplace with interventions other than training, and that they can do it in a fiscally responsible way. Use company newsletters, websites, e- mail, and presentations to employees and management. Share the success stories with anyone who will listen. When the success case is communicated, it should:

Identify the problem or challenge Describe the intervention(s) that were selected Clarify the behavior change that was achieved Estimate the net impact on the organization’s goals and the return on investment projections

Charles Harpham, a Six Sigma Blackbelt with Constellation Energy, says, “I feel like I’m valued more and more with every successful project.” The only way this happens is if the business leaders of his organization know about his successes. This is not the time to be humble. Be proud of your accomplishments, and be sure to share the role that others played in your success.

Step 10: Gain Organizational Support for the TransformationStep 10: Gain Organizational Support for the Transformation

When you are equipped with a successful case, you are ready to spread the word about your HPI function’s new capabilities. There are many ways to get the word out and thereby build support throughout your company. First, everyone on the staff must be capable of describing the vision for the new organization in 30 seconds or less. One effective way to solicit support for your transformation is informally via “elevator” or “water cooler chats.” These conversations tend to be very brief. Therefore, you must be able to succinctly communicate what it is that you are trying to do.

Here is an example of an early-stage conversation:

Chris: Barbara, what’s been going on over in your area? Barbara: We’re beginning to measure training’s impact on the achievement of organizational goals.

A later-stage conversation:

Chris: How are things in training these days, Barbara? Barbara: We’re trying to change our focus from one that just provides skills and knowledge to the

organization to one that offers multiple solutions, in addition to, or in lieu of, training that helps our businesses achieve their goals.

Chris: What’s wrong with training? Barbara: Nothing really, if the reason you’re not making your numbers is because people don’t know

how to do certain aspects of their job, but we’ve found that many times, that’s not the case. In fact, training is a pretty expensive solution, so we only want to use it if we need to. We try to improve performance with less costly solutions, if we can. We use a systematic approach to analyze what’s really going on in the workplace and offer the most cost-effective solutions that

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will bring the desired results.

As you can see, individuals can communicate the overall gist of the transformation from a training- oriented to a performance-oriented approach in just a few short sentences. Occasionally, people like Chris in your organization will show more interest. That opens the door to schedule some time to share the model and approach that you use to improve human performance, as well as your success story. Remember to lose the jargon and talk in terms of how you can help “Chris” with his or her business challenges.

In addition to these informal opportunities to share what you are doing, seek out formal avenues of communication. You should “create a comprehensive marketing plan with the goal of creating mindshare and transforming the way [the training function] is viewed by the organization” (Spirgi, 2005). Newsletters, websites, e-mail, and presentations to managers and employees are all good ways to share your success story. Be careful not to promote the new approach beyond your means. In other words, do not solicit project work that you are not staffed to complete. Make sure that your communication includes your current and future capabilities to implement the model in other parts of the organization.

Consider, at this point, changing the name of your department. Harless (1995), in survey research he conducted, notes that the word performance appeared in the names of many in-house departments. He cited the following list of department names provided by respondents:

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competencies required to transform into a full-service HPI organization. The initial HPI project will define priorities for development for your organization. Initially, you will want to develop one or two HPI practitioners. Your selection of these candidates should be based upon their enthusiasm to grow in their profession and their proven success at organizational analysis.

Services We Offer

Intervention Internally Sourced

Externally Sourced

External Source Options

√ Sample √

360-Degree Feedback Accelerated Learning Action Learning Assessment Center Automated Resume Tracking System Challenge Education Change Style Preference Models Cognitive Ergonomics Communication Compensation Systems Competency Modeling Conflict Management Critical Thinking Systems Cultural Change Customer Feedback Electronic Performance Support Systems Employee Orientation Expert Systems Flowcharts Fluency Development Human Resource Information Systems Job Aids Leadership Development Programs Learner-controlled instruction Leveraging Diversity Mentoring/Coaching Motivation Systems Needs Assessment On-the-Job Training Organizational Development

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Organizational Scan Outplacement Partnering Agreements Performance Analysis Performance Appraisal Performance Management Policies and Procedures Process Mapping Recognition Programs Reengineering Results-based Management Safety Management Simulation Strategic Planning and Visioning Structured Writing Team Performance Teaming Training Usability Assessments Work Group Alignment

Figure 7-5 A checklist for defining the interventions offered by an HPI function/department.

As Jim Fuller (Fuller and Farrington, 1999) writes, “Potential candidates within the organization typically have backgrounds that are strong in either systems thinking or people development. If you must choose between the two, select the candidates with the systems thinking backgrounds.” Each HPI project that is launched will provide additional opportunities for the staff to develop new skills. See Chapter 8 for additional information on how to develop HPI practitioners.

Step 8: Select the Initial HPI ProjectStep 8: Select the Initial HPI Project

Once you have your champion and your newly trained HPI practitioners, you are ready to identify an HPI project that will allow the transformed department to demonstrate its value to others in the organization. Ideally, the initial project should meet the criteria described below.

First, the project should provide an opportunity to improve performance that is easy to define and measure. For example, it should reduce injuries, reduce merchandise return rate, increase production, improve quality, or address some other pressing organizational problem—preferably one of high visibility and one tied to the organization’s strategic objectives. While efforts to increase empowerment or improve the leadership of an organization are outstanding HPI goals, these would not be wise choices for the initial HPI project, since they are more challenging to measure and more difficult to demonstrate short-term results.

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Second, the project timeline should be six months or less. Remember that the goal of the initial project should be to create a success story—and testimony from a credible manager that you can use to promote the desired transformation of the training function. The longer the project timeline, the longer it will take to achieve this transformation.

Third, the project should be relatively straightforward and not complex. Keep in mind that, in most cases, HPI practitioners assigned to the project will be novices and will still be on a learning curve. Avoid projects that are too ambitious in scope and that have too many uncontrollable or politically sensitive issues associated with them.

Fourth, the root cause of the problem or opportunity should be something other than—or in addition to —lack of skill or knowledge. Since a goal is to feature your organization’s capability to select and implement interventions beyond training, it is critical that your initial project be highly likely to result in nontraining interventions.

These are guidelines and not absolute requirements for the initial project. Adhering to these guidelines will help your organization rapidly gain credibility for its new direction.

Step 9: Demonstrate Success and Publicize ItStep 9: Demonstrate Success and Publicize It

Many public case studies demonstrate successful HPI projects at major corporations (see, for instance, Rothwell and Dubois, 1998). Why not just use these to convince management to support your organization’s new direction? After all, if it was successful at Motorola, it will be successful in your organization, right? Managers are quick to point out how these corporations differ from their own. It is unlikely that you would ever gain support for your desired transformation by sharing these case studies with management. What is required to gain the support of management is an internal success story.

Follow the HPI model that your organization selected in Step 3. It is critical to obtain baseline performance measures as your project commences. Success is achieved when the desired performance is achieved or improved in the workplace. Therefore, it is also imperative to conduct a postintervention performance evaluation to demonstrate the success of the intervention(s).

In addition to measuring overall performance improvement, you should complete a cost-benefit analysis or ROI. To do this, track all costs—both direct and indirect. Direct costs are out-of-pocket expenses, such as the cost of materials or external resources. Indirect or opportunity costs are less easily measurable

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Human Performance Enhancement, Performance Systems, Performance Support, Performance Support & Training, Performance Design, Performance & Organizational Support, and Performance Technology.

An argument against changing the title of a department is made by Sorohan (1996). She notes that some people—and especially managers—may become confused with such terms as performance technology and performance consulting. Sorohan states that “some performance consultants report that they’ve had more trouble winning support for the term than the practice.” You need to make the decision about changing—or not changing—the name of your organization to reflect your new service offerings based on your knowledge of your client base.

Recognize that some in your organization might perceive the new model as infringing on the job responsibilities of others. When an executive at a Wall Street financial firm received a recommendation to expand the capabilities of the training function to include analysis of human performance, her response was that she expected her managers to be performing that function. She was not supportive of the concept to have traditional training people performing the analysis she expected from the leaders in her organization. In fact, it’s been suggested that it won’t be long before human performance improvement becomes part of the leading MBA programs.

There may be other functions inside or outside of the human resource organization that perform similar roles. Organization development and quality departments, in particular, are just two of many departments that might regard themselves as already providing this service to the organization. It would be advantageous to engage these departments early in your process, share approaches, and determine if there are overlaps in your strategies to improve performance. Reorganization or merging of similar functions, either on the organization chart or virtually, may prove beneficial as time goes by.

Alternative Paths for Transforming a Traditional Training Department into an HPI Department

Other HPI authors have recommended similar, yet different, paths. Smalley and DeJong (1995) reflected on the transformation of their traditional HRD department at Amway and cited five phases in the evolution to HPI formulated by Harless (1992). These progressive stages included “conventional training, performance-based instruction, job-aided training, front-end analysis and measuring results, and performance planning.” Fuller (1998) described a five-step approach for preparing to transition to a focus on performance improvement. These were to:

1. Determine who needs to be involved as advisers 2. Form a definition of HPI 3. Select a single HPI model to use 4. Identify specific people who will perform the HPI work 5. Position HPI into the organization, illustrating its benefits

As with any road map, there are always alternative routes that can be taken. The 10 elements featured in this chapter are simply guidelines that can be modified to fit your organization. They are intended to help you identify a path that will successfully guide your organization from a training function to a human performance improvement organization.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

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While there is no one right way to navigate the transition from a traditional training organization to a human performance improvement organization, there are some pitfalls that you can avoid when leading this transformation in your company. To list just a few:

Don’t wait for the client to come to you; be proactive in identifying performance improvement projects. Don’t assume that you can make the case for transformation by citing external case studies. Don’t widely publicize the intended transformation before you can respond with resources. Do not treat the transformation as a project; treat it as an ongoing process. Don’t form a task force. Don’t form a project team. It’s an ongoing evolution that will be impacted by an ever-changing environment. The players will need to change depending on current needs. Don’t get discouraged. There will be setbacks. A champion may be promoted or leave the company. An emergency, such as a merger, could occur that will alter your focus. Or a host of other changes could occur that might have a negative impact on your course of action.

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should conduct Level 3 evaluations for 20–30 percent of course offerings and Level 4 evaluations for 10 percent of course offerings. However, those are just guidelines. If your training department is having a credibility problem within your organization, you may choose to conduct Level 3 and Level 4 evaluations for most of your training initiatives until you firmly resolve the image problem. Why not 100 percent all of the time? The answer is that it is a practical matter of resources. We are operating within budget constraints; not just of dollars, but with limited training personnel to meet our organization’s needs. Level 3 and 4 evaluations can be time consuming to complete.

Kirkpatrick Model for Training Evaluation

Level of Evaluation Measures Answers the Question

Level 1 Reaction Did they like it?

Level 2 Learning Did they learn it?

Level 3 Behavior Did they use it?

Level 4 Results Did it make a difference?

Figure 7-2 The Kirkpatrick model for training evaluation.

Figure 7-3 Increase in levels of evaluation. Source: ASTD 2005 State of the Industry Report.

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However, being able to transform the traditional training function into a valued performance-oriented training function requires that professionals in the training department design and implement effective Level 3 and Level 4 evaluations. Chapter 8 provides several options for building this competency in the training organization. Successful execution of Level 3 and Level 4 evaluations also requires that management support the implementation of these evaluations by their own participation and by providing access to the employees whose behavior is being measured.

If it’s quantifiable, you should also calculate the return on investment. This calculation clearly defines your financial value to the organization and is in the language of your customers.

When the training department has a success story, publicize it. Describe it in newsletters, websites, e- mail, and presentations to employees and management. You can even submit the success story to a local or national trade journal. The communication should identify the knowledge or skill gap that existed, the structured learning event that was selected, the behavior change that was achieved, and the benefits received by the organization. The more success stories your department can share, the greater the confidence your customers will have that you’re committed not to just training, but to their overall business success. Once you’ve established that you’re both on the same team trying to achieve the same goal, you’ll have an easier time selling your services—not just training services, but other performance improvement services.

Step 3: Educate Management on the Factors That Influence Human PerformanceStep 3: Educate Management on the Factors That Influence Human Performance

A well-designed Level 3 evaluation not only can measure the behavior change that has occurred as a result of a learning event but also can determine what barriers to performance, if any, still exist in the workplace. Both data are important to communicate to management. The first part helps management recognize the training function’s commitment to follow-up and ensure that the new skills and knowledge transfer to the workplace. Identifying the remaining barriers to performance is the first step in educating management that training is not necessarily the sole solution to all performance problems. It gives you the

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opportunity to communicate the other factors in the workplace that can lead to less-than-acceptable performance.

The ability to educate management requires the HPI practitioner to identify the myriad factors influencing workplace performance. These may include:

Clarity of expectations Level of empowerment Completeness of data, information, or feedback available to performers when they need it and in the form they need it Quality of documentation Quality of job aids for simple, infrequently performed tasks Workplace design Organizational structure Conflicting, or nonexistent, consequences of performance Efficiency of work processes Employee ability

By identifying organizational performance gaps, decision makers can take proactive steps to build a high-performance workplace (HPW), where individuals are supported in all ways to perform to their peak. You can establish yourself and your colleagues as the ones in the organization who have the expertise to bridge these gaps. Try to avoid HPI jargon like, “interventions” and “terminal objectives.” Rather, you should talk to the managers about “solutions” and “what’s most important” (Willmore, 2003). One caution: Many times, management sees most of these types of performance gaps as “their issues” to address. Be prepared for this attitude. Seeing the former training person as someone who can help them with these types of organizational issues may take some getting used to. Be patient, but diligent. Susan Fehl, an HPI practitioner who has over 25 years of experience in the field, says, “There are very few enlightened managers out there that realize that (human) performance improvement is a foundational piece to their business.” Part of our job is to help them not only to accept this role, but to embrace it and value it. Eventually, you’ll find a manager who will welcome your help. And that brings us to Step 4.

Step 4: Obtain an Internal ChampionStep 4: Obtain an Internal Champion

To make a successful transition from a traditional training function to an HPI function, you first need to have a success story. Seek an internal champion—that is, a manager who has shown interest in the results of training offered in his or her organization or a manager who has shown an interest in factors influencing human performance. Choosing a manager who is one to two levels above you on the organization chart has proven to be successful (Fuller and Farrington, 1999). If you go too high in the organization, the project that gets defined may prove to be too challenging and complex for novice HPI practitioners. Too broad a project may require the involvement of a large population of nonbelievers—those who do not understand why trainers should poke around in the business process. For these reasons, “think small” on your first effort.

You want a champion who will support the initial organizational analysis that will result in baseline measurements of performance and will also commit to post-intervention evaluation so you can measure the overall improvement in performance. Your champion should be ready to remove barriers that you encounter during the course of the project. The champion will also be a key partner in communicating the success of the HPI intervention.

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The key to maintaining the support of a champion is to form a partnership with him or her. You form that partnership by asking a lot of questions about their organization. What are the challenges that they face? What kinds of solutions have been tried in the past? What were the results of those solutions? What are the measures of success? How will we know if we’ve achieved our project goals? The HPI practitioner needs to demonstrate his or her true commitment to achieving the organization’s goals, and the champion needs to demonstrate his or her true commitment to the project.

Step 5: Select an HPI ModelStep 5: Select an HPI Model

Chapter 2 featured several models for HPI. It is essential that your training organization select a model that will be utilized by the new HPI function. While it could be argued that using only one model is too restrictive, it is critical at this stage of transformation that the organization gains a thorough understanding of only one HPI model and the procedural tasks accompanying it. Your organization must interface with the client base in a consistent manner. Settling on one model will encourage this. And remember, the model is to guide all HPI practitioners to follow the same process with the organization’s client. It’s not necessary to explain the model to the client. Your interactions with the client should be kept in terms that the client can relate to. “Effective performance

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One Approach to Transforming a Traditional Training Department into an HPI Department This chapter provides a rudimentary list of action steps that are needed to transform a traditional training function into a full-service human performance improvement organization. The order may vary somewhat for different organizations. The steps are shown in Figure 7-1.

Figure 7-1 Possible action steps for transforming a traditional training department into an HPI department.

Step 1: Gain and Maintain Internal Support for the TransformationStep 1: Gain and Maintain Internal Support for the Transformation

Speak to those who have tried to lead a transformation from training to HPI and they will tell you that one of the biggest challenges is securing and sustaining the advocacy of the practitioners in their own training organization. The transition will require many in the training function to upgrade, or in some cases completely change, their skill sets. This can prove to be very exciting to some,

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consultants make sure that the performance model, language, and process don’t distract from the focus on the performance issues and business priorities that initially mattered to the client” (Willmore, 2003). The model you choose to operate within does not need to be taken right out of some textbook. In fact, most organizations find it a useful exercise to develop their own customized model for HPI. Keep in mind, however, that the model should include the following elements (Fuller and Farrington, 1999):

Identification of a business need Determination of the performance required to meet the business need Identification of the performance gap(s) Determination of the root cause(s) of the performance gap(s) Selection and implementation of interventions to remove or reduce the root cause(s) Evaluation of performance to determine the success of the intervention

This model will not only serve as the blueprint by which you approach all HPI projects, but it will also be the primary tool you use to communicate your function’s transformation to the rest of the organization. Over time—and with experience—the original model will most likely be modified to better fit the idiosyncrasies of the key personalities and corporate culture of your organization.

Step 6: Determine What Services the New Organization Is Going to OfferStep 6: Determine What Services the New Organization Is Going to Offer

Before a traditional training department can begin to transform to a human performance improvement function, it must define what that means. There are a host of interventions that a full-service HPI function can offer to an organization. It must be determined which interventions will be included in the service offerings. Of those, determine which will be resourced internally and which will be resourced utilizing external service providers.

Mager (1992) cites several services that might be included in the newly defined organization (see Figure 7-4). Langdon, Whiteside, and McKenna (1999) cite 50 performance improvement tools that you might include as services in your new organization. The checklist appearing in Figure 7-5 will help you define the new organizational unit services.

Here is a list of some of the services that might be offered by a performance-oriented full-service department.

Needs analyses A review of organizational plans to identify needs for training and nontraining services.

Performance analyses Onsite review to identify causes of discrepancies between actual and desired performance, with recommendations for solutions.

Feedback review An onsite review to ensure that all tasks include sources of feedback to the performers.

Consequence review An onsite review to ensure that all tasks include sources of feedback to the performers.

Task analyses Onsite analyses intended to generate descriptions of actual and/or exemplary performance.

Goal analyses A technique intended to assist managers in developing usable definitions of

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abstract intents.

Organizational analyses A review of the organizational structure within and around a job, intended to determine whether the organizational structure facilitates or impedes peak performance.

Documentation Manuals, and so on, designed to be used to facilitate job performance.

Job/performance aids Design and development of items that will prompt desired performance.

Performance management systems

Development of mechanisms and procedures intended to ensure a supportive environment.

Workplace review Onsite review intended to identify obstacles caused by awkward workplace design.

Orientation sessions Sessions that allow people to become familiar with target concepts and information.

Training sessions Sessions intended to teach people what they do not currently know but need to know.

Coaching instruction Training sessions for nontrainers who will be expected to conduct on-the-job training.

Figure 7-4 The full-service training and performance services department. © 1999, “What Every Manager Should Know About Training”. The Center for Effective Performance, Inc., 1100 Johnson Ferry Road, Suite 150, Atlanta, GA 30342. www.cepworldwide.com. 800-558-4237. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. No portion of these materials may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent from The Center for Effective Performance, Inc.

Step 7: Develop HPI PractitionersStep 7: Develop HPI Practitioners

Just as additional competencies are required to transition from a traditional training function to a results- based training function, so too are new

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threatening to others, and downright heresy to a few. It is critical to get the organization aligned and supportive of the change initiative.

At this early stage, one way to build support is to create the vision of the transformed training organization collectively. It is important to identify the many benefits of moving to a full-service HPI organization. These benefits should include expanded opportunities for professional growth, increased credibility within the organization, greater variety in project tasks, increased skills, and many others. It is also important to capture those aspects of the transformation that are likely to prompt the most concern. Examples of such issues might include loss of specialization, lack of clarity in individuals’ future roles, and lack of experience with nontraining interventions. Addressing these concerns in an open manner will encourage the support of internal practitioners. Maintaining an open dialogue can dissuade “negative speak” that can escalate to internal sabotage. Negative “hallway talk” with potential internal clients could stall—or even defeat—transformation efforts.

Too much enthusiasm for the transformation can hurt your efforts. Why? A shift in the functionality of the organizational unit takes time—time for your organizational unit to make the shift and time for your clients to understand and accept the change. Being overzealous by trying to do too much too fast damages your overall transformation effort. Building too much enthusiasm in your client base before you are staffed to respond, or trying to initiate HPI projects in organizations where you have not earned credibility with management, could also prove destructive to your mission.

Therefore, it is important to establish a timeline for the transformation and establish consensus among those in the department for sticking to it. The remaining nine steps are suggested milestones for the timeline.

Step 2: Transition to a Valued, Results-Based Training OrganizationStep 2: Transition to a Valued, Results-Based Training Organization

Establishing the training organization as one that is focused on performance will help management recognize the function’s role in helping the organization achieve its goals. This will help to establish credibility for transforming the training function into an HPI function.

Many training organizations today offer many internally and externally designed training programs. Managers and employees are accustomed to picking up the training catalogue and searching for the program that will provide the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the workplace. That is one of the more optimistic scenarios. In many cases, the company course catalogue is an easy solution to the mandatory employee development effort of the company. Employees flip through the listing of courses, looking for interesting topics that may or may not have much relevance to their current knowledge or skill gaps or, more importantly, anything to do with their current job tasks.

The role of traditional training departments has been to identify the training needs within the organization and to provide training opportunities that will help meet those needs. They often schedule the programs, manage registration and logistics, and, in some cases, even deliver the content. There are many outstanding training departments in corporations today that not only provide standard off-the-shelf training programs but also design and develop customized training for their organizations.

In order to increase our value to the organizations that we serve, we must first offer training that is strategic, i.e., that aligns with the organization’s key business strategies. This means that we need to be very clear on what those strategies are. We need to be able to step into the role of analyst and determine those skills and knowledge that the workforce needs in order to achieve their goals. Then we need to design effective training that will bridge those gaps. Finally, we need to be able to quantify our impact on business results.

To win the support of management to transform a training function into a performance improvement

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function, the training organization must first measure and publicize the effectiveness of their most recognizable human performance intervention—training. It is not good enough to just report the number of classroom hours delivered. The training department must measure and report the ability of the learning events to produce behavior change back on the job and the impact of behavior change in meeting the organization’s goals. This information is vital to communicating the training organization’s commitment to producing measurable business results rather than just filling classrooms.

In general, the training profession has made significant improvements to demonstrate their training’s effectiveness in terms that business leaders can understand (see Figure 7-2). The Kirkpatrick model for evaluation, discussed in Chapter 5, has been historically used for demonstrating training effectiveness. Jack Phillips, of the ROI Institute, has written extensively on a fifth level—return on investment. The ASTD 2005 State of the Industry Report (Sugrue and Rivera, 2005) indicates that 91 percent of courses offered by leading-edge firms are evaluated at Level 1. Fifty-four percent of courses at these firms are evaluated at Level 2. Twenty-three percent of courses offered by leading-edge firms are evaluated at Level 3, and only 8 percent at Level 4 (see Figure 7-3). In general, organizations

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7 Transforming the Training Department into an HPI Function

Chapter 6 illustrated the changes that are occurring throughout corporate America and their implications to HPI practitioners. These trends are driving the need for corporate training departments to transition into full-service performance improvement organizations. Training professionals are moving away from training as the sole solution for all human performance problems or improvement opportunities when, in fact, many performance improvement strategies are possible. Countless books, articles, college courses, conference presentations, and workshops bear witness to this trend.

Such a transition does not occur rapidly and without challenges. In fact, it can easily take two years or more to convert a traditional training department into an HPI function—and perhaps longer, depending on the current status of the training department in the organization. Not only must the training department change and be prepared to offer additional HPI services, but the clients—internal or external—must recognize and value the additional services. This could prove to be quite a challenge in some organizations where the human resource function has enjoyed a less than stellar reputation.

“How is it that, after 20 years of steadily developing professionalism and lofty vision, in many companies, HR is still regarded—rightly or wrongly—as the department where all good things come to an end?” (Finney, 1997). One need only read Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic strip featuring Catbert, the “evil” HR director, to get a sense of what many people in corporate America think of the human resource function and such related functions as human performance improvement, human resource development, and workplace learning and performance.

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D espite the most familiar uses of the term, rhetoric is not speech at odds with reality. Rather, it

is the art of persuasion itself. Its study dates back to ancient Greece, and its terms of analysis remain generative. The rhetorical analyst’s central ques- tion, always specified for situation, is “Who is persuading whom of what, and what are the means of persuasion?”1 Rhetoric is a regular part of medicine: in the absence of positive diagnostic tests, patients may have to persuade physicians that they are ill and in need of care; physicians must sometimes persuade patients to adhere to courses of treatment; illness anxiety, perhaps fuelled by the Internet, may lead people to persuade themselves that they are ill; and multiple forces converge to per- suade us that some conditions count as disease states, while others do not.

A current example of medical rheto- ric in action is the case of flibanserin, a drug currently under review for the third time — the next decision is imminent — by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Flibanserin is offered for the treatment of female hypoactive sexual desire disorder, a type of sexual dysfunc- tion. In October 2014, the FDA held patient-focused, information-gathering meetings on female sexual dysfunction. I attended those meetings to observe first- hand the persuasive strategies at work on a regulatory body understood to adjudi- cate cases on the basis of scientific evi- dence. In the course of events (at these meetings and since), it has become clear that Sprout Pharmaceuticals, owners of flibanserin, and allied individuals and groups likely have persuaded the FDA to take matters outside scientific evidence into account in its decision-making.

In advance of the October meetings, a massive pro-drug media campaign,2 including an active website (eventhe-

score.org), was launched, with the sup- port of groups that prominently include Sprout. Even the Score most saliently equates non-approval of a drug for fe- male sexual dysfunction with FDA bias against women. Its main argument: If men have drugs for improving sexual function, women should have them too. The claim is problematic for many rea- sons. For example, the site claims erro- neously that 26 drugs are approved for men. Most important, Even the Score appears to ignore the fact that, despite

the efforts of pharmaceutical companies over several years, no drug for female sexual dysfunction has been developed that, on the evidence, meets FDA stan- dards for safety and efficacy. Although Even the Score’s reasoning has the sound of a feminist argument, it is rather a co optation of a feminist princi- ple. The bid to “even the score” acts rhetorically to shift the ground of debate from medical evidence to sexism, from reason to popular appeal.

On Feb. 17, 2015, Sprout Pharma-

Medicine and society

The rhetoric of female sexual dysfunction: faux feminism and the FDA

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ceuticals submitted its reapplication for approval of flibanserin. On June 4, expert panelists advising the FDA voted 18 to 6 to approve it “with risk management options.” The FDA’s final decision is expected by Aug. 18 (the FDA can override the vote of an expert panel, although it seldom does). If the decision is to approve the drug, it will appear that the FDA was influenced by Sprout and its allies, and influenced too by public opinion. In part through the efforts of Even the Score, there is wide- spread belief that a “pink Viagra” exists and that, on the principle of gender equity, it should be available to women. (Flibanserin, though, is no “pink Viagra”; for example, the pill must be taken daily, not “as needed,” so adverse effects are a special concern. “Viagra” is only a metaphor here, evoking by association the idea of good sex on demand.)

If the drug fails to win approval, some credit must go to groups such as the New View Campaign that have marshalled more scientific evidence and their own rhetorical resources to in- fluence public opinion and make the case to the FDA that it should not ap- prove a drug that does not meet rigor- ous standards of safety and efficacy.3

Certainly, disappointing sex lives and the figure of the “frigid” woman have been around for a long time. But the turn of this century marked a very public mo- ment in the medicalization of sex4 and pathologization of low desire. Over the past 15 or so years — arguably since the FDA approval of Viagra in 1998 and the publication of a JAMA article in 1999 claiming that 43% of women ex- perience sexual dysfunction5  — many women who experience low sexual de- sire have been persuaded that they may well have a medical condition.

