Showing papers in "Wsq: Women's Studies Quarterly in 2015"

Feminism Underground: The Comics Rhetoric of Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory

Abstract: Introduction: Challenging Forms and RhetoricOn the cover of the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine, a larger-than-life Wonder Woman works to simultaneously tackle domestic and international issues while uncertainly striding forward under the affirmative text: "Wonder Woman for President" (Anderson 1972). While Ms. embraced Wonder Woman as a role model, the feminist movement did not so easily support the comics medium that Wonder Woman called home. In fact, a cover of Ms. in the following year pinpoints the problem behind this tense relationship. A visual homage to Roy Lichtenstein, the cover shows a bespectacled man in profile asking: "Qj Do you know the women's movement has no sense of humor?" while a blue-haired woman blankly gazes forward, replying, "A. No ... But hum a few bars and I'll fake it!" (Severin 1973). The woman's obliviousness that this isn't a popular song to be sung becomes the joke, but the charge and challenge remains, spoken directly under the magazine's masthead. This cover, created by Marie Severin, one of the few prominent female artists in mainstream comics, identifies the struggle that kept women's independent comics off the shelves of women's bookstores and out of the pages of feminist magazines like Ms. Through close readings of two underground comics produced by women, Lee Marrs's The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973-77) and Roberta Gregory's Dynamite Damsels (1976), this essay will consider how these comics visualize and interrogate feminist forms while theorizing new possibilities for women engaging their politics through their bodies.These comics were part of a lively domain of independent comics produced by women in the 1970s in coordination with the larger countercul- tural underground comics movement. Two long-running feminist series emerged out of this space: Wimmen's Comix (1972-91) and Tits & Clits (1972-87). While Marrs and Gregory were contributors to both series, their involvement with the Wimmen's Comix collective across the run of the series more clearly demonstrates the depth of their participation. Marrs was not only a founding member of the collective but was also an editor of Wimmen's Comix #2 and one of the most prolific contributors to the series (Marrs 1973b). Gregory was notably the first openly lesbian contributor, depicting same-sex attraction in her first comic in the series "A Modern Romance," which appeared in Wimmen's Comix #4 (Gregory 1974). Outside of these safe spaces for womens content, the larger underground comics scene was known for its frequent misogyny. Prominent underground female cartoonist Trina Robbins, self-appointed herstorian of the movement, claims that "it was almost de rigueur for male underground cartoonists to include violence against women in their comix, and to portray this violence as humor" (2009, 31). Working in the same medium, these womens comics challenge misogyny as form by producing a range of liberated womens bodies on the page. In so doing, these works also push back against the limitations of feminist discourse in the 1970s, particularly with their open focus and embrace of many forms of sexuality.Couching their political critiques in this visual, often humorously irreverent form won these comics few fans among the women's movement. In an interview in The Comics Journal, Robbins opined: "It's really weird the way leftists and militant feminists don't seem to like comix. I think they're so hung up on their own intellect that somehow it isn't any good to them unless it's a sixteen-page tract of gray words" (1980, 54). Here, Robbins identifies genre tunnel vision where only text in a certain form passes ideological muster. In a separate interview, Marrs expands on the practical consequences of that prejudice: "But we got totally rejected by the women's movement, for the most part... Not just that Ms. magazine wouldn't run us, but bookstores across the country wouldn't carry us, because we did not have a heavy, traditional, feminist political line" (1979, 24). …

Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism

Abstract: In August 1980 more than a hundred activists gathered in Washington, DC, for the National Conference on Third World Women and Violence. Organized by the DC Rape Crisis Center, the conference marked the first time that black, Latina, Asian, and Native American women working in rape crisis centers (RCCs) and battered womens shelters in the U.S. convened both nationally and autonomously. The coordinators explicitly named "concerns of isolation, alienation, and racism" within these organizations as a key rationale for the gathering and their larger goal of cultivating a new national network of women and men of color engaged in antiviolence activism.1 The DC center was uniquely poised to host such a conference, as it was the only African American-led RCC in the country at the time.Conference participants culled lessons from their experiences as antiviolence organizers in communities of color and as people of color working in largely majority-white RCCs and battered women's shelters. While racism within these institutions was one catalyst for the meeting, collective concern about their increasing involvement with the criminal justice state was another closely related impetus. Feminist activists had founded upwards of five hundred RCCs and shelters around the country during the previous decade, making these institutions two of the most prolific and widespread organizational forms of the larger women's movement. Most offered some combination of counseling, support groups, hotlines, and shelter, and many included community education initiatives in their repertoires as well. Activists' need for funding to sustain these programs, as well as their desire to confront the hostility and dismissiveness that law en- forcement and the courts showed rape survivors and battered women, had brought them into growing contact and collaboration with criminal justice agencies (Bevacqua 2000; Schechter 1982). As scholars have shown, this "alliance with the state" reflected, as well as inadvertently fueled, the ascendancy of a law-and-order agenda under the auspices of a highly racialized "war on crime" (Bumiller 2007; Gottschalk 2006; Kim 2014; Richie 2012). The increasing focus on criminalization invariably constrained the transformative social justice goals of the antiviolence movement but also its organizational cultures; as sociologist Nancy Matthews puts it, many antiviolence programs gradually appeared and functioned more like "social service agencies than social movement organizations" (1994, xiii). What is less often acknowledged in the academic literature is that the question of whether, how, and to what end feminist antiviolence activists should accept criminal justice funding and prioritize criminal legal reforms was vociferously debated within individual agencies, at regional and national conferences, and through independent media.In one sense, the National Conference on Third World Women and Violence could be construed as a meeting of the proverbial margins of the U.S. feminist antiviolence movement. Yet the attendees' manifold political affiliations meant that the conference represented a distinctive center emerging from the interface of multiple social movements: U.S. third world feminism, black feminism, indigenous decolonization, and prisoners' rights, among others. The slate of workshops and panel discussions ranged from "Medical Abuses: Sterilization" and "Feminism and Third World Women" to "Working with Men Committing Violence" and "Lesbianism: Third World Perspective."2 Members of the "International Panel" provided a discussion of state-sponsored violence against women in Angola, South Africa, Chile, and Nicaragua and inspired passage of a formal, conference-wide resolution to demonstrate support for the South African Anti-Apartheid movement (Dejanikus 1980). Indeed, the name chosen for the conference signaled the organizers' desire to reconfigure so-called "minority women" as part of a "Third World majority" of women whose lived experiences required an intersectional analysis of patriarchy and gender violence. …

The Value of the Future: The Child as Human Capital and the Neoliberal Labor of Race

Abstract: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste. But a wonderful thing to invest in." This slogan greeted pedestrians during a recent winter at a bus stop on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The bus ad was for Better Futures, a simulated stock option that capitalizes on a meta-awareness of financial capitalism's role in the destruction of public education and the racialization of the achievement gap in the United States. The United Negro College Fund (UNCF), perhaps sensing a need to adapt to the dominant funding arrangement of the neoliberal market, has jumped into the sphere of finance-or its careful simulation. In an effort to solicit "investors," passersby are asked to make donations to what is the latest version of UNCF s historically important college-funding program, one adapted for the era of information capitalism by a forecasting algorithm on its website that can tell potential investors exactly how many dollars of "social return" will be produced for each dollar spent. Suggesting, in turn, that investors imagine the viral proliferation of the campaign from bus stop to Internet, the ad asks "friends" to contribute through social media, so that the future dollars on the screen can multiply precisely and exponentially (United Negro College Fund 2013).Each "share" of Better Futures costs ten dollars and UNCF displays its simulated return value on its home page: 0.96% per dollar per annum. Despite a marketing strategy suggesting that the developing minds of children of color are really worth more "socially" than monetarily, the efficient conversion of those minds into dollars in the calculator undermines any final distinction. The simulation achieved by UNCF coincides with Marx's (1978,335) basic formula for capital accumulation, which financialization fully reflects: M-M', "money which begets money." The missing "C" here (M-C-M'), recall, is intentional. As Marx details in the first volume of Capital, the commodity can be removed to simplify the formula because its beginning and end is circulating money. Perhaps, though, the missing "C" might also be in this case the child. For Better Futures, the commodity is the cognitive capacity of children's neuroplasticity, their capacity to learn (the "mind" that is, according to UNCF's well-known slogan, "a terrible thing to waste"). This capacity is quantified by its projection into a probable future, stretched out as financial speculation across the life span of the child and divisible into discrete spheres by UNCF's calculator that include not only eventual salary but also "health savings," "crime savings," and the nebulous "other savings" (United Negro College Fund 2013).In speculating on the value of the future by monetizing the body and mind of the child of color, UNCF suggests that the value of the child to neoliberal capital is not identical to the idealized modern concept of childhood as a shelter from the labor market, one that took root as whiteness in the Progressive Era (see Macleod 1998). If the orphan Annie incarnates this child figure of American industrial capitalism, the vulnerable, white, and feminine future citizen who must be saved by the nation from the dehumanizing and immoral dangers of the market, she has likewise become in recent years the avatar of the reproductive futurism diagnosed as endemic to the social, most famously according to Lee Edelman, who unceremoniously declares in No Future (2004, 29), "Fuck Annie." Reproductive futurism, for Edelman, signifies the centrality of the child figure to the social organization of time and its root value as political: the child is the emblem of the future in whose name the totality of society is contracted, a precious resource governing the parameters of public politics and private sociality to secure the welfare of tomorrow in a stable form (reproduction), consigning queerness to the purely negative. Edelman argues that only an affirmation of the fully negative, which would comprehend the annihilation of Annie and everything vouchsafed by her image, could possibly overcome the straitjacket of the future upon which she calls. …

Of Woman Born to Mommy Blogged: The Journey from the Personal as Political to the Personal as Commodity

