Notes Towards Day 5 (Tuesday, 9/17): Feminist "Visibility Politics"?

'The Veil,' p. 3;
'The Bicycle,' (esp. p. 15);
'The Party' (cf. p. 40, p. 42);
'The Heroes' (esp. p. 52);
'The Key' (esp. p. 102); and
'The Cigarette' (esp. p. 117).
The abstract visuals on pp. 77 and 89

I. coursekeeping
make a circle of 22 chairs (we're missing 3 soccer players),
leaving the 5 nearest the steps open for late-comers
sign-in

"Celeste" wrote: my perceptions of gender rely heavily on the exterior, such as appearance and clothes and the way a person speaks of themselves…I intend to work on expanding my perspective of others…

get up, seat yourself between two people whose names you still don't know,
and ask them to describe something exterior about themselves:
how are they visually distinctive in this class?
"I am Anne and I am over 40 YEARS OLDER than anyone else in the room!"
go 'round and introduce your neighbor with the appropriate comparative adjective (one word):
"Anne is older..."
anyone want to try and get all the way around the circle?
(have to pass this test by fall break, so study harder/faster!)

exercise from Diana Fuss's essay, "Inside/Out"-->
identity is fundamentally relational: we are defined by what we are NOT,
and develop an awareness of self by contrast with an other
(those contrasts can be on the surface--as visuals often are--
or deep--as the surface can also often be!),
but naming any "inside" category creates an "outside" -->
the very roots of "hetero" (other) and "homo" (same) are opposites
reconsider "in" and "out" as "alongside"; distance/proximity ....?
maybe on Thursday we'll try moving closer (?)

by classtime on Thursday, please finish Satrapi's second volume, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

when you create a post, you can check to be sure that "Critical Feminist Studies 2013" is your audience,

but PLEASE DO NOT TAG your posting as "Critical Feminist Studies Dalke Course Notes"--
that tag generates my page of course notes, and you don't want to be there (I have to go in an un-tag you)

II. on Thursday, I tried to get you to share with one another what you learned from
doing all the exercises in My New Gender Workbook, by writing together first a
series of questions, and then a series of declarative statements, in the form of
"mantrafestos"

I asked you to post those; Amanda, Ariana, Caroline, Piper’s groups all posted--
we’re still missing one group? (who are you? Who will do this?)
my mania for archiving conversation: making it 'real'!

We did have some discussion on-line about the difference between questioning and declaring:
Juliah: not one of us answered the questions, or EVEN made a succinct, declarative statement in response to the issue at hand. We seemed utterly incapable of distilling a broad question…into a concise, concrete statement. All the responses merely bloated the issue…[or were] riddled with shaky, timid statements…hedged with disclaimers. Why is this? Why are we…unable to make decisive statements and stand behind them? Why are we afraid of answering our own questions?...Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg…cites data that shows that ”women systematically underestimate their own ability….[making] forthright statements…made me uncomfortable…who am I to claim my own thoughts?
Maya’s comment: I did not even know where to begin when answering these questions….I did not want to be wrong…I always speak up…but only …when I am…certain I will be right or supported….This makes me feel angry…

what are we learning from this exercise? speaking is not transparent/always mediated,
and the audience is not always clear
Kwilkinson: I struggled with Bornstein’s use of sarcasm/satire in this workbook…Professor Tricia Rose…states [that] satire requires shared knowledge and solidarity…I worry that Bornstein’s use of satire does not necessarily consider knowledge [or] solidarity…I was…left with a bad taste in my mouth that I do not belong in this conversation….Do I have to ask questions that may be other-wise overlooked? Is this a burden or just part of my performance as a Black woman?

III. That was an exercise in the different forms of verbal representation:
many of you didn't like The Gender Workbook, and I wanted you not just to critique it,
but to think of other forms it might take: how could you present ideas about gender anarchy
in a way that people could give you a hearing? In a way that we could give Kate Bornstein a hearing?

Now we're going to turn think together about visual representation,
in particular how well the "children's form" that is the comic book can represent feminist ideas.

Elizabeth: the summarization in Bornstein’s workbook made me feel like her point of view was really being forced on me…I think Persepolis will highlight [gender fluidity] in a more digestable form….