By the time Viagra (sildenafil) came to market, the race was already on to develop a sex drug for women. Several candidate drugs tried and failed to be that drug. Among them are sildenafil itself, repurposed to increase bloodflow to female genitals; Intrinsa, a testoster- one patch for women; and flibanserin, aimed at women’s brains. According to Stephen Stahl, adjunct professor of psy- chiatry at the University of California

San Diego, “Flibanserin is believed to work by correcting [a neurochemical] imbalance and providing the appropri- ate areas of the brain with a more suit- able mix of brain chemicals to help restore sexual desire.”6 Each of these drugs is premised on a different theory about the cause of female sexual dys- function. This inconsistency itself might throw into question the very nature of low desire, but many forces are at work — some professional,5 some corporate7 and some popular2 — to persuade women that low desire is abnormal and may be a sign of biological disease.

At its October meeting, the FDA seemed already to be caught up in the logic of Even the Score and had agreed to feature prominently on its roster of speakers both “patients” and “experts” associated with the campaign. It seemed clear from the language of FDA moderators that certain questions were taken to have already been asked and answered: low sexual desire was, for many women, a biological disease, and there was an “unmet need” for pharmaceutical treatment of it. The pro- drug campaign had ensured that most of the testimony the FDA would hear came from married women who had no interest in sex with their husbands and felt themselves to have a biological dis- ease that was, moreover, threatening their marriages. Eight women testified; six of them told deeply personal stories that ended with an emotional call for drugs. From compulsory disclosures of sponsorship, it emerged that Sprout it- self or Veritas (a marketing firm con- nected to Sprout) paid the expenses of some panelists and countless other at- tendees, most of whom wore matching teal scarves and Even the Score and #WomenDeserve buttons.8

The women who testified were addressed by FDA moderators as “patients” — as people already consti- tuted as having disease — rather than, for example, as people with unresolved relationship issues or a history of sex- ual repression or a life with work and children that left little energy for sex. Moderators asked these women about their “symptoms,” a term also assum- ing the presence of disease. Notably, the word “pleasure” was not used in

two days of meetings: for some women who reported their experience, sexual distress was, in the first instance, proxy distress, and a “satisfying sexual event” (calculated by self-report as a measure for the treatment outcome) counted as satisfying when their husbands were happy after it was over.

We all experience distress in the terms available for us to experience it in, and sexual distress is no different. We are surrounded by professional and public discourses — rhetorics — about health and illness. These rhetorics are imbued with values, including values about sex. We absorb these values and draw on them in interpreting our own experience of health and illness. Rhe- torical study is one means of getting at the processes by which we become per- suaded, sometimes inappropriately, that our distress is best thought of as con- tained in our individual bodies, express- ing a disease, in need of a drug.

Judy Z. Segal PhD Professor, Department of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

References 1. Segal JZ. Health and the rhetoric of medicine. Car-

bondale (Ill): Southern Illinois University Press; 2005. 2. Schiavocampo M, Jesko J, Effron L. Fight over ‘little

pink pill’ raises sexism questions. ABC News: Night- line 2014 May 21. Available: http://abcnews.go.com /Health/fight-pink-pill-boosting-womens-sex-drive -raises/story?id=23813586 (accessed 2014 Oct. 20).

3. Mintzes B, Tiefer L. We shouldn’t push dubious ‘pink Viagra’ pills on women and call it emancipa- tion. The Guardian [London] 2015 June 4. Available: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/05/ women-sex-viagra-flibanserin-fda-research (accessed 2015 June 5)

4. Cacchioni T, Tiefer L. Why medicalization? Intro- duction to the special issue on the medicalization of sex. J Sex Res 2012;49:307-10.

5. Laumann EO, Paik A, Rosen RC. Sexual dysfunc- tion in the United States. JAMA 1999;281:537-44.

6. Stahl S. In: Sprout Pharmaceuticals resubmits fliban- serin new drug application for the treatment of hypo- active sexual desire disorder in premenopausal women [press release]. New York: PR Newswire; 2015 Feb. 17. Available: www.prnewswire.com/news /sprout+pharmaceuticals (accessed 2015 Feb. 17).

7. Raleigh (NC): Sprout Pharmaceuticals. Available: www.sproutpharma.com (accessed 2015 June 29).

8. Female sexual dysfunction patient-focused drug development public meeting. Silver Spring, MD: Food and Drug Administration Center for Drug Evaluation and Research; 2014 Oct. 27. Avail- able: www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/NewsEvents/ UCM423113.pdf (accessed 2015 Aug 7).

Competing interests: Judy Segal’s research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council covered costs of travel to the FDA.

CMAJ 2015. DOI:10.1503/cmaj.150363

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Factors shaping women’s sexual satisfaction: a comparison of medical and social models

Cristalle Pronier and Elizabeth Monk-Turner*

Old Dominion University, Sociology & Criminal Justice (CJ), Norfolk, VA 23529, USA

(Received 12 July 2012; final version received 17 October 2012)

Since the introduction of Viagra in 1998, pharmaceutical giants have been scrambling to develop a similar drug to treat ‘sexual dysfunction’ in women. In 1999, female sexual dysfunction (FSD), an umbrella term for a variety of different sexual ‘dysfunctions’, became an official disorder. FSD is one example of the medicalization of female sexuality whereby problems are defined, conceptualized, and solved in medical terms while ignoring the social, cultural, and psychological factors that shape women’s sexual health. Based on a sample of 311 sexually active women, this work explores the influence of both social factors and sexual dysfunction on sexual satisfaction. Results show that social factors explain more of the variation in sexual satisfaction than sexual dysfunction alone.

Keywords: sexual satisfaction; sexual dysfunction; social factors; stress; women’s health

Introduction

Medicalization is a process that refers to the application of a medical perspective to

hitherto non-medical behaviors and phenomena. It includes medical definitions, medical

terminology, and medical solutions to previously non-medical issues (Conrad and

Scheider 1980, Conrad 1992, 2007). Non-medical issues become medical problems

through the interactions of scientific technology, scientism, advertising, and the

patient/medical community. The conditions are then treated through medical solutions

such as pharmacology. Contemporary examples of the transformation of everyday

experiences into medical problems include shyness to ‘generalized anxiety disorder’

(GAD), rambunctious children into those that suffer from ‘attention deficit hyperactivity

disorder’ (ADHD), and unpleasant menstrual symptoms as ‘premenstrual dysmorphic

disorder’ (PMDD) (Ridberg 2006, Conrad 2007). Conrad (2007) has noted that women

have been disproportionally medicalized, citing examples such as depression,

menstruation, and, now, female sexual function. All of these ‘disorders’ can be diagnosed

using the criteria set out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,

Fourth Edition (DSM-IV-TR) (American Psychiatric Association 2000) and can be treated

with pharmaceuticals. In the current work, we explore how well women’s sexual

dysfunction, compared to social desire variables, explains sexual satisfaction. If social

variables significantly shape variation in reported sexual satisfaction, pharmaceuticals

would be of limited value.

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Journal of Gender Studies, 2014

Vol. 23, No. 1, 69–80, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.752347

Defining female sexual dysfunction

In 1998, the Consensus Conference on female sexual function (by the Sexual Function

Health Council of the American Foundation for Urological Disease) helped solidify the

official definitions of female sexual dysfunction (FSD) (Tiefer 2006). Sexual dysfunction

is defined by the DSM-IV-TR as ‘ . . . a disturbance in the process that characterize the

sexual response cycle or by pain associated with sexual intercourse’ (American

Psychiatric Association 2000, p. 535). FSD is an umbrella term that includes sexual issues

with desire (hypoactive sexual desire disorder, HSDD), arousal (female sexual arousal

disorder, FSAD), orgasm (female orgasmic disorder, FOD), and pain disorders

(dyspareunia) (American Psychiatric Association 2000).

Critiques of medicalization

Academics critical of the medicalized approach to female sexuality have argued that pills

will not be able to address the core issues of women’s sexual satisfaction (McHugh 2006).

Tiefer (2002) has argued that the biological reductionism promoted by the medical model

has substantial detrimental effects on women. Disadvantages include: overemphasizing

the importance of genital response while ignoring social and cultural issues that affect

women, the dangerous promotion of pharmaceutical answers as a panacea to women’s

sexual issues, and the increase in sexual insecurity by ‘disordering’ common sexual

difficulties (Fishman and Mamo 2002, Tiefer 2002, Moynihan 2003b, Hartley 2006, Canner

2008). Many researchers have argued that disease-mongering, or the pathologizing of

common experiences by convincing healthy people that they are ‘disordered’ or ‘diseased’,

allows the pharmaceutical industry to define, promote, and treat disorders and diseases to

their financial advantage (Payer 1992, Moynihan 2005, Dyer 2006, Tiefer 2008).

Sexual functioning has historically been defined in medical terms focused on the

physiological aspects of body response. Masters and Johnson (1966) contributed to

the development of medical treatments for female sexual dysfunctions through the

identification of four phases of the sexual response cycle: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and

resolution. These concepts are also reflected in the DSM-IV-TR which defines the four

phases of the sexual response cycle as: desire, excitement, orgasm, and resolution

(American Psychiatric Association 2000).

Female sexual functioning index

Researchers have developed a standardized measurement that reflects the diagnostic

criteria for FSD as outlined by the DSM-IV-TR. The Female Sexual Functioning Index

(FSFI) is a 19-item self-report measurement that is comprised of Likert scale response

options (Rosen et al. 2000). The FSFI covers the frequency and/or level of satisfaction of:

desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, and pain items – all physiological aspects of the

sexual response cycle. Although the FSFI cannot officially diagnose FSD, or any of its

subtypes, it is an accepted and widely used instrument in the study of female sexual

function.

Operationalizing sexual satisfaction and the sexual satisfaction scale

Measuring and operationalizing female sexual satisfaction has proved to be challenging.

Dundon and Rellini (2010) highlight the on-going difficulty in conceptualizing female

satisfaction, noting that there is a vast array of predictors. Sexual satisfaction is even more

70 C. Pronier and E. Monk-Turner

complex than the physiological underpinnings of sexual functioning because it includes

physical, emotional, psychological, and relational variables. To date, clinical trials have

often used orgasm as a simple quantitative way to measure sexual satisfaction in women

(Canner 2008). This is problematic as Nicolson and Burr (2003) argue that orgasm is

extremely limiting in understanding sexual satisfaction among heterosexual women.

Further, Galinsky (2009) argues that the ability to communicate and understand another

person’s emotions as well as self-esteem and autonomy are better measures of sexual

health and satisfaction than orgasm.

Recently, a scale to address the complexity of female sexual satisfaction has been

developed. The Sexual Satisfaction Scale – Women’s version (SSS-W) is a 30-item self-

report instrument that has been tested for reliability, both internal and test-retest, and

validity (Meston and Trapnell 2005). This scale measures satisfaction based on a five-

factor model with subscales covering contentment, communication, compatibility,

relational concern, and personal concern.

Besides dysfunction, predictors of female sexual satisfaction focus on age, race,

relationship satisfaction, general well-being, and lifestyle factors. Relationship

satisfaction and relational variables such as emotional closeness have been shown to be

significantly related to sexual satisfaction in women (Philippsohn and Hartmann 2009).

Philippsohn and Hartmann found, in a sample of German women, that sexual satisfaction

was ‘ . . . intricately and inextricably interwoven with relationship factors’ (2009, p. 1008).

Likewise, Carpenter et al. (2009) found that women in midlife associated emotional

closeness more with sexual practices than with relational factors. Witting et al. (2008)

concluded that overall relationship satisfaction was positively associated with sexual

satisfaction and inversely related to the presence of sexual functioning problems. The

subjective experience of emotional closeness before, during, and after sexual activities is

also positively related to sexual satisfaction (Bancroft et al. 2003, McHugh 2006).

Notably, extant work in sexuality focuses on Caucasians (Dobkin et al. 2006, Huang

et al. 2009). Huang et al. (2009) purposefully oversampled minority respondents to

explore possible differences and argued that sexual satisfaction did vary according to race

and ethnicity independent of other variables. Age has varying effects on sexual satisfaction

in women (Davison et al. 2009).

Lifestyle factors and sexual satisfaction

Time restraints have been identified as a primary issue in shaping sexual satisfaction.

A study of 519 French women, aged 35 years and older, found that lack of sexual desire

was directly related to time restraints as experienced by the individual woman (Colson

et al. 2006). Qualitative research conducted by McHugh (2006), on a college-aged

population, also identified time as a crucial factor in sexual satisfaction. Additionally,

McHugh (2006) identified seven themes in her content analysis of 2000 þ sexuality

journals in response to the question, ‘What do women want?’ These themes are:

consensual sex, mutually satisfying sex, sexual agency, relationships, self love, time and

rest, and sexual health and liberation (emphasis ours).

McHugh (2006) conceptualized ‘self love’ as a love of one’s own body, finding that

body image and self-esteem were integral factors in shaping young women’s sexual

selves. Holt and Kogan (2001) found that college women who reported dissatisfaction

with their sexual relationships were also more likely than others to be dissatisfied with

their body image. Likewise, Pujols et al. (2010) link body image and sexual satisfaction.

How media shape body image concerns has been the focus of much research. In a meta-

Journal of Gender Studies 71

analysis of past work, Grabe et al. (2008) write that the mass media ideal of female

‘thinness’ shapes body image disturbances. Media images of ideal bodies, and ideal body

parts (Holt and Kogan 2001), shape self-esteem which in turn is associated with sexual

satisfaction (McHugh 2006).

The role pornography plays in women’s sexual pleasure has received some research

attention. Heider and Harp (2002) argue that pornography objectifies women and depicts

them as willing to engage in any sexual act. Likewise, Gorman et al. (2010), utilizing free

internet pornography sites, found that women were typically depicted in such media as

submissive and enjoying this role in sexual activity. Notably, Dines and Jensen (1998)

maintain that pornography is primarily produced and used by men for male pleasure. In her

work, Attwood (2005, 2006, 2012) explores the sexualization of culture focusing on how

media, via images, sex products, and fashion, shape how we perceive body pleasure and

sexuality. The proliferation of pornography and how this shapes self-esteem, perceived

sexual roles, and sexual satisfaction merits further work.

Past work on exploring the relationship between survivors of childhood sexual abuse

(CSA) and adult sexual satisfaction shows mixed results. For example, Rellini and Meston

(2007) reported little difference in sexual functioning between survivors of childhood

sexual abuse compared to others. Likewise, Valentine and Feinauer (1993) write that

female survivors of sexual abuse may become sexually resilient as adults. On the other

hand, Wyatt et al. (1992) and Finkelhor and Hotaling (1989) found that adult survivors of

sexual abuse are less likely to report satisfaction in their sexual relationships. We posit that

social factors are important in shaping women’s reported sexual satisfaction; however, the

medical model generally fails to take these into account.

Feminism and the new view campaign

In 1999, in response to the resurgence of the medicalization of female sexuality, Tiefer

formed an activist group titled the New View Campaign (Tiefer 2001a, Moynihan 2003a).

Launched in 2000, the New View Campaign provides an alternative to the medical model

of female sexuality and challenges the assumptions of this approach. The New View

Campaign highlights the influence of social factors in relation to women’s sexuality.

Instead of focusing on a physiological etiology of female sexual dysfunction, the New

View Campaign argues that sexuality should be understood based on experiences of

women themselves (McHugh 2006). The New View Campaign offers an alternative sexual

problem classification system for women to that of the medical and pharmaceutical

industries. This understanding focuses on sexual desire and includes measures of non-

consensual sex, relationship intimacy, sexual agency (how often one’s feelings of sexual

desire and pleasure were acknowledged), emotional closeness, body love, stress (which

may be caused by family/work responsibilities resulting in not enough time or rest to take

care of self needs), and sexual liberation (or knowledge about one’s own sexuality). The

current work posits that sexual satisfaction is primarily shaped by sexual desire (as

informed by the New View Campaign). In other words, sexual dysfunction may play a part

in shaping sexual satisfaction; however, sexual desire will be critical in shaping self-

reported sexual satisfaction among sexually active heterosexual women.

Method

The sample consists of female respondents from a large urban university who had access to

the online announcement board and a university email address during the spring of 2010.

72 C. Pronier and E. Monk-Turner

Respondents included students, faculty, and other members of the university community.

Thus, our sample represents a diverse university population rather than a student sample,

which allows us to control for the possible effects of education and age. It has been noted

by previous researchers who have used the announcement page to recruit survey

participants that females are much more likely than males to participate in online surveys

for educational purposes, which provided a strong reason to use this recruitment method.

The participant’s information remains anonymous and cannot be traced back to them. Due

to the length of the survey (20 minutes) a small incentive for participation was offered

(a drawing for a gift card). The survey was composed in Survey Monkey (an online survey

development tool and data collection manager).

The dependent variable is sexual satisfaction, which was operationalized as the

respondents’ composite Sexual Satisfaction Scale-Women’s version (SSS-W) score. In

order for respondents to be eligible to complete the two standardized survey measurements

(SSS-W and FSFI, both validated instruments), they needed to be recently sexually active.

In order to determine their sexual activity the definition outlined in the FSFI was provided

to adhere to the instrument’s standardization. This definition of sexual activity included

caressing, foreplay, masturbation, and/or vaginal intercourse. Respondents were asked if

they had participated in any of these activities within the past four weeks. When asked

about their recent sexual activity, 81% of respondents were sexually active.

The (SSS-W) is a 30-item self-report measurement that was used to measure sexual

satisfaction (Meston and Trapnell 2005). The scale includes subscales covering the

following: contentment, communication, compatibility, relational concern, and personal

concern. Sexual function was measured using the FSFI, a 19-item questionnaire that

utilizes a five-point Likert scale where higher scores indicate higher sexual functioning.

The FSFI covers the frequency and/or degree of satisfaction of: desire, arousal,

lubrication, orgasm, and pain items (Rosen et al. 2000). Finally, female desire was

measured with seven overarching themes that were developed from a previous qualitative

analysis: consensual sex, intimacy (mutually satisfying sex), sexual agency, relationships,

self love, stress (time and rest), and sexual health/liberation (McHugh 2006).

Respondents were asked if they had engaged in non-consensual sex within the past

four weeks (yes ¼ 1; no ¼ 0). Non-consensual sex was defined as being forced, pressured,

or coerced into unwanted sexual activity. Intimacy was a Likert-scaled variable where

respondents were asked how satisfied they were with the quality of sexual interactions

during the relationship (including intimacy and affection) (coded as 1 ¼ very satisfied, to

6 ¼ very dissatisfied). Sexual agency measured whether sexual desire and pleasure were

acknowledged within the relationship (coded as 1 ¼ all of the time, to 5 ¼ not at all).

Emotional closeness was captured by asking how often one experienced satisfying

emotional closeness during and after sexual activities (coded as 1 ¼ all the time, to

5 ¼ not at all). Respondents were asked this statement to capture self/body love: ‘I love my

body’ (coded as 1 ¼ strongly agree, to 6 ¼ strongly disagree). Stress was operationalized

by asking respondents how often stress negatively affected their relationship (stress could

be caused by responsibilities resulting in not enough time to take care of self) (coded

1 ¼ all the time, to 5 ¼ not at all). Sexual knowledge/liberation was captured by asking

respondents about knowledge of their own sexuality (including self-awareness of sexual

orientation, sexual rights, sexual feelings/desires, and sexual/reproductive health) (coded

as 1 ¼ strongly agree, to 6 ¼ strongly disagree).

Age is a continuous variable measured in actual years. Race is a dummy variable and

was coded as white (1) compared to others (0). Education was measured as some high

school, high school graduation, trade school, some college, bachelor’s degree, and

Journal of Gender Studies 73

graduate degree. This was re-coded as a dummy variable where (1) included those with at

least some college compared to others (0). Respondents were asked how important

religion was to them (coded as (1) for very important; (0) all others). Respondents were

asked about general life satisfaction – (1) was very happy versus all others (0).

Relationship status compared those who were married (1) to others (0). Respondents were

asked if they had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease (Yes ¼ 0; No ¼ 1).

Respondents were asked whether they were being treated for a medical condition (or a

psychological condition) (No ¼ 1; Yes ¼ 0).

Results

In total, 515 female respondents completed the survey instrument. Of these respondents,

72% (or 389) were sexually active. Fifty-eight percent of respondents identified as white

(21% as black/African American). Age ranged from 18 to 61; however, most respondents

(75%) were 25 years of age or younger, with a mean age of 24 (see Table 1). Perhaps

because our respondents are so young, relatively few (3%) can be classified (on FSFI

scale , 26.5 composite score) as officially sexually dysfunctional. For this reason, in our

work the FSFI scale will be used instead of a dummy variable capturing sexual

dysfunction.

When asked about their current relationship status, almost half of all respondents

(48%) were in a relationship, 15% were married, and 37% were single. When asked to

identify their sexual orientation the vast majority (91%) identified as heterosexual (3%

identified as homosexual, 6% identified as bisexual, and 1% identified as ‘other’). In light

of past work, our work restricts the sample to heterosexual individuals.

Among our restricted sample, 29% indicated that they were survivors of sexual abuse

and/or assault at some point in their lives. Respondents were asked if they had been diagnosed

or treated for an STD/STI, other medical condition, or a psychological condition within

the previous 12 months. Few respondents (11%) had been diagnosed with an STD/STI.

Twenty-three percent of the sample had been diagnosed or treated with a medical condition

Table 1. Variable description.

Variable Mean Standard deviation Minimum Maximum

Sexual satisfaction 93.15 19.77 28.5 116 Sexual function 18.17 3.48 10.7 29.9 Age 24.16 7.24 18 61 Sexually active 0.72 0.45 0 1 White 0.57 0.49 0 1 At least some college 0.88 0.32 0 1 Very happy 0.25 0.43 0 1 Married 0.14 0.35 0 1 No children 0.77 0.41 0 1 Religion very important 0.30 0.45 0 1 Absence of non-consensual sex 0.84 0.35 0 1 Intimacy 4.82 1.20 1 6 Agency 3.82 0.97 1 5 Emotional closeness 3.81 1.11 1 5 Body love 4.10 1.15 1 6 Stress 2.92 0.88 1 5 Sex knowledge 5.41 0.72 1 6

74 C. Pronier and E. Monk-Turner

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Journal of Gender Studies 75

other than an STD/STI, and 18% had been diagnosed or treated with a psychological

condition.

Composite scores were calculated for the SSS-W and the FSFI in accordance with past

work. In order to be eligible to take these survey instruments, respondents were required to

have been sexually active within the previous four weeks. The range of FSFI composite

scores was 10.7 – 29.9. Higher scores indicated less sexual dysfunction. The SSS-W scores

ranged from 28.5 – 116. A high SSS-W score indicated a higher level of sexual satisfaction.

Regression results

We posited that social factors would be significantly related to sexual satisfaction. To

assess this relationship, we first modeled sexual satisfaction with only sexual function in

the model. Looking at Table 2, the reader can see that 46% of the variation in sexual

satisfaction is explained by this model. In other words, the simple medical model accounts

for almost half of the variation in women’s reported sexual satisfaction. Next, sexual

satisfaction was modeled to include social desire variables. The seven desire variables,

which aim to capture non-medical concepts, account for 59% of the variation in sexual

satisfaction (see Table 2). Five of the social desire variables were significant in the model.

Women who report greater intimacy, agency, emotional closeness, less stress, and greater

sexual knowledge enjoy more sexual satisfaction than others.

Next, we include both sexual function and desire variables to see how well sexual

function holds in explaining sexual satisfaction. As the reader can see in Table 2, sexual

function is significant in the model; however, the coefficient declines from 22.85 to

21.16. Essentially, when social desire (or non-medical variables) is omitted from models

aiming to explain women’s sexual satisfaction, the coefficient for sexual function will be

upwardly biased. Looking at Table 2 (model 3), the reader can see that the key variables in

shaping women’s sexual satisfaction, when controlling for sexual function, are sexual

function, perceived intimacy within the relationship, sexual agency, and stress levels.

Perceived intimacy in the relationship appears most important in shaping sexual

satisfaction. Women with less stress report greater sexual satisfaction than others where all

else is equal. In addition, sexual agency (feeling one’s feelings of sexual desire and

pleasure are acknowledged within the relationship) and emotional closeness are significant

variables in shaping sexual satisfaction.

Finally, we modeled sexual satisfaction using sexual function and desire variables

along with demographic and background variables. Table 2 (model 4) shows that, in

addition to sexual function, intimacy, emotional closeness, and experiencing less stress,

sexual satisfaction is positively related to not being diagnosed or treated for a

psychological condition within the past 12 months. No other background variables were

significant in the model including age, relationship status, education, race, presence of

children, past abuse, or a medical condition.

Discussion and conclusion

The success of Viagra – a pharmaceutical treatment for male erectile dysfunction –

prompted the pharmaceutical and medical industries to ‘discover’ or ‘create’ an equally

lucrative pharmaceutical treatment for FSD (Fishman and Mamo 2002, Basson et al. 2003,

Conrad and Leiter 2004, Hartley 2006, Canner 2008). We argue that this medicalized

perspective overshadows social factors relating to sexuality (Canner 2008) and ignores the

vast feminist literature on female sexuality (Tiefer 2001b). Even though all

76 C. Pronier and E. Monk-Turner

pharmaceutical treatments for a pink Viagra have been rejected by the Federal Drug

Administration, due to their inability to produce positive benefits beyond the placebo

effect (Canner 2008), the quest for a ‘pink’ Viagra is on. Given the findings reported in this

work, the potential of such a pharmaceutical is less than promising.

Critics of medicalization argue that the over-emphasis of medical diagnoses and

medical treatment overshadows social and cultural factors contributing to an individual’s

experience. Not only does medical ideology dominate how society thinks about and solves

issues such as sexual problems, it is also a powerful mechanism of fear. This fear stems

from being negatively labeled with something such as ‘sexual dysfunction’ which can be

harnessed and leveraged by institutions with vested interests in widening the net of the

‘sick’, ‘diseased’, and ‘dysfunctional’.

Sexual functioning has historically been conceived as the physiological and biological

part of sexuality whose components comprise the sexual response cycle. This is also

referred to as the medical model, and it has dominated the way researchers approach

sexual problems and discontents. Taking a critical look at this perspective, the current

work aims to highlight the shortcomings of this model in the hope of filling the gaps and

addressing the issue on a more integrative level which includes social and cultural factors.

While the social model of female sexuality does not reject the importance of medical

components to the sexual experience, it does, however, challenge medicine’s claim to be

the panacea for women’s sexual issues and problems. While physiological components

were determined in the analysis to be important in a woman’s overall sexual satisfaction,

other factors such as stress, intimacy, sexual agency, and emotional closeness were

significant in understanding variation in reported sexual satisfaction. In fact, if models

exclude social desire variables in modeling sexual satisfaction, the coefficient for sexual

function will be upwardly biased. Women need to know and feel confident that their sexual

physiology is functioning properly, but that in itself is not the ‘be-all, end-all’ fix to the

broad spectrum of issues women experience in their sexual lives. In addition to sexual

function and desire variables, being in treatment for a psychological condition negatively

impacted women’s sexual satisfaction. Psychological health appears to impact sexual

satisfaction even with general life satisfaction, past abuse, medical conditions, and other

background variables constant.

These results suggest that women would benefit from reducing their stress, increasing

their experiences of quality intimacy, asserting their needs and desires, and increasing

their feeling of emotional closeness in their relationships. None of these actions involve a

prescription for a pill. These are individual and social actions that not only affect the

sexual satisfaction of women but are in fact intertwined with many aspects of life. Factors

that affect sexuality are interconnected and a part of a web of social, cultural, and

physiological factors and should be studied as such. This conclusion draws attention to the

importance of a multitude of factors in regard to one’s sexual satisfaction.

Future work should address what types of stress-reducing strategies are most beneficial

in shaping sexual satisfaction in a relationship. Stress reduction may come from

participating in classes or activities targeted at alleviating pressure in one’s life, having

one’s partner engage in more housework/childcare in the home, and/or some other

activity. Perhaps, different strategies to ease stress may work better in one situation

compared to another or at different points in the life-span. The successful reduction of

stress in one’s life and how this impacts all aspects of relationships merits future

exploration.

