7286: feminine anger

“There’s not much you can do with leggings, but I’m doing everything I can.” -Lindsay Lohan

As I face another New England winter, I decided to try a little experiment with hosiery, taking inspiration from one of my favorite sculptures, Snore, by Bruce Conner. (Some of my biggest style and role models have been, not stars, but artwork.) The piece, which lives in San Francisco’s De Young Museum, is a body created out of splintery boards, nails, red thread, and wads and stretches of used / dilapidated pantyhose. I love how Conner turns the symbol of feminine delicacy and propriety—perfectly maintained nylons that are supposed to cradle perfect female legs—and turns them into bulbous tumors worthy of the Alien movies, and coverings for bodies that can be the foundation of a house, or mafioso weapons of intimidation.

I’ve written here a few months earlier about the joy of run-pantyhose, in its affront to traditional femininity. Shortly after I wrote that entry, I was walking with my sister in the Castro wearing black run pantyhose when some North Face fleece-wearing white faggot walked by me and yelled out sneeringly, “You have a run in your hose!” Why did a faggot feel like he had to call out a mark of punk femininity? Why was he so threatened when clearly he had no physical relationship to femininity, holding hands with a similarly fleece-wearing white faggot? The manifestation of his threatened feeling was confounding to me. So I was like, Whatever. But my sister turned around and barked, “Yeah it’s called style, asshole!”

If the faggot was responding aggressively to my particular femininity, I loved it that it brought out my sister’s own mastiff-like feminine aggression. This notion of feminine anger is something about which I’ve been thinking a lot lately. This semester at RISD, I taught a class called “thingamajigirl: objects, humans, femininity,” which explored the conceptual crossings made between the idea of “girl” and the idea of “thing” in patriarchal societies. As I worked through my syllabus, I realized that I put together some texts that were PISSED—even though that was not why I chose them. In Flaubert, Terry McMillan, Natsuo Kirino, Toni Morrison, week after week I found myself reading—and reveling in—instances of feminine rage, feminine anger.

Feminine anger is often marked (by men) as hysteria or loss of control, when actually it is an emotional strategy of dealing with the frustration that is the world of men. Teaching the course, I happily got to read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for the second time in one year. This time, it is the following passage that glowed neon-red at me:

Providence, she thought, was intent on hounding her, and drawing strength from pride in her own conduct, she was, more than ever before in her life, filled with a sense of her own worth and of her contempt for others. She felt ready to take on the whole world. She wanted to lash out at men, to spit in their faces, to crush them, every one....

Previously, I’d loved Emma Bovary for the faggoty drama of her shopping-addiction and sexual frustration. But now, I saw a whole new side of her: this rage, this laser-focused force of anger that gives engine to her life. In its own time, Madame Bovary was considered a dangerous book for female readers for the female sexual desire that it portrayed. But now I wonder if the real dangerousness of Emma lay not in her horniness, but in her anger.

Recently, I came upon a beautiful persona that synthesizes what I’ve been thinking about with Madame Bovary and Snore: Diane Lane as a 15-year old pissed-off-proto-punk girl in the 1981 film, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. (Thanks Tara J for telling me about this!) In the film, Lane plays Corrine “Third Degree” Burns, whose memorable uniform is: see-through blouse, vintage cardigan, panties, pantyhose, ankle socks, and booties.

Third Degree Burns’ outfit is interesting because it is not symbolic of her anger at the world: there is no safety pin or metal spike in sight. But what it does is provide a medium in which to explore her anger, by turning the submissive sexuality of “good girls” inside out. The softness of the 50s cardigan, offsetting the hard eye-makeup and hair, provides a strangely perfect frame for her angry self-presentation. Emma Bovary and Third Degree Burns have a lot in common: they do not sublimate their anger into softness, they allow feminine softness to serve as a language with which to express their anger. Men expect angry girls to look angry: they don’t expect softly feminine girls to express switchblade anger.

LOOK SOFT, BE HARD.

In our culturally paranoid age in which teenage anorexia is thought to arise from reading too much Us Weekly and In Touch and their toothpicklimbeddrugaddled starlet-heroines, is Lindsay Lohan our Emma Bovary, the worst role model a girl can have? Rehabed twice before legal drinking age, decadent shopper, graffitting public restroom walls with messages that equate Scarlett Johansson as a vagina, becoming a lesbian in act if not in name: yup. In a recent interview, Scarlett Johansson said that she doesn’t understand Lindsay’s “anger.” LL may not be a great role model for the daughters of middle-class suburban families, but that’s precisely why I love her, why she is my role model of feminine anger.

Lohan gives a totally underrated performance in Robert Altman's last film, Prairie Home Companion. Playing the Plathian nihilist (someone asks her, "What kind of songs do you write?" Her answer: "Suicide.") daughter of a country singer, Lindsay takes the stage for an impromptu version of "Frankie and Johnny" that reinstates anger as its rightful place in the song:

LL demonstrates precisely the kind of look-soft-be-hard ethos of feminine anger: wrapped in a granny shawl, singing an old bluesy tune about a woman betrayed, she replaces the desperation of the original lyric--"she shot him once, twice, three times" with a succinct aggression (not to mention a surprisingly powerful Garlandesque belting): "she shot the bastard in the heart." This is the LL I admire, I long to become.