Abstract: "Mommy blogging is a radical act!" proclaimed Alice Bradley, a wellknown and prolific blogger, at the 2005 BlogHer Conference. Her assertion reframed and elevated the genre of online writing that deals with mothering, colloquially referred to as "mommy blogs." Blogging motherhood may feel radical because it allows for an up-to-the-minute, authentic, and less isolated take on motherhood, one that veers from the highly edited and airbrushed version found in other media, such as magazines or television. Bradley articulates the difference here:We readers and authors of parenting blogs are looking for a representation of authentic experience that we're not getting elsewhere. We sure as hell aren't getting it from the parenting magazines ... [A] parenting magazine will never help you feel less alone, less stupid, less ridiculous. This is the service I think parenting blogs provide-we share our lopsided, slightly hysterical, often exaggerated but more or less authentic experiences. If one blogger writes about, say, her bad behavior at the doctor's office, then maybe at some point, some freaked-out new mother is going to read that and feel a little better-less stupid, less ridiculous-about her own breakdown at the pediatrician's, (quoted in Camahort 2006)As Bradley suggests, the "service" of the blogs is to present an "authentic" version of motherhood that deviates from the older accounts found in broadcast media (such as parenting magazines), wherein mothering is made out to be both instinctual and fulfilling. The blogs provide a space for women, mothers, and caregivers-no matter how "freaked out" or "hysterical"-to provide and receive emotional validation. Bradley's use of the terms "authentic experience" and "radical" nods to the second wave feminist tradition of consciousness raising but, as I detail in this paper, falls short of it. As Catherine Rottenberg notes, when 1970s feminists discussed personal experiences it was always "accompanied by some form of critique of male domination and/or structural discrimination" (2013, 14). We find no similar pattern within the mommy blog genre despite their rhetoric that digital media radically reframes their experiences as mothers. For Bradley and other bloggers in this genre, to "feel less stupid" or "less alone" is the goal; they rarely connect their feelings or experiences to gendered structures of power. For all the bandwidth given to the personal, little attention is given to the political.This article investigates the claim that blogging "authentic experience" is a political act. Mining personal experience was the first step in transforming society for second wave feminists. Today, when personal experience meets up with digital technology, it is mined instead for two intertwined forms of value production: emotional and economic. Emotional value comes from the "crowdsourcing" of validation, as Bradley's quote makes plain. Economic value comes from the way online platforms turn such digital expressions of care into content, which the proprietors of social media platforms leverage for profits via data accumulation, advertising, and website traffic. Today, authentic experience has been absorbed into our modern-day digital mode of production. Experience becomes a commodity produced endlessly, in this case, by mothers.To map the shift from the personal-for-politics to the personal-for-production, I compare personal writings on motherhood from two sources separated by approximately forty years: Adrienne Rich's 1976 book Of Woman Born (reprinted in 1986) and selections from mommy blogs, which explore all aspects of motherhood and have a global readership in the millions. Despite being separated generationally from Rich, mommy bloggers discuss their experiences in startlingly similar terms. The blogs are a rich and vast archive of experiences of motherhood, yet the feminist project of situating women's experiences within a larger social context as a way to effect change, as so adroitly done by Rich, has disappeared. …

Environmental innocence and slow violence

Abstract: "Any day now," says the teacher in Benh Zeitlins 2012 film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, "fabric of the universe is coming unraveled. Ice caps gonna melt, water's gonna rise, and everything south of the levee is going under. Y'all better learn how to survive now." The film poses a nearly unthinkable, yet all too present, question: how does one prepare a small child for a future marked by imminent environmental collapse? The scene of impossible pedagogy stages the paradoxical relation between the child, so widely theorized as the sign of futurity, and her place at what Bill McKibben has called "the end of nature" (Edelman 2004; Stockton 2009; Sheldon 2013; McKibben 1989). In this essay, I wish to suggest that innocence, as a temporal structure and as a form of absence, deeply informs environmental representation, causing it to make special claims on the figure of the child. I am especially concerned to illuminate the negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for the psychic apprehension of environmental harm. As Anne-Lise Francois has observed, the privileged environmental figure is precisely one of nonimpact, of leaving no trace-a figure of environmental innocence bound up in Romantic childhood that the literature of environmental advocacy works to disallow, asserting instead, and in the face of what Francois has identified as nature's "withheld response" to violence, a call to responsibility (2014, 6). Environmental genres work to expose environmental innocence-a nonculpable earliness or having-time-as a fiction to be strongly countered by a sense of urgency (in reality, we're out of time). Building on Robin Bernstein's analysis of "racial innocence," I suggest that such efforts rest on racialized temporalities of both anticipation (not-yet) and foreclosure (already- over). Environmental innocence plays out against a long-standing shadow drama of specifically environmental black culpability seated in the figure of the black child. I am especially concerned to illuminate the negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for the psychic apprehension of environmental harm. I take Beasts of the Southern Wild as an exemplary object for illuminating the deep interchanges between environmental innocence and racial innocence by situating it in a longer trajectory of stagings of black childhood, from the William Blake poem cited in the film's title to Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.Beasts of the Southern Wild, filmed in the midst of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup, is a self-consciously post-Hurricane Katrina environmental narrative set on an outlying Louisiana island that Zeitlin has described as "literally forgotten by the system" (Mohney 2012; Gallot 2012). Through the subjective centering of a very young child, Hushpuppy (Quevenzhane Wallis), the film seeks to render visualizable what Rob Nixon has called the unspectacularizable-indeed, almost imperceptible-"slow violence" of environmental destruction. Why is a child's subjectivity the key to this visualization? And why must that child be a black girl who is frequently conspicuously misidentified by both age and gender? I wish to suggest that the film's temporalities of innocence, realized formally through the adoption of Hushpuppy's fantastical consciousness, depend on a racialized logic of childhood-a logic that the film attempts to transcend but ultimately only reinscribes. Yet this is not a one-way street: the film's logic also opens out for us the environmental forms already present in conceptions of racial innocence, revealing wider consequences for environmental genres and the representation of slow violence.Temporalities of InnocenceFrom the concept of the "Anthropocene," the geological period of humans' mark upon the earth, to its calls to urgent action, environmental discourses are deeply implicated in negotiations of time-too much time to comprehend, too little time in which to act (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Nixon 2011,12). …

Risky Measures: Digital Technologies and the Governance of Child Obesity

Abstract: Childhood and the Politics of PreemptionIn a neoliberal climate of underfunded and overcrowded public schools, physical education has suffered. With only six states requiring physical education in every grade and only 2 percent of high schools offering it daily, gym class seems destined for the dustbin of history. As part of her campaign against childhood obesity, Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Active Schools initiative aims to reverse this trend by reinvigorating physical education programs across the nation. Although evidence suggests that rates of child obesity are declining, Obama's initiative is among an array of new antiobesity programs at the local, national, and even global level (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2013). Launched in February 2013, Let's Move! Active Schools aims to reach fifty thousand schools in the next five years with a six-step program that mobilizes teachers, administrators, and parents to become "school champions" for their communities in order to "once again make being active a way of life for our kids" (The White House, Office of the First Lady 2013).Central to this effort is the implementation of FitnessGram, a software and database platform that tracks body composition, aerobic capacity, and "health-related fitness levels," and aims to inspire long-term health by teaching students to monitor their behaviors. Replacing the older President's Challenge Youth Fitness Test dating back to 1966, FitnessGram will be implemented in 90 percent of U.S. schools by 2018 with ten million dollars in funding from General Mills (Let's Move! 2014a). Although the program has come under attack for sending home report cards with information about students' body mass index (dubbed "fat letters"), FitnessGram represents a growing trend toward using new media and digital technology to promote health and fitness at ever earlier ages (Bindley 2013).1While American cultures have a long history of policing body size and weight, it was not until the development of a media panic over an "epidemic" of obesity in the early 2000s that "overweight" became a medicalized term (Saguy and Almeling 2008). Yet as fat studies scholars have observed, rather than promoting health, antiobesity discourse often further stigmatizes fatness.2 In a neoliberal moral economy in which active citizens are expected to manage their own risk, fatness signifies a moral failing on the part of the individual. As scapegoats for larger social anxieties over national fitness and changing patterns of production and consumption, fat bodies have emerged as a primary target of "a vast network of surveillance, monitoring and regulating strategies and technologies" by medical, government, and corporate agencies (Lupton 2012, 32).Yet even as antiobesity programs mark specific populations for social stigmatization and regulation, we need to understand how the discourse of "epidemic" extends new modes of ongoing surveillance and regulation over the entire population. While public health traditionally safeguarded national health through racialized policies of containment and exclusion, I argue that the obesity epidemic has engendered new measures of control that operate through a logic of preemption, constituting new populations for intervention according to a racialized calculus of risk. Far from metaphorical, the language of "epidemic" indexes the ways in which epidemiological measures of risk have shifted the register from a pathologization of fatness to a preemptive logic of health.This preemptive logic takes shape around the construction of childhood obesity as a site of crisis. Within antiobesity campaigns, children serve as both a precarious group in need of protection and a symbolic figure for America's moral and physical strength. As Obama puts it, "The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake" (Let's Move! 2014b). The body of the child emerges as both an object of risk and a risky subject: the child both is at risk for the physical and emotional health tolls associated with obesity and is a risk to the nation, insofar as these unhealthy bodies constitute a security threat unto themselves. …

The Power of the First-Person Narrative: Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party

Abstract: In 1971 Black Panther Party (BPP) members Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale were tried for kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. In a fury, one juror picked up a chair in the deliberation room and threatened, "Let these defendants go. You know you don't have any evidence. If you want to confine them to prison for the rest of their lives go on and try it, but I swear I will kill you to death."1 In recalling this moment leading up to her release, Huggins described how this juror's remarks had a "no-nonsense, don't cross me" tone, making note of the female juror's gender, her whiteness, and her occupation as a nurse. She learned about this critical information at the completion of the trial, admitting, "Thank God with everything in me because when it came to declaring a verdict, the women were the ones that said, ?You know there's no evidence. Why are we trying these people?"' Huggins's account illustrates the key role she believes women played in granting her freedom. She also claimed that one white male juror held out to the very end. After two hung juries, she stated, "The judge said, ?Let them go, we cost the taxpayers of Connecticut too much money. The defendants are free to go.'" Evoking her feelings of triumph, she continued, "So Bobby and I walked out that day" (Interview by the author, April 16, 2010). Her words "walked out," represent a feeling of liberation from the bars of injustice. The silence that black women revolutionaries so often encounter became part of Huggins's experience at the trial. Huggins's account of her trial and imprisonment responds to her invisibility in the face of official record keeping, and it serves as an example of the marginalization many female activists experienced during the civil rights and black power eras of the 1960s and 1970s. Her first-person narratives depict the direct impact of governmental repression similarly shared by Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Mabel Robinson Williams, and others, whose voices most often remained distorted and excluded from the official public record.Reframing history through her personal experience, Huggins challenges hegemonic practices of power and knowledge. At the center of the historical record she serves as a critical player in the black radical protest movement. Her stories as a living Black Panther Party member recognize her agency and allow for a new kind of history that invokes passion and feelings. Interviews play a critical role in reconstructing black womens lives and they capture the importance of affect in history making. They offer a way to unpack emotions and provide intimate views of the experiences of BPP members. Black women's personal writing and reflections are important sources for helping us better understand the black power era and notions of gender, feminism, history, and motherhood. Huggins agreed to talk with me on the condition that I produce research "that goes beyond a scholarly approach" (interview by the author, February 20, 2010). As a case study, Huggins's personal account became critical in the political enfranchisement of women in the BPP. It is a radical intervention that captures an important subjective point of view and functions as a feminist methodological praxis that privileges personal experience. Her story provides an alternative political discourse for understanding the implications of history, allowing Huggins to move from the background to the foreground of the BPP.The Black Panther Party, one of the most well-known organizations during the black power movement, functioned as a grassroots political coalition-building organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. The BPP practiced their cofounder Huey P. Newton's theory of intercommunalism, which transformed over time to meet the changing needs of black and poor communities. Judson Jeffries explains, "Newton suggested that the stage of Intercommunalism will come about when the world's nonruling class seizes the means of production (presumably of the entire imperialist system) and distributes the wealth in an equitable fashion to the many communities of the world" (2002, 80). …