Although this research provided support for the social model, there are some

limitations that must be taken into consideration. The method of sampling in this project

Journal of Gender Studies 77

was a convenience sample, therefore care must be taken with generalizing any results.

Further, this sample was drawn from a university population and was generally young,

unmarried, and educated. Finally, the web-based survey was approximately 80 questions,

assuming the respondent qualified to complete the SSS-W and the FSFI. Estimated time to

complete the entire survey was about 20 minutes, which probably deterred some potential

participants.

After reviewing the findings and limitations of this study it is clear that sexual

satisfaction is a complex issue and must be addressed as such. Research must continue to

reflect the changing and increasing complexity of human experience. Additionally, further

research with more diverse and representative samples will aid in providing a more

accurate picture of women’s sexual issues. The suggestion that a pill can greatly improve

women’s sexual problems is oversimplistic and counter-productive to the well-being of

women. It denies the fact that sexuality is experienced within a complex social

environment. Gender roles (especially for women) are constantly changing and evolving

in many ways, all of which are a part of the social context that influences the experiences

of sexuality. Prescribing a pill for women’s sexual problems also denies the fact that

women have long been the subject of social control through the oppression and regulation

of their sexuality.

Notes on contributors

Cristalle Pronier received her MA in Sociology at Old Dominion University. She is currently employed as a researcher with the Social Science Research Center at Old Dominion. Her primary research interests are in gender and sexuality.

Elizabeth Monk-Turner received her PhD in Sociology at Brandeis. Her work appears in the American Sociological Review, Feminist Economics, Sociological Quarterly, among others. Current research interests include subjective well-being, the gender wage gap, and factors shaping commercial sex work.

References

American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV-TR. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Attwood, F., 2005. Fashion and passion. Sexualities, 8, 392 – 406. Attwood, F., 2006. Sex up: theorizing the sexualization of culture. Sexualities, 9, 77 – 94. Attwood, F., 2012. Treating it as a normal business: researching the pornography business.

Sexualities, 15, 391 – 410. Bancroft, J., Loftus, J. and Long, J., 2003. Distress about sex: a national survey of women in

heterosexual relationships. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 32, 193. Basson, R., et al., 2003. The making of a disease: female sexual dysfunction. BMJ: British Medical

Journal, 326, 658 – 660. Canner, E., 2008. Sex, lies and pharmaceuticals: the making of an investigative documentary about

‘female sexual dysfunction’. Feminism & Psychology, 18, 488 – 494. Carpenter, L., Nathanson, C. and Young, K., 2009. Physical women, emotional men: gender and

sexual satisfaction in midlife. Archive of Sexual Behavior, 38, 87 – 107. Colson, M., et al., 2006. Sexual behaviors and mental perception, satisfaction and expectations of

sex life in men and women in France. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 3, 121 – 131. Conrad, P., 1992. Medicalization and social control. Annual Review of Sociology, 18, 209 – 232. Conrad, P., 2007. The medicalization of society: on the transformation of human conditions into

treatable disorders. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Conrad, P. and Leiter, V., 2004. Medicalization, markets and consumers. Journal of Health and

Social Behavior, 45, 158 – 176. Conrad, P. and Scheider, J., 1980. Deviance and medicalization: from badness to sickness. St Louis,

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Davison, S., et al., 2009. The relationship between self-reported sexual satisfaction and general well- being in women. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 6, 2690 – 2697.

Dines, G. and Jensen, R., 1998. The content of mass marketed pornography. In: G. Dines, R. Jensen and A. Rosso, eds. Pornography. London: Routledge, 65 – 100.

Dobkin, R.D., et al., 2006. Depression and sexual functioning in minority women. Journal of Sexual Marital Therapy, 32, 23 – 36.

Dundon, C. and Rellini, A., 2010. More than sexual function: predictors of sexual satisfaction in a sample of women age 40 – 70. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 7, 896 – 904.

Dyer, O., 2006. Disease awareness campaigns turn healthy people into patients. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 332, 871.

Finkelhor, D. and Hotaling, G., 1989. Sexual abuse and its relationship to later sexual satisfaction, marital status, religion, and attitudes. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 4, 379 – 399.

Fishman, J. and Mamo, L., 2002. What’s in a disorder: a cultural analysis of medical and pharmaceutical constructions of male and female sexual dysfunction. Women and Therapy, 24, 170 – 193.

Galinsky, A., 2009. Positive sexual health in emerging adulthood, PhD Dissertation submitted to the Johns Hopkins University.

Gorman, S., Monk-Turner, E. and Fish, J., 2010. Free adult internet web sites. Gender Issues, 1, 1 – 15.

Grabe, S., Ward, M. and Hyde, J., 2008. The role of the media in body image concern among women. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 460 – 476.

Hartley, H., 2006. The ‘pinking’ of viagra culture: drug industry efforts to create and repackage sex drugs for women. Sexualities, 9, 363 – 378.

Heider, D. and Harp, D., 2002. New hope or old power. The Howard Journal of Communication, 13, 285 – 299.

Holt, W. and Kogan, L., 2001. Satisfaction with body image and peer relationships for males and females in a college environment. Sex Roles, 45, 199 – 215.

Huang, A., et al., 2009. Sexual function and aging in racially and ethnically diverse women. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 57, 1362 – 1368.

Masters, W. and Johnson, V., 1966. Human sexual response. Boston: Little Brown and Co.. McHugh, M., 2006. What do women want? A new view of women’s sexual problems. Sex Roles, 54,

361 – 369. Meston, C. and Trapnell, P., 2005. Development and validation of a five-factor sexual satisfaction

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Moynihan, R., 2003a. Company launches campaign to ‘counter’ BMJ claims. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 326, 120.

Moynihan, R., 2003b. The making of a disease: female sexual dysfunction. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 326, 45 – 47.

Moynihan, R., 2005. The marketing of a disease: female sexual dysfunction. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 330, 192 – 194.

Nicolson, P. and Burr, J., 2003. What is normal about women’s (hetero) sexual desire and orgasm? Social Science and Medicine, 57, 1735 – 1745.

Payer, L., 1992. Disease-mongers: how doctors, drug companies, and insurers are making you feel sick. New York: Wiley & Sons.

Philippsohn, S. and Hartmann, U., 2009. Determinants of sexual satisfaction in a sample of German women. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 6, 1001 – 1010.

Pujols, Y., Meston, C. and Seal, B., 2010. The association between sexual satisfaction and body image in women. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 7, 905 – 916.

Rellini, A. and Meston, C., 2007. Sexual function and satisfaction in adults based on the definition of child sexual abuse. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 4, 1312 – 1321.

Ridberg, R., 2006. Big bucks, big pharma: marketing disease and pushing drugs. Pp. 46 minutes. New York, USA: Media Education Foundation.

Rosen, R., et al., 2000. The female sexual function index (FSFI): a multidimensional self-report instrument for the assessment of female sexual function. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 26, 191 – 208.

Tiefer, L., 2001a. A new view of women’s sexual problems: why new? why now? The Journal of Sex Research, 38, 89 – 96.

Journal of Gender Studies 79

Tiefer, L., 2001b. The selling of ‘female sexual dysfunction’. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 27, 625 – 628.

Tiefer, L., 2002. Beyond the medical model of women’s sexual problems: a campaign to resist the promotion of ‘female sexual dysfunction’. Sexual & Relationship Therapy, 17, 127 – 135.

Tiefer, L., 2006. Female sexual dysfunction: a case study of disease mongering and activist resistance. Public Library of Science Medicine, 3, 436 – 440.

Tiefer, L., 2008. Prognosis: more pharmasex. Sexualities, 11, 53 – 59. Valentine, L. and Feinauer, L., 1993. Resilience factors associated with female survivors of

childhood sexual abuse. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 21, 216 – 224. Witting, K., et al., 2008. Female sexual function and its associations with number of children,

pregnancy, and relationship satisfaction. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 34, 89 – 106. Wyatt, G.E., Guthrie, D. and Notgrass, C., 1992. Differential effects of women’s child sexual abuse

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80 C. Pronier and E. Monk-Turner

Copyright of Journal of Gender Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

  • Abstract
  • Introduction
  • Defining female sexual dysfunction
  • Critiques of medicalization
  • Female sexual functioning index
  • Operationalizing sexual satisfaction and the sexual satisfaction scale
  • Lifestyle factors and sexual satisfaction
  • Feminism and the new view campaign
  • Method
  • Results
    • Regression results
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • References

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h o m e › o p i n i o n U S w o r l d s p o r t s s o c c er t ec h a r t s l i fes t y l e fa s h i o n b us i n es s

Feminists, stop lecturing women about ‘female Viagra’ Sonia Sodha

T he backlash against flibanse r in ignor e s fe male individuality

S e x O p inio n

al l

jobs US edition sig n in sear c h

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Pa ssions running high – without even a ctua lly ta king the little pink ta blet. Photogra ph: Allen G Breed/AP

Sa turda y 22 August 2015 19.03 EDT

I t is the 1960s, and for the first time, the contraceptive pill has become widely available. While many women have welcomed it, some feminist g roups have condemned it as a terrible form of exploitation: women being

forced to stuff themselves with hormones that mess with their natural

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biolog ical rhythms just to be able to pleasure men without inconveniencing them with a preg nancy and the consequent marital oblig ations.

A ludicrous-sounding alternative reality, rig ht? Everyone knows that feminists heralded the pill as the dawn of female sexual liberation. But is there a strain of this extreme form of feminist arg ument, so concerned about the exploitation of g ender that it rides roug hshod over any notions of individual ag ency, in the debate now rag ing about flibanserin?

Flibanserin, approved by the U S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week, is the first drug to be authorised for the treatment of female sexual dysfunction. Feminists who oppose it arg ue it is an example of the pharmaceutical industry doing what it does best: making money by inventing a new medical condition where one doesn’t exist, creating a perceived need for expensive drug s to manag e it.

In doing so, they arg ue it has exploited a natural mismatch between female and male expectations of sex to develop a drug that messes with the female psyche and creates a creepy “on” switch for female lust. They point to the fundamental difference between flibanserin, which creates desire by boosting levels of brain chemicals linked to sexual excitement, and Viag ra, which targ ets the physiolog ical causes of male sexual dysfunction. (This hasn’t stopped the media dubbing flibanserin the “female Viag ra”, perhaps because it has a terribly unsexy name).

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Concerns about this drug aren’t unfounded: the pharma industry struck g old with Viag ra and has been looking for a drug to cure female dysfunction since. But there is an active debate within the medical community as to whether female sexual dysfunction is actually a medical condition at all or whether it can simply be accounted for by psycholog ical and social issues.

These concerns aren’t unique to this area, however. Pharmaceutical companies have long made big bucks by inappropriately marketing drug s in the context of the American for-profit healthcare system. Companies spend billions beaming ag g ressive advertising into people’s homes showing how wonder drug A is the solution to your life’s problems. Consumers push for it; doctors prescribe it; insurance premiums g o up.

When it g ets to what’s g oing on in our brains, thing s g et even murkier. Take anti- depressants. In the U S, they are almost certainly overprescribed by a healthcare profession that is not very g ood at understanding the psychosocial bases of many mental health conditions. But just as it would be ludicrous to arg ue all types of depression should be treated with drug s, isn’t it equally extreme to arg ue that they have no role to play in manag ing some forms of clinical depression

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that are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain?

Flibanserin sounds like a drug that will only be rig ht for a small proportion of women for whom there is a biolog ical, rather than purely psycholog ical and social, cause of their sexual dysfunction. But shouldn’t these women have the rig ht to make an informed choice? Rather than ban the drug altog ether, isn’t the answer to address over-medicalisation in western healthcare by tackling attitudes in the pharma industry and teaching the medical profession to better disting uish between the biolog ical and the psychosocial causes of conditions such as depression and sexual dysfunction?

But the anti-flibanserin feminist brig ade has questioned whether there is such a thing as a meaning ful choice. Forg et the fact that some women with sexual dysfunction want this drug and say they believe it will make them feel human ag ain. The essence of this feminist arg ument is that these women are slaves to social expectations about sex: they don’t ultimately want sex for themselves, but are fretting about not being able to satisfy their partners. No matter that women’s org anisations have campaig ned to g et flibanserin on to the market: this is explained away by arg uing they have been manipulated by the drug s companies.

In portraying women like this, the feminists sceptical of flibanserin rob women of their ag ency. They attribute to these women a sort of sexual false consciousness – you just think you want sex, you don’t know any better. And

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what women would want to risk feeling sick and dizzy for just the one extra sexual experience a month that flibanserin has been associated with?

But who are they to say? For some women, the difference between zero and one mig ht be worth all the side effects in the world. The implication women can’t know what they really feel about sex is horribly patronising – isn’t desiring sex even while you don’t, or not wanting to eat the last doug hnut in the box even as you’re reaching for it, what makes us wonderfully, but painfully, human? Whether it’s a drug to fix the chemical imbalances that are associated with low libido, companies paying for female employees to freeze their eg g s or g iving g irls the rig ht to wear the hijab to school, the truth is that what is liberating for one woman can be exploitative for another.

This is where the feminist movement – or movements – can run into trouble. In its fig ht for the sisterhood, feminism has tended to oversimplify what it is to be female. When all of our interests coincide, this has not only been unproblematic, but has helped feminism achieve some momentous wins, from female suffrag e to the campaig n for equal pay.

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Mo re c o mment T o pic s Sex Wo men Feminism P ha rma c eut ic a ls ind ust ry

But a movement whose essence is to define women by their g ender has not always been very g ood at coping with ethical complexity and moral nuance. At its worst, it can descend into a platform for women to air their own deeply personal views and experiences, while claiming the false leg itimacy that comes from speaking on behalf of all women. Feminists need to remember when they speak for themselves and when they speak for half of the population. I, for one, will remain suspicious of any woman claiming to comment on ethically complex issues from a “feminist” standpoint on my behalf.

V i e w a l l comme n ts >

Agenda 11.14.17

News and announcements

Media Essay

Gender, Sexuality, and Medicalization

Media Essay

Media essay (30% of final grade): five-six page critique of a film, television show, or any other type of visual media that focuses on one of the themes and topics that have been discussed in class. You must discuss at least TWO readings from the course in your paper. Your paper must have a thesis.

Media Essay

Due date: 12.5.17

Instructions

Essay Format

Five to six pages

Essays must be double-spaced.

12 pt. Times New Roman font.

No extraneous spaces between paragraphs.

Media Essay

Instructions cont.

In text citation: (Author Year: Page)

Reference format: MLA, Chicago, APA

Be consist with the citation format chosen.

Wikipedia, blog entries, or information gathered from a website are not appropriate sources. Information gathered from news sites is permissible, e.g., Salon, Slate, Bust, and Ms., among others like these sites.

Media essay

Turn essays in at the beginning of class

Submit paper online under “Assignments” tab

If you do not submit paper online, you will receive a “0” on the paper until you do.

Late papers:

2% deduction every 24 hours

Extensions:

Accommodation documentation

Extraordinary circumstances

Media Essay

Summarize the film

Critical analysis

Thesis

Make an argument

Make an interesting and unexpected argument

Support the argument

Draw upon issues, concepts, notions, and themes from the semester

Media Essay

Papers will be evaluated according to the following 5 criteria:

The extent to which the student follows instructions of the assignment, in particular having a well-developed and thoughtful thesis (/10)

Intellectual creativity and rigor (/10)

Ability to integrate concepts and themes from across readings (readings are in conversation with each other) (/10)

Depth of analysis (/10)

Clarity and organization of writing; grammatical and editing issues (/10)

How to write the media essay

Watch

How is women’s desire and pleasure being represented?

What message is the media sending?

Who is the targeted audience? How do you know?

How is gender and gender roles depicted?

Who is being represented: class, race, religion, sexual partners?

How to write the media essay

Contemplate:

What did you find interesting?

What did you find troubling?

How does this media relate to class themes?

Women’s desire and pleasure in relation to freedom, choice, heteronormativity, class, race, social and cultural norms

Representations of women as sexual objects

Medicalization of women’s sexuality and desire

How can you analyze these themes?

Psychoanalytical approaches to women and desire

Second and third wave feminist theories

Feminist film theory

9

How to write the film essay

Develop

Make a claim

Think persuasively (meaning, make an argument that can not be easily argued, e.g., “the sun is hot,” “racism and sexism are bad,” and “it’s great that women enjoy sex.”

Gather evidence: examples from film, class readings, and class discussion that bolster your claim

Write!

Summarize film

Focus on main argument

10

Ehrenreich and English reading

Femininity as a disease (late 19th and early 20th centuries)

Female functions are inherently pathological

Women prone to illness

Pregnancy as a form of illness

Pathological nature of childbirth

Menopause: “death of the woman in the woman”

Ehrenreich and English reading

Dictatorship of the Ovaries/Psychology of the Ovary

“Ovarification” of women’s bodies and health

Relationship between biology, gender, and reproduction

Reproductive organs were the source of disease and thus the target of treatment

12

12

Ehrenreich and English reading

Dictatorship of the Ovaries/Psychology of the Ovary/

Women as “reproducers” and “sexual beings” not one in the same

Sexuality and sensuality perceived as detrimental to reproduction

Female sexuality paradox:

Women perceived as having no “predilection” for sex

Women also perceived as having an “insatiable lust”

13

13

Medicalization of Gender

Class, feminine biology and health in the late 19th century

Marriage as “sexual-economic relation”

Upper class women’s role as breeders

Linked with female invalidism

Poverty, SES, race, gender, and health

Ehrenreich and English reading

Wave of invalidism among middle- and upper-class women in mid- to late 19th century

Hysteria

Relationship to “gentle invalidism”

“real disease” vs. malingering

Transformed conversation about the nature of “women’s conditions”

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/original-sin-sex/videos/birth-of-the-vibrator/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKgdLjDZ6ig

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Ehrenreich and English reading

Role of Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology

Transformed conversation about the nature of “women’s conditions”

Focus on female psyche, not female body

“The experts of the twentieth century would accept women’s intelligence and energy: the question would no longer be what a woman could do, but, rather, what a woman ought to do” (283).

Medicalization of Gender

Legacies of Hysteria, invalidism, and Freud

Contradictory female sexuality

Necessary to “desexualize” reproduction

Need to suppress women’s innately unruly sexuality so women’s innately restrained sexuality can be unleashed

Women are innately sick and reproductive

FSD

Female sexual dysfunction (FSD)

“‘ . . . a disturbance in the process that characterize the sexual response cycle or by pain associated with sexual intercourse’” (70)

Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD)

Female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD)

Female orgasmic disorder (FOD)

Dyspareunia

FSD and sexual response cycle

Desire, excitement, orgasm, and resolution

Dysfunction n.功能失调;出现机能障碍

18

“Female Viagra” (flibanserin/Addyi)

History of flibanserin

Owned by Sprout Pharmaceuticals

Failed as anti-depression medication

Side effect: improved women’s sexual outcomes

Failed twice in seeking Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in U.S.

Approved on third try by an 18-6 vote with the agency's strongest warning label.

Relationship with feminism

Fibanserin 药物名为弗利班思林(flibanserin),据报告,每天服用100毫克该药物的女性比服用安慰剂的女性有更多满意的性生活

19

Addyi

Flibanserin

Drug performance vs. placebo

Side effects: nausea, dizziness, fainting, and severely low blood pressure

Side effects may increase in frequency and severity in combination with alcohol.

Women are advised not to drink at all if taking the drug

Addyi

Leonore Tiefer, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine.

http://newviewcampaign.org/video.asp#20152

“I am very opposed to the drug and have been since it first went to the FDA in 2010 and it was rejected. Then it was rejected a second time. The drug hasn’t changed, the data hasn’t changed, and my opinion hasn’t changed. I think it’s a disaster. It’s unsafe and it doesn’t work. That is all a drug is supposed to do. Work and be safe. The third strike is the illegitimate means by which the company [Sprout Pharmaceuticals] tried to distract the FDA by honing in on this completely erroneous accusation of sexism. The campaign is totally inappropriate.” (Time article, August 17, 2015)

Addyi

Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of San Diego Sexual Medicine and consultant for Sprout Pharmaceuticals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77iFta9nKhY

"Serving as a consultant to pharmaceutical companies helps me ensure that the research they're performing or results they're interpreting match what we in the field understand about women's sexual function," he says. "I'm seeking the best possible treatment options that might be available to my patients….I just cannot understand—it just makes me a tiny bit crazy—how something that actually helps women's lives would be so criticized," Goldstein says. "They have another agenda.” (Mother Jones article, September 2, 2015)

Addyi

Should the FDA have approved Addyi?

What seem to be the benefits and risks of putting Addyi on the market?

How does the marketing of Addyi relate to different kinds of feminism?

Addyi

http://fortune.com/2017/11/06/valeant-pharmaceuticals-sprout/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKEayZ6oqmg

“Female Viagra” (flibanserin/Addyi)

“Flibanserin sounds like a drug that will only be right for a small proportion of women for whom there is a biological, rather than purely psychological and social, cause of their sexual dysfunction. But shouldn’t these women have the right to make an informed choice? Rather than ban the drug altogether, isn’t the answer to address over-medicalisation in western healthcare by tackling attitudes in the pharma industry and teaching the medical profession to better distinguish between the biological and the psychosocial causes of conditions such as depression and sexual dysfunction?” (Sodha)

“Female Viagra” (flibanserin/Addyi)

“We all experience distress in the terms available for us to experience it in, and sexual distress is no different. We are surrounded by professional and public discourses — rhetorics — about health and illness. These rhetorics are imbued with values, including values about sex. We absorb these values and draw on them in interpreting our own experience of health and illness.” (Segal)

FSD

Medicalization of sexuality and the market

Pharmaceutical companies involved at every stage.

Belief in origin of FSD related too focus of research and market endeavors

Relationship with health care practice

Relationship with popular culture

Depoliticizes women’s sexual problems

Lack of focus on “non-medical” issues

Female sexual satisfaction

“Measuring and operationalizing female sexual satisfaction has proved to be challenging…. Sexual satisfaction is even more complex than the physiological underpinnings of sexual functioning because it includes physical, emotional, psychological, and relational variables.” (Pronier et. al. 70-71)

Measurements typically focused on orgasm

FSD

Factors influencing female sexual satisfaction

Race, class, age, educational background, religion, etc.

Lifestyle choices

Time

Personal well-being

Sexual history

Depoliticizes women’s sexual problems

FSD

Female sexual satisfaction research from feminist and qualitative perspective

“While physiological components were determined in the analysis to be important in a woman’s overall sexual satisfaction, other factors such as stress, intimacy, sexual agency, and emotional closeness were significant in understanding variation in reported sexual satisfaction…These results suggest that women would benefit from reducing their stress, increasing their experiences of quality intimacy, asserting their needs and desires, and increasing their feeling of emotional closeness in their relationships. None of these actions involve a prescription for a pill.” (Pronier et. al. 77)

Feminism?

“Whether it’s a drug to fix the chemical imbalances that are associated with low libido, companies paying for female employees to freeze their eggs or giving girls the right to wear the hijab to school, the truth is that what is liberating for one woman can be exploitative for another.” (Sodha)

Next Week

Alia Imtoual and Shakira Hussein (2009). “Challenging the Myth of the Happy Celibate: Muslim Women Negotiating Contemporary Relationships.” Contemporary Islam 3(1): 25-39.

Lauren Winner (2005). Excerpts from Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.

Agenda 10/24.17

Announcements

The Ladies and Music

Quiz #1

Next Week

Hispanics and Latin Americans in Canada

“Latin America is the fourth-largest source of immigration to Canada”

Professional wave began in 1990s

Between 600,00-1.2 million in Canada

28% in Toronto

11,000 Latinos in London

Hispanics are five years younger and more likely to be university-educated than other Canadians.

“…almost 50 per cent of Hispanic Canadians have at least a bachelor’s degree; another 12 per cent have a non-university diploma.”

*http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/targeting-canadas-invisible-hispanic-community/article554684/

Hispanics and Latina/os in U.S.

54 million in U.S. (17% of U.S. total population)

Largest “ethnic” group

64% are of Mexican heritage

23% of Californians are of Mexican heritage

Concepts

Hypersexuality: (Celine Parrenas Shimizu)

“a form of bondage that ties the subjectivity of Asian/American women”

“vibrant combination of fantasy and reality”

can be a “productive perversity or critique of the power of normalcy”

White gaze:

“‘the power of whites to control or contain constructions of nonwhite ethnicity in US popular culture.’” (Molina-Guzman 65)

Latinas and Popular Culture

Latinas and Popular Culture

The “help”

“Brown” lady (racial flexibility and ethnic ambiguity)

“Hot” (sensuality and temperament)

Commodification of Latina panethnicity

Associations with different Latino

communities

Approximation to blackness

Approximation to whiteness

Latinas and Popular Culture

Representations of Latina booty/body

Innate sexuality

Relationship with the hypersexualization of Latinas

Sexualization of race and ethnicity

Representation as colonialization

Relationship with blackness

“…Latina bodies as historically contingent artifacts are informed by specific social and political contexts” (Molina-Guzmán 83)

Jennifer Lopez

Nuyorican

In Living Color back-up dancer

J. Lo. album and Wedding Planner film (2001)

3rd woman to have #1

album and film in the same

week

American Idol judge

Television star

Booty before her face

Jennifer Lopez

“Similarly Lopez entered the lucrative stream of global popular culture as a docile, exotic, desirable, commodifiable body, yet she was forbidden to partake in the full rights and economic privileges of whiteness” (Molina-Guzmán 85)

“…ethnic women function in symbolically important ways as constitutive of national identity discourses. The cultural status of Latinas is always mediated by the project of U.S. empire-building” (Molina-Guzmán 86)

Jennifer Lopiz

J Lo, hypersexualization and ethnoracial identity and ambiguity

White gaze

Colonized media depictions

Culturally dangerous

Jennifer Lopez and Popular Culture

Who is the target audience? Women? Men? Both?

How is pleasure visualized and verbally expressed in the videos?

Are there racialized dynamics in the videos?

Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny from the Block”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dly6p4Fu5TE

Jennifer Lopez’s “Booty,” featuring Iggy Azalea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxtIRArhVD4

Themes

Power

Control

Objectification

Exoticization

Desire

Transformation

Nicki Minaj

Onika Tanya Maraj

Born in Trinidad; raised in Queens

Independent underground rapper

Pink Friday (2010)

Femmecee

Not a “Righteous Queen”*

Not a “Gangsta Boo”*

Not a non-gendered or nonsexual female rapper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOlvNyseYTY

Shange

Butler and femmehood

“to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of the repetition of a law that is not its consolidation, but its replacement” (Butler 1990, 40).

Do you agree with Butler’s argument?

How would Nicki Minaj represent Butler’s argument?

Shange

Shange on Minaj

“Thus, I argue that Nicki’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform “straight” or “queer,” but upon closer examination, she refuses both. It is this refusal of legibility, of any parochial rendition of black sexuality, that fuels derisive dismissals of Nicki’s black femme subjectivity…” (30).

Shange

Strategic queerness

“is a situation-specific performance of nonheteronormativity enacted in the service of a subject’s material, political, erotic, or discursive interest(s)” (31).

Homonationalism

“queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rhetoric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as ‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” (Jasbir Puar 2005: 122)

Shange

Homonormativity

legitimate “queer” sexuality and identity (white, middle-class, nuclear, “good”)

Homonorms in nondominant queer communities

Butch, stud, and femme sociality

Organizes desire

Regulates “selves” (identities)

Shange

Nicki Minaj, strategic queerness (defies homonormativity), and disarticulation

Disentangles femme from femme (female/feminine)/ butch (male/masculine) dichotomy

Possibilities of black

femme-ness

Her “kingliness”

Phallic imagery

Shange

Do these videos reenact and replace scripts about gender roles and sexual belonging?

What provocative images are used in the images? What do they convey?

