Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (2 page)

Even though cultural studies that looks at popular culture has the power to move intellectuals both out of the academy and into the streets where our work can be shared with a larger audience, many critical thinkers who do cultural criticism are afraid to make that move. They prefer to score points by remaining in the academic world and representing radical chic there. This is especially the case when academics feel they are less cool if they attempt to link cultural studies’s intellectual practice with radical politicization. The desire to “appear cool” or “down” has led to the production of a body of cultural studies work in the United States that appropriates and rewrites the scripts and meanings of popular culture in ways that attribute to diverse cultural practices subversive, radical transgressive intent and power even when there is little evidence to suggest this is the case. This has been especially true of the academic work produced about popular icons (Madonna, for example). Voyeuristic cannibalization of popular culture by cultural critics is definitely dangerous when the intent is purely opportunistic. However, when we desire to decolonize minds and imaginations, cultural studies’ focus on popular culture can be and is a powerful site for intervention, challenge, and change.

All the essays and dialogues in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations emerge from a practical engagement with cultural practices and cultural icons who are defined as on the edge, as pushing the limits, disturbing the conventional, acceptable politics of representation. Starting from the standpoint that it is not the work of cultural critics merely to affirm passively cultural practices already defined as radical or transgressive, I cross boundaries to take another look, to contest, to interrogate, and in some cases to recover and redeem. These essays reflect the desire to construct frameworks where border crossing will not be evoked simply as
a masturbatory mental exercise that condones the movement of the insurgent intellectual mind across new frontiers (another version of the jungle safari), or become the justification for movements from the center into the margin that merely mimic in a new way old patterns of cultural imperialism and colonialism. Working with students and families from diverse class backgrounds, I am constantly amazed at how difficult it is to cross boundaries in this white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society. And it is obviously most difficult for individuals who lack material privilege or higher levels of education to make the elaborate shifts in location, thought, and life experience cultural critics talk and write about as though it is only a matter of individual will. To claim border crossing, the mixing of high and low, cultural hybridity, as the deepest expression of a desired cultural practice within multicultural democracy means that we must dare to envision ways such freedom of movement can be experienced by everyone. Since the disruption of the colonized/colonizer mind-set is necessary for border crossings to not simply reinscribe old patterns, we need strategies for decolonization that aim to change the minds and habits of everyone involved in cultural criticism. In these essays, I call attention to class and the myriad ways in which structures of class privilege prevent those who are not materially privileged from having access to those forms of education for critical consciousness, that are essential to the decolonization process. What does it mean for us to educate young, privileged, predominantly white students to divest of white supremacy if that work is not coupled with work that seeks to intervene in and change internalized racism that assaults people of color; to share feminist thinking and practice if that work is not coupled with fierce action; to share feminist thought and change sexism in all walks of life? To create a culture where those who could occupy the colonizing location have the freedom to self-interrogate, challenge, and change while the vast majority of the colonized lack such freedom is merely to keep in place
existing structures of domination. Politically, we do not live in a postcolonial world, because the mind-set of neo-colonialism shapes the underlying metaphysics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Cultural criticism can be an agent for change, educating for critical consciousness in liberatory ways, only if we start with a mind-set and a progressive politics that is fundamentally anticolonialist, that negates cultural imperialism in all its manifestations.

Crossing borders within the academic world, moving in and out of Black Studies, Women’s Studies, traditional English departments, and cultural studies, I am continually distressed by the willingness of one group to repudiate domination in one form while supporting it in another—white men who take sexism seriously but are not concerned with racism or vice versa, black men who are concerned with ending racism but do not want to challenge sexism, white women who want to challenge sexism but cling to racism, black women who want to challenge racism and sexism but claim class hierarchy. To arrive at the just, more humane world Stuart Hall envisions cultural studies as having the power to help create, we must be willing to courageously surrender participation in whatever sphere of coercive hierarchical domination we enjoy individual and group privilege. Given that cultural fascism is on the rise, that there is such open demand for separatist politics, embracing notions of inclusion and exclusion, whether based on shared gender, race, or nationality, seriously impedes all progressive effort to create a culture where border crossing enables both the sharing of resources and the production of a culture of communalism and mutuality. The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution. Cultural criticism can be and is a vital location for the exchange of knowledge, or the formation of new epistemologies.