This is a kind of love letter to LL, so I’m not going to delve into all the Dostoevskyan specifics of her private life and public trials (Except I do think that her referring to Barack Obama as “our first colored president” is not a racist gaffe as some have simplistically and unfairly labeled it: how can it be racist when she spends the rest of the interview singing her love and praise of him? Clearly, she meant to refer to him as ”a person of color,” [rather than “black” or “African-American”] to refer to the kind of post-racial blackness his election represents. Syntactical slip-up!!). Instead, I want to think about the dangerousness of the idea of “Lindsay Lohan” in a culture that still desires its girls to behave a certain, prescriptive way.

I’m the girl that censorship laws try to protect and cannot: I will try anything I read. Including spending $100 on a pair of leggings. I’m waiting with Buddha-like patience for two presidential things: for Barack Obama to be officially sworn in as the President of the United States, and for my 6126 by Lindsay Lohan leggings in “Mr. President.” One of them is a sure thing, the other depends on my status on the waiting list, and both will affect the way I carry myself through the world this winter and spring. Until I get my own knee-padded black leggings, I will make do with my layered ripped hose—which I will christen, in honor of LL: 7286.

Lindsay christened her leggings line “6126” as an homage to her idol Marilyn Monroe (MM’s birthday: June 1, 1926). What do leggings have to do with MM? Nothing. But I like that: Lindsay is seizing upon the masochistic myth of Marilyn and injecting it with a new feeling—ANGER—of which Marilyn could have used a healthy helping. The leggings I’m on the list for cites Marilyn’s famous breathy-sexed up rendering of “Happy Birthday Mr. President” (Or rather: “Mr. Pwesident”) to John F. Kennedy. Marilyn famously sang the song in a wiggly white gown studded with curve-accentuating crystal beading. LL’s “Mr. President” leggings refuse the coy, fleshy sexuality of Marilyn in favor of something harder. Compare the dress to the leggings:

The“legging” version of Marilyn is black lycra, with black quilted leather knee-pads. It’s naughty for sure: rather than swathing female sexuality in infantile translucency, the “Mr. President” leggings are built for a girl ready to kneel to give head. But oral sex is not necessarily passive (teeth!) just as it is not necessarily male-servicing. Moreover, its sharp black color and the utilitarian, race-car driver aesthetic of the knee-pads also grant its wearer an athleticism that doesn’t imply a supplicant kind of femininity. The leggings suggests that feminine sexuality is a dangerous sport that requires strength, audacity, and fearlessness on the part of the girl who will practice it.

love hangover

My electoral shift map: a mound of denim. Late in the evening of November 4, 2008, the USA turned as blue as my pile of jeans. The morning after the elections, I was totally hungover—EMOTIONALLY HUNGOVER, that is. But before you read any further, lest you get the wrong idea about why I’m writing about the beautiful election of Barack Obama as the 44^th President of the U.S.A. through the idea of a “hangover,” let me clarify something:

THIS IS A DECLARATION OF OPTIMISM!!!

The bad part of the electoral hangover is: while still woozy from the high that we had elected the first AFRICAN-AMERICAN to be our president, that a nation of a caucasian majority with a history of slavery and segregation and racist violence had chosen an AFRICAN-AMERICAN as its leader...

(see, I still cannot get over it, it still steals my breath away)

...so while still woozy from that high, a lot of us woke up the next morning and with coffee to mouth, learned that in the same night, three gay marriage bans had passed in voter referendum, including the evil Proposition 8 in California. This was the vomiting bile and half-bottle-of-Excedrin-worth migraine part of the hangover. But does a hangover mean that you never enjoy the pleasures of cocktailing again? I hope not. Yes, a hangover is painful, but a hangover is important. It’s “sweet, sweet, sweet,” as Diana Ross immortally sang. A hangover is a visceral reminder of the joy you had the night before. If the night before made you feel as if you could explode the skin-boundaries of your body, the hangover reminds you of the very physicality that allowed you to experience the joy in the first place. I confess, sometimes I actually enjoy a good hangover. On another late night, many years ago, I drank way too much Johnnie Walker Black to dampen the extreme, sleep-preventing nervousness I had about an important event in which I had to participate the next morning. I felt like shit the next morning but I felt functional. The anxiety had made me all twitchy –paranoid-Virgo mind; the hangover put my brain—and myself—back in my body, and forced me to re-integrate myself. Like Beyoncé says, I got bodied, and got to work.