“Beez In The Trap”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmZvOhHF85I

“Anaconda” video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs

Nicki Minaj’s ABC interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u3eTsCaRQg

Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda

“Nicki Minaj is the current walking embodiment of that tradition of stereotype enabled victim-blaming, proving that as a society, America has yet to defeat its racist notions and will even continue to invoke them to the economic and social benefit of the Whiter man. This implicates Nicki Minaj and her brand in an unforgivable way. As the face of the modern perpetuation of a stereotype created to serve and justify White male dominance, Minaj and her multi-million dollar empire represents everything wrong with our current perception of blackness and more specifically, Black female sexuality.” (Tiffanie Drayton)

Drayton

Anaconda

Themes

Power

Control

Racialization

Desire

Subversion

Tove Lo

Ebba Tove Elsa Nilsson

Swedish

Songwriter for Icona Pop,

Ellie Goulding, and Hilary Duff(!)

Truth Serum (2014)

Lady Wood (2016)

"Sweden's darkest pop export"

"the saddest girl in Sweden”

a “hard-drinking, hard-drugging, DTF party girl”? A dirtier Taylor Swift?”

Tove Lo

“For me it’s always been a very sure thing that I am a feminist,” she goes on. “In Sweden, we have a ways to go, but it’s almost shameful to say you’re not. But here it seems like a very loaded thing to say. Like in interviews, they say drops her voice to a serious register]: ‘Would you say that you are a feminist?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ And they’re like, ‘Ohhh.’ So,” she shrugs, “I guess I’m just going to scream it from the rooftops now.” (Pressler article)

“Well, Lady Wood is an expression that means the female hard-on,” she tells us in a very matter-of-fact way when we ask why. “And that feels right because this album is really all about chasing rushes – whether that’s a sexual rush, the rush you get from drugs, or from falling in love, or whatever. And also, when a woman is strong or brave or has a lot of opinions, people will often say she ‘has balls’ , but I never really liked that [expression]. So maybe Lady Wood can be a new way of saying ‘a chick who has balls’.” (Levine article)

Tove Lo

How is sexual desire expressed? With confidence? As natural?

Does the fact that Tove Lo is white affect how her videos could be perceived?

Habits (Stay High) and Cool Girl (Part of Fairy Dust)

https://www.vevo.com/watch/tove-lo/habits-(stay-high)-hippie-sabotage-remix/SEUV71400050

http://www.vevo.com/watch/tove-lo/Cool-Girl-(Part-of-Fairy-Dust)/SEUV71600146

Tove Lo

Themes

Pleasure

Ownership

Responsibility

Desire

Emotion

Quiz!

Next Week

Gould

Nash and Grant

Nijhawan

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C U L T U R E > > >C U L T U R E > > >

WORDS nick levine

Tove Lo makes pop music that’s cool, catchy and kind of risqué. “I eat my dinner in the bath tub / Then I go to sex clubs,” she sang on her 2014 breakthrough hit Habits (Stay High). Then she celebrated the freedom of being in an open relationship on this summer’s comeback single Cool Girl, which featured the knowing line, “We don’t put a label on it.” And now, in her usual no-messing-about style, she’s named her new album Lady Wood.

“Well, Lady Wood is an expression that means the female hard-on,” she tells us in a very matter-of-fact way when we ask why. “And that feels right because this album is really all about chasing rushes – whether that’s a sexual rush, the rush you get from drugs, or from falling in love, or whatever. And also, when a woman is strong or brave

or has a lot of opinions, people will often say she ‘has balls’, but I never really liked that [expression]. So maybe Lady Wood can be a new way of saying ‘a chick who has balls’.”

Tove, who grew up in a smart part of Stockholm and wrote her rst song at the age of 10, is de nitely a woman who has Lady Wood. On stage, she’s frank and funny, often telling the crowd about whatever rushes she may have been chasing lately. O stage, she moonlights as an in-demand songwriter who’s co-written hits for Ellie Goulding (Love Me Like You Do), Girls Aloud (Something New) and The Saturdays (What Are You Waiting For?).

“Performing is de nitely a rush for me,” she says today, “but so is getting in the recording studio and making a really great song.”

She experienced another rush when she guested on Years & Years’ spring single Desire, though she says she was “gutted” not to have time to appear in the video – a super-sexy and celebratory a air which frontman Olly Alexander described as an exploration of “poly-multi-hetero-homo-sappho-inter- gender-queer-desire”. Tove bonded with the Years & Years boys when she met them in Stockholm, and says the collaboration came about “completely organically”. When Olly o ered her the chance to re-write the parts of the song she’d be singing, Tove said no. “I couldn’t, because the song was perfect already. I just love Olly and everything he stands for.”

By the bi ALONGSIDE CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS AND SHURA, POP’S SEXUALITY-FLUID REVOLUTION IS BEING SPEARHEADED BY TOVE LO – THE FIERCE, FRESH AND FRANK SWEDISH SINGER-SONGWRITER WHO’S COLLABORATED WITH BOTH NICK JONAS AND YEARS & YEARS IN 2016. AS SHE PREPARES TO DROP HER SUPERB SECOND ALBUM LADY WOOD, WE CHAT TO THIS EXCITING RISING STAR ABOUT BEING BI, SUBVERTING POP CULTURE’S “BOY MEETS GIRL” TROPE, AND WHY SHE’LL ALWAYS BE IN OLLY ALEXANDER’S CORNER…

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She was equally impressed when she rst saw the video. “It’s just completely beautiful, isn’t it? I know Olly wrote, like, a letter explaining to people what the video was about but I don’t see how anyone could nd it shocking. Like, how could you nd Desire shocking when there are all these lms where just people go around shooting people? For me, love, sex and people connecting is the most natural thing in the world.”

Tove has her own moment of something close to “poly-multi-hetero-homo-sappho- inter-gender-queer-desire” on a standout track from Lady Wood. “Boy meets boy, meets girl, meets girl / This is the best place in the world,” she sings on the slinky electro-pop gem In uence. Is this lyric is a deliberate nod to sexual equality? “Oh, it was de nitely deliberate! It was my way of changing up the classic old ‘boy meets girl’ story, like playing with it... What’s the word?”

Subverting? “Yes, subverting! I’d been reading about this

church in Sweden where they were refusing to accept gay people and it put the idea [of celebrating equality] in my head. I should say it was just this one random church – Sweden

is a very liberal and accepting country generally, and I don’t want to get in trouble for saying it’s not! But this song is about being in a club and drinking and dancing and chasing a rush – and it’s de nitely a club where every type of person is welcome. So yeah, that line is de nitely supposed to have subtle message of sexual equality.”

On the one hand, it could look as though collaborating with Years & Years on Desire helped Tove to embrace the queerness in her own music. But on the other, she’s always been open about identifying as bisexual, and she’d probably have written this lyric anyway. A few days before we speak to Tove, the O ce for National Statistics releases data that suggests more people in the K than ever before are de ning themselves as bi.

Does she feel there’s a greater understanding now? In the past, even some members of the LGBT+ community have been a bit dismissive, ignorantly suggesting being bi is simply a “gateway drug” to becoming a full-blown homo.

“Why is it something that people need to understand?” Tove replies, as matter-of-fact as ever. “Some people just like guys, some people just like girls, some people like guys and girls.

What’s so di cult about that? I think that once we label who we are, we limit our options – people will say, ‘If you’re that, why are you doing this then?’ I just think, why can’t we all just be attracted to whoever we’re attracted to?” Yet Tove also appreciates that labels can be empowering to the people who embrace them, and helpful to their friends, families and work colleagues. “Sometimes people need to put a label on you so they know how to behave and feel comfortable around you. I get that.”

But whenever Tove is questioned about her sexuality, she deals with it in a way that feels very Lady Wood. “I get shit from some of my friends who say, ‘How can you call yourself bisexual when you’ve never been in a relationship with a woman?’ But I’m attracted to women and I’ve had sex with women and the fact I’ve never been in a relationship with a woman isn’t something I think about.

“Who knows what the future holds for me? I just am – and I’m attracted to who I’m attracted to. And that’s the way I’m always going to live my life.”

Lady Wood is available from 28 October, tove-lo.com, @tovelo

MUSIC

Copyright of Gay Times (09506101) is the property of Millivres Prowler Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

ne night this summer, Tove Lo was in a bar in Brooklyn, getting hit

on by a guy.

What’s your name, he asked, the singer recalls afterward.

nymag.com/thecut/

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Tove, she said.

What do you do?

I’m a singer.

Then she saw it, the briefest flicker of recognition. She watched his alcohol-

infused synapses slowly make the connections.

Tove, like Tove Lo? he eventually asked. Whoa, you’re that chick?

This is something that happens to Tove Lo not infrequently. Which is sort of

odd, because she is technically a huge pop star. “Maybe it’s that I’m so

normal-looking,” the 29-year-old says, standing in her Williamsburg kitchen

one Saturday this summer. Which might sound like false modesty, because

with her septum ring and pale-blue eyes, Lo is not exactly plain, even now,

dressed “like a dirtbag,” as she describes herself, in jean shorts and a T-shirt,

her straw-colored hair in a just-woken-up position despite the fact that it’s

past 2 p.m.

But you can see how she might not totally stand out in a pop-music

landscape full of Nickis and Mileys and Gagas. “Maybe if I had a big blue

Afro, people might be like, ‘Oh, that’s the girl with the Afro,’ ” she says,

shaking a half-ounce of weed into a bowl of coconut oil for the “treats” she is

making on the occasion of her friend’s birthday.

This is the main thing people remember about Lo when they realize that she

is “that chick”: She likes to get high. This is because of her 2014 hit single,

“Habits (Stay High),” which was about going out and getting fucked up to

forget a romance gone bad (You know the one: “You’re gone and I got to stay

high / All the time to keep you off my mind, oooo ooo”) The song went

multiplatinum and two years later remains ubiquitous, along with “Talking

Body,” the other single from her debut album, Queen of the Clouds

(https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/queen-of-the-clouds/id913743421) ,

and a number of other earworms that, chances are, you have heard recently if

you ever popped into an H&M or been to the hair salon. That song

“Heroes” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7SouU3ECpU) that was

drifting out of random car windows this summer? (You know the one: “We

could be he-ro-oh-oh-oh-ohes-ooo-ooo-oo-oo.”) That's her. The Ellie

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Goulding song from Bridget Jones's Baby soundtrack? Lo co-wrote it. And

one could argue, as her labelmate Nick Jonas does, that she’s had a

widespread influence over pop music in general.

“ ‘Habits’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh2LWWORoiM) and

‘Talking Body,’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzRyxGBGiAE)

when they first came out, they didn’t sound like anything else, and now

everything sounds like them,” says Jonas. He means especially her lyrics,

which, unusually for electronic music, can be so personal and evocative as to

almost be uncomfortable. “Habits” had all the elements of a standard party

anthem, but “Binged on all my Twinkies / Threw up in the tub”? That sounds

like something that was lived, not dreamed up to maximize the sound of

global wooos. It’s the aural equivalent of a Cat Marnell blog post. The

barbaric yawp of the Basic Bitch. “There’s this honesty and vulnerability to

her work,” says Jonas, “and not a lot of people will go to that place.” Which is

why he called upon Lo last year for a duet, “Close,”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgJFqVvb2Ws) which is roughly about

the intimacy issues one encounters when, say, one is a former member of a

boy band once forced to wear a ring declaring his virginity to the world.

While this kind of emo ultra-sharing may be more common now, people

weren’t quite sure what to make of Lo when she appeared a few years back.

Who was this oddly named Swedish person singing about sex and drugs?

Was she, as the Village Voice (http://www.villagevoice.com/music/tove-

lo-webster-hall-10-1-6640075) posited, a “hard-drinking, hard-drugging,

DTF party girl”? A dirtier Taylor Swift?

“So the dudes that you sleep with, should they be worried?” Lo recalls one

interviewer asking, during her promotional rounds. “Say it’s me,” the guy

apparently went on to say. “Say we're like — ” He made a humping motion

“‘Oh, yeah. I’m fucking Tove Lo. Should I be worried that you are going to

write a song about me after?”

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“Some guys were clearly confused,” says Lo. “Especially these certain types of

guys who think that because I am open about sex they can talk to me in a

disrespectful, objectifying way.”

Then, before she could really set them straight, Lo disappeared. As it turned

out, like so many singers before her, the emotive throatiness of her voice was

owing in part to a cyst on her vocal cords. One intense operation and two

years later, she’s back, with a new album, Lady Wood

(https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/lady-wood/id1143635682) . As one

might gather from the title, the project promotes a rowdy sort of feminine

empowerment. “It’s about reclaiming the female hard-on,” says Lo, who

counts herself a fan of Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham and sees herself as

having a similar audience: “Girls who have a lot of emotions and maybe tend

to be too impulsive sometimes,” as she puts it. Or “normal girls with normal

problems who are trying to figure out what’s right for them.”

“For me it’s always been a very sure thing that I am a feminist,” she goes on.

“In Sweden, we have a ways to go, but it’s almost shameful to say you’re not.

But here it seems like a very loaded thing to say. Like in interviews, they say

[drops her voice to a serious register]: ‘Would you say that you are a

feminist?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ And they’re like, ‘Ohhh.’ So,” she shrugs, “I

guess I’m just going to scream it from the rooftops now.”

Whether Lo can sneak feminist messaging into the decidedly retrograde

genre of club music is unclear, but she seems determined to try. In her

kitchen, she pokes at the batter, which she is actually planning on making

into raw-food pot balls, because Lo is a woman of contradictions who in

addition to having some very unhealthy habits is also mostly vegan. She

picks off a piece from the side of the bowl and pops it in her mouth. “Hmm,”

she says, chewing. “I’m kind of regretting not adding cocoa powder. It kind of

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masks the taste of the weed a little bit.”

For someone who presents themselves as a Twinkie-vomiting mess, Lo

comes across as quite well adjusted. Possibly this is because she is Swedish.

Or maybe it’s that her mother is a psychologist, and growing up, Tove

became accustomed to analyzing her feelings. As a teenager, she worshipped

Courtney Love, painted her bedroom black, and wrote poetry and short

stories her classmates thought were weird. “But I think that’s just being

creative,” she says. “That’s what you do, you express things that most people

feel, that aren’t easy to say, but you thankfully have an outlet for.”

“She is crazy and she is fun and she is wild,” says Caroline Hjelt, who met Lo

at Stockholm’s Rytmus Music School. “And she has had a pretty dramatic

love life.” But she was dependable, too. “If I was heartbroken and called her,

she would come to me with, like, a pineapple.”

After graduation, the pair moved into an apartment in Stockholm. Hjelt

formed her own band, the electronic-pop duo Icona Pop. Despite their

address, which was “seriously on Techno Street,” Lo was still committed to

being the next Courtney Love. “We got so much shit,” says Lo, pulling up a

picture of herself in a grungy slip dress with her band, Tremblebee. “I

remember we were at this pool alley, and this bunch of guys in fancy shirts

were booing us out like, ‘Fuck you, you ugly bitch.’ ” She smiles. “I think I

got a lot of inner confidence at that time.”

While Icona Pop took off fairly quickly, Lo “struggled for a long time,” says

Hjelt. It wasn’t until she encountered Robyn circa Bodytalk

(https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/body-talk/id401164294) ’s release, in

2010, that she started to feel like there might be a place for her in electronic

music, too. “I loved the simplicity of it,” she says. “It’s so hard to be clever

and have a big message in five words. I thought, This is what I want to do.”

Her break came after Hjelt invited her to the 40th-birthday party for one of

Sweden’s top songwriters. There was a band, and Lo, who was drunk,

grabbed the mic and sang a scorching rendition of a Britney Spears song the

birthday boy had written. The move got her invited to Los Angeles, where she

was absorbed into the cabal of Swedish dudes who are responsible for all Top

40 hits. Once there, she took a while to realize her advantage, which was that

being a young woman herself made her more able to relate to young female

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artists. “It doesn’t matter if you are famous or not, there’s still the same

questions,” she says. “ ‘Am I enough?’ ‘What am I doing with my life?’ ‘Is this

real love?’ ”

Soon she was writing songs for Hilary Duff, Girls Aloud, and Ellie Goulding,

and others. “I was like, ‘Okay, songwriting is going to be my career now, but I

still want some kind of artist thing,’ ” she says. “But no one really believed in

me. Not in that capacity.”

In retrospect, this may have been a good thing. She worked on “Habits,”

which began as a poem, for months, before eventually releasing the song

herself. “It took off like crazy,” she says in her apartment. Suddenly, the

labels she’d been writing for were looking at her as an artist. Sort of.

“Everyone was like, ‘Okay, we have this song, but we are going to have to

make her into something,” Lo adds, forming the raw dough into balls. “We

will have to create something. She’s not a star. I mean, no one actually said

that to me, but, you know, I’m not a fucking idiot, I would pick up little

comments.”

The emphasis on her looks and clothes bothered her. “It’s fucking weird,” she

says. “Because I’m a girl, it’s supposed to be such a big part of my life. I

mean, I love getting ready when we do red carpets, I’m not putting that

down, but it seems to be much more important that I look good than that I

perform well.”

The scrutiny hurt, but more than that it agitated her. “Honestly, I kind of felt

like, You guys are all stupid,” she says. “I have tried for years to find my

fucking artist thing. I know what it is. My thing is that I am me. I’m a normal

person, I am in the dirt with everybody else, writing about everyday

emotions.”

She started refusing makeup in photo shoots and scuttled the first video for

"Habits," replacing it with a piece of vérité that followed her through a club

as she took shots, made out with strangers, and ugly-cried in the bathroom.

After it hit, she barely had time to gloat. She was doing shows or promotional

appearances nearly every night. “It was so unreal, just in terms of like, it’s my

dream,” she says. When the annoying interviewer humped the air in front of

her, she decided not to play along. “I was a little bit terrified because this

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station has a lot of listeners, and I was worrying, If I say something, is he not

going to play me?” she says. “But then I just decided, ‘No, I need to stand up

for myself. Feeling respected is more important. So I just go, ‘That would

never happen. I’m not going to say anything more about that.’ And it felt so

good.”

As Lo well knows, not all highs last forever. On tour with Katy Perry before

her vocal-cord operation, she was waking up barely able to speak. “When I

broke down and went to the doctor, he was like, ‘How the fuck are you even

talking?’ ” she recalls. It took nearly a year after the operation for her to

regain control of her voice.

Lo arranges the raw-food balls neatly on a plate. She taught herself the basics

of making edibles when she was recovering from her surgery, since she

couldn’t smoke anymore. Absent the cocoa powder, she’s decided to whip up

a cashew-vanilla icing, to mask the marijuana flavor, and as she speaks she

adds apple slices as an extra garnish. “At the moment, I have no walls.

There’s no guard up,” she says, as we head to her back porch. “I am only

realizing that as I’m saying it. I haven’t really processed it. I think it comes

from kind of being on my own and fighting for it by myself for a long time.

You kind of build up this, like, I am vulnerable, but I am also really fucking

strong. I have a strong thing going on in here.”

She slices a ball in half and gives the larger piece to me, and for a moment we

chew in silence. She’s right, the frosting really helped. You can’t taste the

secret ingredient at all.

Styling by Rebecca Ramsey; Hair by Korey Fitzpatrick for Exclusive Artists Management using Kevin Murphy; Makeup by

Colby Smith for Sephora Collection Colorful; Blouse by Chloé

*A version of this article appears in the October 31, 2016, issue of New

York Magazine.

© 2017, New York Media LLC. View all trademarks

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A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee Savannah Shangea a Department of Africana Studies and the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States Published online: 14 May 2014.

To cite this article: Savannah Shange (2014) A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 24:1, 29-45, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602

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A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee

Savannah Shange*

Department of Africana Studies and the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States

This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as “straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj’s gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki’s hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.

Keywords: gender performance; femme; hip hop; blackness; queer theory; homonormativity

On her breakthrough mixtape Beam Me Up Scotty, Nicki Minaj rapped about her penchant for “bad bitches,” piquing the interest of queer hip hop heads when she bragged: “I only stop for pedestrians/ or a real, real bad lesbian” (Maraj 2009). In the three years since her debut, Minaj has shot to stardom as the reigning hip hop and now pop diva. Her sexu- ality has remained at the center of her public persona, propelled by both the spectaculariza- tion of her body as a target of sexual desire and her piecemeal lyrical expressions of queerness. In the blogrolls and YouTube comment chains that track Minaj’s1 popular recep- tion, a current of disdain runs beneath the critical props and teenybopper adulation. In addition to the familiar chorus of “put your clothes back on” nostalgia, there is also an ongoing critique of her professed-and-then-not-professed bisexuality as being just a gimmick. This suspicion of her same-sex desire in online discursive spaces is part of a criti- cal consensus that foregrounds capital as the “true” engine of Minaj’s strategic queerness.

If Minaj’s selectively “gay” maneuvering is indeed an attempt at material gain, does that automatically dismiss her potential to upset heteronormative scripts in hip hop? Or, more

© 2014 Women & Performance Project Inc.

*Email: [email protected]

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2014 Vol. 24, No. 1, 29–45, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2014.901602

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bluntly, how much pussy does one have to talk about eating for it to “count” as queer? I invoke Nicki in these pages as a thinking partner to help me examine the distance between provocation and transgression, and how queer practice and commodification inter- act in the discursive flows of black popular culture. In these flows we find currents that are both strategic and static, essentialist and ambiguous, coerced and agentic, coursing through the same narrative. This article traces how Nicki creatively navigates these crosscurrents, particularly when marked as black, female, and famous.

While recent scholarship has noted Minaj’s nimble sexuality play, most has not recog- nized or marked her performance of gender as femme (Whitney 2012; Butler 2013; Smith 2013). In this analysis, I foreground femmehood, building on the presumption that “to operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination. It offers the possibility of the repetition of a law that is not its consolidation, but its replacement” (Butler 1990, 40). Thus, I argue that Nicki’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform “straight” or “queer,” but upon closer examination, she refuses both. It is this refusal of legibility, of any parochial rendition of black sexuality, that fuels derisive dismissals of Nicki’s black femme subjectivity as yet another Top 40 titil- lation, particularly within the user-generated content of mainstream gay and feminist online spaces like Autostraddle and Clutch. If a stable, transparent, performance of queer identity has such currency, might femme subjects be perceived to fall a few cents short in their (mis) recognition as conforming to and benefiting from heteropatriarchal gender norms? Further, how do we as queers perpetuate our own enclosure by enforcing homonorms on our femme kin, judging them as inadequate? Where does Nicki Minaj fit in our attempts to map the popular contours of black feminism over the past generation? And finally, what forms of queer black subjecthood might we misrecognize in our pursuit of legible queer genealogies in hip hop, in our pursuit of kinship? Making ourselves visible to each other as queer family is a strategy of black life in the face of social death, an effort at liberatory rupture in a world “sutured by anti-Black solidarity” (Wilderson 2010, 59). I am guided particularly by film theorist Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight as a compass towards these ends, which thus far is the only book-length work on black femme cultural representation. Before engaging Minaj’s musical oeuvre, I take a step back to sketch the contours of tactical queerness in relationship to homonormativity, both in its dominant and nondominant permutations. I then briefly situate Nicki in the historical context of contemporary commercially successful women in rap, before finally turning to her contingent performances of black femmehood on wax, on film, and in print.

Sincerely, strategically queer

At the heart of this inquiry is what we might call strategic queerness and its encounters with a homonormative impulse that distinguishes the legitimate from the illegitimate queer. Stra- tegic queerness unfurls as a heuristic from Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 13) argument for the “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.” Having witnessed the widespread misuse of her concept, Spivak sought to distance herself from the term, but not necessarily its project, lamenting that “my notion just simply became the union ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy, no one

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wondered about that” (Darius, Jonsson, and Spivak 1993, 35). While this piece circulates Spivak’s notion as academic currency, it also seeks to centralize the “strategies” used by queer(ed) subjects within the constraints of late capitalism. As sketched here, strategic queerness is a situation-specific performance of nonheteronormativity enacted in the service of a subject’s material, political, erotic, or discursive interest(s). In this frame, Nicki’s penchant for “real big ol’ ghetto booty” can be understood as a strategically queer assertion of self that provides her with a financially lucrative buffer against heteronor- mative demands, even as it provides the tender homecoming of another woman’s black femme flesh (Raymond and Maraj 2010). Diverging from Spivak’s conception, strategic queerness in this sense does not necessarily denote an exclusively scrupulous visibility. She demonstrates the ethical dimension of strategy through the example of a diverse set of subaltern groups articulating a collective identity that denies difference in order to make a claim on the state. By contrast, a strategically queer individual may be interpreted as inauthentic, cowardly, or even immoral – the inverse of the “good gay subject” produced and regulated through regimes of homonormativity. We see this dynamic when Nicki fans were chided on mainstream white lesbian website AfterEllen.com that “if you buy her album, you are buying into fauxmosexuality,” and reminded that “the last thing we need is another straight woman pretending to identify with our culture just to lure us as custo- mers” (Bendix 2010).

As articulated powerfully in recent years, homonormativity often dovetails into homo- nationalism, which we might sketch as a hegemonic patriotism that hinges on the queer liberal subject’s investment in the Western state apparatus (Puar 2005, 2007; Agathangelou, Bassichis, and Spira 2008). Homonationalism’s “good gay subject” is not only white and bourgeois, but is also monogamously partnered, normatively gendered, and as committed to the flag as he or she is to the nuclear family. In Puar’s (2005, 122) frame, “queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rheto- ric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as ‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” In this context, the War on Terror and the Islamophobic strains of homo- national discourse serve to legitimate imperial aggression overseas. The same queer “imperialist center” also serves to “other” communities within the United States because their race, class, gender deviance, politics, and/or affect fall outside the boundaries of ideal queer liberal subjectivity. The mainstream gay lobby’s two policy priorities over the past decade demonstrate this dynamic: repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and securing the right to gay marriage. Petitioning the state on behalf of queer people who want to par- ticipate in the imperial war machine is a homonationalist politic in the sense that it uses queer identity as a tool to expand rather than interrupt the most lethal elements of the Amer- ican way. While less obviously bloody, the gay marriage movement is premised on the conceit that “we are just like you,” and that gay marriage is about equality. Of course, that only works if “you” are a heteronormative middle-class couple who reap the material benefits of being married. For queer people of color and poor queer folks, issues of econ- omic marginalization, mass incarceration, and police brutality are often far higher on the list of priorities, as seen in a recent protest sign that demanded accountability from the Human Rights Campaign, “Sleeping in the Streets or Walking Down the Aisle?!”2 Despite its

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pretensions to the contrary, bourgeois homonationalism is not the only expressive field of homonormative regulation.

Nondominant queer communities can also employ the technologies of normativity to maintain social coherence, even if their homonorms are wholly different, or counter to, those of Puar’s “imperial center.” One instantiation of this normative technology is “butch” or “stud” – femme sociality. Multiply distanced from queer liberalism, black and working-class inflected stud–femme3 sociality is a common sense of gendered norming within queer women of color communities that

contains nodes of consent to dominant hegemonies, and it often enforces a rather rigid behav- ioral and aesthetic code that may have outlived its usefulness for some. At the same time, however, butch-femme also is a malleable form of sociality that still functions as a vehicle for the survival of forms of black lesbian community and as an expression and organization of erotic desire. (Keeling 2007, 133)

Even though terms like “lesbian” or even “woman” may not fit comfortably for everyone operating in these communities, folks still have to navigate and engage a binary pair of con- structed masculine and feminine gender roles. Distinct from the sex-positive, campy “butch-femme as play” strain of white queer theory, stud-femme is a citational field that extends far beyond the bedroom to sketch the boundaries of fair play for legible selves. In this social field, homonormative discourse surveys those very boundaries to legitimize compliant queer subjects and discipline those who stray. The homonorms of stud-femme sociality include etiquettes surrounding gender presentation, partner choice, and the level of disclosure or “outness” expected of community members. Along these lines, members of black queer women’s communities4 are expected to present a coherent gender, whether that is masculine or feminine of center; we are also expected to partner with someone who has a different gender presentation than ourselves. While Nicki’s self-fash- ioning is compliant with femme norms, her lyrical and visual displays of desire for other femme-presenting women are not. Based on these established (and contested) boundaries of authenticity, homonormativity dictates how to be gay and throws shade upon those, like Minaj, who dare to defy.