Erin McD: I studied Persepolis in my 12th grade English class…the drawings were very simplistic, it made the story more relatable… simple drawings could allow [non-Iranians] to not feel like they were reading the story of an “other”…However, the style also leads to an enforcement of gender stereotypes…The style does not really allow for any variance in gender…it shows only two possible points…

Polly’s comment: in the culture that Satrapi is describing, the laws and societal rules are enforcing the binary very strictly.

We all know the cliche: a picture is worth a 1000 words.
Cf. Marguerite Duras (French writer and film maker):
"a word is worth a 1000 pictures"--
meaing: it is less directive, opens the space for more interpretation,
while an image is more limiting (think about films:
don't they control your imagination more than writing?)

Keeping in mind the convo we just had about how directive questions and statement are,
let's look @ how some images operate on us.

Has anyone studied graphic narrative, as a genre, in class before?
complex form, with a long history (bring in instruction books...)
Art Spiegelman's Maus --about the Holocaust--was one of Satrapi's inspirations;
two other visual sources she has identified are
* Persian miniatures  ("the drawing itself is very simple," eschewing perspective,
"trying to paint the world as God would see it and not as we, humans, do"); and
* avant-garde, black-and-white, expressionistic films like
Murnau's vampire fantasy Nosferatu (1922)

IV. Break into 7? groups of 3, to discuss the relation between medium and message,
between this genre and gender, between the generic predilections of graphic narratives,
and the gender positions of Satrapi's primary characters and (presumed) readers.

Doing some close reading (following Art Spiegelman's observation that "people don't even
have the patience to decode comics ... comics have become one of the last bastions of literacy"):

One group each to focus on
'The Veil,' p. 3;
'The Bicycle,' (esp. p. 15);
'The Party' (cf. p. 40, p. 42);
'The Heroes' (esp. p. 52);
'The Key' (esp. p. 102); and
'The Cigarette' (esp. p. 117).

The abstract visuals on pp. 77 and 89.

Tell each other what is happening/describe how the page is composed
(what other pages it reminds you of), and what the relation is between word and image.

V. Reporting out:
* how accessible, vernacular is this form? how mass its appeal?
* why is it black and white? what are the effects of this minimalist drawing style?
* how child-like is the perspective? how "feminist"? (what's the relation between the two?)
* what can we say about Satrapi's representation of trauma?
* does drawing seem more "fictional" than prose? less "transparent"?
* look especially @ the unique artificial borders in comics:
what is the effect of the gutters between the panels?

"Violence today has become something so normal, so banal ... But it's not normal. To draw it and put it in color -- the color of flesh and the red of the blood, and so forth -- reduces it by making it realistic" .... Persepolis is devastatingly truthful and yet stylized ... style as a narrative choice ... is fundamental to understanding graphic narrative ... pared-down techniques of line and perspective ... as with abstract expressionism, which justifies a flatness of composition to intensify affective content ... is a sophisticated, and historically cognizant, means of doing the work of seeing.

child's eye rendition of trauma ... haunts the text because of its incommmensurablity -- and yet its expressionistic consonance -- with what we are provoked to imagine is the visual reality of this brutal murder ... the author draws a scene of death... as a child imagines it .... in a form keyed to structural gaps through the frame-gutter sequence...

present mass death in a highly stylized fashion .... almost architectural ... a child's too-tidy conceptualization ... and the disturbing, anonymous profusion of bodies ....

the pitfalls of other, ostensibly transparent representational modes: "I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it. It would not be anything but cynical. That's why I drew it" ... from a child's (realistically erroneous but emotionally, expressionistically informed) perspective ....

... no perspective, however informed, can fully represent trauma .... it is in "excess of our frames of reference" .... [In] a child's imaging of torture ... one recognizes not only the inadequacy of any representation to such traumatic history, but also ... the simultaneous power of the radically inadequate (the child's naive confusion).

combining on a page ... the historical "routine" (execution) and the personal "routine" (sneaking cigarettes) ... uses understated graphic idiom to convey the horror of her "story of a childhood." Persepolis shows trauma as ordinary, both in the text's form -- the understated, spatial correspondences Persepolis employs to narrative effect through comics panelization -- and in style: the understated quality of Satrapi's line that rejects the visually laborious ... to departicularize the singular witnessing ... to open out the text ... while Persepolis may show trauma as (unfortunately) ordinary, it rejects the idea that it is (or should ever be) normal ....

Persepolis offers not simply a "visibility politics," but an ethical and troubling visual aesthetics...