In this way, the gay marriage bans are a serious reminder that we have more work to do to become as blue a country as we can be. But I hope that people—particularly my tribe of homosexual humans—don’t get too overworked about this to an extent that they forget the joy of that was 11:00 PM EST November 4, 2008. But many are already letting the pain of the hangover define the experience of electoral euphoria. Many are already doing so. I—and my loved ones—were plenty upset about the passing of Proposition 8, but I was very much offended by Harvey Fierstein’s headline for his op-ed about this on The Huffington Post: “Historic for Some, Same Old Shit For the Rest of Us.” I dislike this marking gay people as “the Rest of Us” not because it is ghettoizing (I like gay ghettos) but because it assumes that the overall effect of 11-4-08 is NOT HISTORIC for those “of us” who are working for gay rights. I think that we must work very hard now to make sure these bans get overturned, appealed. And more importantly, we must work to shatter the cultural fiction that marriage is some religious-moral position, when it is really a romantic-social contract. But to suggest that the gay marriage bans cancel out or undercut the momentousness of Obama’s presidency produces a bitchiness (like Fierstein’s) that divides and provides fodder for racist homosexuals. There has been a disturbing sub-trend in blogsphere to blame blacks (and other racial minorities, but mostly blacks) in California for Prop 8’s passage. I’ve read some ignorant gays who have actually said things to the effect of: “The gay community has helped the black community and now they are ungrateful hypocrites.” This feeling is racist and evil, and it must be nipped in the bud. Yes, gay people have suffered a loss with these voter referenda, but should that then emotionally and politically exclude us from the historic momentum of electing our very first African-American president?

I answer NO. To me, this is akin to the kind of hypocrites I try not to be like: “Oh, I’m never drinking ever again because I’m so in pain from my hangover.” I refuse to be a political tea-totaler. The wine we drank was not some hallucinogenic. It allowed many Americans to forget their brainwashed racism for a vital moment and vote with their integral selves for a great leader...who happens to be African-American. There is no “us” that should feel “shitty” about November 4. We have a black president. We have a black president. We have a black president. (I’m smiling)

Celebrating the historic nature of Obama’s win doesn’t equal complacent ignoring of gay rights—and, by the way, other human rights issues disguised as “moral” issues. For instance: Californians resoundingly voted against Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act. Prop 5, in providing rehabilitation rather than imprisonment for drug-related nonviolent offenses, would have offered much needed prison reform and progressive judicial and law-enforcement policies. It would have worked to progressively deal with the disproportionate number of African-Americans who are prosecuted and imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. Why are not gay people going out in droves to protest the defeat of this important voter referendum? I would, and I will. But I don’t see any gay people writing heated opinions protesting the defeat of Prop 5.

What I’m trying to say is that Obama’s win does not need to be connected to every political movement that happened at the same time. So before we forget our joy, let’s remember that we have a black president-elect who is aware of gay people and their human rights. Obama not only fraternally mentioned gays again in his acceptance speech, he has gone on record against Prop 8. But he’s not going to let us just sit on our ass and bask in his awesomeness (as awesome as he truly is). My RISD students, who are not over 21, were totally inspired and dazzled by Obama’s utterly somber, serious sobriety during his acceptance speech. They are uplifted by the call for struggle, to do something to make things happen in this country, and so am I.

In fact, we don’t need that much prodding to come “down” from our elective high. Obama himself emphasized this with his serious (and not giddily celebratory) acceptance speech. I was also struck by the physical arrangement of the entire Obama family that night. No bright Democrat blues or firework-y jewel tones: Michelle, Sasha, and Malia were coordinated with their gentleman in black and red.




The sobriety of Barack’s speech matched the black stockings of his daughters, the black dress of Sasha (oh...black looks so good on a child!). And of course, there is Michelle’s black-and-red Narciso Rodriguez topped off with a black cardigan—for which she got pretty much roundly trashed (exception: the great Robin Givhan at the Washington Post). But I think the dress is Michelle’s reminder to us of the mutual work we had of us. The dress is a couture version of the New York Times electoral map that charts the voter shift, not from 2004, but from 1996, which shows that there are more Republican voters now than when I was an adolescent. The message of Barack and Michelle’s sparkling somberness is not lost: after all, while Obama had an electoral landslide, the popular vote was in fact much narrower. Obama had 53% (about 65 million votes), but there were still 57 million voters who cast votes against him, who voted for a campaign founded upon racist, sexist, and violent rhetoric. Blackness (of racial politics) and redness (of social conservatism) still do not go together.

But what does it mean that while the country has gone “redder” since 1996, it has accepted blackness as more transparent? As Michelle’s defiant wearing of Republican red with African-American black suggests, it means that the meaning of “red” might be changing. Enough Republicans cast aside racism in asking for an African-American leader; I personally never thought I’d see that day. They might still be homophobic. But they can be changed. Someday, maybe we will have a president-elect family wearing pink and red. But just as Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson and Carole Mosley Braun and Shirley Chisholm have fought bitterly and bleedingly and with superhuman tenacity so that 11-4-08 could happen, we must now take our post-election hangover as a reminder of joy, a joyful inspiration, to fight as African-Americans have fought ever since Plymouth Rock landed on them. The prospect of joining this history may feel like a migraine for some, but for me, it is joy, it is sweet, sweet, sweet.

change.gov
no on prop 8
yes on prop 5