Strategic queerness appears ever shady in this regime of authenticity – “strategy” slips easily into “manipulation,” a bedfellow of inauthenticity. However, rather than consolidate homonorms as uniformly negative in their disciplining function, and conflate strategy with impersonation, it is important to recognize the productive and humanizing role they can also play in queer communities. What, then, might we find at the crossroads of strategic and nor- mative sexualities? Perhaps more pertinently, if the authenticity of individual black queer subjects is predicated on the logic of stud-femme, how does the singular femme come into the field of recognition? How can we see Nicki, even as her image is ubiquitous?

An heir to what throne?

Over the past four decades there has been a steady stream of women rocking mics and air- waves who follow in the footsteps of early women rappers like Lady B and Roxanne Shanté, as a well as a rich tradition of women hip hop scholars who probe the confluences

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of gender, race, and power within and beyond hip hop (Rose 1994; Morgan 1999; Keyes 2002; Perry 2004; Pough 2004; Gaunt 2006; Peoples 2007; Pough et al. 2007; Brown 2009; Love 2011; Brown and Kwakye 2012; Durham, Cooper, and Morris 2013).5

However, women continue to be so underrepresented as mainstream hip hop artists (but cer- tainly not as hip hop heads), that the introduction of every new female rapper is heralded as a sign of the rise of women in hip hop. Indeed, even the term “femcee,” a contraction of “female emcee,” signals the alterity of women to hip hop as the unmarked “emcee” is assumed to be male. Problematic as it is, “femcee” continues to circulate rather heavily in both in print and online hip hop criticism, often in ciphers of purists or rap classicists who differentiate between the skilled title of “emcee” and the far more common “rapper.” Jean Grae, who has been on most folks’ “top 10 femcees” list for the better part of a decade, has built an impressive canon of rhymes that battle the patriarchal base of heteronormative hip hop (Smalls 2011). Along the way, she has also dedicated thousands of characters on her Twitter account to abolishing the term: “Unless we agree on calling dudes ‘mancee’ (which actually makes me feel awful) stop saying ‘femcee.’ EMCEE is fine, thanks” (Grae 2010).6 Beyond the concern Grae and others hold that “women emcees” should just be respected and evaluated as emcees, rather than by gender, there is also the misleading aural prominence given to “fem”-ness in the term “femcee,” even though as we will see, femme gender is by no means universal to women who rap.

Over the past two decades, two broad archetypes of commercially successful women rappers have emerged, which I designate roughly as the Righteous Queen, whose lyrics focus on community empowerment and positivity, and the Gangsta Boo, who often enters the scene as the protégé of a prominent male rapper, whose rhymes spin tall tales of crime laced with sex. In the pantheon of Righteous Queens, we might find the “conscious” manifestos of Lauryn Hill, MC Lyte’s cautionary tales, Ladybug Mecca’s homages to black liberation, Mystic’s elegies for our fallen, and, perhaps definitionally, Queen Latifah’s party jams oriented toward unity and self-pride. Among the Gangsta Boos, we have the lyrical arsenal and sexual prowess of Lil Kim, Foxy Brown’s husky-voiced drug raps, Remy Ma’s streetwise independence, the original ride-or-die chick Eve, and of course the intimate exploits of the category’s eponym, Gangsta Boo. While it may seem like a facetious title, each of these “Gangsta Boos” have been arrested after the inception of their professional music careers, reminding us of the continued vulnerability of gendered black bodies to the penal state. Significantly, pat- terns of gender performance differ across these archetypes, with both Lyte and Latifah sometimes being read as masculine presenting and some shade of gay. Neither has under- gone a public “coming out” ritual, but Latifah’s purchase of a home in 2010 with per- sonal trainer Jeannette Jenkins coupled with refusals to discuss her “personal life” in media interviews have been widely read as a discreet acknowledgement of her queer- ness. Just as is true with every identificatory formation, these rough consolidations of Righteous Queens and Gangsta Boos are porous and subject to negotiation and subver- sion, as evidenced the many “symbolic remainders” (Jackson 2005, 59) produced by “femcee” math.

Perhaps most prominent in their exception to this loose heuristic are commercially suc- cessful women emcees whose gender presentation is consistently non-normative. Here we might find multi-platinum Dirty South representer Missy, Jermaine Dupree’s masculine-of-

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center protégé Da Brat, and Detroit’s Bo$$, who was arguably the first stud to rap on a major label. Missy’s embodiment of gender at once prevented her from playing the role of a Queen or a Boo, and at the same time allowed her to carve an unprecedented space for herself as a headlining artist in her own right. With trademark short hair and chocolate skin darker than any of the 10 women rappers listed in the above paragraph, Missy is not immediately legible as any brand of black leading lady. Further, her relationship to her ample size early in her career was the inverse of socially mandated shame; in the video for her 1997 single “I Can’t Stand the Rain” video, she plays with her size using visual effects, flipping fatness into an asset for a sexy, bodycentric emcee. While Missy has been the subject of gay rumor mills for these and other reasons, her lyrics generally refer- ence heterosexual scenes, even if not normatively so. Da Brat and Bo$$ both present them- selves as less ambiguous queer subjects – with the exception of Da Brat’s dissonant French manicure in her post-prison video shoot – and aligned drug- and crime-oriented rhymes with their masculine presentation. Distinct from these gender defiant emcees, another slice of musicians also resist identification as Righteous Queens or Gangsta Boos. They are a renegade collection of women artists aptly described by Nas’s turn of phrase: “the rapper’s rapper,” including Jean Grae, Bahamadia, and Rah Digga (Jones 2002). Signifi- cantly, these female “rapper’s rappers,” whose supreme lyrical skills and nonsexual content make them direct threats to male mic domination, are also the least supported by the recording industry. None of the three aforementioned have a major-label record deal, or the backing of the publicity machines that facilitate chart toppers. Minaj, who came into the game independently and was soon picked up by the Young Money crew, also works outside of these generic conventions for women rappers.

Sidestepping categorization as a Gangsta Boo or a Righteous Queen, Minaj’s verbose, hyperbolic braggadocios rhyme style qualifies as rap for rappers. However, since she also sings pop tunes and engages Lady Gaga-style wardrobe antics, Minaj’s work simul- taneously challenges the boundaries of the very category “rapper.” In order to index the multiple moves Minaj makes in terms of gender, sexuality, and the generic conventions of hip hop, it may be useful to think of Minaj as a femmecee. Unlike the dismissive “femcee,” whose gender assignment at birth modifies their right to the “emcee” title, a femmecee is a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextric- ably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes.

Femmecee on film: same-sex desire in Minaj’s music videos

Visuality has been key to Nicki’s strategic deployment of queerness. By tracing the mani- festations of same-sex desire in Minaj’s music videos, I seek to reveal both the transgres- sions and the concessions that are built into Nicki’s femmecee stance. For a few years after her first underground mixtape Sucka Free was released (Spring 2008), Minaj almost exclusively recorded and performed on other artists’ songs through cameos or guest appear- ances. Her piecemeal approach garnered unprecedented commercial success even before her major label debut. At one point in Fall 2010, Minaj was featured on seven of Billboard’s Hot 100 songs at the same time, setting a new record for most singles on the chart at once – allowing her to brag that she earns “$50 K for a verse/ no album out” (Maraj 2010). Indeed,

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the hype paid off for the record sales of her first studio album, Pink Friday, released later that season.

This variegated set of guest recording appearances has allowed Minaj opportunities to strategically deploy a range of lyrical, ethnic, and sexual personae. In Nicki’s case, she deploys black femme gender performance as part of her public persona, particularly in her music videos. These performances remind us of the difficulty of enacting a black femme subject on the screen, partly because her very presence threatens to “dislodge the racist, sexist, and homophobic conceptions” that structure our domination (Keeling 2007, 9). Thus, it seems Nicki’s appearance has the potential to recall the black femme from her/our cinematic, and therefore discursive, exile. Her rendition of black femmehood positions us somewhere between Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) unthinkable and Saidiya Hartman’s unthought (Hartman and Wilderson 2003), and regales black femmes in an optimistic, even celebratory way. But if recognizing black femmehood always already disrupts hegemo- nic scripts, what does it mean to recognize a black femme in mainstream hip hop, particularly if she disavows any queer “identity” even while referencing queer practice?

When examined chronologically, we find that while Nicki consistently peppers sexual innuendoes and scenarios into her rhymes, the tone of her verbal engagements with same- sex desire has shifted over the course of her career. Whereas earlier lyrical offerings often centered on Nicki’s interest in threesomes with a man and a woman, in her more recent work, she rhymes separately about potential male and female sex partners rather than con- flating them into a queered heterosexual scene. This shift reflects in part the changing power dynamics in Nicki’s artistic career; on almost all of her early tracks, she was a featured guest on a male rapper’s song, in keeping with the “male sponsorship” model of black women in popular music (Emerson 2002). More recently the tables have turned, with Nicki instead playing host to male rappers jockeying for cameos on her tracks. As a lens into this chan- ging dynamic, I now look to a pair of music video releases that loosely bookend this tran- sition: Usher’s 2010 release “Lil Freak,” which features Nicki, and Nicki’s 2012 “Beez in the Trap,” which features 2 Chainz.

In her guest appearance on R&B superstar Usher’s “Lil Freak,” Nicki made an assertion of queerness that appeared quite different across visual and verbal platforms. When the lyrics of “Lil Freak” are examined in tandem with the images presented in the music video, we are able to better apprehend Minaj’s strategically queer maneuverings. In the video, Nicki is positioned ambiguously as the wingwoman for Usher’s exploits and a potent homoerotic seductress in her own right. Set in an eerily silent, cavernous warehouse space, “Lil Freak” opens with the timid steps of a fair-skinned ingénue who reads as almost- if-not-quite white. Looking around nervously, the ingénue enters an industrial elevator and is followed by Nicki and an entourage of black women, all dressed to the nines in scanty club gear. Nicki’s trademark over-the-top wig is split-dyed down the middle, with one half platinum blonde and the other black. The wig is a suggestive visual accompaniment to her dual role in the narrative as a queer femme initiator on the one hand, and a minion of Usher’s patriarchal sexuality on the other. After Nicki’s crew disembarks into Usher’s party, the ingénue tries to push the button to get to her own floor, but to no avail; she is stuck on the floor of the party and ventures out of the elevator apprehensively.

Usher’s verse foreshadows Nicki’s seduction of the ingénue, instructing Nicki to make out with her in anticipation of a ménage a trois. Usher narrates homosex as a prelude to his

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own satisfaction, and positions himself as the “true” target of female desire, because to him it is obvious that they are on the prowl for a celebrity. By making Nicki’s loyalty to him contingent on both the recruitment of and sexual engagement with women he will later have sex with, Usher deploys a classic formula of intimate coercion: “if you really loved me, then you would x.” Usher’s instruction to acquire his sexual partners at least partially brackets off Minaj’s sexual autonomy, a move she echoes later in her own verse when she describes herself as Usher’s employee. By goading the imagined erotic interest to have sex with Minaj, Usher’s lyrics attempt to further de-queer homosexual contact by dragging it under the rubric of male desire and control. Further, because Usher has already narrated Nicki and the ingénue’s kiss before it actually happens, he appears as the auteur of the queer sex scene, which then could be seen to unfold as a manifestation of his fantasy. However, Minaj’s verse steps assertively away from subordination to male desire as she addresses her erotic interest.

Shot in profile, the women’s faces are just inches away from each other when Minaj reverses the terms of Usher’s demand. Minaj stays in a decidedly transactional, non-roman- tic register with: “I really like your kitty cat, and if you let me touch her/ . . . I’ll take you to go see Usher.” Instead of serving as just a conduit for Usher’s desire to see the erotic interest turn into his “lil freak,” Minaj layers on her own desire to “touch” the soon-to-be freak, and positions herself as the gatekeeper to Usher’s hypermasculine sex symbol. Minaj assumes that the ingénue has her own agentic reasons to “go see Usher” and offers a femme-femme sexual encounter as currency to get her in the door. Building on her sexual proposition of the Lil Freak, the rest of Minaj’s verse reinforces her position as perpetually, and patriarch- ally, queer. Nicki goes on to boast “I keep a couple hoes,” as she likens herself to Santa with a stable of women in lieu of reindeer.

Visually, Minaj advertises her sexual prowess in relation to the remarkably light com- plexioned, nervous girl – in the video she seems to tease her viewing public with the specter of homoerotic intimacy, bringing her lips close to the ingénue’s face, leaning forward sug- gestively as she raps to the woman. While still certainly playing fast and loose with the archetypes of heteronormativity, the cinematic imagery plays much straighter than Minaj’s lyrics. Textually, Minaj brags not only about the women she partners with, but even jokes about nabbing Cassie, the R&B singer and sometime girlfriend of rap mogul Sean “P Diddy” Combs. Still, Minaj’s queer voyage ultimately remains tethered to the anchor of Usher as both the headlining artist on the track that opens and closes the song, and as the narrative’s protagonist – both Nicki and her love interest are his lil freaks starring in the video shot at his party.

While also set in a dark club atmosphere full of dark flesh and deep bass, the video for Minaj’s 2012 single “Beez in the Trap” is an almost complete inversion of the gendered power dynamics at work in “Lil Freak.” Minaj is the center of the narrative, with shots of her flanked by black women in bikinis and bustiers interposing footage of her rapping directly to the camera in an abstract grey space. In both frames, Minaj appears in Techni- color; in her solo shots, she crouches on a wooden pedestal in a neon pink leotard and lime stilettos to spit rhymes behind a nest of barbed wire in the foreground. In the club, she appears in a Day-Glo green wig, outsized gold chains nestled in her bare cleavage. In a departure from “Lil Freak,” Nicki begins the song herself, establishing that she “Beez in the Trap.” The opening chorus recalls Dr. Dre’s 20-year-old misogynist classic, “Bitches

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Ain’t Shit,” from the multiplatinum 1992 album The Chronic, revived recently by Tyga and YG’s single of the same name in 2011. Of course, when Nicki spits the lyric as someone who is putatively a “bitch” herself, the phrase becomes palimpsestic – her attempts at resignification layer messily over patriarchal norms. In a belligerent, cocky tone, Nicki raps the whole song without a trace of the teenybopper girliness that animates her pop tunes, instead staying in “battle rap” mode for the duration. Her verses paint a familiar picture of misogynist desire-cum-degradation, where the black female body is subject to “thingification” (Césaire 1955, 42) as “that,” and sex is the only currency accepted in exchange for affection.

Nicki’s delivery hits each plosive gutturally so that the repeated “bitch” lands hard on the ear. No longer offering to “touch your kitty cat,” Nicki instead invokes penetration aggressively, demanding “bitch, bust that open.” In keeping with the tendency of emcees in the Young Money orbit to celebrate, rather than denigrate, sex work, Nicki suggests that she is also in the market as a potential john who will “spend a couple thou[sand]” to have sex with a woman of her choice. These lines are further contextualized by the video, which conjures a strip club atmosphere in which Nicki holds a huge stack of $100 bills as two women lean their breasts in towards her.

Just as Nicki busted a guest verse on “Lil Freak,” rising star 2 Chainz does the honors on “Beez in the Trap,” spitting lyrics about money rather than sex, rehearsing a rags to riches tale that starts in the projects and ends in a mansion. More significant to the discussion of Nicki’s shifting sexuality is the on-screen depiction of the two rappers. While 2 Chainz raps, he and Nicki are shot together in an unadorned grey photo studio, removing their interaction from the diegetic arc of the club narrative. Fierce in a backless leopard print unitard, Nicki dances alongside 2 Chainz during the verse, but never with him. Unlike a strikingly similar scene from the video for Ciara’s 2010 “Ride,” in which Ciara becomes a sexual object for Ludacris during his guest verse on her song, Nicki never touches 2 Chainz, maintaining instead her own space and interaction with the camera. This distance between them is underscored at the end of the video, when Nicki poses standing, giving much attitude and facing away from 2 Chainz. Similar to the kind of hijinks a student might play behind a teacher’s back, he comes up behind her and playfully “air-grinds” maybe 10 inches away from her body. Untouched and unperturbed, Nicki doesn’t respond at all during his dance. It is not until he stops dancing and shifts into a back-to-back pose with her that she moves, turning her head toward the camera as he does, establishing them as platonic peers.

Indeed, the only sexual contact Nicki has in the “Beez in the Trap” is during the closing bridge, when Nicki questions in a husky sing-song, “damn, damn what they say about me?” She follows with “if I get hit/ swinging on a big bitch,” and appears flanked by two women in stripper gear that are a full head taller than her. Nicki raps with her rear end pressed up against one woman, while holding the other woman’s shoulder and caressing her back and rear end. The query, “what they say about me?” obliquely references the rumor mill debates about Nicki’s queer sexuality, and paired with her refusal to engage 2 Chainz as sexual interest points to Minaj’s deployment of queer femme autonomy as a public stance. However, Nicki consistently denies recognition as “gay,” even as she dodges identification as “straight.”

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Evasion or defiance? Strategies of disavowal

When interviewed by the magazine Black Men, which is a cross between soft porn and a video vixen directory, Minaj asserted quite unequivocally: “I don’t date women, and I don’t have sex with women” (Blassingame 2010, 14). However, equivocation came later when she appeared on the October 2010 cover of Out magazine, a mainstream gay publi- cation in the United States. Nicki claimed to be using the outlet to thank her gay fans, rather than to out herself as a queer person. When the Out journalist pressed Minaj about her pre- viously published denials of bisexuality, Minaj quipped: “But I don’t date men either” (Ganz 2010, 2). Minaj’s contradictory disclosure does not necessarily signal surrender to hegemonic norms. Recalling Butler, we can understand Nicki’s evasion to be an effort to replace rather than reenact scripts of sexual belonging. At the same time, Minaj’s femme gender presentation underwrites her access to even cursorily heteronormative spaces, even though her elaborate wigs and hyperbelle personae immediately recall drag queen aes- thetics to the queer gaze.

While Minaj disavows queerness several times, she also significantly and strategically skirts heteronormativity, as in a 2009 interview on the video magazine VladTV. Titled “Nicki Minaj – How to Get At Her,” hosted by DJ Vlad who Minaj calls “the crazy white boy.” He invites her to perform her straightness by asking her for instructions to guide her male suitors. I quote the interview at length because Minaj dodges the question not once, but three times.

DJ Vlad: What does it take for a guy to walk up to you, start a conversation with you, and really get your attention?

Nicki Minaj: Pull your penis out! Psych I’m just kidding – that’s what you thought I was gonna say, you so nasty!

DJV: No, I’m tryna clean it up for you girl, you comin’ at me with this mature shit, I’m tryna keep it mature!

NM: Haha, tricked you!! Aaah! Um, a guy can approach me … actually, he can’t because I be with a lotta people. I be with big dudes [laughs]

DJV: Security’s back there, yamean?

NM: Yeah, they don’t really let me out of their sight, but I like girls to approach me.

DJV: You like girls to approach you?

NM: Yeah, you know how I do.

DJV: Well, how can a girl approach you?

NM: Just be cute and be themselves, you know how I love you girls. Um, kisses and hugs to all my bad bitches. And, shout out to the guys too, but the guys … they’re just dudes. They don’t have any [changes voice] fun parts that I can squeeze! Psych, I’m just kidding. Um, um, yeah. (VladTV 2009)

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Instead of complying with the male interviewer’s request for access, Nicki deflects and opens the door onto what might be called “bisexuality,” even though in this clip she’s unin- terested in dating men, and a year later she is uninterested in dating women.

Tracing my own affective experience as a black femme watching the interview, I find something supremely, and perhaps problematically, unsatisfying about this oscillation. When Nicki infers her queerness to DJ Vlad with “you know how I do,” I am instantly hailed. I remix her words into “you know how we do” and annex Nicki into my own orbit as another black femme. I want her kisses and hugs, less as a sexual encounter, and more as a ritual of recognition – I want the relief of seeing myself seen in hip hop after two decades of listening to my own absence over and over on boomboxes and Walkmen, on CD players, Minidiscs, and iPods. Even when Nicki flips from her Queens brogue to the high pitched squeal of “fun parts that I can squeeze,” I still perk at the notion of being a game to be toyed with, of playing at objectification. It’s not until the “psych” that I deflate, disappointed, particularly given that there is no disavowal of the disavowal, no “I’m just kidding” after she says she is straight. Of course, this raises several questions: What respon- sibility does Nicki Minaj have to stave off my black femme disappointment, to satisfy my longing for recognition in the first place? Further, does the recounting of any one individual affective experience effectively lower the stakes of this effort to recalibrate our engagements with queerness in hip hop? Given the always already embodied nature of both blackness and femmeness, a robust analysis of Nicki requires us to account for the constant evaluation and assessment of the authenticity of femme sexuality, particularly when it resists legibility.

Out gay male rapper Cazwell’s commentary on Minaj brings attention to the ways in which her sexual persona (dis)articulates with the homonorms of stud-femme sociality. When asked about Minaj’s star potential given her queer lyrical content, he opined: “If she was a butch and dressed like a guy, people would be turned off, but people like a pretty girl no matter who she sleeps with” (Ganz 2010, 6). In much of queer theory and queer living, “femme” is not only exclusively lesbian, but also is thought of as – femme, where the dangling hyphen signals an irreducible attachment to a masculine counterpart. Even in more racially and regionally complex portraits of femme subjecthood, femme sexu- ality is still consummated in partnership with someone who has a “complementary gender display” (Moore 2011, 82). Evading that familiar dyad, Nicki’s ostensibly femme-femme eroticism pierces “lesbian” and renders it an open set because her sexual desire is no longer congruent with stud-femme sociality. Minaj’s femme subject withholds the affective labor that reproduces stud masculinity. In her discussion of the liberatory possibilities suggested by black femme figures in the cinematic gaze, Keeling (2007, 143) argues that “with one foot in an aporia and one foot in the set of what appears, the black femme cur- rently is a reminder that the set of what appears is never perfectly closed and that something different might appear therein at any-instant-whatever.” That “something different” in Nicki’s case is often Roman Zolansky, who she describes as the “crazy boy who lives in me and says the things I don’t wanna say,” (Warren 2010) appearing on many of her more rhyme-heavy songs. While Nicki’s femme gender isn’t verified as queer by the pres- ence of a butch partner, it does at times stand in contrast to the “crazy” British boy inside her, who takes risks unavailable to “Barbie,” Nicki’s primary persona. Indeed, Roman’s staccato rhyme delivery and caricatured vocal shifts mark off his verses as that “something different” that haunts the recognizable.

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However, Nicki’s second album release, Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, begins to explore gender beyond a bifurcation between masculine Roman and feminine Barbie. She is not only the “heavyweight champ,” as she proclaims on her duet single with Drake, but the video for that song opens with an animated storybook page that reads: “Once upon a time there lived a king named Nicki. One day, while sitting on her throne … ” With this male monarch title echoed again on her most recent Vibe cover, King Nicki spits more expli- citly queer lyrics on Roman Reloaded than she did on the teenybop-inflected Pink Friday. Nicki’s kingliness is complemented by an emergent phallic theme. On “Stupid Hoe,” she uses a Roman-esque voice to tell Lil Kim to “suck my diznick,” an insult congruent with the battle rap framing. Nicki’s gender performance in the song takes a turn when in her “own” voice, or what she calls “Nicki” in her interviews, she belts out in a sugar- sweet alto melody: “Oooh, dick in yo face, I put my dick in yo face, I put my dick in yo face, yeah!” (Maraj 2012). Because she sings in a very different register than the no-nonsense battle rapper who spits bars on “Beez in the Trap” and the rest of “Stupid Hoe,” the “dick-in- yo-face” serenade emphasizes the juxtaposition between her polished, coy, femme presen- tation and hip hop’s long-established discourse of fellatio as a tool of denigration, from the “deez nuts” era onward. Especially with such an extended, passionate riff, Nicki gives us time to imagine not only her having a dick, but putting it in our faces, thereby conjuring the queered queer scene of a black femme top whose sexual aggression belies the pillow prin- cess archetype. She takes it a step further when she sings a rendition of that lyric for a video interview with Complex magazine in which Minaj cites that moment as the most liberatory for her during the making of Roman Reloaded. “That’s when it was like explosion! Roman Reloaded is here!” (Frederick 2012). Before saying “explosion,” Minaj makes a [chick- pow] onomatopoetic bomb sound with her mouth, and illustrates the explosion with her hands, constructing an unavoidably ejaculatory narrative of the album.

The phallic turn in Nicki’s work extends beyond the realm of the lyrical. Still images of Minaj with a strap-on dildo during the 2011 I am Music tour also put the “drag” in King Nicki.7 In the first picture, taken at the Buffalo show that also featured rappers Lil Wayne and Rick Ross, Nicki holds a blindingly white penis in her hand, complete with veins, a pink glans, and testes beneath (Figure 1). Stooping comically, Nicki holds the strap so that it droops down lasciviously, and sneers in a transparently campy, Roman-esque fashion. This is King Nicki at play, performing the contrast between her skin-tight Afrofuturist get up and the wiggly white dick. A second image taken at the show is more opaque. Caught between poses, Nicki pauses with her mouth slightly agape, eyes fixed on the empty space before her (Figure 2). This time the strap is erect, and just a foot or two away from the crouch- ing back-up dancer whose hips are angled up toward Nicki’s figure. Nicki stands in thought, shaping the moment, shaping her relation to it as she enacts the scene of queer sex for the audience. It is in this awkward moment that we witness Nicki present to her interiority, her own white dick in her hand, the dissonance of which signals her outsiderness to what we might imagine to be a legible queer black subject. Her hesitation recalls the inassimilability of harder-to-recognize figures, including studs, femmes, those who fly no rainbow flags, and perhaps even those that disavow queerness as “ambivalent, destabilizing, and unstable forces of desire and community [that] cohere as a collective expression of a multifarious ‘we’ that complicates any innocent notion of ‘the one’ who says, ‘I am a black lesbian’” (Keeling 2007, 224), even if we understand the innocence of queer normativity to be itself a ruse.

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Figure 1. Nicki Minaj at a 2011 performance in Buffalo, New York. Source: Michael K. (2011)

Figure 2. Nicki Minaj at a 2011 performance in Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Necole Bitchie (2011).

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Nicki stands as a member of that multifarious collective in her ambivalence, her unsatisfy- ingness, her syncopated two step between “maybe” and “no” that dances away from the “yes” that would proclaim, that would say “I am a black lesbian,” “I am a black queer,” “I am one of you.” Instead, she challenges us to acknowledge her dick and her throne without demanding reconcilability. She teaches me as a black femme to question satiety as the engine of my listen- ing. She lets me down exactly in the tender spots where I am still invested in the liberal fantasy of recognition, even as I imagine myself to be radically over it. Her queerness denies legibility, and instead is revealed to be yet another strategy for black female survivance8 that bends the rules of neoliberal capital without breaking them. Just as we might understand the black femme’s haunting of the cinematic to gesture toward the “Open” afforded by her (in)visibility, King Nicki’s hypervisibility as a black femmecee and her refusal to cede to any regime of rec- ognition confound the multiple common senses – hip hop/patriarchy/ homonormativity – that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.

Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to Mecca Jamilah Sullivan and Sam Seidel for their sustained critical engage- ment with my work, and for their fine-tuned feedback on this piece throughout its development from a conference talk to an article. Many thanks are also due to Scott Poulson Bryant and C. Riley Snorton for the opportunity to first share this work as part of the Queerness of Hip Hop/ Hip Hop of Queerness symposium at Harvard University in September 2012. Finally, I offer gratitude to all the women who have stood at the centers and margins of hip hop for the last three decades, whether they are rocking mics and bruising themselves on linoleum, or standing right next to me in the crowd, bobbing our heads and making the cipher complete.

Notes on contributor Savannah Shange is a joint doctoral candidate in Africana Studies and Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies circulated and lived forms of blackness using the tools of anthropology, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of blackness and multiracial progressive organizing in San Francisco.

Notes 1. Because this article takes up the public maneuverings of the rapper “Nicki Minaj,” rather than

assuming any overlap with the life of her auteur, Onika Maraj, I do not follow academic conven- tion and refer to her as “Maraj.” Instead, I toggle between the more familiar “Nicki” and the more formal “Minaj” in an attempt to convey both my respect for Nicki Minaj as a knowledge produ- cer, as well as my imagined intimacy with her as a co-conspirator in race, gender, and hip hop.