Girlhood in the Gutter: Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity

Abstract: The dream of providing girls with the means to represent themselves has long animated multiple strands of feminist thought Yet feminist inquiry into gendered childhood confronts an elusive subject: more often represented by others than self-representing, girls (in childhood and adolescence) are known primarily in relations of dependence in families and culture, their economic and legal vulnerability figured and materialized through their sexual precarity1 Girls are often represented visually and featured in narratives as "objects to be seen and rescued" (Hesford 2011, 130); in other words, their vulnerability permits the heroism of others while they remain stubbornly stuck in material conditions of danger as well as visual and narrative practices that habituate audiences to see this as their inevitable fate For this reason, calls for a more transparent display of girls' vulnerability miss how visual culture is invested in hiding the sexual precarity of girls in plain sight through techniques of omission and oblique references that groom audiences to overlook the social fact of sexual violence against girlsAs scholars of visual culture have noted, images are not neutral They do not merely document; instead, they materialize in visual form the social fact of girlhood and violence We offer a feminist analysis of how girls are depicted as sexually available to men, lacking control of their bodies and lives, dependent, and vulnerable through three visual techniques: (l) the use of scale to map and complicate gendered relations of power as well as shifting temporality (eg copresence of past and present images of the author); (2) the practice of "updating" canonical stories such as fairy tales to contemporary settings, which habituates audiences to seeing girls' endangerment as typical, and thus catalyzes closure rather than prompts critique; and (3) the feminist practice exemplified by comics artist Phoebe Gloeckner of refusing to hide rape in the gutter, and exposing its visual encoding as permissible as long as unseen2We compare two exemplary texts in order to demonstrate the difference between one mode of visual representation that subsumes sexual violence against girls by seeing it as an aspect of the greater danger of commodity culture and another that explicitly addresses the fact of sexual abuse within the home from a feminist perspective The texts are The Girl in Red (Innocenti 2012), a contemporary picture book in comics form illustrated by Roberto Innocenti that remediates the tale of "Little Red Riding Hood" and implies rather than visualizes sexual violence, and A Child's Life and Other Stories (Gloeckner 2000), a "semiautobiographical" (Orenstein 2001) comic by Phoebe Gloeckner that challenges graphically the ideology linking not-seeing and not-knowing to the sexual precarity of girls and women It is important to note that although Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch's The Girl in Red and Phoebe Gloeckner s A Child's Life and Other Stories are steeped in different histories of production and reception, meaningful convergences enable us to chart the politically divergent work of their creators3 Most obviously, the two texts are formally comparable in that they communicate "through the comics medium" (op de Beeck 2012, 470) Both have either alerted or eluded calls for censorship and each remediates fairy tales, as well as the material artifacts of childhood-the picture book and the comicBy bringing these two texts together in a critical analysis, we underscore their representational politics within a cultural assemblage of childhood in which the actual precarity of the girl-child is constantly effaced by how she is represented in conditions of danger This project extends our earlier work (Marshall and Gilmore 2010) on a history of feminist autobiographical representation focused on narratives of girlhood by adult women in verbal and visual texts We compare how gendered meanings about girls, families, and sexual precarity are visually coded as taking place in the gutter in Innocenti's illustrations and, hence, unseeable, in contrast to Gloeckner's "devastatingly 'realistic'" (Chute 2010, 6) drawings of sexual abuse in the panels …

The Old Way

Abstract: WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2015) © 2015 by Stella Padnos-Shea. All rights reserved. There were no trees There were no men There was no length There was no anger There was no war We held court in the late mornings, after jasmine tea, cooled enough to drink through bendy straws There were petty disagreements, escalating as the moon waxed There was roughage, there was grass, shrubbery, walnut pancakes We played cards, we ran for sport, we had no destination Our bellies no longer turned full, we stayed to ourselves when we saw fit

Pedo-Sexuality: An Especially German History

Abstract: Translated by Nicholas LevisControversies about pedophilia continue to unfold in many countries. In no small measure, this is due to the coming to light in recent years of many incidents of abuse involving the Catholic Church. These scandals have posed a serious challenge for the Church and have been treated in various national case studies.The ongoing public debate on pedophilia in Germany, however, has been cast as a problem of the Left and of liberalism, almost certainly making for a unique circumstance internationally (Herzog 2014). To understand how this happened, we must take a closer look at the German discourse since 2010, which has gone through different waves and displayed a variety of discursive elements. The narrative that has been reinforced since 2013, especially, portrays the Left and liberalism as particularly apt to adopt pedophiliac positions.Though the waves of public debate have been complex, since 2013 there has been an almost complete failure to distinguish between actual practices of sexual abuse and the adoption of pedophilia-defending positions in the debates about sex crime laws during the 1970s and 1980s. These controversies are deeply embedded in the specificities of German history. They return us to the 1960s and 1970s, the sexual revolution, and the post-1968 antiauthoritarian education and childrens Kinderladen (day care) movements in West Germany-and thus also to the "paradoxes of sexual liberalization" that still concern us today (Herzog 2013). From the perspective of historical scholarship and a history of education that considers the longer term, even more fundamental questions arise about how very differently child sexuality and the relationships between adult and child sexualities have been discussed and assessed at various points over the centuries (Konig2014).Stages of the German Debate Since 2010Starting in early 2010, the German public learned of numerous incidents of sexual abuse at Catholic boarding schools in prior decades. This served to revive interest in another earlier scandal involving the sexual abuse of children and adolescents at the Odenwald School, an institution famous within the educational reform movement. Odenwald had been founded in 1910 as a pioneering coeducational boarding school closely associated with the life reform (Lebensreform) and youth and womens movements of that time. In the 1970s, Odenwald became a model for a new West German movement for educational reform. Stories about sex abuse incidents at Odenwald in the 1970s and 1980s first emerged in the late 1990s, but without major public, let alone legal, consequences. The full terrifying extent of what had transpired was only revealed after 2010: more than 130 mostly male students were sexually abused by Odenwald teachers, with the headmaster playing a prominent role. How could this have been concealed for so long? Among the reasons advanced are that Odenwald was an elite school as well as a model school of the reform movement. The school enjoyed a kind of institutional protection, and the headmaster similar personal protection. These unwritten rules were respected by the media and still very much followed in the late 1990s.In the meantime, a series of publications by victims, journalists, and social scientists have considered how such a high number of abuse incidents could occur over a period of so many years without discovery. The practice of abuse enjoyed a level of discursive legitimation at Odenwald. The school's agenda of educational reform was wrapped up in a specific dynamic, both drawing connections to Greek antiquity and Plato's ideal of "pedagogical Eros," and appropriating the arguments and vocabulary of the sexual revolution (Baader 2012a). In the wake of the abuse controversies, a thorough scholarly examination of "pedagogical Eros" explored its origins and development through the German and English life reform movements around 1900 and in the ideas of the English sexologist Havelock Ellis (Oelkers 2011). …

Offending Children, Registering Sex

Abstract: "We all know that there is a difference between a healthy and a normal love of children and a love which is sick and freakish." With this provocation, literary theorist James Kincaid opens Child-Loving (1992), a book examining representations of the erotic child. While Kincaids project focuses mainly on the Victorian era, in our own moment, crowded with televised child beauty pageants, skyrocketing rates of child poverty, and abstinence-only sexual-health curriculum in schools, sexual normativity is still pervasive and perverse. What is authentic sexual development when heteronormativity, for example, is naturalized? What are childrens emergent relationships to sexuality? What is normal love? The number of juveniles charged and convicted of sexual violence and subsequently placed on sex offender registries across the United States should provoke these questions. While public dialogues (and scholarly research) about youth/child sexuality and agency are difficult, even in a culture that fetishizes youth and sex, registries provide a grim and uneven public archive of harm, sexuality, and childhood.1A 2009 research brief from the U.S. Department of Justice identifies that young people are disproportionately charged with and convicted of sexual offenses: "Juveniles account for more than one third (35.6 percent) of those known to police to have committed sex offenses against minors" and "juvenile sex offenders comprise more than one-quarter (25.8 percent) of all sex offenders" (Finkelhor, Ormrod, and Chaffin 2009, 1, 3).2 Notably, this research indicates that preteens are increasingly charged and convicted of sexually based crimes: "The number of youth coming to the attention of police for sex offenses increases sharply at age 12 and plateaus after age 14" (Finkelhor, Ormrod, and Chaffin 2009, 2). In Illinois, "fully half" of the juveniles arrested for sexual offenses in 2004,2006,2008, and 2010 were fourteen years old or younger (Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission 2014, 15). This increase, not unnoticed by law enforcement entities, has created an industry of sexual recovery for juveniles (Finkelhor, Ormrod, and Chaffin 2009, 2). As research suggests that child sexual violence is a cyclical and potentially learned behavior, mandated recovery/ treatment programs and registration are particularly punitive, possibly hypocritical. Children arrested for perpetrating sexual offenses are five times more likely than children who have not been arrested (for sexual offenses) to experience sexual violence themselves (Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission 2014,16).3The very systems set up to protect children from sexual violence, sex offender registries, also work to disproportionately regulate and punish children. While across the United States, youth, particularly those nonwhite and poor, can be tried in adult court for crimes committed at age fifteen. (Griffin et al. 2011)4 Across disciplines, scholars have examined sex offender registries, conceptions of sex offenders, and the states response to violence against children and women (Lancaster 2011; Jenkins 1998; Levine 2002; Corrigan 2006; Harkins 2009; Bumiller 2008; Wright 2003; Simon 2000). A growing body of research also critically engages with our nations overreliance on incarceration (Mauer 1999; Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007). Scarce scholarship, however, has explored the increasing number of young people classified as sex offenders.This essay explores how criminalizing sexual activities perpetrated by minors naturalizes the link between age and consent, creating complex and uneven landscapes for youth to navigate sexuality. This tendency to criminalize child sexual activity flattens the possibilities of youth/child sexual agency and disproportionately affects the most marginal young people. Yet producing meaningful opportunities for public safety and dismantling registries, as this essay will illustrate, requires moving beyond child saving. It is not enough to focus simply on the problem of juveniles on the registry. …

Tween Intimacy and the Problem of Public Life in Children's Media: "Having It All" on the Disney Channel's Hannah Montana