As I pondered the fascination those children of diverse gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, class, and as yet undeclared sexual
practice expressed about the red door, I began to think about the politics of space. This door led into a room designed for small bodies: everything in reach, nothing placed to intimidate or threaten. Although I was unable to conjure clear memories, I tried to remember my relationship to space as a child, the ways the break with dependency on grown-ups or older, bigger siblings and the assertion of one’s own agency was a declaration of freedom and power. I remember thinking—and, like all cultural critics who are children, sharing my observation with the world around me—that if I had the power, I would make everything in the world be the right size for children, and grown-ups would have to learn how to do everything differently. In many ways progressive cultural revolution can happen only as we learn to do everything differently. Decolonizing our minds and imaginations, we learn to think differently, to see everything with “the new eyes” Malcolm X told us we needed if we were to enter the struggle as subjects and not objects. These essays and dialogues represent my ongoing growth as artist, cultural critic, feminist theorist, writer, seeker on the path. Contrary to convention, I almost always first imagine a collection of essays I want to write and then produce them as cultural events excite my imagination. Some of my essays appear first in magazines, because I am eager to spread the message, get critical feedback, and to speak to and with diverse audiences; publishing work in multiple locations makes that possible. The work in Outlaw Culture often begins where earlier published work stopped; at times it may repeat for emphasis and remembrance. Though I see it as all connected, each piece has a different take on culture and reality. Polyphonic, it combines the many voices I speak—academic talk, standard English, vernacular patois, the language of the street. Celebrating and affirming insurgent intellectual cultural practice, it is symbolically a red door—an invitation to enter a space of changing thought, the open mind that is the heartbeat of cultural revolution.

1
POWER TO THE PUSSY

We don’t wannabe dicks in drag

I believe in the power of Madonna, that she has the balls to be the patron saint of new feminism.

—Kate Tentler, The Village Voice

In my twenties, I made my first pilgrimage to Europe. Journeying there was a necessary initiation for any young artist in the United States destined to lead a Bohemian life of intensity, a life on the edge, full of adventure. Nothing about being black, female, working class, growing up in a racially segregated Southern town, where the closest I ever came to ecstasy was during Sunday morning church service, made me think that the doors of avant-garde radical cool would be closed to me. Con-fined and restrained by family, region, and religion, I was inwardly homeless, suffering, I believed, from a heartbreaking estrangement from a divine community of radical artistic visionaries whom I imagined were longing for me to join them.
In much pain, I spent my childhood years dreaming of the moment when I would find my way home. In my imagination, home was a place of radical openness, of recognition and reconciliation, where one could create freely.

Europe was a necessary starting place for this search. I believed I would not find there the dehumanizing racism so pervasive here that it crippled black creativity. The Europe of my imagination was a place of artistic and cultural freedom, where there were no limits or boundaries. I had learned about this Europe in books, in the writings of black expatriates. Yet this was not the Europe I discovered. The Europe I journeyed to was a place where racism was ever present, only it took the form of a passion for the “primitive,” the “exotic.” When a friend and I arrived in Paris, a taxi driver took us to a hotel where pictures of nude black females adorned the walls. Everywhere, I encountered the acceptance and celebration of blackness as long as it remained within the confines of primitivism.

Ironically, white Europeans were constantly urging me to join them in their affirmation of Europe as a more free, less racist, more culturally open place than the United States. At some point I was told that Europeans, unlike white Americans, had no trouble worshipping a black Madonna; this was proof that their culture was able to move beyond race and racism. Indeed, European friends insisted that I make a pilgrimage to Montserrat to see for myself. At the shrine of the Black Madonna I saw long lines of adoring white worshippers offering homage. They were praying, crying, longing to caress and touch, to be blessed by this mysterious black woman saint. In their imaginations her presence was the perfect embodiment of the miraculous. To be with her was to be in the place of ecstasy. Indeed, momentarily in this sanctuary, race, class, gender, and nationality had fallen away. In their place was a vision of hope and possibility. Yet this moment in no way altered the politics of domination outside, in that space of the real. Only in the realm of the sacred imaginary was
there the possibility of transcendence. None of us could remain there.