2. Str-Crssed, “Sleeping on the Streets or Walking Down the Aisle?” Real/Love (blog). Tumblr, December 2012. http://str-crssd.tumblr.com/post/37023786275/sleeping-on-the-streets-or- walking-down-the.

3. Stud is a term used primarily in communities of color to describe people assigned female at birth who embody a masculine-of-center gender presentation, or are on the transmasculine spectrum. Other terms to describe the same demographic include aggressive, AG, and dom. While “butch” could be seen as an analogous term, stud/dom/AG/aggressive specifically invokes a black/ened “female masculinity.” Regional differences account for much of the variation in people’s term of choice – I will use ‘stud’ here, both in respect to my West Coast queer socialization, and to avoid the potentially confounded connotations of “aggressive.”

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4. While there are a significant number of trans-identified, gender nonconforming, and gender defiant folks who are central participants in this social network, I use the term “black queer women’s communities” to distinguish this cultural sphere from the related, but distinct, gay and queer black men’s social world. I find that even when folks do not identify as women, the locally hegemonic norms of gender presentation and partner choice are still central to how they are read by others in the same space.

5. For an intellectual history and theoretical rendering of hip hop feminist scholarship, see particu- larly Peoples (2007), Durham (2010), and Durham, Cooper, and Morris (2013).

6. Other examples include: Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy). “Y’all just gotta call me SOMETHING, huh. Femcee, MILF, cougar, ANYTHING. They’re all wrong. It’s hilarious though. Also, sad. Single tsk.” Twitter, November 29, 2012. Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy). “ … and for those of you still sep- arating female and male emcees and/or using the term ‘femcee’ please stop. Grow up. Enjoy music.” Twitter, March 27, 2012. Grae, Jean (@jeangreasy).

7. While Minaj’s use of a dildo can also be read as non-sexual and symbolic of social power (Smith 2013), I use the tools of queer of color critique (Ferguson 2003) to center the possibility of both black queer sex and black queer subjects.

8. Here, I build on the work of indigenous scholars who have articulates survivance as a centuries- long quotidian and aesthetic counterpractice to domination and genocide (Vizenor 1999, 2008) that moves beyond the bare life of “survival” to include generative, dynamic processes of con- tinuing to be. While facing a different façade of the settler/slave estate, black women have also engaged some of these generative practices, including ritual, memory, art, war, and of course, self-preservation in the face of social death.

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with Saidiya V. Hartman.” Conducted by Frank B. Wilderson, III. Qui Parle, 13 (2). Jackson, John L. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press. Jones, Nasir. 2002. “Last Real Nigga Alive.” On God’s Son [CD]. New York: Columbia Records. Keeling, Kara. 2007. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common

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and Exploring Bridges Between Black Second Wave and Hip-Hop Feminisms.” Meridians 8 (1): 19–52.

Perry, Imani. 2004. “The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto.” In Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, 155–190. Durham: Duke University Press.

Pough, Gwendolyn D. 2004. Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture and the Public Sphere. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 45

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  • Abstract
  • Sincerely, strategically queer
  • An heir to what throne?
  • Femmecee on film: same-sex desire in Minaj's music videos
  • Evasion or defiance? Strategies of disavowal
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes on contributor
  • Notes
  • References

28 | Sight&Sound | January 2017

A LESSON IN AWKWARD Following the toe-curlingly acute comedy of ‘The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl’, Issa Rae is back with ‘Insecure’, but has her zany, idiosyncratic brilliance been diluted during the transition from web series to mainstream TV? By Gaylene Gould

Internet star Issa Rae’s popular web series The Misadven- tures of Awkward Black Girl (2011-13) begins with an epi- sode called ‘Stop Sign’. In it we meet plain-faced J (played by Rae) in a beat-up car navigating traffic etiquette. When repeatedly stopping next to someone you know at red signals and stop signs, how long do you keep up the half- hearted smile and wave? Do you pretend to hear when they shout at you? Do you mime being on the phone? As in real life, the scene goes on long enough to make your toes curl. This opening instalment is low-budget practi- cal and comedically on point. “For any ordinary person,” J explains in voiceover, “the stop sign is a simple sign of direction, but for me it’s the epitome of social misdirec- tion.” She bears two crosses: she’s awkward AND black

– “the two worst things anyone could be”. Over 24 epi- sodes she guides us through life as a twentysomething wrestling with social mores on the fringes of adult life.

Comedy, of all genres, has been particularly successful at finding a wider audience for the black experience – through broad-appeal family sitcoms, from The Jeffersons (1975-85) to Black-ish (2014-), and more recent, edgier of- ferings such as Donald Glover’s Atlanta (2016-), an ellipti- cal look at life on the lower rungs of hip-hop’s celebrity ladder, and, in Britain, Michaela Coel’s dirty-mouthed Chewing Gum (2015-). Misadventures encroaches on terri- tory usually occupied by older Jewish men – existential comedy. Rae has said she was inspired to write the series after studying Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David – come-

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January 2017 | Sight&Sound | 29

RAE’S A LAUGH Issa Rae as Issa in Insecure (above), this year’s big- budget HBO follow-up to her hit web series Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (right)

dians who amble through the musing mind, revealing frailties most of us are too cool to admit to. The milieu ex- plored is often recognisable yet hilariously heightened: Misadventures reveals the murky, multicultural, zero- hours-contract world that America refuses to advertise.

J works in a call-centre for a dodgy diet pill company, Gutbusters. She’s surrounded by a cast of madcap col- leagues, including a delightful Rachel Dolezal-style race- switching boss, all skull-exposed cornrows and daishikis. J herself is no poster-child for normal. After her boyfriend dumped her, J shaved her head and has taken to compos- ing violent raps in her bedroom.

Essentially, Misadventures is a black The Office (2001- 03). But where David Brent suffers a self-awareness deficiency, J has been dished an excruciating double dose. We watch with shame-riddled compulsion as she writhes around in a perpetual state of embarrassment.

In an Escher-like episode called ‘The Long Corridor’ Rae brings to life the horror of walking past the same person over and over in a passageway until the standard string of polite greetings is exhausted. You wish the other person would die rather than face another awkward meeting. “Does this girl live in the hallway?” J screams internally.

At some time or other, we’ve all walked down that metaphoric corridor, haven’t we? Those places where social constructs threaten to crash down and expose our inept, bewildered selves. Misadventures lives within those terrible moments.

Race and gender are two of those constructs that both protect and stifle us. At least since The Birth of a Nation (the D.W. Griffith 1915 version, not Nate Parker’s recent film), images of black people and women have been a public not a private matter. Young black women are par- ticularly schooled in how not to present themselves for fear of negative labelling and the message often received is to tone down natural instincts in order to fit into a Eu- rocentric norm. Dress, style and behaviour become im- portant signifiers. If you need evidence, follow the nev- er-ending debates around the politics of black women’s hair. Letting one’s hair grow natural and unkempt could, according to some, in a single style bring down the entire race – but that’s what J does. She’s tomboy plain too, the kind of woman used to going unnoticed. Most of the storylines show her struggling with ideas of femininity. She’s an uncool, terrible flirt. The only romantic activity that makes any sense is with White Jay – an awkward pairing, because this is socially segregated America and White Jay is, well, white.

This unstyled character gained a fervent following among African American women, rather in the way Lena Dunham warmed the hearts of white women by waddling down a posh New England sidewalk in a bikini in her hit show Girls (2012-). As it did with Dunham, HBO took Rae into its stable. With its reputation for en- couraging quality writing and complex representations, HBO looked like the perfect partner. If anyone was going to understand Rae’s vision, it would.

The part of the TV watching world that I belong to waited impatiently. What impact would the move from a self-produced, crowdfunded internet platform to a major industry player have on Rae’s writing? Misadven- tures was principally made for and funded by a niche au- dience. Would the move from the margins to the centre prompt Rae to tone down the honest comic instincts that made her breakthrough such a refreshing joy? The show was finally aired this year under the name Insecure. Maybe the clue was in the title change. Men are rarely

labelled ‘insecure’. It is one of those nebulous feminised terms, like ‘hysterical’.

Rae explained her intention for the show in an inter- view with Fast Company magazine. “It seems to me [on television], we’re either extremely magical, or we’re ex- tremely flawless. But we don’t get to just be boring. Like, it’s a privilege to be able to be boring and not answer questions like, ‘What do you think about this shooting?’ and ‘How are you overcoming all of these obstacles?’… What about the times that I’m just kicking it with friends at brunch?”

The ‘we’ referred to here is black women. When it comes to black characterisations, boring is a radical concept. Black people are often placed at the edges of the frame (the sidekick) or presented negatively (the vil- lain). As a defining character trait, though, ‘boring’ needs some qualifying. Whose version of boring do we mean, and does boring make for good television?

Insecure focuses on two women, one of them played by (and named) Issa. Both women are trying to find se- curity – which in this context means finding the perfect man. Issa has a man, Lawrence, but he lacks drive. She is tempted, then, when a hot ex arrives back on the scene. Meanwhile, her friend Molly has worked her way up from a working-class background to become a lawyer and is now trying, with little success, to snare a man who embodies the New Her.

Issa’s life in Insecure is like a gentrified version of J’s in Misadventures. Her tomboyish looks now have a stylist’s touch. Her hair is natural but now neatly coiffed. She

still vents by rapping, but now she’s pretty good at it. Her job has been ramped up a notch, too. The call-centre has been replaced by a charity for inner-city black kids, and she is the only black worker. The multicultural world of Misadventures is now predominantly white. This gives rise to some interesting and potentially funny moments of dissonance, as when Molly is instructed to ask the new black intern to “tone it down” simply because they share ethnicity. Also Issa’s colleagues rely on her to give them the ghetto low-down whereas the black children she works with read her as white. These moments may be socially poignant, but they aren’t always funny. They sometimes have the instructive tone of a ‘white privilege’ Buzzfeed video. Most comedy-crushing

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30 | Sight&Sound | January 2017

INSECUREISSA RAE

of all, the levels of awkwardness have been dialled way down. Awkward White Jay has been replaced

by two gorgeous, nice black men. Easy on the eye they may be, but nice does not make funny.

Clearly, Rae’s intention has shifted with this show and that’s OK: artists are allowed to do that. But if her intention was to create a show that depicted black life as boring, she has, unfortunately, achieved it. Watch- ing Insecure after Misadventures is like playing a game of Spot the Difference. Some of the same actors appear in both shows and in similar roles, but they now sport less colour. In both shows Catherine Curtin plays her boss, but in Insecure the cornrows have been unpicked. In Misadventures Sujata Day plays kooky ‘bff’ CeCe, J’s true soulmate; in Insecure she features as a silent background colleague. Insecure bff’s have been upgraded to a group of sophisticated sisters with ‘good hair’.

It makes sense that Rae would not want to peddle cer- tain well-worn, problematic black tropes. The danger of desiring to appear normal through the lens of TV, howev- er, is that you might exchange one trope for a – perhaps – less interesting one.

Twenty years ago, Sex and the City made the spectacle of women sitting around in chi-chi bars talking sex and men popular. The show forced a revolution in the way women represented themselves. Here was an unfiltered look into what women really thought about their own sexualities in their own words. But it’s a format that’s been replicated many times since and is limited in its scope. For the most part, female characters are still re- alised only in terms of their relationship with the oppo- site sex. Insecure climbs into the Sex and the City hot tub – but now the genre is tepid. Yes, Molly and Issa meet over

brunch to talk sex and men, and, yes, these characters are now black, but the narrative feels done to death. I miss the zaniness of Misadventures. It’s like J moved to Stepford and was replaced by a TV stereotype.

The boredom of the everyday has great comedy po- tential, as Atlanta demonstrates. Donald Glover’s series debuted on Fox in September, around the same time as Insecure. Set in the eponymous city, it follows Earn, a young father and college drop-out, as he tries to jump on the coat-tails of his cousin’s burgeoning rap career. That’s the hook. However, Atlanta is really an opportunity to share the surreal existence of young black men trapped on the fringes of America. The hilarious and disturbing second episode, ‘Streets on Lock’, takes place entirely in a police station where first-time felon Earn is enduring a tedious overnight wait, straining to keep eyes front as a hoodlum on his left unwittingly chats up a transvestite on his right. Glover observes eccentricities as well as Rae did in Misadventures.

Atlanta is full of the problematic tropes that Rae con- sciously wants to move away from – drugs and guns and a fair few magical negroes. But unlike Rae, Glover amps up the strange and unusual: “I just always wanted to make Twin Peaks with rappers,” he said in one interview. Atlanta is many things, but it is never boring or derivative. Inter- estingly, in Misadventures J desperately hopes that her first date with White Jay will turn out to be a Glover gig. (It’s not.) J would love Glover. Glover came to TV prominence as the goof Troy Barnes in the sitcom Community, a mul- ticulti portrayal of the lovable losers who end up at com- munity college. By this point in his career, Glover was already a seasoned stand-up, as well as a rapper under the name Childish Gambino, and had sharpened his sitcom skills in the writing room of NBC’s Tina Fey vehicle 30 Rock. With Atlanta, Glover was intent on keeping his own show intimate, bringing friends and family on to his team and writing from his own home-based workspace. The result is a mescaline trip of a show, which has been described as a post-sitcom sitcom. Atlanta is now Fox’s highest-rated comedy.

Both Rae and Glover grew up between white and black worlds and their liminality granted them original per- spectives. In their new shows, though, Rae has seemed to drift to a more centrist view, while Glover has contin- ued to travel way past leftfield. As a result, he has created something much more memorable.

Misadventures and Insecure are very different shows, and perhaps comparison is unfair: but the difference shows the perils of mimicking someone else’s version of normality – and serves as a reminder of the, possibly self- imposed, pressures on the black writer. The desire to fit into a ‘normal’ TV frame is a limiting one especially for black female writers. First, that frame was not originally designed with them in mind and second, that frame con- stricts the comedic scope. Rae remains an extremely tal- ented comic performer and writer. Her presence draws me back each week, in the hope of glimpsing some awk- ward flashes of brilliance. I hope she eventually sidesteps the stifling romance of TV, lets her hair grow free, and continues to mine the deep seam of our innate rubbish- ness. The image of J shimmying clumsily along a corri- dor will stay in my mind for a long time yet.

i � Insecure�is�on�Sky�Atlantic�and�HBO�Online.��

Atlanta�is�on�Fox�UK�and�Amazon�Video

COUCH�TRIPS Issa�Rae�as�Issa�with�Jay�� Ellis�as�boyfriend�Lawrence� in�Insecure�(above),�and� Brian�Tyree�Henry,�Keith� Stanfield�and�Donald�Glover� in�Donald�Glover’s�Fox�series� Atlanta�(right)

It makes sense that Rae would not want to peddle problematic black tropes, but the danger of desiring to appear normal through the lens of TV is that you might exchange one trope for a less interesting one

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Agenda 10.31.17

Announcements

Final Exam?

SATC and Girls

Mindy Project

Awkward

Final Exam?

NO FINAL EXAM

Post-feminism

Post-feminism

“…post-feminist sensibility in media texts involves an intersection of individualism, choice, feminine self-surveillance, and body management, the ‘makeover paradigm,’ and a shift from sexual objectification to ‘subjectification.’” (Nash and Grant 981)

Post-feminist subject: “…white, economically successful, young, attractive (hetero)sexual female subject.” (Nash and Grant 981)

Sex and the City

SATC

1998-2004 (6 seasons)

4 white upper-middle class women in NYC

Created by gay man; director and writer most associated with show is a gay man

Seen as popular and ground-breaking show

Spawned two feature films

Sex and the City and Girls

How does SATC represent post-feminist rhetoric? How does it not represent post-feminist rhetoric?

How does SATC demonstrate women’s empowerment? How do they not demonstrate women’s empowerment

How is male desire and sexuality depicted? What does this depiction say about how the creators think of male sexuality?

How are women’s and men’s bodies filmed in the pilot?

How are SATC and Girls similar and/or different?

Sex and the City

Themes

Friendship

Communication

Marriage?

Pleasure

Selfishness?

Girls

2012- (six seasons)

Created, written, and directed by

twenty-something Lena Dunham

Depicts the experiences of four friends (white upper-middle class women) in NYC

“In focussing on four distinct female character types in New York and embedding itself almost immediately in the US cultural landscape, Girls has endured obvious comparisons to SATC (e.g., Rory Carroll 2012; Emily Nussbaum 2012).” (Nash and Grant 978)

“Post? Feminism” and Girls

“The show is a kind of millennial consciousness-raising tool in which Dunham engages with the social processes that were instigated by second wave feminism and that were aimed at developing experiential knowledge, giving women a “voice” and unifying their experiences (although this is clearly contested in terms of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality), and “empowering” women in their relationships to their bodies.” (Nash and Grant 988)

“Post? Feminism”

“We propose that the term “post? feminism” may be used to describe a revised post-feminist sensibility for a millennial generation. Rather than rejecting post-feminism, we include a question mark to create a platform for new debate and engagement with post-feminism, while acknowledging its coexistence with predecessor feminisms, and the continuing popular and academic usage of post-feminism. The question mark importantly provides a focal point for questioning and re-articulating the meaning, usage, and constituencies of post-feminism today.” (Nash and Grant 988)

The Mindy Project

2012- (5 seasons)

Created, produced, and starring Mindy Kaling (1st WOC to do so)

About the work and romantic travails of a pop culture obsessed, narcissistic, and “quirky” OB/GYN in NYC

The Mindy Project

Representations of South Asian femininity

Repressed

Serious

Work-oriented

Less focus on personal and sexual lives

Otherized through foreignness, immigration status, and accents

Representations and fatness and womanhood

Connected to race

Connected to success

The Mindy Project

Is The Mindy Project a “post? feminist” show?

How is Mindy’s race a factor (or non-factor) in the show?

How are Mindy’s sexual and romantic desires represented?

How is Mindy’s body represented and discussed?

What are the similarities and differences between SATC, Girls, and The Mindy Project?

The Mindy Project

“In this way, women like Dunham and Kaling, through their deployment of diverse female bodies and femininities, can disrupt the normative iteration of gender and race. Their production of femininity in bodies that are attractive (just not normatively so) has more than just an impact on how we look at fat. They bring to us women that are flawed, assertive, insecure, confident, contradictory, talented, creative, that make difficult choices in love and work, and that don’t make an obsession with weight or even race their markers of self worth.” (Nijhawan)

The Mindy Project

Mindy as South Asian “everywoman”

“Her production of her femininity is inextricably bound up with race. However, Mindy avoids marking herself as a racial minority by making her quest for love and her confusions about body image something all women can identify with.., I am not suggesting that this reflects the reality of experience for many women in the USA who belong to ethnic minorities. I am suggesting that Mindy is creating a possible or potential reality, in which neither size nor being a racial minority are causes for shame.” (Nijhawan)

The Mindy Project

Racial identity:

“OK, I know that my ID says that I’m 5’10” with blond hair, 110 pounds with crystal blue eyes. My philosophy is that an ID should be aspirational.” (Mindy Lahiri, S2e14, The Mindy Project)

Mindy Kaling on protagonist’s white boyfriends

“Do people really wonder on other shows if female leads are dating multicultural people?...“Like I owe it to every race and minority and beleaguered person. I have to become the United Nations of shows?” (Interview with EW August 1, 2013)

“I think it's too bad that a small minority of people are fixated on the men who are in bed with me…I think that's a bit specific and weird.” (Interview with LA Times March 29, 2014)

Insecure

2016- (1 season, renewed for 2nd)

Based on webseries The Misadventures of

Awkward Black Girl

Created and written by Issa Rae

“This unstyled character gained a fervent following among African American women, rather in the wayLena Dunham warmed the hearts of white women by waddling down a posh New England sidewalk in a bikini in her hit show Girls (2012-).” (Gould)

Insecure

From The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl to Insecure

“Would the move from the margins to the centre prompt Rae to tone down the honest comic instincts that made her breakthrough such a refreshing joy? Maybe the clue was in the title change. Men are rarely labelled ‘insecure’. It is one of those nebulous feminized terms, like ‘hysterical’.” (Gould)

Insecure

“I think just an authenticity and for lack of a better word, a, like regular voice, you know? I think black people aren't really used to seeing themselves be the norm, and the default and have these regular human emotions that white people are afforded on every single type of show. So, to just to have relationships and friendships exist in a normalized way is something that hasn't been done in like 20 years.” (Issa Rae, E! Interview December 12 2016)

Insecure

Themes

Blackness (colorism, expectations, and beauty)

Femininity

Masculinity

Class

Work

Romance

Friendship

PWIs

Negotiations

Insecurity

Insecure

What is the relationship between desire and expectations in the pilot?

How are racial stereotypes and/or ideals about blackness and femininity represented in the pilot?

Is an “oppositional gaze” represented in the pilot?

What are the similarities and differences between SATC, Girls, The Mindy Project, and Insecure?

Women’s desires and television

Representations and characteristics of women’s sexuality and desire

Pleasure-seeking

Liberatory (or individualistic)

Varied and limited

Conflictions and contentions

Racialized, classed, and heteronormative (typically)

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M/C Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2015) - 'fat' Home > Vol. 18, No. 3 (2015) > Amita Nijhawan

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

A mita Nijhawan Volume 18 Issue 3 June 2015 'f at'

When characters in the Fox Television sitcom The Mindy Project call Mindy Lahiri fat, Mindy sees it as a case of misidentification. She reminds the character that she is a “petite Asian woman,” that she has large, beautiful breasts, that she has nothing in common with fat people, and the terms “chubbster” and “BBW – Big Beautiful Woman” are offensive and do not apply to her. Mindy spends some of each episode on her love for food and more food, and her hatred of fitness regimes, while repeatedly falling for meticulously fit men. She dates, has a string of failed relationships, adventurous sexual techniques, a Bridget Jones-scale search for perfect love, and yet admits to shame in showing her naked body to lovers. Her contradictory feelings about food and body image mirror our own confusions, and reveal the fear and fascination we feel for fat in our fat-obsessed culture.

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in our fat-obsessed culture.

I argue that by creating herself as sexy, successful, popular, sporadically confident and insecure, Mindy works against stigmas that attach both to big women – women who are considered big in comparison to the societal size-zero ideal – and women who have historically been seen as belonging to “primitive” or colonized cultures, and therefore she disrupts the conflation of thinness to civilization. In this article, I look at the performance of fat and ethnic identity on American television, and examine the bodily mechanisms through which Mindy disrupts these. I argue that Mindy uses issues of fat and body image to disrupt stereotypical iterations of race. In the first part of the paper, I look at the construction of South Asian femininity in American pop culture, to set up the discussion of fat, gender and race as interrelated performative categories.

Race, Gender, Performativity

As Judith Butler says of gender, “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Bodies, 2). Bodies produce and perform their gender through repeating and imitating norms of clothing, body movement, choices in gesture, action, mannerism, as well as gender roles. They do so in such a way that the discourses and histories that are embedded in them start to seem natural; they are seen to be the truth, instead of as actions that have a history. These choices do not just reflect or reveal gender, but rather produce and create it.

Nadine Ehlers takes performativity into the realm of race. Ehlers says that “racial performativity always works within and through the modalities of gender and sexuality, and vice versa, and these

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categories are constituted through one another” (65). In this sense, neither race nor gender are produced or iterated without also producing their interrelationship. They are in fact produced through this interrelationship. So, for example, when studying the performativity of black bodies, you would need to specify whether you are looking at black femininity or masculinity. And on the other hand, when studying gender, it is important to specify gender where? And when? You couldn’t simply pry open the link between race and gender and expect to successfully theorize either on its own.

Mindy’s performance of femininity, including her questions about body image and weight, her attractive though odd clothing choices, her search for love, these are all bound to her iteration of race. She often explains her body through defining herself as Asian. Yet, I suggest in a seeming contradiction that her othering of herself as a big woman (relative to normative body size for women in American film and television) who breaks chairs when she sits on them and is insecure about her body, keeps the audience from othering her because of race. Her weight, clumsiness, failures in love, her heartbreaks all make her a “normal” woman. They make her easy to identify with. They suggest that she is just a woman, an American woman, instead of othering her as a South Asian woman, or a woman from a “primitive”, colonized or minority culture.

Being South Asian on American Television

Mindy Lahiri (played by writer, producer and actor Mindy Kaling) is a successful American obstetrician/gynaecologist, who works in a successful practice in New York. She breaks stereotypes of South Asian women that are repeated in American television and film. Opposite to the stereotype of the traditional, dutiful South Asian who

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agrees to an arranged marriage, and has little to say for him or herself beyond academic achievement that is generally seen in American and British media, Mindy sleeps with as many men as she can possibly fit into a calendar year, is funny, self-deprecating, and has little interest in religion, tradition or family, and is obsessed with popular culture. The stereotypical characteristics of South Asians in the popular British media, listed by Anne Ciecko (69), include passive, law-abiding, following traditional gender roles and traditions, living in the “pathologized” Asian family, struggling to find self-definitions that incorporate their placement as both belonging to and separate from British culture. Similarly, South Asian actors on American television often play vaguely-comic doctors and lawyers, seemingly with no personal life or sexual desire. They are simply South Asians, with no further defining personality traits or quirks. It is as if being South Asian overrides any other character trait. They are rarely in lead roles, and Mindy is certainly the first South Asian-American woman to have her own sitcom, in which she plays the lead.

What do South Asians on American television look and sound like? In her study on performativity of race and gender, Ehlers looks at various constructions of black femininity, and suggests that black femininity is often constructed in the media in terms of promiscuity and aggression (83), and, I would add, the image of the mama with the big heart and even bigger bosom. Contrary to black femininity, South Asian femininity in American media is often repressed, serious, concerned with work and achievement or alternatively with menial roles, with little in terms of a personal or sexual life. As Shilpa S. Dave says in her book on South Asians in American television, most South Asians that appear in American television are shown as immigrants with accents (8). That is what makes them recognizably different and other, more so even than any visual identification. It is much more

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common to see immigrants of Chinese or Korean descent in American television as people with American accents, as people who are not first generation immigrants. South Asians, on the other hand, almost always have South Asian accents.

There are exceptions to this rule, however, the exceptions are othered and/or made more mainstream using various mechanisms. Neela in ER (played by Parminder Nagra) and Cece in New Girl (played by Hannah Simone) are examples of this. In both instances the characters are part of either an ensemble cast, or in a supporting role. Neela is a step removed from American and South Asian femininity, in that she is British, with a British accent – she is othered, but this othering makes her more mainstream than the marking that takes place with a South Asian accent. The British accent and a tragic marriage, I would say, allow her to have a personal and sexual life, beyond work. Cece goes through an arranged marriage scenario, full with saris and a South Asian wedding that is the more recognized and acceptable narrative for South Asian women in American media. The characters are made more acceptable and recognizable through these mechanisms.

Bhoomi K. Thakore, in an article on the representation of South Asians in American television, briefly explains that after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality act, highly-educated South Asians could immigrate to the United States, either to get further education, or as highly skilled workers (149) – a phenomenon often called “brain- drain.” In addition, says Thakore, family members of these educated South Asians immigrated to the States as well, and these were people that were less educated and worked often in convenience stores and motels.

Thakore suggests that immigrants to the United States experience a

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segmented assimilation, meaning that not all immigrants (first and second generation) will assimilate to the same extent or in the same way. I would say from my own experience that the degree to which immigrants can assimilate into American society often depends on not only financial prospects or education, but also attractiveness, skin tone, accent, English-speaking ability, interests and knowledge of American popular culture, interest in an American way of life and American social customs, and so on. Until recently, I would say that South Asian characters in American television shows have tended to represent either first-generation immigrants with South Asian accents and an inability or lack of desire to assimilate fully into American society, or second-generation immigrants whose personal and sexual lives are never part of the narrative. Examples of the former include South Asians who play nameless doctors and cops in American television. Kal Penn’s character Lawrence Kutner in the television series House is an example of the latter. Kutner, one of the doctors on Dr. House’s team, did not have a South Asian accent. However, he also had no personal narrative. All doctors on House came with their relationship troubles and baggage, their emotional turmoil, their sexual and romantic ups and downs – all but Kutner, whose suicide in the show (when he left it to join the Obama administration) is framed around the question – do we ever really know the people we see every day? Yet, we do know the other doctors on House. But we never know anything about Kutner’s private life. His character is all about academic knowledge and career achievement. This is the stereotype of the South Asian character in American television.