Abstract: Contradictions of public participation pervade the everyday lives of contemporary children and those around them. In the past two decades, the children's media and consumer industries have expanded and dramatically transformed, especially through the development and consolidation of "tweens"-people ages nine to thirteen, not yet "teenagers" but no longer quite "children"-as a key consumer demographic (Cook and Kaiser 2004). Commentators increasingly bemoan the destabilization of age identities, pointing to children's purportedly more "mature" taste in music, clothes, and media as evidence of a process of "kids getting older younger" (Schor 2004), and to adults' consumer practices as evidence of their infantilization (Barber 2007). Tween discourses focus especially on girls, for whom the boundary between childhood innocence and adolescent or adult independence is fraught with moral panic around sexuality, which only heightens anxieties about changing age identities. Girls' consumption and media participation increasingly involve performances in the relatively public spaces of social media, mobile media, and the Internet (Banet-Weiser 2011; Bickford, in press; Kearney 2007), so the public sphere of consumption is full of exuberant participation in mass-mediated publics. Beyond literal performances online and on social media, even everyday unmediated consumption-of toys, clothes, food, and entertainment-is fraught with contradictory meanings invoking children's public image as symbols of domesticity, innocence, and the family and anxiety about children's intense affiliation with peer communities outside the family (Pugh 2009). Participation in the sphere of consumption entails a form of publicness that is in stark contrast to a traditional construction of childhood as private, innocent, and islanded in domestic spaces.In this context, the Disney Channel sitcom Hannah Montana is a seminal text. Hannah Montana aired from 2006 to 2011 and ushered in a new era of childrens media. Along with the television movie High School Musical and the rock act the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana returned Disney to a level of commercial dominance with young audiences that it had lost since its heyday of animated musical films in the 1990s, when musical features such as The Lion King and The Little Mermaid topped movie and music sales charts and transformed the home video market (Graser 2009). In 2007 the Hannah Montana soundtrack album debuted at number one and spent seventy-eight weeks on the Billboard 200 chart (Billboard 2014). A national concert tour sold out in minutes (Kaufman 2007), and a concert film sold out theaters nationally (Bowles 2008), earning sixty-five million dollars and setting box office records for normally slow winter releases (Box Office Mojo 2014). The show transformed Disney's music business and accelerated a decade-long shift toward pop music genres and multimedia tie-ins across the children's music industry (Chmielewski 2007; Bickford 2012). Hannah Montana built on earlier Disney Channel successes like That's So Raven and Lizzie McGuire, as well as 1990s teen pop, heavily marketed to children, such as Britney Spears and NSYNC. But it combined and transformed these predecessors, establishing a model of hugely successful multimedia celebrity acts, bridging film, television, and popular music and focused entirely on preadolescent child audiences. In the changing fields of tween media and children's consumer culture, then, Hannah Montana is a genre-defining text.Hannah Montana intervenes directly in discourses about childhood, publicness, and consumerism. Its premise is that fourteen-year-old pop sensation Hannah Montana lives a normal life as middle school student Miley Stewart.1 The show's narrative conflict builds around tensions between Miley s public and private life, exploring in detail how Miley s public life disrupts her "normal" childhood and threatens her intimate friendships. This conflict seems to broadly allegorize children's changing relationship to media and public culture, but rather than reinventing the wheel in applying such questions to children, Hannah Montana adapts its approach from another sphere with a long tradition of dramatizing cultural anxiety around changing social boundaries: the postfeminist prob- lem of "having it all" and women's changing relationship to domestic and waged work. …

James Tiptree Jr.: Rereading Essentialism and Ecofeminism in the 1970s

Abstract: Ecofeminism's Family Trees In the introduction to This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein describes the incomprehensibility of climate change through her maternal fears about the future her son will inherit (2014, 26-28). "Becoming a mother in an age of extinction brought the climate crisis into my heart in a new way," Klein reflects (419). "If the earth is indeed our mother, then far from the bountiful goddess of mythology, she is a mother facing a great many fer- tility challenges of her own," one who prompts us to create "a worldview based on regeneration and renewal rather than domination and depletion" (424). Within a work that the New York Times hailed as "the most mo- mentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring" (Nixon 2014, BR12), this ecofeminist invocation of the maternal invites pause, forcing us to reckon with the specter of an environmental politics that has been under attack by academics nearly since its origins. When Klein's envi - ronmentally just future rests on a vision of Earth as a woman needing help with her ovaries, it's time to revisit ecofeminism. Since its emergence in the 1970s, feminist scholars have often criticized ecofeminism for its dangerous essentialisms. Many of those well-founded critiques dismantled the problematic adoption of a second wave feminist perspective in which the universalizing category of "woman" assumed whiteness, heterosexuality, upper middle class status, and fertility. Others took issue with the reframing of feminized traits such as nurturing and pro- tectiveness as environmentally positive, suggesting that this subversion ac- tually reproduced the dualistic logics that it sought to unmake insofar as it refused to meaningfully interrogate the category of "nature." In the wake of these attacks, ecofeminist defenses began to emerge, arguing that ecofemi -

"Programas Sin Vergüenza (Shameless Programs)": Mapping Chicanas in Community Radio in the 1970s

Abstract: Women are not being presented fairly in public broadcasting media; moreover, the viewing and listening publics are shown a distorted image of women and women's role in society.-Report of the Task Force on Women in Public BroadcastingWhen they called in, they'd tell us they'd had to leave home to use the corner pay phone-God forbid their husbands should overhear them calling in to this programa sin verguenza-this 'shameless' radio program.-Maria Martin, "Crossing Borders"When President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke at the passing of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967-the last piece of his Great Society legislation- he affirmed that the airwaves belonged to all people, for the "enlightenment" of all people (Johnson 1967). This act formed lasting institutions: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), National Public Radio (NPR), and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). With these new entities, the 1970s witnessed an unprecedented surge of public broadcasting, including radio programs that continue to sound out of our radios to this day, notably NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Radio shows currently being uncovered like Somos Chicanas (We are chicanas) and Mujer (Woman) demonstrate that this moment of radio possibility led to much innovation by Chicana/o community broadcasters. Yet, even seven years after the Public Broadcasting Act was authorized, its promise to dedicate the airwaves to all people had yet to come to fruition. In 1974, the CPB commissioned a Task Force on Women in Public Broadcasting that signaled to a problem endemic to public media-not all people were being represented or employed in what promised to be a medium for all. Four years later, the CPB commissioned the Task Force on Minorities in Public Broadcasting (1978), once again affirming that the possibilities of public broadcasting needed to be reimagined.1 These Task Forces can be cast as a result of the social-movement activism of the 1970s, notably the women's and civil rights movements of this era. These reports provide a historical record of the state of women and minorities in public broadcasting, and the record shows women of color were neither equitably represented nor employed in this arena. Yet, beginning in 1975 and through the end of the decade, Chicanas harnessed community radio technologies in new and radical ways. I spin this historical record once more to listen for the tactics and strategies deployed by Chicana radio activists within programming and hiring, while amplifying their role as leaders of Chicana/o-controlled community radio stations.A small yet potent number of Chicanas in technical and leadership roles had a significant impact on the fabric that constitutes community radio broadcasting. Their model of alternative public media included programming for Chicanas and farmworkers, segments of the population that had not been addressed by mass media; a national Spanish-language news network; and the training of other women as producers and technical staff. The effects are lasting to this day, and yet there is little scholarship that documents and analyzes these strategies. I draw from the experiences of Chicanas at two Chicana/o-controlled community radio stations-KBBFFM in Santa Rosa, California, and KDNA in Granger, Washington-as examples of women making community radio in the 1970s to provide insights into the radical ways women were in fact creating cutting-edge programming while learning the technical skills to produce radio broadcasts they desired. Working-class women of Mexican descent may not be the first population we think of when we consider the deployment of feminist tactics in radio. Yet in the 1970s, Chicanas on community airwaves altered the cultural landscape of public broadcasting by incorporating just such tactics in programas sin verguenza (shameless programs) designed to reach women farmworkers who had never before been directly addressed by radio. Interviews with Maria Martin, KBBF-FM producer, and Rosa Ramon, KDNA cofounder and station manager, provide rich resources for mining feminist histories within community radio. …

Sex and the Me Decade: Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s

Abstract: In an article published in 1976 in New York magazine, author and journalist Tom Wolfe declared the arrival of the "Me Decade," arguing, "The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one's personality-remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one's very self. . . and observing, studying, and doting on it" (1988, 143). Wolfe highlights sex and sexuality as a key component of this "new alchemical dream," and indeed, the 1970s saw a solidification of self-help and therapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality aimed at self-exploration and personal transformation. This solidification is particularly noticeable within the booming dating and sex advice literature market of the 1970s. In stark contrast to earlier iterations of this genre, these texts helped establish a market for individually oriented relationship and sex guides that encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity formation and a critical element of self-awareness.Given the considerable scholarly attention paid to the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s is often treated as merely an extension of the previous decade, or as a dramatic and unfortunate reversal of gains made in the 60s. This lack of attention to the specificity of the 1970s is troubling for two reasons. First, the 1970s was a decade of profound shifts in the terrain of sexual and gender politics in the U.S., including the two landmark Supreme Court cases Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) and Roe v. Wade (1973); the publication of William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), Shere Hite's The Hite Report: A Nationwide Report on Female Sexuality (1976), Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex (1972), and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Women and Their Bodies: A Course (1970); and the release of Deep Throat (1972). The decade was also marked by high-profile battles over the Equal Rights Amendment and sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation; both issues generated considerable steam for what would become a powerful force in U.S. politics-the religious right and its insistent invocation of sexual and gender politics as wedge issues in the American political landscape. Second, the 1970s was a vitally important decade for specifically feminist and lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics, in which both domains (and their overlaps) exerted considerable pressure on popular sexual discourse. To ignore the 1970s as a distinct era of sexual thought in the U.S. is to miss an opportunity to understand the legacies of feminist and queer activism and scholarship and their continuing import for contemporary sexual politics. Revisiting the 1970s as feminist scholars may help illuminate contemporary struggles around sex and their feminist and queer implications.If the 1970s tends to be overlooked more generally, the role of dating and sex advice literature of this era, in particular, is grossly underexamined within feminist and sexuality studies, garnering significantly less attention than early- and mid-twentieth-century marriage manuals. While sales figures alone cannot help us gauge the impact these manuals had on people's sexual behavior, the impressive circulation of texts like Comfort's The Joy of Sex, for example, suggests that this literature struck a cultural nerve. The purchase and circulation of texts such as Comfort's is, in and of itself, a behavior that warrants scholarly attention, particularly given that these texts had to be acquired in brick-and-mortar shops. The acquisition of guides such as these suggests a public increasingly interested in pursuing sexual knowledge, and titillation, beyond the bounds of traditional sexual and gender norms.In this essay, I first trace a brief history of sex advice literature in the U.S., demonstrating that the 1970s literature marks a distinct shift in tone, audience, and content from the literature of earlier decades. …