My journey ended. I did not return home to become a Bohemian artist. My creative work, painting and writing, was pushed to the background as I worked hard to succeed in the academy, to become something I had never wanted to be. To this day I feel as imprisoned in the academic world as I felt in the world of my growing up. And I still cling to the dream of a radical visionary artistic community that can sustain and nurture creativity.

I share these memories and reflections as a preface to talking about Madonna as a cultural icon, to contextualize what she has represented for me. Early on, I was enamored of her not so much because I was “into” her music—I was into her presence. Her image, like that of the Black Madonna, evoked a sense of promise and possibility, a vision of freedom; feminist in that she was daring to transgress sexist boundaries; Bohemian in that she was an adventurer, a risk taker; daring in that she presented a complex, non-static ever-changing subjectivity. She was intense, into pleasure, yet disciplined. For me and many other young “hip” feminist women confined in the academy, Madonna was a symbol of unrepressed female creativity and power—sexy, seductive, serious, and strong. She was the embodiment of that radical risk-taking part of my/our female self that had to be repressed daily for us to make it in the institutionalized world of the mainstream, in the academy. For a long while, her transgressive presence was a beacon, a guiding light, charting the journey of female “feminist” artists coming to power—coming to cultural fulfillment.

These days, watching Madonna publicly redefine her persona away from this early politicized image of transgressive female artistry necessarily engenders in diverse feminist admirers feelings of betrayal and loss. We longed to witness the material girl enter mature womanhood still embodying a subversive feminist
spirit. We longed for this, in part, to see serious radical female cultural icons manifesting the feminist promise that sexism would not always limit, inform, and shape our cultural identities and destiny. Deep down, many feminist Madonna admirers, ourselves entering mature womanhood, fear that this transition will signal the end of all forms of radicalism—social, sexual, cultural. We have so needed her transgressions. Women struggling to maintain fierce commitment to radical feminist womanhood in the face of a culture that rewards betrayal want to have a feminist icon who stands against the patriarchy, who “fights the power.” For a long time, Madonna appeared to be that icon. Since feminist thinking and the feminist movement are currently undermined by intense backlash, we long for female icons who show everyone that we can triumph despite fierce antifeminism. Ultimately, we know that feminist transformation of culture and society is even more directly threatened when those who were once advocates, supporters of feminist demands for an end to sexism and sexist oppression, act as though this is no longer a necessary and crucial agenda. Hence, our collective lament when it appears that Madonna will not fulfill that earlier sense of feminist promise and power.

Currently, Madonna is redefining her public persona in a manner that negates and erases her earlier support for feminist issues. The first hint of this major about-face was made public in the October 1992 issue of Vanity Fair with its display of Madonna as little-girl sex kitten. A frightening gap separated the radical vision of active female sexuality Madonna projects in the Vanity Fair interview with Maureen Orth (evocatively titled “The Material Girl’s Sexual (R)Evolution”) and the boring, conventional kiddie-porn type photographs accompanying the text. The image of a grown, over thirty, Madonna recreating herself as a little-girl sex kitten, presumably for the thrill of gaining and holding onto the sustained mass patriarchal pornographic gaze for as long as she can keep the public’s attention, exposes the
way female aging in a sexist society can undermine any woman’s allegiance to radical politics, to feminism. What is the “material girl” to do when she has fast become a grown woman in an economy of cultural images where so much of her mass appeal was deeply rooted in the romance of rebellious youth? The re-creation of herself as little girl comes across primarily as an opportunistic attempt to sustain the image that she can be forever young. Starting over again as little-girl-on-the-playground sex symbol, Madonna abandons and betrays her earlier radical questioning of sexist objectifications of female sexuality, announcing via these photos that she consents to being represented within a field of image production that is over-determined by patriarchy and the needs of a heterosexist pornographic gaze.