Yet, Mindy, with her American accent, sees herself as American, doesn’t obsess about race or skin colour, and has no signs of a poor- me narrative in the way she presents herself. She does not seem to have any diasporic longings or group belongings. Mindy doesn’t ignore

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race on the show. In fact, she deploys it strategically. She describes herself as Asian on more than one occasion, often to explain her size, her breasts and femininity, and in one episode she goes to a party because she expects to see black sportsmen there, and she explains, “It’s a scientific fact that black men love South Asian girls.” Her production of her femininity is inextricably bound up with race. However, Mindy avoids marking herself as a racial minority by making her quest for love and her confusions about body image something all women can identify with. But she goes further in that she does not place herself in a diaspora community, she does not speak in a South Asian accent, she doesn’t hide her personal life or the contours of her body, and she doesn’t harp on parents who want her to get married. By not using the usual stereotypes of South Asians and Asians on American television, while at the same time acknowledging race, I suggest that she makes herself a citizen of the alleged “melting pot” as the melting pot should be, a hybrid space for hybrid identities. Mindy constructs herself as an American woman, and suggests that being a racial minority is simply part of the experience of being American. I am not suggesting that this reflects the reality of experience for many women in the USA who belong to ethnic minorities. I am suggesting that Mindy is creating a possible or potential reality, in which neither size nor being a racial minority are causes for shame.

In a scene in the second season, a police officer chastises Mindy for prescribing birth control to his young daughter. He charges out of her office, and she follows him in to the street. She is wearing a version of her usual gear – a check-pinafore, belted over a printed shirt – her shoulders curved forward, arms folded, in the characteristic posture of the big-breasted, curvy woman. She screams at the officer for his outdated views on birth-control. He questions if she even has kids,

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suggesting that she knows nothing about raising them. She says, “How dare you? Do I look like a woman who’s had kids? I have the hips of an eleven-year-old boy.” She then informs him that she wolfed down a steak sandwich at lunch, has misgivings about the outfit she is wearing, and says that she is not a sex-crazed lunatic. He charges her for public female hysteria. She screams after him as he drives off, “Everyone see this!” She holds up the citation. “It’s for walking, while being a person of colour.” She manages in the space of a two-minute clip to deploy race, size and femininity, without shame or apology, and with humour.

It is interesting to note that, contrary to her persona on the show, in interviews in the media, Kaling suggests that she is not that concerned with the question of weight. She says that though she would like to lose fifteen pounds, she is not hung up on this quest. On the other hand, she suggests that she considers herself a role model for minority women. In fact, in real life she makes the question of race as something more important to her than weight – which is opposite to the way she treats the two issues in her television show. I suggest that in real life, Kaling projects herself as a feminist, as someone not so concerned about size and weight, an intelligent woman who is concerned about race. On the show, however, she plays an everywoman, for whom weight is a much bigger deal than race. Neither persona is necessarily real or assumed – rather, they both reveal the complexities by which race, gender and body size constitute each other, and become cruxes for identification and misidentification.

Is It Civilized to Be Fat?

When Mindy and her colleague Danny Castellano get together in the

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second season of the show, you find yourself wondering how on earth they are going to sustain this sitcom, without an on-again/off-again romance, or one that takes about five years to start. When Danny does not want to go public with the relationship, Mindy asks him if he is ashamed of her. Imagine one of the Friends or Sex in the City women asking this question to see just how astonishing it is for a successful, attractive woman to ask a man if he is ashamed to be seen with her. She doesn’t say is it because of my weight, yet the question hangs in the air. When Danny does break up with her, again Mindy feels all the self-disgust of a woman rejected for no clear reason.

As Amy Erdman Farrell suggests in her book on fat in American culture and television, fat people are not expected to find love or success. They are expected to be self-deprecating. They are supposed to expect rejection and failure. She says that not only do fat people bear a physical but also a character stigma, in that not only are they considered visually unappealing, but this comes with the idea that they have uncontrolled desires and urges (7-10). Kaling suggests through her cleverly-woven writing that it is because of her body image that Mindy feels self-loathing when Danny breaks up with her. She manages again to make her character an everywoman. Not a fat South Asian woman, but simply an American woman who feels all the shame that seems to go with weight and body image in American culture.

However, this assumed connection of fat with immorality and laziness goes a step further. Farrell goes on to say that fat denigration and ethnic discrimination are linked, that popularity and the right to belong and be a citizen are based both on body size and ethnicity. Says Farrell, “our culture assigns many meanings to fatness beyond the actual physical trait – that a person is gluttonous, or filling a deeply disturbed psychological need, or is irresponsible and unable to control

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primitive urges” (6) – psychological traits that have historically been used to describe people in colonized cultures. Farrell provides an intriguing analysis of Oprah Winfrey and her public ups and downs with weight. She suggests that Winfrey’s public obsession with her own weight, and her struggles with it, are an attempt to be an “everywoman”, to be someone all and not only black women can identify with. Says Farrell, “in order to deracinate herself, to prove that ‘anyone’ can make it, Winfrey must lose weight. Otherwise, the weight of all that fat will always, de facto, mark her as a ‘black woman’, with all the accompanying connotations of inferior, primitive, bodily and out of control” (126). She goes on to say that, “Since the end of the 19th century, fatness has … served as a potent signifier of the line between the primitive and the civilized, feminine and masculine, ethnicity and whiteness, poverty and wealth, homosexuality and heterosexuality, past and future” (126). This suggests that Winfrey’s public confrontations with the question of weight help the women in the audience identify with her as a woman, rather than as a black woman.

In a volume on fat studies, Farrell explains that health professionals have further demarcated lines between “civilization and primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, sexual restraint and sexual promiscuity, beauty and ugliness, progress and the past” (260). She suggests that fat is not just part of discourses on health and beauty, but also intelligence, enterprise, work ethics, as well as race, ethnicity, sexuality and class. These connections are of course repeated in media representations, across media genres and platforms. In women’s magazines, an imperative towards weightloss comes hand- in-hand with the search for love, a woman’s ability to satisfy a man’s as well as her own desires, and with success in glamorous jobs. Sitcom couples on American television often feature men who are

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ineffectual but funny slobs, married to determined, fit women who are mainly homemakers, and in fact, responsible for the proper functioning of the family, and consequentially, society. In general, bigger women in American and British media are on a quest both for love and weight loss, and the implication is that deep-seated insecurities are connected to both weight gain, as well as failures in love, and that only a resolution of these insecurities will lead to weight loss, which will further lead to success in love. Films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bridget Jones’s Diary are examples of this prevailing narrative.

Thakore investigates the changing image of South Asians on American television, suggesting that South Asians are represented more and more frequently, and in increasingly more central roles. However, Thakore suggests that, “all women of colour deal with hegemonic skin tone ideologies in their racial/ethnic communities, with lighter skin tone and Caucasian facial features considered more appealing and attractive … . As media producers favour casting women who are attractive, so too do the same media producers favour casting women of colour who are attractive in terms of their proximity to White physical characteristics” (153). Similarly, Lee and Vaught suggest that in American popular culture, “both White women and women of colour are represented as reflecting a White ideal or aesthetic. These women conform to a body ideal that reflects White middle class ideals: exceedingly thin, long, flowing hair, and voluptuous” (458). She goes on to say that Asian American women would need to take on a White middle class standing and a simultaneous White notion of the exotic in order to assimilate. For Mindy, then, fat allows her to be an everywoman, but also allows her to adopt her own otherness as a South Asian, and make it her own.

This trend shows some signs of changing, however, and I expect that

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women like Lena Dunham in the HBO comedy Girls and Mindy Kaling are leading the march towards productions of diverse femininities that are at the same time iterated as attractive and desirable.

On The Hollywood Reporter, when asked about the more ludicrous questions or comments she faces on social media, Kaling puts on a male voice and says, “You’re ugly and fat, it’s so refreshing to watch!” and “We’re used to skinny people, and you’re so ugly, we love it!” On David Letterman, she mentions having dark skin, and says that lazy beach holidays don’t work for her because she doesn’t understand the trend for tanning, and she can’t really relax. Mindy’s confusions about her weight and body image make her a woman for everyone – not just for South Asian women. Whereas Kaling’s concern over the question of race – and her relative lack of concern over weight – make her a feminist, a professional writer, a woman with a conscience. These personas interweave. They question both normative performances of gender and race, and question the historical conflation of size and minority identity with shame and immorality.

Butler suggests that gender is “the repeated stylisation of the body” (Gender, 33). She argues that gender roles can be challenged through a “subversive reiteration” of gender (Gender, 32). In this way, women like Dunham and Kaling, through their deployment of diverse female bodies and femininities, can disrupt the normative iteration of gender and race. Their production of femininity in bodies that are attractive (just not normatively so) has more than just an impact on how we look at fat. They bring to us women that are flawed, assertive, insecure, confident, contradictory, talented, creative, that make difficult choices in love and work, and that don’t make an obsession with weight or even race their markers of self worth.

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TWENTY-SOMETHING GIRLS V. THIRTY-

SOMETHING SEX AND THE CITY WOMEN

Paving the way for “post? feminism”

Meredith Nash and Ruby Grant

Lena Dunham’s cable television series Girls is a candid and comical look at the lives of four young

women living in Brooklyn, New York. Following in the footsteps of the earlier post-feminist, woman-

centred television series, Sex and the City (SATC), Girls explores numerous feminist themes centring

on an exploration of what it is like to be a young white woman in contemporary US society. Yet

what kind of post-feminist narrative is being constructed in Girls? How is post-feminism deployed in

the show? In a comparative analysis of Girls (Seasons 1–2) and SATC (Seasons 1–6), we argue that

although both shows certainly exemplify post-feminist culture, they are inflected differently in

relation to the representation of sexualities, reproductive “choice,” and feminine embodiment.

Compared to SATC, we argue that Girls represents a novel approach to representing young US

women’s lives on television, re-articulating and re-mobilising existing conceptualisations of post-

feminism. To conclude, we propose that the term “post? feminism” may be used to describe

Dunham’s version of post-feminism for a millennial generation.

KEYWORDS femininity; gender; popular culture; post-feminism; television

Introduction

In 1994, Angela McRobbie flagged a desire for a diverse feminist politics in response

to a burgeoning post-feminist culture. For twenty years, feminist scholars have explored

post-feminist texts and experiences, debating the meaning and deployment of post-

feminism. However, they continue to identify an impasse in terms of feminist engagement

with the concept. For instance, Imelda Whelehan (2010, 159) has observed that post-

feminism is now so prevalent that it is “boring” and requires “little unpacking.” In this paper,

we address this impasse through a comparative analysis of two post-feminist US television

series, Sex and the City (SATC) (1998–2004) and Girls (2012–present). Exploring both

programmes’ representations of femininities and sexualities allows for a closer examination

of the use and continuing relevance of post-feminism and offers an opportunity to consider

the micropolitics of this “baggy” concept (Charlotte Brunsdon 2013, 389).

Specifically, in light of SATC’s legacy and influence on contemporary post-feminist

dramas, we wonder how the characters in Girls relate to their SATC precursors. Moreover,

we question what kind of feminist narrative defines Girls. Is post-feminism useful in this

analysis? In this article, we argue that SATC’s post-feminist legacy “lurks on the periphery” of

Feminist Media Studies, 2015 Vol. 15, No. 6, 976–991, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1050596

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

Girls, moulding it into a “new” kind of post-feminist narrative (Whelehan 2010, 161). From

the inter-textual nod of the SATC poster on Shoshanna’s bedroom wall (Season 1, Episode 1,

“Pilot”), to the ways in which the characters navigate early adulthood, sexuality, and

relationships, Lena Dunham—the show’s twenty-seven year old creator, lead actor, writer,

director, and executive producer—cannot ignore SATC as a formative cultural text while

simultaneously railing against it. We contend that Girls is conscious of post-feminist

discourses and themes but demonstrates an ability to irreverently satirise itself, actively

taking both post-feminism and second wave feminism into account and asking “what

now?” (Katherine Bell 2013, 363). By reflexively questioning and challenging its influences

from earlier generations of second wave feminism and post-feminism, we argue that Girls

allows for a re-articulation and re-mobilisation of post-feminism for a millennial generation.

Twenty-Something Girls v. Thirty-Something SATC Women

Broadcast for nine years on the premium cable channel Home Box Office (HBO), SATC

was a wildly popular US television series that chronicled the lives of four single women in

Manhattan. Sarah Jessica Parker played the role of Carrie Bradshaw, a journalist who writes

a column, “Sex and the City,” for the fictitious newspaper, The New York Star. Based on New

York journalist Candace Bushnell’s novel of the same name, the television show was created

and produced by a male creative team led by Darren Star (of Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose

Place fame) and Michael Patrick King (Murphy Brown, Will & Grace). Each episode is

structured around Carrie pondering a topic for her next column (e.g., having sex without

emotion, female ejaculation, threesomes). Her friends—“hopelessly cynical” lawyer Miranda

Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), “hopeless romantic” gallerist Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), and

sexual libertine PR executive Samantha Jones (Kim Catrall)—serve as her inspiration as they

share their perspectives on sex, love, and relationships (Season 1, Episode 1, “Sex and the

City”; see Kim Akass and Janet McCabe [2008] for a detailed overview of the show). Carrie’s

turbulent relationship with “Mr. Big,” a dashing but emotionally unavailable financier,

provides a narrative thread throughout the series. The romantic/sex comedy show became

a cult hit that inspired two spinoff movies arguably because it provided a template for

television audiences to imagine what life was like for contemporary (single) New York

women (Jane Arthurs 2003). Women especially coveted the glamorous lives of the

characters and appreciated the frank, taboo-breaking discussions of sex and femininity.

As Akass and McCabe (2008) have observed, it is no coincidence that such a ground-

breaking show was aired on HBO, a channel that was changing the way that audiences were

viewing television in the 1990s. As a premium, subscription-only channel that was not reliant

on commercial advertising, HBO was able to commission original shows and spend huge

amounts of money on marketing. SATC was pivotal in helping HBO to establish its identity as

a channel that is now widely known for allowing writers creative freedom, catering to niche

audiences, and for contending with difficult adult content (especially around sex).

Despite its focus on ambitious women and their individual life “choices,” Michael

Patrick King, the show’s writer and director, has rejected suggestions that SATC is “feminist,”

noting in an interview that “ . . . Every time a character says they feel something or entitled

to something we literally put a man in front of them that blows that [feminism] all up”

(Paley Center for Media 2008). However, feminist scholars have long regarded the series as

one that “shadowboxes” with second wave feminism (Jane Gerhard 2005, 37). Feminist

scholars have described it as a post-feminist narrative par excellence given its direct

2 GIRLS: PAVING THE WAY FOR “POST? FEMINISM” 977

engagement with individual women’s negotiations of sexual empowerment, choice,

mobility, and consumption (Fien Adriaens and Sophie Van Bauwel 2014). While SATC may

construct Carrie Bradshaw and her friends as “empowered,” it does this through a

heteronormative, white, privileged lens that “ventriloquizes” feminism as out-dated

common sense (Whelehan 2010, 162–163). Indeed, the first season of SATC aired in June

1998 just weeks before the publication of the Time magazine cover asking “Is Feminism

Dead?” (Astrid Henry 2004, 65). In the show, feminism is presented as a series of individual

“choices” with no political agenda (Henry 2004). For instance, in “Time and Punishment”

(Season 4, Episode 7), Charlotte positions her “choice” to quit her job to try to get pregnant

as a validation of the “choices” that are now available to her because of “the women’s

movement.” As Rosalind Gill (2011, 64) has observed, post-feminist “women are offered

particular kinds of freedom, empowerment and choice in exchange or as a kind of

substitute for real feminist politics and transformation.”

However, second wave feminist discourses are never entirely abandoned in SATC

and the show is “haunted” by a feminist consciousness (Whelehan 2010, 161). The show

reflexively evaluates the feminist legacy of “choices” as they are experienced by this

particular group of women. For instance, when Charlotte presents her “choice” to quit her

job to her friends, Samantha reminds her of the effect that this frivolous “choice” could have

on her ability to return to the workforce: “Be damn sure before you get off the Ferris wheel,

because the women waiting to get on are 22, perky and ruthless” (Season 4, Episode 7,

“Time and Punishment”). As Samantha’s observation indicates, the legacy of second wave

feminism imbues post-feminist texts with a feminist consciousness, and exemplifies the

generational divide forged between feminist and post-feminist era women. This feminist

conscience prompts post-feminist women to evaluate their “choices” and relationships, and

to reflect on what has really been gained through “liberation” and “empowerment.”

It is this generational divide between feminist and post-feminist women in SATC that

paved the way for Lena Dunham’s quirky comedy, Girls, a show that prompts us to further

question the legacy of “liberation” and “empowerment” via its focus on the lives of four

women in their twenties, living in Brooklyn. Also premiering on HBO to critical acclaim in

2012, Girls follows the lives of protagonist, Hannah Horvath (played by Dunham), and her

friends—gallery assistant Marnie Michaels (Alison Williams), unemployed freespirit Jessa

Johansson (Jemima Kirke), and naı̈ve university student Shoshanna Shapiro (Zosia Mamet),

as they flounder through their twenties, coping with sex, relationships, work, personal

humiliations, and “rare triumphs” (HBO 2014).

In focussing on four distinct female character types in New York and embedding itself

almost immediately in the US cultural landscape, Girls has endured obvious comparisons to

SATC (e.g., Rory Carroll 2012; Emily Nussbaum 2012). Dunham confronted the issue in the

pilot episode of Girls via a conversation about Shoshanna’s SATC movie poster on her

bedroom wall:

Shoshanna “Do you like the poster?”

Jessa “Oh, I’ve never seen that movie.”

Shoshanna “Only the show?”

Jessa “Is it a show?”

Shoshanna “Oh my god. You’re not serious. That’s like not being on Facebook.”

Jessa “I’m not on Facebook.”

Shoshanna “You’re so fucking classy. You know, you’re funny because you’re definitely

3MEREDITH NASH AND RUBY GRANT978

a Carrie, with like, some Samantha aspects, and Charlotte hair. That’s like a

really good combination.”

Jessa “Well, thank you.”

Shoshanna “I think I’m definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes . . . sometimes

Samantha kind of comes out. And then, when I’m at school, I definitely try

to put on my Miranda hat.”

In this exchange, Dunham alludes to the practice of fans identifying with SATC

characters as archetypes of feminine identity (e.g., Are you a Carrie? Are you a Miranda?).

The conversation between Jessa and Shoshanna is, to a certain extent, necessary because

Shoshanna, and even Hannah, would have likely moved to New York as a result of

identifying with Carrie (even though Hannah would probably never admit to it). As Dunham

has said, “these are women who could not exist without SATC” (James Poniewozik 2012).

Thus, in this scene, Dunham honours SATC and its cultural relevance, but moves on, hoping

to forge new paths for her own show. In establishing the characters in Girls, Dunham does

not represent them as aspirational as in SATC (e.g., Are you a Hannah? Are you a Jessa?), but

as young women experiencing post-university life in ways that are more familiar to viewers

(see Claire Danes 2012). For instance, viewers would not aspire to be like Hannah—who

wears shabby, ill-fitting clothes, has no money, makes a number of poor life decisions, and

muddles through relationships—even though they may identify with her.

After all, fifteen years separates the airing of the first seasons of SATC and Girls—a

period of time marked by a series of important social changes. The first season of Girls takes

us to post-recession New York where the four main characters are trying to make it

financially. Whereas the women of SATC were drinking Cosmopolitans in the hottest New

York City nightspots, dripping in designer labels, and obsessing over $300 shoes, Girls is

“Sex and the City in a charcoal-grey Salvation Army overcoat” (Frank Bruni 2012). Thus while

“liberation” on SATC was primarily symbolised through economic and sexual independence

(Arthurs 2003), the women of Girls are similarly white and entitled but unambitious, mostly

unemployed, and financially unstable. The show shifts the feminist narrative from

“liberation” to one of “post-graduation/post-feminist entitlement” (L. J. DeCarvalho 2013,

370) where “choice” has morphed from a “freedom” to an encumbrance. For instance,

Hannah and Marnie share an apartment and much of the first season revolves around

Hannah’s inability to pay the rent due to her lack of a job (she gets fired from her unpaid

internship at a publishing company), and the humiliation of sponging off her parents (she

begs her parents to give her $1100 per month to support her writing). Like Carrie Bradshaw,

Hannah is also a New York City writer, albeit an emerging one who writes in an entirely

different medium (online). In one of the most quoted lines of the series, Hannah proclaims

to her parents that as a writer she may be “the voice of my generation, or at least a voice.

Of a generation” (Season 1, Episode 1, “Pilot”). However, throughout the series Hannah

realises that there is no guarantee that she will find her voice or that her voice will actually

be heard. Thus this bold statement established Dunham and the series as “a proxy for the

collective aspirations and insecurities” of a subset of millennial women in a similar way that

SATC influenced women during the late 1990s (Meghan Daum 2014).

Like SATC, Girls evokes the post-feminist archetype of the modern “girl,” a term that

was made popular in Helen Gurley Brown’s (1962) Sex and the Single Girl, which introduced

the concept of an independent, urban, reflexive, and sexually active, modern woman.

4 GIRLS: PAVING THE WAY FOR “POST? FEMINISM” 979

In using “Girls” as the title for a show focused on young women, Dunham is arguably

perpetuating the post-feminist “girlification” of adult women in which women are

infantilised and pre-adolescent girls are sexualised (Gill 2007). Yet Girls taps into the

connotations of the word that “summon[s] up memories of choice and relative freedom

before the travails of womanhood set in” (Whelehan 2000, 39). Compared to SATC, the show

is a coming-of-age story with the characters awkwardly hovering between adolescence and

adulthood—one gets the sense that the characters are not even sure that they would refer

to themselves as “women.” Although the title certainly symbolises a post-feminist

sensibility, its appearance in the opening credits in bold uppercase lettering that “gobbles

up the screen,” subverts the pejorative nature of the word “girl” and demonstrates a

knowing irony that permeates the narrative and perhaps an unwillingness to leave

feminism behind so easily (Danes 2012). For instance, in contrast to the dismissal of

feminism as an influential force in SATC by the show’s writing/production staff, Dunham

leads an all-female writing team, identifies as a “feminist” publicly, and regularly engages in

activist work especially in relation to reproductive rights (e.g., Judy Kurtz 2014). Following

from this point, Dunham’s recently published memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young

Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” (2014), reveals the most intimate details of her

personal life from toxic relationships, to body image, and psychotherapy. Inspired by Helen

Gurley Brown’s best-selling Having it All (1982), Dunham (2014, xvi) describes writing her

book as a feminist act because: “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing

that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.”

Dunham turned her book tour into a political campaign trail by partnering with US

reproductive rights organisation Planned Parenthood to educate women and men about

prevalent health issues. Thus the second-wave feminist project of conceptualising the

“personal as political” in terms of voicing young women’s experiences of sexuality and

embodiment is never far from the centre of her work and this has clearly influenced how

she has approached Girls. Unlike the “empowered,” upwardly mobile post-feminist women

of SATC, Dunham constructs a less optimistic vision of “liberation” and “empowerment” for

her characters in Girls. Thus although SATC and Girls are clearly post-feminist cultural texts,

they are inflected differently. In Girls, “discourses of post-feminism and privilege are called

up, largely to be scrutinised” (Bell 2013, 363).

Theorising Post-Feminism

Post-feminism is a complex concept with multiple, contested interpretations. The

arguments for and against post-feminism are well-rehearsed and have been outlined

substantively in many other places (e.g., Gill 2011; Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra 2007), so

we will highlight only a few key arguments. Developing out of the fractures caused by the

1980s feminist “sex wars,” post-feminist discourse can be seen as an “aftermath” of the

achievements gained from second wave feminist movements in the West in the late 1960s

and early 1970s. While post-feminism has been conflated with the third wave feminism of

the 1990s–2000s, an era of “girl power” and “riot grrl” politics, it cannot be seen as a social

movement in the same way (Catherine M. Orr 1997). The “Riot Grrl” movement originated in

the 1990s with girl bands like Bikini Kill and was characterised by a suspicion of the

“artefacts of femininity,” and the shunning of “femaleness” (Feona Atwood 2007, 24). Many

grrrls used their bodies to convey their political resistance (e.g., wearing baby doll dresses

with combat boots and smudged makeup). In contrast, as McRobbie (2004, 258) has

5MEREDITH NASH AND RUBY GRANT980

argued, post-feminism refers to the “undoing” of feminism that she believes started in 1990

in the UK and elsewhere. This was most visible in popular culture, where the sexualisation of

women’s bodies on billboards and in advertisements became normalised. McRobbie (2004)

has described a “new” and “modern” post-feminist British female subject with the ability to

“freely” make her life “choices.” Thus the “post” prefix in post-feminism has been seen to

represent the idea that feminism is “dead” but also as “an emerging culture and ideology

that simultaneously incorporates, revises, and de-politicizes many of the fundamental

issues advanced by feminism” (Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Stacey 1990, 549).

Scholars have also argued that the “post” prefix may symbolise a positive association—

an “in relation to” rather than a “split from” earlier feminist movements (Adriaens and Van

Bauwel 2014, 175). Ann Brooks (1997, 4) operationalises this as a critical re-theorisation of

feminist conceptual and theoretical agendas. For Gill (2008, 442) post-feminism is

a distinctively new “sensibility” that distances itself from pre-feminist and feminist

constructions of gender, while actively responding to both, “entangling feminist and

antifeminist discourses.” Gill’s (2007, 147) post-feminist sensibility in media texts involves an

intersection of individualism, choice, feminine self-surveillance, and body management, the

“makeover paradigm,” and a shift from sexual objectification to “subjectification.” Thus post-

feminism is positioned as part of a contemporary neoliberal refashioning of femininity in

which women escape traditional boundaries of femininity through a continual reworking of

subjectivity as subjects and objects of commodification and consumerism.

Feminist scholars have argued that although post-feminism is framed as universally

“empowering,” it primarily describes a white, economically successful, young, attractive

(hetero)sexual female subject (e.g., McRobbie 2009). This depoliticised female subject has

translated especially well in television shows such as SATC and Girls where white women

explore their “independence” (Adriaens and Van Bauwel 2014). As a result, post-feminism

has long been criticised for excluding women of colour (e.g., McRobbie 2009). Given the

sexual content of both shows and the ways in which female characters are portrayed, it is

unlikely that SATC and Girls would even be broadcast in many countries. Thus SATC and

Girls do not represent most women around the world and the lack of racial diversity/

tokenistic portrayals of people of colour on both shows has been criticised widely (e.g.,

Rebecca Brasfield 2006; Kendra James 2012). While an in-depth discussion of this is beyond

the scope of this paper, it is worth pointing out that the cultural conversations about the

lack of racial diversity in SATC in the late 1990s and now Girls flags the complex terrain of

contemporary post-feminism and the relations of power that produce post-feminist

discourses for women. If post-feminism has become merely an “empty signifier” that is

“overburdened” with meaning, as Whelehan (2010, 161) suggests, we argue that a

comparison of SATC and Girls presents an opportunity to further clarify the meaning of the

term—is post-feminism still relevant in relation to analyses of contemporary woman-

centred television? How should/could the term be deployed?

Sexuality

If he goes up your butt, will he respect you more or respect you less? That’s the issue.

(Miranda, Season 1, Episode 4, “Valley of the Twenty-Something Guys”)

As the quote above demonstrates, one of the most ground-breaking aspects of SATC

was the open “sex talk” among the characters and their breaching of traditional female

6 GIRLS: PAVING THE WAY FOR “POST? FEMINISM” 981

sexual scripts (for an overview, see Gail Markle [2008]). For instance, all of the characters had

sex with a variety of men in defiance of Western cultural messages that discourage women

from having multiple sexual partners (John H. Gagnon and William Simon 1973). The

women of SATC, in many ways, embodied Gill’s (2008) media archetype of the “midriff,” a

woman who finds pleasure and empowerment in self-objectification and sexual agency.

To illustrate, in the first episode of the first season (“Sex and the City”), Carrie attempts to

“have sex like a man,” an experience for pleasure only, and without feeling or commitment.