Some of This Actually Happened

Abstract: "Some of this actually happened." So states the epigraph that opens David O. Russell's late 1970s period piece, American Hustle (2013). My attraction to this frank yet winking statement is that it might be the most honest claim any historian can make. As a media scholar who has attempted to train himself as a historian, I am often skeptical of reading fictions as historical evidence. Yet as a 1970s enthusiast born mid-decade (the week The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975] opened in the U.S., to be historically precise), I am interested in thinking through investments in moments that one almost lived through but doesn't actually remember: a past just before one's own experience that seems familiar or resonant.1 Is this just a curious form of nostalgia or a self-reflexively honest mode of historical consciousness? In this, perhaps, films can be more helpful as theory-explanatory lenses for how we make sense of the past now-than as a way to access the past itself.Todd Haynes's 1970s queer, glam-rock musical fantasia Velvet Goldmine opens with a more audacious epigraph: "Although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless be played at maximum volume" (1998). This proclamation of fiction is itself a coy reference to the back cover of David Bowie's album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which includes the instructions, "To be played at maximum volume" ( 1972). Velvet Goldmine invents a glittery and disorienting fantasy version of the past that is rigorously researched, yet it always exceeds the facts and screws with the details. This film very literally enacts a practice of queer historiography, if we understand queer to not only mean nonnormative or nonlinear (i.e., nonstraight) but also fabulous in both its stylishness and its deployment of fantasy and self-invention for a community so long denied recognition in the so-called real world.Velvet Goldmine is as nonchronological as memory and as temporally nonlinear as the search for historical evidence; indeed, the research process is rarely linear or teleological, and what makes an impression as historically important or meaningful is subjective. At key moments, the film is temporally disorienting and also fabulously blurs what was, what was performed, and what was imagined.2 Velvet Goldmine approaches the concept of a subcultural queer golden age as always already self-mythologizing and understands that any understanding of the past is always speculative and therefore a fusion of fact and fabulation.3 We might remember that in such seminal and fascinating key films of the late 1980s and early 1990s new queer cinema-including Looking for Langston (1989), The Making of Monsters ( 1991 ), Orlando (1992), Swoon (1992), and later The Watermelon Woman (1996)-perverting history was a recurring device for radically imagining the world otherwise or for offering queer countervisions of the past. Queer cinema, contemporaneous with the emergence of queer theory-and arguably intertwined with its formation-presented a project of retrospeculation, of seeing a different historical narrative that was not bound to separations of fact and fiction or between past and present.4Fantasy, of course, existed in queer and feminist texts of the 1970s- probably most prominently in gay male pornography and lesbian feminist science fiction. But there was also a radical impulse to manifest a queer and feminist actuality in the then-present rather than merely speculate. Even The Rocky Horror Picture Show urges us to be literal in our empowerment: "Don't dream it. Be it" (1975).A refusal to speculate was what most struck me upon recently encountering Chris Hegedus's and D. A. Pennebaker's 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall, which represents a 1971 panel discussion on feminism featuring Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch), Jill Johnston (author of Lesbian Nation), Jacqueline Ceballos (former president of the National Organization for Women), Diana Trilling (literary critic), and moderator Norman Mailer (male writer). …

Touched by Le Roy: Teens, Tourette's, and YouTube in the Twilight of Neoliberalism

Abstract: In early 2012, a story swept across broadcast and cable television, newspapers, the New Yorker, Slate, the Hujfington Post, and the Atlantic: in October 2011, roughly fifteen teenage girls in the town of Le Roy, New York, had begun exhibiting mysterious Tourette's syndrome-like symptoms, including spasms and verbal and nonverbal vocal outbursts. Some had also begun posting about their condition and experiences on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.1 Relating an isolated occurrence among a statistically insignificant group of people, the story went viral, thanks in no small part to aggregators such as the Hujfington Post and Gawker. Most coverage circled around questions of diagnosis. It also portrayed the young womens use of social media more as a pathogenic vector-a means by which thenillness spread-and less as a tool in their efforts to share their situation with the world.That illness was eventually identified as collective conversion disorder, more commonly called mass hysteria. The questions that drove mass media reporting on the story, beyond what caused that outbreak, included: What caused the outbursts and spasms? Were these symptoms psychosomatic? Were they caused by environmental factors, or perhaps faked? And what drove the women to perform them online and on television? Concern about the root cause of the outbreak also bracketed the young womens own quest for an explanation for their circumstances. Faced with a diagnosis of conversion disorder, they, along with their parents, rebelled, accusing the school district, their local health system, and the state of failing to locate an organic cause for the outbreak.Popular and professional concerns about regulating adolescence have lately expanded to include anxiety around what I refer to here as "intermediated" adolescence-a biosocial event/process that unfolds across a range of social and mass media. These concerns are often articulated through neoliberal discourses about social media's effects on personal competitiveness and success, less often in terms of a politics of intermediated social life. Intermediation weaves through this event and its reportage, raising further questions about the role that both mass and social media played in its circulation, transmission, and containment. This essay explores the event's etiology and symptomatology by examining how it articulated the circumstances of these young women as adolescents, as women, and as members of an aspirational middle class in structural and institutional conditions increasingly hostile to that class, generation, and gender. Because media effects theories also address these questions, it compares the general premises of dominant media effects models to newer, decentered theories of "insect media" and "virality" in analyzing this intermediated event. The essay also considers how the Le Roy, New York, outbreak may offer a lens through which to examine the ways we model, regulate, and theorize the intermediated and gendered adolescent's passage from childhood to adulthood as a social good.A durable narrative in media studies and communication since the early twentieth century has been that popular media, when consumed by developing children, have effects on those children that may negatively or positively alter their futures.2 Rich in data, but poor in syntheses that support its basic premises, this narrative has origins in early twentieth-century social sciences and persists to this day. A profound popular investment in this belief has also abetted the development of media industries and products that purport to be good for children.3 Both media effects research and the industries defined in relation to it depend upon that initial premise: that developing children, as subjects in formation, consume the messages and affective experiences that media offer and from them create the adult subjectivities they eventually occupy. During the Depression, studies by the Payne Fund framed moviegoing as a significant factor in children's eventual success as adults. …

"To Live a Humanity under the Skin": Revolutionary Love and Third World Praxis in 1970s Chicana Feminism

Abstract: Love, naming both affection and an expression of ethical commitment, is often considered foundational to feminist and queer frameworks of collective social change. As Maria Lugones argues, a feminist practice of love that recognizes interdependence and seeks to understand other women's perspectives can serve as the groundwork for coalition building, particularly among women of color in the United States (1987, 8). Scholars and activists have typically followed Lugones and subsequently Chela Sandoval in tracing the emergence of love as a radical ethic and political methodology to the interventions of U.S. third world feminism and women of color coalition building in the 1970s (Lugones 1987; Sandoval 2000; Nash 2011; Moore and Casper 2014). As Sandoval explains, U.S. third world feminists developed a "hermeneutics of love," a method and mode of resistance rooted in collective care and transformation (2000, 140). In this article, I contribute to elucidating U.S. third world feminist love politics by tracing what I describe as a revolutionary love-praxis in the work of Chicana feminist writer Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland Martinez and her collaborations with fellow Chicana journalists Dolores Varela and Enriqueta Vasquez during the 1970s.Active in the civil rights movement, women's liberation organizations, and the Chicano movement, Martinez also contributed to left and emergent political formations of Chicana feminism and U.S. third world feminism during the 1970s.1 Martinez's collaborators and movement scholar-activists such as Tony Platt and Angela Davis have celebrated Martinez's dedication to and influence on Chicana/o and interracial movements for social justice (Platt 2013; Davis 2013). Yet Martinez's contributions to theorizing and practicing Chicana feminism, third world feminism, and Black and Latina/o coalition building have not been examined in-depth in feminist scholarship. Through an analysis of Martinez's journalism about transnational alliance building in relation to writing by fellow Chicana feminists Varela and Vasquez, I trace an emergent Chicana feminist praxis that links interpersonal feeling and affection to the project of revolutionary internationalism, the latter a political commitment to global proletarian struggle against capitalism and imperialism most often associated with third world Marxist theorists, U.S. Black Power, and Asian American and Chicano radical politics during the 1970s (Pulido 2006; Wilkins 2007, Watkins 2012; Young 2006).2 The revolutionary love-praxis that I locate in the work of Martinez and her collaborators reflects an alternative framework to left paradigms of revolutionary discipline and political love popular in the 1970s. Martinez and fellow Chicana feminist writers Varela and Vasquez portray experiential feeling and expressions of interpersonal care as constitutive of, rather than incidental to, collective struggles against capitalism, imperialism, racism, and sexism.Love and the Dilemma of Revolutionary DisciplineIn May 1967 leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a key civil rights organization known for leading lunch counter sit-ins and the Mississippi Freedom Summer project, voted to transition to an all-black staff and membership. In the months following the decision, Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland Martinez, the director of the New York City office of SNCC and one of two Chicanas on staff, offered a singular analysis of the shifting political vision in SNCC.3 In a series of notes titled "Black, White and Tan" submitted to the SNCC Atlanta offices in June 1967, Martinez provides a "personal and incomplete attempt to think things out" with respect to SNCC members' growing black nationalism and exploration of third world revolutionary struggles as models for social change. In Martinez's assessment, the growing "ideology of blackness" in SNCC and emergent "consciousness of peoplehood" among black Americans represents a stage of struggle necessitating a consideration of the "price of revolution, the human toll of righting wrong" (1967, 2). …

Empowerment or Equality?: Legacies of Free to Be … You and Me

Abstract: Since Free to Be... You and Me marked its fortieth anniversary in 2012, I've spoken about this groundbreaking children's album, book, and television special to audiences across the country. Along with historian Laura Lovett, I coedited a collection titled When We Were Free to Be, which documents the production of the Free to Be project by Mario Thomas and her creative team during the 1970s. Our volume also explores the reception of Free to Be among critics, parents, and children and offers personal reflections and social critiques by journalists, scholars, and artists today.From the moment the vinyl LPs first hit the record store shelves, Free to Be became a cultural phenomenon. For the first generation of Free to Be kids, this musical melange of songs and stories still stirs up a heady mix of emotions, memories, and even tears. Revisiting Free to Be prompts adults to time travel back to their elementary school days to reclaim those bygone moments when the future beckoned with a boundless sense of open possibility.Free to Be influenced listeners' values, politics, and even core identities in two fundamental ways. First, it provided an affirming narrative to boys who did not conform to dominant, heteronormative standards of masculinity. As Mario Thomas recounts, over the decades, countless gay men have told her that "William's Doll" and "It's All Right to Cry" provided "the first inklings" that "they were going to be okay" (Thomas 2012,13). Many straight fathers, too, recall finding in these lyrics reassuring license to grow into nurturing parents. Although Free to Be's creators still assumed the existence of only two genders linked to biological sex, families of LGBT youth often praise the album as a pioneering manual of social acceptance.Second, Free to Be schooled young children in a particular set of liberal feminist ideals. With some important exceptions (discussed below), Free to Be s feminist politics are strongly individualistic: it asserts that children should pursue their interests and talents regardless of stereotypes, and it invites them to embrace their uniqueness (and thus to accept differences among other people, too.) The story "Atalanta" teaches girls to relish independence, adventure, curiosity, and competition rather than value marriage as life's crowning achievement. And as expressed in the song "Parents Are People," Free to Be affirms the importance of paid work and parental roles for both mothers and fathers within heteronormative, nuclear family life.Indeed, we might regard Free to Be as the original primer of what is now sometimes called "empowerment feminism": a "be it all-have it all" ethos that tells girls and women that they can succeed in all realms of life by aiming high, working hard, staying confident, and-dare I say it-"leaning in." Countless women have testified to Free to Be s emboldening influence on their identities as equal-opportunity feminists; fittingly, Mario Thomas's own niece, Dionne Gordon Kirschner, offers a representative account of this experience. Raised during the 1970s by a capable single mother-and also benefiting from supportive ties with Mario's extended family-Dionne sees little distinction between the independent women who raised her and the Free to Be philosophy that suffused her childhood:My aunt has always been "Free to Be" in my eyes. I grew up feeling that I wanted to attack life in the same way. I knew that whatever dreams I had would be my own and not a product of what others wanted for me____ Along with my mom and my aunt as role models, Free to Be empowered me in its one of a kind, progressive, and skillful storytelling. As a young person, it left me feeling energized, transformed, and capable of taking on anything that might come my way. (Kirschner 2012,22)Reading these words, it's hard not to feel impressed that a children's album could leave such an inspiring imprint. I myself was a Free to Be kid in suburban St. Louis during this time; I, too, belted out these melodies, scarcely realizing, until many years later, how profoundly they would shape my aspirations, ambitions, and beliefs. …

Above the Line

Abstract: WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2015) © 2015 by Cheryl Dunye. All rights reserved. Twenty plus years ago I began my work in the media arts as a filmmaker with three short films, She Don’t Fade, The Potluck and the Passion, and Greetings from Africa. These projects gained international acclaim and success for their positive and empowering representation of black lesbian identities. Each explores the intersection of race, class, and sexuality while investigating the codes of behavior, power dynamics, and body language performed in them. Filmmaking, without the constraints of a feature-film format, allows me to reach viewers like me who are hungry for any mediated representation of their real lives on the screen. Short filmmaking has allowed me to observe as well as create a heightened cinematic drama and portraiture that is palpable and functions as a strategy for overturning sexism, racism, and homophobia in the media arts. My work incorporates an autoethnographic focus building on a visual language that explores the intersection of truth and fiction in my life. Filmmaking opens a nexus of doorways, pages, and places—the timeless depths of my own eternity, choreographed in the moment, clinging with departure. And when audiences cross through these doorways with me, the ERA is at work. After my move to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2012, I found myself at the crossroads of another personal and political discovery with the vibrant black trans male and masculine-of-center communities that lack visibility within queer media and cultural production. Inspired by the work of Oakland queer of color activists, I created Black Is Blue as a short film exploring the everyday racism and transphobic experiences in the lives of these black Above the Line

Equality, Sameness, Difference: Revisiting the Equal Rights Amendment

Abstract: The Equal Rights Amendment, originally the brainchild of suffragist Alice Paul in the early twentieth century, endorses a particular view of equality. That view, as expressed in Section 1 of the 1972 amendment, endorses equal treatment as same treatment. This understanding is both the cause of praise and of pause, historically. Harvard University professor Paul A. Freund wrote in 1971 that the standard of sameness is difficult to apply given the vast and varied roles played in society by the different sexes ( 1971 ). A 1971 piece by Barbara A. Brown, Thomas I. Emerson, Gail Falk, and Ann E. Freedman championed the amendment on the standard of sameness, noting, "Our legal structure will continue to support and command an inferior status for women so long as it permits any differentiation in legal treatment on the basis of sex" (873). The equation of equality with sameness has been the subject of intense feminist debates, perhaps most famously characterized in Joan W. Scott's essay "Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference" (1988). Deconstructing this binary, Scott insists that when we claim that equality and difference are antithetical,it denies the way in which difference has long figured in political notions of equality and it suggests that sameness is the only ground on which equality can be claimed. It thus puts feminists in an impossible position, for as long as we argue within the terms of a discourse set up by this opposition we grant the current conservative premise that because women cannot be identical to men in all respects, we cannot expect to be equal to them. (46)In spite of Scott's powerful argument, this dichotomizing of equality and difference not only hindered ERA advocates in the 1970s but it also continues to constrain several struggles for so-called equality today. In our work as a collective, we see this struggle most starkly in debates surrounding "marriage equality," where rhetorical and visual narratives of sameness saturate pro-gay-marriage political campaigns.1 "Sameness" in this case both makes a claim to normalcy and respectability that has been historically denied to sexual minorities but also levels a demand that the state recognize only gay and lesbian kinship structures that mimic the ideology of family already upheld by contemporary marriage law: family units headed by monogamous conjugal couples. Here, difference is once again sacrificed in the clamoring toward equality, while ignoring much greater need for comprehensive family law reform. As legal scholar Nancy D. Polikoff notes, gays and lesbians are asking what straight people have that they don't, instead of asking what kind of legal protections might we need to support our families as they are lived and sustain us, not as they are imagined (2008).In Against Equality, we see the question of "equality " as one that is overlaid by the history of the ERA, but also by the history of what are broadly construed as "minority rights" and/or affirmative action in the U.S. Today, especially after the June 2015 Supreme Court decision effectively legalizing gay marriage, it is-incorrectly-assumed that women and ethnic and racial minorities have achieved their share of equality, while the right of gays and lesbians to equality remains one of the last frontiers. We know, of course, that this is false on several fronts, even putting aside the problem of framing the attainment of rights in such ahistorical terms.Women in the U.S. still only earn seventy-eight cents to the dollar and face considerable challenges in a culture and an economy which penalizes women for pregnancy and single status despite legislative fixes like the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which have yet to rectify the matter of unfair pay discrimination for women (Ellis, Hartmann, and Hegewisch 2015, l). For people of color, the bar has hardly moved, and the recent attention finally being paid to the criminalization of black and brown people, the result of several publicly documented murders by police in particular, indicates that people of color have hardly achieved anything approaching parity. …

"Little Boats" in the Storm: Racial Ambiguity and Gender in Two Postemancipation Adoptions

Abstract: Exactly what transgression Mary Ann Lamb committed is unknown, but her adoptive parents, Loren and Nancy Thompson, considered them serious things "which we had to reprove her for." Lamb, a young black woman of "about 20," had visited the city of Kingston, Jamaica, to bid the Thompsons farewell as they departed for their native home in the United States (Thompson 1858b). They left her behind and did not return for more than a year. Perhaps the Thompsons caught Lamb "drinking rum with friends." Perhaps she flirted. Or perhaps she "rebuked the Thompsons for leaving her" (Kenny 2010,192). Whatever she did, it clearly contravened the gendered etiquette by which the Thompsons, white emissaries of the American Missionary Association in postemancipation Jamaica, lived and that they sought to cultivate among their congregants.In 1875, another daughter rebelled. Writing to her guardian, the radical Republican "carpetbagger" Albion Tourgee, nineteen-year-old Adaline Pattillo announced her intention to withdraw from the Hampton Institute, where she had been enrolled for four years. She would instead return to Yanceyville, North Carolina, where her biological mother, Louisa, and sister, Mary, remained. Motivated by guilt and loyalty, Pattillo had decided to devote her time to them. Tourgee had envisioned a very different path for Ada, as he called her. Although Pattillo was born a slave, Tourgee expected that formal education would provide middle-class respectability, and perhaps a limited, gender-appropriate public role, joining white reformers in "uplifting the race" (Elliott 2006). Tourgee had moved Pattillo into his North Carolina home in 1869, directed his wife, Emma, to educate her, and sent her to Hampton, with this result in mind (Elliott 2006; Woods 2013). Pattillo had other plans for both herself and her blood relatives. "I do want," she stressed with an underline, in an unequivocal expression of insistence, "a home of our own & I will not feel content until I get one" (Pattillo 1875).Although separated by seventeen years and nearly two thousand miles, these two acts of rebellion reveal what was possibly a common outcome of transracial adoption in postemancipation societies. Historically, the family has been a primary site in which the racial and gender ideologies of its members, including children, are formed. The phenomenon holds true for the end of slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic (Scully and Paton 2005). Concepts of race in the nineteenth century partly relied on the notion that "the filiation of individuals transmits from generation to generation a substance both biological and spiritual and thereby inscribes them in a temporal community known as 'kinship'" (Balibar 1991, 100). Thus, the disruption of this "genealogical scheme" by the transfer of nonwhite subjects from black households to those of white reformers raises questions concerning how the racial and gender subjectivities of freedchildren were affected.1 Transracial adoptees lived on the cusp of two families, included fully in neither. By examining these arrangements from the perspectives of children, adopters, and, where sources allow, biological mothers who sought to reclaim their offspring, the present essay will show that the result for the children in question manifested in conflicted identities and an ambiguous sense of place within race and gender categories.The early decades of freedom provide fruitful sites of examination for these phenomena. Before emancipation, abolitionists frequently criticized the effects of bondage on enslaved families (Dixon 1997) but had little to no power to directly intervene. Slavery's demise provided reformers like the Tourgees and Thompsons a degree of access to governance of black children that property rights of slaveholders had hitherto largely prevented. Moreover, the adoptions occurred when racial hierarchies that many had once assumed stable were undone. Transracial adoption, Mark Jerng argues, was most common when "national traumas focused on the formation of. …

Introduction: The 1970s

Abstract: Initially, our thinking about this special issue, The 1970s, began with Wonder Woman. The television series ran from 1975 to 1979. As children we watched, amazed by her magic belt, her nonviolent golden Lasso of Truth, her bullet-deflecting bracelets, and, of course, her killer (though not deadly) tiara. In our girlhood memories, she stood for all of us: Wonder Woman the Chicana, Wonder Woman the South American Amazon. For us, she was the outsider woman hero with whom we could identify. And then came the cyborg, the Bionic Woman, whose television series ran from 1976 to 1978. On the big screen, too, there was Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones, and a host of super women who would feed our imaginations and make us believe we were, indeed, "Free to Be."These popular versions of empowered women reflected the revolutionary potential of the 1970s. Following the various strands of activisms around civil and human rights in the previous decades, women activists-second wave feminists-worked to shape new paradigms for thinking about gender, sexism, racism, sexuality, reproductive rights, religion, labor, colonialism, technology, art, music, and the environment. They transformed accepted notions of female power regarding their bodies, their pleasure, and their work. And they launched a host of interventions and institutions that will continue to haunt and inspire for generations to come.The Feminist Press itself began in 1970. Its journal, W5Q. (originally published as Women's Studies Newsletter), first appeared in 1972. The same year, Ms. magazine launched its inaugural issue, which featured the headline "Wonder Woman for President" (fig. l). The accompanying image de- picts a towering woman warrior whose utopian ideal can effect real-world changes and defeat the machines of war, whose stride spans the length of a street, and whose golden lasso protects a city encased in its electrified pyramid. She seems to signal a new era, an era in which peace and justice seemed within reach. In the magazine, Gloria Steinern claimed her as a feminist icon, an inspiring symbol of female power. As feminists we know plenty of real women, wondrous in their power, whose labors sought to change the world in the decades (and centuries) before and after the 1970s. Even Ms. magazine's Wonder Woman imagery stands on a legacy; it extends a 1943 cover of the comic book issue #7 that envisions a future President Wonder Woman pictured among a crowd of women who voted her into office (Matsuuchi 2012, 122). That future is still to come.Separate from Ms. magazine, DC Comics sought to incorporate the Zeitgeist of 1970s Wonder Woman as feminist in its 1972 Wonder Woman Women's Lib. The comic book's editors commissioned a series from black and gay science-fiction author and feminist ally Samuel R. Delany, who envisioned six parts, "each with a different villain," in the series:The first was a corrupt department store owner; the second was the head of a supermarket chain who tries to squash a women's food co-operative. Another villain was a college advisor who really felt a woman's place was in the home and who assumed if you were a bright woman, then something was probably wrong with you psychologically, and so forth. It worked up to a gang of male thugs trying to squash an abortion clinic staffed by women surgeons. And Wonder Woman was going to do battle with each of these and triumph. (2001)Ann Matsuuchi describes this 1970s moment in Wonder Woman's feminist history as an opportunity to explore the politics of representation as they inform feminisms in popular culture. In the issue "The Grandee Caper," the only one published before the series' abrupt cancellation, Wonder Woman wears pants. And, like the comic's noteworthy brown women characters, she looks for employment in New York's Lower East Side. When a department store owner wants to exploit the women and simultaneously capitalize on Wonder Woman's brand, the women unite to organize for equitable pay. …