Similarly, the women experiment with sex toys and Charlotte has a sexual awakening

thanks to her new vibrator, “the rabbit” (Season 1, Episode 9, “The Turtle and the Hare”).

Sexuality in SATC is presented as part of a consumer lifestyle—sexual relationships, fashion,

and entertainment are the primary drivers.

SATC introduced “awkward” sex into the televisual realm through its storylines built

around everything from “golden showers” (e.g., Season 3, Episode 2, “Politically Erect”) to

premature ejaculation (Season 2, Episode 15, “Shortcomings”) and “funky tasting spunk”

(Season 3, Episode 9, “Easy Come, Easy Go”). While female viewers cringed and laughed at

these moments in recognition, for the most part, sexual “awkwardness” was attributed to

the men. For a show that was supposed to more accurately represent single women,

viewers rarely, if ever, saw any of the female characters fumble in the bedroom. Sex never

involved smudged makeup and the lighting was always perfect. Viewers never saw bodily

fluids, stained sheets, or genitals. Although the characters’ idealised images were

momentarily interrupted in these “awkward” scenes, the women ultimately remained

perfectly posed and sexually desirable. Furthermore, sexual “awkwardness” rarely involved

the protagonist—a key difference between SATC and Girls. Carrie never used vulgar

language, played with sex toys, was naked, or engaged in explicit sex acts on screen due to

a strict clause in Sarah Jessica Parker’s contract (Nussbaum 2008). Parker was only filmed

from the waist up in sex scenes and she was always wearing a bra, resulting in a more

romanticised/sanitised portrayal of Carrie’s sexuality.

Furthermore, SATC women were always in control of when sex occurred. In a content

analysis of a representative sample of episodes over six seasons, Markle (2008, 54) found

that SATC characters had sex more often than they declined sex. However, when the

women did decline sex there were no repercussions for doing so. Men never forced women

to have sex on SATC—there is no date rape—and male characters only expressed “mild

disappointment” when their advances were rebuffed (54). While this representation is

certainly appropriate and conforms to feminist and other cultural messages that promote

women’s empowerment in relation to sexuality, it is unrealistic that viewers never saw the

characters in an uncomfortable sexual situation or expressing feelings of ambivalence or

guilt about declining sex or more broadly, given the number of men that the women had

sex with each season (at least five men per character). The show’s portrayal of female sexual

negotiation runs counter to feminist research which reveals that US women admit to

consenting to unwanted sex because they are pressured by men or do so in order to

maintain intimate relationships (e.g., Elizabeth M. Morgan and Eileen L. Zurbriggen 2007).

In this way, the ability of SATC women to transgress social norms and engage in risky

behaviour without consequences has been central to the show’s popularity among

Western women. Samantha, in particular, was represented as being unabashed in her desire

for recreational sex, announcing in the pilot episode, “I’m a trisexual—I’ll try anything once”

(“Sex and the City”). Samantha’s vivid sexuality was a key aspect of her character and this

was often used comedically in the show in a similar way to Hannah’s frequent, unglamorous

7MEREDITH NASH AND RUBY GRANT982

nudity and awkward sex scenes in Girls, which we discuss in forthcoming sections. The

“post-feminist irony” is that SATC was meant to provide an alternative, “empowering” view

of female sexuality, however, the characters continually returned to the safety of normative

femininity (Arthurs 2003, 87). To illustrate, although the women were shown with multiple

boyfriends/sexual partners, ultimately the series reinforced social norms via their ongoing

search for “The One.” By Season 6, the women abandoned their need to have sex “like a

man” and all four characters end up either married or in committed relationships (Markle

2008).

Compared to the women of SATC, Dunham’s Girls are not wholly positioned as active,

confident sexual subjects. Arguably, one of the great strengths of Girls is Dunham’s

attention to the emotional and experiential sexual fumbling of women in their twenties.

Adam Sackler (played by Adam Driver) is Hannah’s bizarre boyfriend who straddles a fine

line between repulsive and charming throughout the first season. Hannah’s sex scenes with

Adam are far from the idealised acts of “empowered” SATC women who know how to

exploit the power of femininity. These encounters are often anxious, awkward and, at times,

unwatchable, as Hannah disappointedly exhales “I almost came . . . ” after unsatisfying sex

with Adam (Season 1, Episode 6, “The Return”). Furthermore, Hannah frequently

externalises her anxieties about sex to Adam (e.g., “Is this position comfortable? Are you

wearing a condom?”) and looks to the Internet when she is alone, Googling “the stuff that

gets up around the sides of condoms” when she is convinced that she has an STI (Season 1,

Episode 3, “All Adventurous Women Do”). In this way, Hannah’s relationship with and

knowledge of her body is at odds with the post-feminist figurehead of the modern, sexually

subjectified, “Can-Do Girl,” like Samantha, who has reaped the benefits of second wave

feminist health movements (Anita Harris 2004, 16–17). Girls complicates post-feminist

notions of feminine sexuality in its representation of a subset of millennial women whose

primary source of information, knowledge, and experience of their bodies seems to come,

not from feminist consciousness-raising or advice from friends (à la SATC), but from the

Internet. With the proliferation of online knowledge and identities, Western women of

Dunham’s generation experience and understand their bodies more ambivalently (Rhonda

Shaw 2010). As a result, in sex scenes, Hannah is naked and the viewer is privy to her body

wobbling and moving in relatively unflattering ways. Dunham has observed that her

approach to representing sex on the show is led by a feeling of disillusionment with stylised

Hollywood depictions of sexuality and “sex-in-a-bra type characters” (e.g., Carrie Bradshaw),

stating in a recent Vogue interview, “Seeing somebody who looks like you having sex on

television is a less comfortable experience than seeing somebody who looks like nobody

you’ve ever met” (Nathan Heller 2014).

Thus the more nuanced representation of “awkward” sex, sexual failure, and issues of

sexual intimacy in Girls is an important acknowledgement that such things happen in

young women’s lives and are worthy of deeper consideration. For Dunham, “awkward” sex

is not just a comedic source—it is also used as a compass for a character’s emotional state.

For instance, for much of Season 1, Marnie is looking for a way to break up with her

boyfriend Charlie who loves Marnie “too much.” Marnie can barely contain her revulsion for

his sweet personality and desire to have romantic sex by candlelight, at one point

responding to his desire to do whatever would “turn her on the most” sexually with the

following reply: “What if you were a stranger? What if you were just a totally different

person? What if you didn’t act like you?” (Season 1, Episode 1, “Pilot”). Marnie becomes

infatuated with experimental artist, Booth Jonathon, and her interactions with him provide

8 GIRLS: PAVING THE WAY FOR “POST? FEMINISM” 983

an important glimpse into Marnie’s need for a “jerk” and also how young women negotiate

“awkward” sex (Season 2, Episode 3, “Bad Friend”). In Season 1 (Episode 3, “All Adventurous

Women Do”), Booth delivers this “pick-up” line to Marnie: “The first time I fuck you, I might

scare you a little. Because I’m a man, and I know how to do things.” As it turns out, Booth

does not live up to this claim. In Season 2 (Episode 3, “Bad Friend”), Booth’s idea of foreplay

involves imprisoning Marnie in one of his art installations (a chamber of TVs showing

disgusting/confronting footage) and then having sex with her in a “starfish” position

against the backdrop of a blood-smeared dollhouse with a doll placed strategically on the

bed to “watch” them. Marnie goes along with this disappointing experience for the sake of

a potential relationship. Although she laughs hysterically at the end of the scene, Marnie

does not call Booth out for his sexual shortcomings because she is desperate to have a

relationship with a “real” man.

The sexual objectification/subjectification of women in Girls is more complex than

SATC as the post-feminist notions of “choice” and sexual “empowerment” are juxtaposed

with male-defined sexual encounters. The inclusion of a scene wherein sex is not clearly

consensual is worthy of discussion (Season 2, Episode 9, “On All Fours”) in light of our earlier

point about the lack of consequences associated with sex on SATC. Although a previous

sexual encounter between Adam and his new girlfriend Natalia appeared to have been fun

and consensual, in a subsequent encounter, Adam commands Natalia to crawl on all fours

into his bedroom. He has sex with her without any apparent concern for her enjoyment or

willing participation. The scene ends with Adam ejaculating onto her chest and Natalia

looking away, saying “I don’t think I like that . . . I, like, really didn’t like that.”

Public reaction to this episode was divided—whereas feminist commentators

contended that Adam “raped” Natalia (e.g., Amanda Hess 2013) others observed that it was

merely a case of “exceedingly uncomfortable sex” (e.g., David Hagland and Jeffrey Bloomer

2013). Dunham responded:

Did what Adam do constitute rape? That’s hard for me to answer. I’m a rabid feminist and

no woman should ever be placed in a sexual situation that leaves her feeling degraded or

compromised. That’s not what sex is supposed to feel like. But I don’t think Adam is a

villain. If he thought he had even touched the R-word, he would be unable to live. To me,

it seemed like a terrible miscommunication between two people who didn’t know what

they really wanted. (HuffpostTV 2014)

Throughout the first season, Adam is depicted making unusual sexual requests of

Hannah (e.g., roleplaying, watching him masturbate). These episodes certainly raise issues of

consent but Hannah acquiesces without too much concern. In contrast, in “On All Fours,”

Adam’s behaviour is taken to a new extreme and Natalia is visibly distressed. Whether one

believes that the scene is depicting rape or not, this episode does break important new

ground when it comes to dealing with the unspoken realities of young women’s sexual

experiences. The encounter between Adam and Natalia is not easily categorised but is an

experience that many young heterosexual women have had and are often unable to

describe—that “awkward” sex can change from something fun/funny to something much

more difficult to articulate. This scene shows the blurred boundaries of consent and that

women are not always sure themselves whether a “rape” has occurred. It also shows us that

“rapists” are not necessarily predatory strangers but can be men that women know and trust.

These examples showcase Dunham’s masterful attempts at constructing a

contemporary feminist narrative that reveals the multiple and often contradictory ways

9MEREDITH NASH AND RUBY GRANT984

that young women experience “liberation” and “sexual empowerment” compared to SATC

which is more akin to fantasy fiction. Furthermore, the embodiment of feminine

heterosexuality in Girls is experienced as an endless negotiation of objectification and

subjectification that perhaps more closely reflects the experiences of young Western

women.

Reproductive “Choices”

I don’t like women telling other women what to do, or how to do it, or when to do it. Every

time I have sex it’s my choice. (Jessa, Season 1, Episode 2, “Vagina Panic”)

As Jessa’s quote above makes apparent, second wave feminist notions of sexual

“choice” and liberation are experienced as a “given” for the privileged characters of Girls,

with previously politicised issues such as abortion, sexual promiscuity, and sexually

transmitted infections being solved by “the all-purpose postfeminist answer that [women]

have a right to choose” (Whelehan 2010, 161). However, the narrativisation of reproductive

“choice” in Girls subverts post-feminist discourses. An example of this is when Jessa is

thrown an “abortion party” by her friends, who openly engage in a discussion about the

termination of pregnancy (Season 1, Episode 2, “Vagina Panic”). As a demonstration of this

“openness,” the word “abortion” is used eleven times in the episode. Although the

characters seem to be mostly comfortable with abortion, the situation is more complex

(Anna Goldsworthy 2013, 58). Marnie is furious that Jessa missed her appointment; Jessa is

upset by her situation; Hannah is uncertain about whether having an abortion is a “big

issue,” and Adam has the clearest stance of any of them—“kind of a heavy fucking

situation.” Nevertheless, the abortion itself is a source of comedy as Marnie sends Jessa

irritated text messages: “Uh, hey. You’re pregnant when you don’t want to be. So you might

want to come have your abortion now. Thanks.”

This ambivalence coupled with a willingness to openly discuss abortion is contrasted

with the handling of unwanted pregnancy ten years earlier in SATC in Season 4 (Episode 11,

“Coulda Would Shoulda”) when Miranda, the career-focussed lawyer, finds herself pregnant.

Miranda’s “choice” to terminate her pregnancy converges around the reproductive

“choices” of her friends Charlotte (who is desperate to become a mother but faces the

shock of infertility) and Carrie (who ruminates over whether to tell her boyfriend Aidan that

she had an abortion when she was twenty-two). The conversation around abortion itself is

fraught—“abortion” is only uttered three times during the episode even though both Carrie

and Samantha admit to having had “at least one” as younger women.

Miranda’s ambivalence toward abortion centres on her struggle to “have it all.” Faced

with Charlotte’s meagre “15% chance of ever getting pregnant,” Miranda weighs the pros

and cons of motherhood. By the end of the episode, she fulfils the post-feminist cultural

expectation that, as a woman in her late thirties, she should opt in to motherhood because

this may be her only chance. Jessa, in her early twenties, in contrast, is far removed from the

burden of the questions Miranda grapples with. In the middle of hooking up with a stranger

in a pub bathroom, Jessa gets her period (or conveniently has a miscarriage), freeing her

from making a “choice” about motherhood altogether. Upon seeing her blood on the man’s

fingers, the relief on Jessa’s face is evident but it is a strange, sad scene that effectively

demonstrates the ambivalent emotions that surround abortion for many young

women. In this way, Jessa’s “choice” could be read as evidence of feminist progress in

10 GIRLS: PAVING THE WAY FOR “POST? FEMINISM” 985

de-stigmatising abortion compared to SATC where abortion must be personally and

ethically laboured over. From another perspective, however, the age gap between Jessa

and Miranda is a key distinction between the two shows which allows Girls to avoid what

Diane Negra (2009, 47) refers to as the “time anxiety” around female life stages (e.g.,

marriage, career, motherhood) and a staple of post-feminist representational culture.

Whereas Miranda falls into a life stage paradigm that is consistent with post-feminist

feminine archetypes, Jessa is neither celebrated nor castigated for “failing” to become a

mother. In not hewing to the logic of post-feminism, the Girls episode perhaps confirms

that motherhood does not have to be a site of “authentic” feminine subjectivity. However,

in challenging the “rules” of post-feminism, the episode is also an exception that “proves

the rule when it comes to the strict ideological control post-feminism seeks to maintain

over the female lifecycle” (Negra 2009, 85).

Feminine Embodiment and Bodily Management

Last night I could not stop thinking about a Big Mac. I finally had to get dressed, go out

and pick up a guy. (Samantha, Season 4, Episode 2, “The Real Me”)

Truthfully, I gained a bunch of weight very quickly and I just felt very out of control of my

own body. It was just this Riot Grrrl idea, like “I’m taking control of my own shape.”

(Hannah, Season 1, Episode 3, “All Adventurous Women Do”)

For Gill (2007, 149), post-feminist “femininity is defined as a bodily property rather

than a social, structural or psychological one . . . In today’s media, possession of a ‘sexy

body’ is presented as a woman’s key source of identity.” The central features of Gill’s (2007)

post-feminist sensibility are feminine bodily management, discipline, and self-surveillance.

As feminist scholars have observed, this takes the form of beauty, fashion, fitness, and

dieting regimes common in post-feminist popular cultural texts such as SATC, where

women are portrayed as always engaging in the process of self-monitoring and bodily

management (e.g., Susan Bordo 1993; Shari L. Dworkin and Faye L. Wachs 2009; McRobbie

2009). The characters are often shown engaged in fitness activities (e.g., training for a

marathon, doing yoga), at spas, purchasing beauty products, and visiting plastic surgeons.

Samantha is especially concerned with her appearance as the oldest friend in the group

(she is in her forties for most of the series). For instance, Samantha’s obsession with physical

perfection is played out in Season 4 (Episode 2, “The Real Me”) when she goes on an

extreme diet in preparation for a nude photo shoot and again in Season 5 (Episode 5, “Plus

One is the Loneliest Number”) when she gets a chemical peel (“an impulse purchase”) to

erase the signs of ageing before attending an event. Although the show, to a certain extent,

reveals contemporary taboos surrounding (ageing) women’s bodies, the show is primarily a

celebration of normative feminine bodies that are used to gain the attention of men.

Girls complicates post-feminist conceptualisations of femininity and feminine

embodiment typified by SATC. Though women’s naked bodies are featured on Girls, they

often do not conform to typical heteronormative ideals of feminine beauty or sexiness

and body work is not a primary focus for any of the characters, with Hannah often

unglamorously flopping onto beds in her worn-out underwear. Unlike Samantha, who

actively pursues feminine bodily control, Hannah is featured sweaty and exhausted while

attempting to exercise, playing table tennis in her underwear, binge eating, and dancing

wildly (see Claire Perkins 2014).

11MEREDITH NASH AND RUBY GRANT986

Yet Hannah’s lack of feminine bodily control is complicated by her desires to be

controlled. In a telling scene quoted at the start of this section, Adam pinches her “fat” and

asks her why she has so many tattoos. Hannah admits that she had this “Riot Grrrl” idea and

got tattoos to reclaim control over her body after gaining weight when she was younger

(Season 1, Episode 3, “All Adventurous Women Do”). As a millennial, Hannah’s nod to the

feminist subcultural “Riot Grrrl” movement is poignant. The “girl power” of the Riot Grrrl

movement encouraged young women to see themselves as the producers of knowledge

with diverse embodied experiences. Hannah’s commentary evidences her engagement

with the cultural representation of women’s bodies and her own appearance which largely

diverges from the post-feminist “self-fashioning” associated with SATC.

Dunham’s intention is to represent women and women’s bodies in a more realistic

and unpolished manner, as “a way of saying, with these bodies, you know: don’t silence

them” (Goldsworthy 2013, 59) and this is political. As noted earlier, the frequent exposure of

Dunham’s naked body, especially during sex scenes, has sparked much discussion in terms

of her subversion of dominant norms of feminine beauty and “sexiness.” Both within and

beyond the show, the consumption, criticism, and metatextual discussion of Dunham’s

body flags lingering sexist cultural attitudes around women’s bodies. A primary example of

this occurred in relation to Episode 5 in Season 2 (“One Man’s Trash”) when Hannah spent a

weekend with an attractive older man (played by Patrick Wilson). Critics of the show argued

that a woman with a body like Dunham’s would never “get” a man as good looking as

Wilson (Tracie Egan Morrissey 2013). Similarly, while being interviewed on a Television

Critics Association panel, Dunham was questioned by a reporter who queried the

“necessity” of her nudity in Girls (Kelly Faircloth 2014). Dunham responded, “Yeah. It’s

because it’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive, I think, and I totally get it. If you

are not into me, that’s your problem.” The exchange sparked a range of reactions on Twitter

(see Faircloth [2014] for examples) and feminist critics argued that it was sexist for the

reporter to imply that women like Dunham should not show their bodies. We argue that

this exchange reflects the very notion of the male-defined representation of women’s

bodies that Dunham subverts by allowing women’s bodies to “speak” for themselves.

Towards Post? Feminism?

Although Girls and SATC are “post-feminist” and share a number of continuities in

terms of their foci of life, love, and friendships of privileged white women, we have

proposed that the differences between the shows are equally significant. Through an

analysis of the presentation of sexuality, reproductive “choices,” and feminine bodily

management, we have demonstrated that the millennial women in Girls experience

“liberation” and “empowerment” in “new,” arguably more complex ways than their SATC

foremothers. Thus Girls embodies a distinctive post-feminist sensibility by re-articulating

and complicating existing notions of post-feminism and by mobilising femininities and

anti-feminist/feminist attitudes in nuanced ways. This re-articulation builds an argument for

the continuing relevance of post-feminism but also flags the necessity of identifying

“moments of rupture and refusal . . . ” (Gill 2011, 64). The deployment of this “new” version

of post-feminism on Girls is primarily credited to Lena Dunham, a “feminist” millennial

woman who has had a strong hand in shaping the metatextual commentary and perhaps

more “honest” depiction of Western womanhood on the show.

12 GIRLS: PAVING THE WAY FOR “POST? FEMINISM” 987

What should we call this “new” version of post-feminism? We propose that the term

“post? feminism” may be used to describe a revised post-feminist sensibility for a millennial

generation. Rather than rejecting post-feminism, we include a question mark to create a

platform for new debate and engagement with post-feminism, while acknowledging its

coexistence with predecessor feminisms, and the continuing popular and academic usage

of post-feminism. The question mark importantly provides a focal point for questioning and

re-articulating the meaning, usage, and constituencies of post-feminism today. For

instance, “post? feminism” is potentially useful in enabling a dialogue around the

challenges faced by a “media-savvy, culture driven” (Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy

Richards 2000, 77) generation of young women who are trying to position themselves

between second wave feminism and post-feminism and in changed social, economic, and

political contexts. Here, the addition of the question mark symbolises that feminist

engagement with post-feminism is multiple and shifting and that the breadth of issues

involved in feminist identification is much broader and complex in the current moment.

Is a post? feminist consciousness apolitical? While we recognise objections that

surround post-feminism in terms of its political stance, we argue that Dunham has

demonstrated that post-feminism does not necessarily have to be apolitical and can also be

a site for critical resistance (see Fien Adriaens 2009). Dunham has shown that television can

be an effective medium to advance the feminist adage that the “personal is political” via her

position as an influential figure in cultural production (e.g., as a writer, director, and

producer). The show is a kind of millennial consciousness-raising tool in which Dunham

engages with the social processes that were instigated by second wave feminism and that

were aimed at developing experiential knowledge, giving women a “voice” and unifying

their experiences (although this is clearly contested in terms of race/ethnicity, class,

sexuality), and “empowering” women in their relationships to their bodies. In relation to

this, the addition of the question mark identifies the generative potential of popular

cultural forms like Girls and the importance of articulating the “personal” and “political” in

many different ways and contexts as opposed to assuming that they are political or not

which is perhaps less productive given the “plurality of positions and issues that constitute

feminisms today” (Ann Braithwaite 2002, 342).

Girls renews debates about post-feminism that, in many ways, SATC instigated in

feminist media and cultural studies. This paper is a first step towards further analysis and we

call on other scholars to examine Girls and its place within a changing post-feminist media

landscape.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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16 GIRLS: PAVING THE WAY FOR “POST? FEMINISM” 991

  • Abstract
  • Introduction
  • Twenty-Something Girls v. Thirty-Something SATC Women
  • Theorising Post-Feminism
  • Sexuality
  • Reproductive ``Choices''
  • Feminine Embodiment and Bodily Management
  • Towards Post? Feminism?
  • Disclosure Statement
  • References

Agenda 11.14.17

News and announcements

Media Essay

Gender, Sexuality, and Medicalization

Media Essay

Media essay (30% of final grade): five-six page critique of a film, television show, or any other type of visual media that focuses on one of the themes and topics that have been discussed in class. You must discuss at least TWO readings from the course in your paper. Your paper must have a thesis.

Media Essay

Due date: 12.5.17

Instructions

Essay Format

Five to six pages

Essays must be double-spaced.

12 pt. Times New Roman font.

No extraneous spaces between paragraphs.

Media Essay

Instructions cont.

In text citation: (Author Year: Page)

Reference format: MLA, Chicago, APA

Be consist with the citation format chosen.

Wikipedia, blog entries, or information gathered from a website are not appropriate sources. Information gathered from news sites is permissible, e.g., Salon, Slate, Bust, and Ms., among others like these sites.

Media essay

Turn essays in at the beginning of class

Submit paper online under “Assignments” tab

If you do not submit paper online, you will receive a “0” on the paper until you do.

Late papers:

2% deduction every 24 hours

Extensions:

Accommodation documentation

Extraordinary circumstances

Media Essay

Summarize the film

Critical analysis

Thesis

Make an argument

Make an interesting and unexpected argument

Support the argument

Draw upon issues, concepts, notions, and themes from the semester

Media Essay

Papers will be evaluated according to the following 5 criteria:

The extent to which the student follows instructions of the assignment, in particular having a well-developed and thoughtful thesis (/10)

Intellectual creativity and rigor (/10)

Ability to integrate concepts and themes from across readings (readings are in conversation with each other) (/10)

Depth of analysis (/10)

Clarity and organization of writing; grammatical and editing issues (/10)

How to write the media essay

Watch

How is women’s desire and pleasure being represented?

What message is the media sending?

Who is the targeted audience? How do you know?

How is gender and gender roles depicted?

Who is being represented: class, race, religion, sexual partners?

How to write the media essay

Contemplate:

What did you find interesting?

What did you find troubling?

How does this media relate to class themes?

Women’s desire and pleasure in relation to freedom, choice, heteronormativity, class, race, social and cultural norms

Representations of women as sexual objects

Medicalization of women’s sexuality and desire

How can you analyze these themes?

Psychoanalytical approaches to women and desire

Second and third wave feminist theories

Feminist film theory

9

How to write the film essay

Develop

Make a claim

Think persuasively (meaning, make an argument that can not be easily argued, e.g., “the sun is hot,” “racism and sexism are bad,” and “it’s great that women enjoy sex.”

Gather evidence: examples from film, class readings, and class discussion that bolster your claim

Write!

Summarize film

Focus on main argument

10

WS2283F 2017

Instructions for Media Essay

Media Essay

Due date: December 5, 2017

Media essay (30% of final grade): five-six page critique of a film, television show, or any other type of visual media that focuses on one of the themes and topics that have been discussed in class. Specifically, the chosen visual media must relate to women’s sexual desires and sexuality. Central questions to consider: how women experience sexual desires, ideologies surrounding women’s sexuality? How women’s sexual desires are represented? You must discuss at least TWO readings from the course in your paper. Your paper must have a thesis.

Papers must be submitted online: submit under “Assignments” tab

· When essay is submitted online, it will automatically be submitted to Turnitin.

· If you do not submit it online, you will receive a “0” on the paper.

· Late papers: 2% deduction every 24 hours without academic accommodation or prior arrangement with instructor (only approval for extension for extenuating circumstances)

Essay Format

· five to six pages

· Essays must be double-spaced.

· 12 pt. Times New Roman font.

· No extraneous spaces between paragraphs.

· Use citations.

· Citation format

· Cite reading if you are paraphrasing (summarizing in your own words) an idea or passage from the reading; and cite reading if you are using a quotation.

· Footnotes and endnotes are permissible; follow the same format as is used for the reference page

· In-text citation format: (Author Year: Page)

· Reference page format: MLA, Chicago, APA acceptable

Basic Essay Guidelines

· The purpose of this essay is to encourage students to use course readings to think critically about a chosen visual media.

· The essay should discuss at least two course readings.

· The readings do not have to be from the same week.

More Specific Essay Guidelines

· Have an introduction

· Provide a summary (brief) of the visual media that you have chosen.

· Influenced by the course readings, critically analyzes the chosen visual media and create a thesis.

· Use examples, theories, arguments, etc., from the readings as evidence that support your thesis.

· Be sure to be critical of the readings and scholarship that you have chosen (the author’s word is not gospel).

· Have a conclusion.

The most important aspect of the media essay is the thesis statement:

· Thesis statement: “In this paper I will argue that you should break-up with your boyfriend/girlfriend/ companion/partner/special friend.

· NOT a thesis statement: “In this paper I will discuss my latest break-up.”

Papers will be evaluated according to the following 5 criteria:

· The extent to which the student follows instructions of the assignment (/10)

· Is there a well-developed and thoughtful thesis?

· Does the paper use the specified citation format (Author Year: Page #)?

· Does the paper use proper paraphrasing technique? (changing 5 out of 15 words from a primary source is not proper paraphrasing)

· Does the paper discuss a specific visual media?

· Does the paper discuss two course readings?

· Intellectual creativity and rigor (/10)

· Is the analysis superficial?

· Does the paper generalize or make broad assumptions?

· Does the paper repeat arguments discussed in course readings or outside sources?

· Ability to integrate concepts and themes from across readings (/10)

· Are the readings discussed in conversation with each other?

· Are the concepts discussed in the paper defined?

· Are the most related concepts from the readings discussed in the paper?

· Depth of analysis (/10)

· Does the paper analyze the chosen media in a thoughtful manner?

· Does the paper provide in-depth analysis of the readings?

· Are the examples discussed in the paper demonstrate critical engagement with the readings and/or chosen media?

· Clarity and organization of writing; grammatical and editing issues (/10)

· Is there “flow” to the paper?

· Are there spelling errors and informal language used?

· Is there subject-verb agreement?

· Is there proper use of commas, semi-colons, and colons?

· Are there sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and awkward sentence structure?

· 50 points X 2 = 100%

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