When Will the Children Be Free?: Looking Back on Free to Be … You and Me

Abstract: Movements of wildly different political aspirations have long understood that if you want to change the world, you start with the children. In Free to Be ... You and Me, second wave feminists embraced this idea, creating childrens songs and stories that are fun, pointed, and enduring. Its creators often claim that at the time, there were no feminist childrens stories. Mario Thomas visits the childrens section of the bookstore to find that "not only had nothing changed" since she was a child, "but in some cases things had gotten worse" (Thomas 2012, 14). Then, Gloria Steinern introduces Thomas to Letty Cottin Pogrebin, editor of Ms. magazine's "Stories for Free Children," who tells her she has "trouble finding even one book a month" that meets her "nonsexist, nonracist, and multicultural" criteria, and may have to "buy original stories written just for Ms." (Pogrebin 2012, 42). Realizing that she will also need to create feminist stories, Thomas enlists an all-star cast, including Pogrebin; producer Carole Hart; writer-composers Stephen Lawrence, Carol Hall, Sheldon Harnick, Shel Silverstein, and Mary Rodgers; performers Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, Mel Brooks, Carol Channing, Shirley Jones, Diana Ross, Tom Smothers; and many more. The result is the record album Free to Be... You and Me (Thomas and Friends 1972), followed two years later by a book and prime-time TV special.It's true that there were distressingly few feminist children's stories in 1972, but some of Free to Be's predecessors deserve mention. Anticipating Free to Bes "Atalanta," Jay Williams created feminist fairy tales in the 1960s. In his The Practical Princess (1969), Princess Bedelia defeats a dragon and rescues the prince; in his Philbert the Fearful ( 1966), a knight succeeds by thinking instead of fighting. A precursor to Free to Be s "Parents Are People," Eve Merriam's Mommies at Work (1961) shows mommies doing "all kinds of work" including rancher, dancer, writer, doctor, air traffic controller, architect ("bridge-building mommies with blueprints and T squares"), scientist ("atom-splitting mommies"), and factory worker ("assembly-line mommies building cars"). Part spoof of Kay Thompson and Hilary Knights Eloise (1955/1983), and part manifesto for liberated childhood, Sandra Scoppettone and Louise Fitzhugh's Suzuki Beane concludes with beatnik Suzuki declaring, "Children Are People," after which she and her "square" classmate Henry Martin set off to find a place where children can be themselves. As she tells her parents, "i have to go where i can be me" (1961, 87). A decade before the New Seekers sang the opening track on Free to Be, Suzuki was already dreaming of a land "where the children are free."While Free to Be wasn't the first to give voice to that dream, it-more than any other single work-helped establish feminist stories for children as commercially viable. As Leslie Paris notes, "The Free to Be enterprise was one of the most financially and culturally successful feminist projects of the 1970s. Nominated for a Grammy the year it was released, the album sold a very respectable 150,000 copies by March 1974." The book landed on the New York Times best-seller list and won an American Library Association Award. The TV special "drew a large audience (a 18.6 rating/27 share) and won both an Emmy award for children's prime-time entertainment and a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting" (2011, 520). Indeed, though the Ms. Foundation was expected to underwrite Free to Be, Free to Be actually ended up underwriting the Ms. Foundation (526).Beyond bringing antisexist literature into American homes and classrooms, Free to Be helped bring second wave feminism into mainstream American culture. However, like all great progressive cultural works, it did not have as profound an impact as its creators and fans hoped it would. Throughout the "Creating a World for Free Children" section of Lori Rotskoff and Laura L. Lovett's fascinating When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made, contributors convey the sense that-while sexism is far from over and gender inequalities have not been solved-Free to Be has helped create a world in which, in the words of educator Barbara Sprung, "several generations of children have grown up knowing that it's all right for boys to cry, that girls can be leaders, and that both mothers and fathers can take care of babies" (2012, 77). …

Nurturing Anger: Race, Affect, and Transracial Adoption

Abstract: My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.-Audre LordeMy daughter is two months old in the first picture taken of us together. She is lying on the bed in our railroad apartment in Jersey City, nestled into a dip made by the weight of her body on the duvet. I am crouched at her feet, leaning over, smiling into her face. She looks up at me. Her brown-pearcolored skin darkening into an acorn-hued sheen at her temples where it meets her loose black curls. I am tickling her stomach through a too-big pink shirt with a picture of a blue-frosted, cherry-topped pink cupcake on its front. The shirt her interim care provider dressed her in that morning. The shirt that creased into folds under her birth mother's hands when she placed her baby onto my lap that afternoon.My fingers curl over the cupcake shirt, red at the knuckles, skin yellow white and freckled. My other hand touches my daughter s. Hers is balled into a fist; brown fingers pressed against my flat, pink palm.One late spring day three months later, I dress my daughter in camouflage pants and a pink hoodie and we take our first trip on the ferry from Jersey City to Manhattan. I scan the grass near the waterfront at Battery Park for a place to sit so that my daughter can explore and play. I spot some room next to a circle of mothers and babies. These mothers have yellow-blonde highlights and manicured fingers. My daughter sees one of the pink-faced babies. A boy dressed in a striped shirt; his red hat casts a shadow over his blue eyes. Her arms reach outward. She topples over."Say hi to the baby," I say.The baby's mother turns. She doesn't look at me, but her eyes, blue like mine, glance at my daughter. Her hair, yellowish and wavy like mine, flicks as she shakes her head. With one of her hands, pink skinned and blue veined like mine, she scoops her baby away. She turns her back, shoulders squared, her body now a barrier.Anger seeps into me, beginning at my fingertips, tensing the muscles in my hands, spiraling into my upper arms, spilling into a tight band across my chest, stuck in the space between my collarbone and my throat: This white mother did not want the velvet-textured, sweet-and-sour-smelling brown skin of my daughter's hand to touch her son's pillowy-white, redfinger-tipped hand. This white mother did not want my black daughter to touch her white son.The anger I feel toward this white mother coagulates, immovable and untranslatable because it is not mine. My not-quite-six-month-old daughter cannot talk or walk, name her emotions, or comprehend the relationship between herself and the people around her, but today she has been judged, rejected, and excluded because of the color of her skin. I am angry but I am not the object of this white woman's racism. My anger belongs to my daughter.My daughter is five now and the anger I experienced then continues to provoke questions: What will my daughter feel the first time she consciously experiences racism? And every time after that first time? Will she express or repress her feelings? If she is angry, will her anger hurt her? Or will others hurt her because of her anger? Will she be afraid of her anger or, as Lorde exhorts, will she learn from it? How can my daughter experience anger as a nurturing emotion-one that will help her to understand her identity as a black child with a white mother- and as an emotion that will enable her to navigate and respond to racism?Prompted by these questions, in this essay I examine anger and consider its ramifications for black girls who are adopted by white mothers. I use memoirs by two transracially adopted women-Scottish poet Jackie Kay's (2011) Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey and Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir by Pauline Black (2011), the lead singer of the ska band The Selecter. I chose these texts because they intersect with my reflections about my daughter and because, like my daughter, both authors have white British mothers from working-class backgrounds. …

Bicycles and Juvenile Masculinity During World War I

Abstract: Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the bicycle was extremely popular. By 1900, however, sales in the United States experienced a dramatic fall. After coming to terms with the fact that the "Golden Age" of the bicycle was over, members of the bicycle industry undertook concerted efforts to recover sales. Those attempts included cooperative advertising and marketing efforts that might broaden the bicycle's appeal beyond upper- and middle-class men. At first, the industry turned to "society women." Women had actually taken to the bicycle a few decades earlier, but the industry had yet to concentrate advertising and marketing on females. Even after more attention was devoted to female riders in advertisements, there seemed to be little success in regaining womens enthusiasm. This is evident in how short-lived that campaign would be in comparison with the industry's next campaign-one that focused on a younger demographic.This essay focuses on the bicycle industry's pursuit of juvenile consumers in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. It examines how anxieties aroused by World War I presented an opportunity to promote bicycles as beneficial for the nation. Attempts to exploit concerns about the nation's fitness were so successful that the industry continued appeals to juveniles' health, individualism, and patriotism well after the war was over. The connections the industry drew between these virtues and juveniles (specifically boys) left an indelible mark upon American ideals of mobility and masculinity. As a product of one of the first industries to base its marketing strategies on the emerging child consumer, the campaign to link bicycles with boys offered an example of how significant juvenile consumers had become. The strategies the industry employed to capture the interest of juveniles reveal the social and cultural ideals that guided childrens entrance into American consumer society.Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears have argued that the genesis of American consumerism sprang from the preoccupations of white elite adults (1983, x). It would not take long, however, before American children also embraced values of consumerism. Steven Mintz shows that manufacturers soon marketed toys directly to children, but this development occurred earlier than he suggests. Whereas Mintz locates it in the late 1920s (2004, 217), Lisa Jacobson provides evidence that the targeting of child consumers began as early as 1911. By that time, children's magazines such as American Boy "were trumpeting the untapped potential of the boy market and the dynamic salesmanship of the boy consumer in the advertising press.... During the interwar years ... the child consumer became the focus of... advertising campaigns for everything from breakfast cereal and toys to big-ticket items such as radios and automobiles" (Jacobson 2004, 16-17). Such attempts to appeal directly to children were rife among marketing strategies of the bicycle industry even before the United States entered World War I.Jacobson acknowledges that the 1920s were a "major turning point in the field" as even the advertising trade itself, not just children's magazines, "s[a]ng the praises of the child consumer" (28). The bicycle industry followed a similar path, at first experimenting with children's advertisements in the first half of the 1910s. By the 1920s, it was poised to go all in. Jacobson argues that general marketing to boys marked a "privileging of boy culture" in a manner that offered psychic rewards to advertisers and that more overt appeals to boys' consumer appetites demonstrated "advertisers' new assessment of boy culture" (105, 123). This essay complicates her argument by contending that, at least for bicycle marketing, boys were also targeted because they were convenient. Not only were boys thought to be enterprising consumers who actively influenced their peers, thereby increasing sales, they also provided an opportunity for broadening appeals without reimaging the product. …

The Pornoethnography of Boys in the Sand: Fetishisms of Race and Class in the 1970s Gay Fire Island Pines

Abstract: Aspiration for the Gay UniversalBoys in the Sand is a lyrical, joyful celebration of a utopian space- Bayside, Poolside, Inside-where men take pleasure in one another in the face of normative taboos...An idealized, hypersexual male emerges in each episode from the conjuring imagination of a solitary desiring subject. The sex that follows serves to validate and celebrate, while never exactly normalizing, the difference of gay sex.-Linda Williams, Screening SexJoyful and self-absorbed, Boys in the Sand rises and falls on a look that fit well with an aspirational-assimilationist understanding of homosexuality: to be liberated does not mean taking to the streets, but creating a utopian space in which to simply be one's sexual self. Thinking too much about the social and political standing of that sex and sexuality is a drag. One daydreams of hot men, and they should simply materialize.-Cindy Patton, L.A. Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film ClassicConceived as an almost abstract visual poem, Boys was intended by its maker to reflect the various aspects of the "universal gay experience," moving from discovery to experimentation to first love and the acceptance of life shared with a "significant other," ultimately resulting in self-knowledge and sexual bliss.-Dries Vermeulen, "In the Beginning ..."Despite its transgressive subject matter and hardcore action, Wakefield Poole's porn film Boys in the Sand may be described as a dreamlike idyll. The low-budget "porno chic" flick was set and shot in the Fire Island Pines, the gay sexual mecca of the 1960s and 1970s.1 An immediate commercial success upon its premiere at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York City on December 29, 1971, it grossed $44,755 during the first two weeks alone and charted at #46 on Variety's list of 50 Top Grossing Films (Standard Data Corp., NY, 1972). Narratively, the film is composed of three lyrical, nonsequential vignettes entitled "Bayside," "Poolside," and "Inside." It documents the one-on-one sexual encounters of the lead actor Casey Donovan (with Peter Fisk, Danny Di Cioccio, and Tommy Moore) in three disparate yet interlocking spaces in the Pines, as Donovan maneuvers through the wooded landscape of the Meat Rack as well as the constructed space of Fire Island's modernist architecture. As several North American reviewers at the time of the movie's release have pointed out, Boys in the Sand presents what we might here characterize as a brand of sexual pastoralism: in the film's portrayal, gay male sexuality appears to be benign, shame free, and nonthreatening. In an Advocate review enlivened with much camp flair, Jesse St. Ives remarks on the film's "mystic bent," for example, by identifying Boys' allusion to Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus in its opening sequence (1972, 25). In a 1977 interview with the film's director, Peter Pappas further notes how sexuality in Poole's cinematic oeuvre more generally is dissociated from stigma and shame (1977,17). In the same interview, Poole himself brings out the pastoralist undertone of Boys quite explicitly in a nostalgic lookback when asked to comment on a sequence in his new production Moving: "The first section [of Moving] was really a takeoff on myself, Boys in the Sand again, with Cal and the pretty house and everything's beautiful and green and gorgeous" (24).2Three decades later, contemporary commentators, in various historicizing analyses, similarly see the film as engaging in contestation over the meaning of homosexuality. Linda Williams, in Screening Sex, adopts a Foucauldian frame and maintains that the formation of a reverse discourse is central to historically contextualizing the film's idealization of gay sex (2008, 153-54). Cindy Patton, in L.A. Plays Itself/Boys in the Sand: A Queer Film Classic, further parses various strands of gay and lesbian politics in early 1970s culture and observes how the film betrays an "aspirational-assimilationist" leaning in its narrative construction of a depoliticized sexual utopia (2014, 73). …

New Feminist Approaches to the Study of Race and Sound

Abstract: Gaye Theresa Johnson's Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013Deborah R. Vargas's Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012In 2003 trailblazers of feminist sound studies Frances Aparicio and Candida Jaquez astutely observed that, given the overdetermined complexity of new global media regimes, critical attention to contemporary circulations of Latina/o popular musics throughout the Americas would require no less than "the transforming of traditional methodologies and theoretical frameworks that have defined music and music making primarily through discrete categories such as national identity and musical genre" (2003, 9). Just over a decade later, a new generation of scholarship guided by this intellectual imperative has accomplished just that, deploying the analytics of critical race, gender, and queer studies to remap the contours, content, and conversations that have conventionally animated the disciplines of popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and sound studies. Gaye Theresa Johnsons Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles and Deborah R. Vargas's Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda offer noteworthy contributions to this emergent interdisciplinary ferment. Significantly, both authors complicate the subject/object relationship that has traditionally structured ethnomusicological inquiry, turning our eyes and tuning our ears to how cultural workers have mobilized repertories of song, sound, rhythm, and performance to critique, negotiate, and subvert the constraints of everyday life. Through the use of "alternative archives," feminist of color analyses, and innovative methodologies, Johnson and Vargas persuasively demonstrate that geographies of sound must be understood as terrains of material and ideological struggle upon which aggrieved communities disrupt dominant historical narratives, negotiate structural forces and institutions, and fashion alternative social worlds.At a moment when the so-called "black/brown" divide prevails as a commonsense axiom within U.S. public discourse, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity provides a timely intervention into antagonism-focused histories of relational racial formation. Johnsons richly researched historiography of "Afro-Chicano" cultural activism in post-World War II Los Angeles details the "parallel but not identical histories of labor exploitation, housing segregation, and cultural demonization" that have politicized black and brown communities in urban Southern California (ix). Critical of the media narratives and institutional records that depict African Americans and Chicanos as continually at odds, Johnson instead chronicles a neglected history of the "infrapolitics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color" (xv). Combining the methods and frames of ethnic and cultural studies, urban geography, and social movement history, Johnson deftly demonstrates how spatial proximity and cultural contact set the stage for black and brown communities in urban Los Angeles to "us[e] the physical places they inhabited and the discursive spaces they imagined to assert their common humanity and forge shared struggles grounded in mutuality and solidarity" (x).Spaces of Conflict is theoretically anchored in the convergence of two analytical repertoires: the spatial and the sonic. Johnson engages the geographic most robustly in her ongoing discussion of the dialectics of spatial mobility and spatial immobilization. She argues that the dynamic structural forces that have shaped postwar Los Angeles-urban renewal, deindustrialization, the erosion of the welfare state, and the resurgence of anti-immigrant revanchism-have consistently constrained the physical, social, and economic mobility of the city's poor communities of color. …

ERA's Legacy Calls for Intersectionality in Words and Action

Abstract: Reflecting on the movement for equal rights, the question before us is how to envisage the campaign, how to address the ways in which inequalities intersect on the issues of fairness, equity, and parity. If justice is concerned with respect and opportunity and endeavoring to provide resources to realize democracy, then a continued campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment should take the shape of addressing and connecting sexism with race, class, and homophobia.My own perspective comes from my experience working as a community organizer in the 1970s, as I worked through the Chicano civil rights movement and worked toward defining a Chicana feminism that articulated class, gender, and race as a response to a masculinized discourse of national liberation and to a depiction of women's liberation as a white middle-class endeavor.The current assault on women can be traced to the rise of the "New Right" and Reaganism. Much like the "postracial" myth, women in these movements do not have equal rights. The slogan of "family values" is deep-rooted in the ideology against feminism. So, my thoughts focus on how we can connect issues, bring greater context to issues of parity.As I followed the case of Ellen Paos 2012 suit against the venture capital company in Silicon Valley, I kept thinking of the way in which race and gender intersect-exoticizing Asian women in masculinized spaces. Pao filed suit in 2012 against the firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers, where she had been a junior partner. Charging gender imbalance and bias, the trial revealed embarrassing disclosures about how Pao and other women were treated at the firm, as well as Silicon Valley's corporate culture and its lack of diversity.Could the legal team have brought race and gender together in the lawsuit? Pao was criticized simultaneously for being too timid and for being too aggressive, for speaking up too much and for not speaking up enough. Her performance ratings were vague and unspecific. This unclarity speaks to the catch-22 for women of color in the workforce. Had her legal team presented these annual evaluations as framed by gendered and racial discourse, perhaps the analysis of discrimination would have revealed a complex understanding of what women of color in the work force confront. Issues of justice must be concerned with how wealth, respect, and opportunity are distributed. Considering gender inequity alone limits the way in which women of color are restricted from multiple and simultaneous oppressions that must be remedied.Employment inequality isn't the only inequity that cuts through women's lives in complex ways. Statistics of incarcerated women show more than one million women are currently under the supervision of the criminal justice system in the U.S. Remarkably, black women represent over 30 percent of all females incarcerated under state or federal jurisdiction and Hispanic women represent roughly 17 percent of all incarcerated women in the criminal justice system. According to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, "Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to be incarcerated in prison or jail, and Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely to be institutionalized (Sayers 2014). The statistics underscore systemic racial bias, the school-to-prison pipeline, lack of access to mental health treatment, co-occurring disorders, domestic violence, and poverty. The racial disenfranchisement must be tied to the fight for equal rights as issues of distribution of power are connected.Equal rights is about the distribution of social benefits. …

Free to Be … You and Me: Revisiting a Feminist Classic

Abstract: Free to Be You and Me was a remarkably prescient project for its time, with a profound impact on the history of feminism in the United States Placing Free to Be in the history of the womens movement brings children and childhood to the center of an already multifaceted movement and reveals that they were there from its beginning Free to Be used material developed in Ms magazine from its first issue and its royalties supported the Ms Foundation for Women through its early years Similarly, the Womens Action Alliance began the Non-Sexist Child Development Project in response to demand for a national feminist agenda that included children and the impact of sexist stereotypes In the 1970s, chapters of the National Organization for Women led the fight against violent and sexist childrens toys with pickets and protests at toy manufacturers (Rotskoff and Lovett 2012) For feminists focused on childhood, toys could reinforce sexist stereotypes as easily as they could inspire creative potential In 1974, Letty Pogrebin challenged parents not to buy toys that insulted, offended, or excluded one sex, usually females In her words, "We're refusing to buy toys 'for girls' that teach hypocrisy, narcissism, and limited aspirations We're avoiding toys 'for boys' that promote militaristic values and a must-win attitude" (49) Instead, Pogrebin urged parents to apply feminist values when considering toys for their kids This faith in the power of socialization and the impact of parenting placed children at the center of the women's movementThe history and continued relevance of Free to Be inspired historian Lori Rotskoff and me to use its fortieth anniversary as an occasion to revisit the fight against gender stereotypes in our collection When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made (Rotskoff and Lovett 2012) We wanted to create a history in four voices: the voices of the creators of the original Free to Be book, album, and TV special; the voices of the children of those creators; the voices of contemporary thinkers on gender, feminism, and parenting; and the voices of scholars seeking to place Free to Be in its historical context We weren't seeking an oral history or a collected memoir but a form of collective history and commentary written for a contemporary audience still facing stereotypical representations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and abilityWhen we called Free to Be a classic, we were making a claim about its place in history, its legacy, and its life in our contemporary culture Free to Be remains in print, with a new edition issued in 2010 That it continues to inspire both adults and children does not mean that its interpretation has remained unchanged or unchallenged Contributors in When We Were Free to Be, like commentators in this journal and elsewhere, have questioned the stories, skits, and songs of Free to Be, pointing out a range of inconsistencies and shortcomings, especially when viewed from a contemporary perspective For instance, contemporary commentators, such as sociologists Karl Bryant and Karin Martin, are much more open about the implications for male sexuality suggested in the story and song "William's Doll" than were the creators of Free to Be in 1974 (Bryant 2012; Martin 2005) Bryant recounts being drawn to the gender-nonconforming William as a child but realizing as an adult that William was redeemed only by becoming a father and conforming to a heterosexual and familial ideal that valued masculinity over femininity for boys and men The framers of Free to Be were not blind to the issue of sexuality In 1980, Letty Pogrebin, a framer of Free to Be, addressed the "secret fear" that sex roles somehow determined sexuality and she railed against homophobia as a "malevolent enforcer of sex-role behavior" and an "enemy of children" (289) …