Like Kelley last week, Ross made me reconsider, at least briefly, the annoyance I feel when an audience member loudly responds to or comments on a film while it is playing at a movie theater. According to Ross, this is how working class audiences responded to films in their early days and one way to perhaps measure audience reception. And though my experience of this phenomenon has usually been confined to the jackass that talks on his phone in the row behind me or occasionally shouts out stupid jokes at the screen or asks his girlfriend to read the subtitles for him, I recognize the importance of audible responses in determining the effect of the film on the audience.
Of course, Ross discusses other methods of studying receptivity. To do so, he extends his notion of audience to include "not just ticketholders sitting in movie houses, but people outside the theater who reacted strongly to what was shown on the screen: capitalists, censors, police, government officials, union and radical leaders, and the rank-and-file members of their organization" (107). I think that this is a smart move on Ross's part in order to more fully measure a film's impact not just on an individual viewer--which would be in most cases impossible--but on a culture as a whole. One part of his analysis, though, that might not quite translate to a contemporary audience is his discussion of melodrama as the major mode informing the plots of radical working class films. He claims that the employment of melodrama by working class radical filmmakers showed that it "was not inherently bourgeois or individualist" but, quoting Robert Lang, "'a drama of identity, of protest, of wish-fulfillment,' that contained 'both progressive and reactionary impulses'" (100). It's hard, at least for a contemporary reader like myself, to reconcile working class film as melodramatic wish fulfillment with actual labor activity. In other words, in a Brechtian sense, if the wish of a working class audience is fulfilled by a film, do they need to actually enact the fulfillment of the wish in reality? Or is this just the criticism of a jaded contemporary viewer, who tends to see inauthenticity in any clear cut, good vs. bad plot line?
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The Movie-Going Public Sphere - Jennifer
After spending time this semester learning about the nineteenth-century public sphere in another course I was pleasantly surprised to see the public sphere idea again in Ross's Working Class Hollywood. I found Ross's idea that the movie industry helped expand the public sphere for women. Women previously seen walking alone, especially at night were taken to be prostitutes, but with the new medium of movies women could and would go alone to movie theaters. As Ross tells us, with the emergence of movie theaters all across the country public space was redefined, especially for women. What I found to be the most interesting was not just women, but mother's and the new possibilities movie theaters gave them. For some mother's the movie theater was a place where they could go with their children to entertain both themselves and their children for a day at the movies. In other cases, however, the movie theater became like a nanny where mothers sent their children for the day to spend a day away from their children, either at home or running errands around town. It may sound strange to us now to think of mother's shipping their children to the movies on a summer day when school is out so they can have time to themselves for chores or leisure, but doesn't this still go on? On a day when schools all over Pittsburgh were cancelled because it was so cold outside I stood outside of a movie theater waiting to get in because parents were dropping their children off at the movies so they would not have to have them around the house for the day. I'm sure the same happens all summer, parents rotating between the mall, pool, and movies, as well as I'm sure many of us loath seeing the massive groups of teens swarming the movie theater on a Friday night. It seems the silliness of shipping children off to the movies is nothing new, it just doesn't occur to us as much now because we have so many more places for children to be shipped to now, as opposed to a hundred years ago when the movie theater was one of the few safe and entertaining places to let a child spend a hot summer afternoon.
There was another part of Ross's portrayal of women's use of the new movie theater rich public sphere. Ross writes that women who missed the frequent balls and dances of her pre-marriage days would often go alone, with her children, or with other women, most frequently other sisters, to the movies. Ross brings into question the loss of thrills from a woman's life before she is married, the balls and dances where she is most often with her soon to be husband, but does not mention the movies as a place where she would then go with her husband. It seems a woman of the early twentieth century went to the movies with just about anyone but her husband. Now this may just be an oversight of language, or the fact that Ross is speaking of a woman's afternoon trips to the movies when her husband would be working, but the correlation between her enjoyments before her marriage that seemed so seeped in the company of a man seemed to be missing the same man when discussion of her place in the new movie theater experience is discussed.
Marx-ist Humor
“Groucho: You know what an auction is, don’t you?” “Chico: Sure, I come from Italy on the Atlantic auction,” (The Cocoanuts). The Marx Brothers are arguably one of the most famous and beloved comedy teams in history. They were ingenious in their combination of witty wordplay and lowbrow slapstick comedy, beginning their career in vaudeville and eventually taking over Broadway and Hollywood. Though popular in the decades after the period discussed in Ross’ book, Working-Class Hollywood, I believe the Marx Brothers are a prime example of the amalgam of ethnic and working-class experiences to create a brand of comedy that transcended class barriers.
Ross writes: “the widespread popularity of movies helped to break down long standing patterns of ethnic isolation among immigrant groups.” (21) Ross also goes on to say, “Many of the first ‘movie stars’-Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, etc.-came from working-class backgrounds and began their careers by making films that related to the lives and fantasies of working-class audiences.” (44) As first-generation New Yorkers, the Marx Brothers were able to collect material from the diverse world in which they lived. “Fresh off the boat” immigrants, gangsters, gamblers, and intelligentsia – these were all people that the brothers would come into contact with throughout their lives.
There is evidence of binaries that can be attributed to life in New York: most importantly, “insider vs. outsider” is visible in their work. The emotive existence of “outsiders” gives special significance to their experience as the children of Jewish immigrants and the diversity of New York City would go on to greatly affect their mode of comedic performance. For example, the Cocoanuts quotation above utilizes the incongruence of Chico’s status as an “ignorant immigrant” to grain humor from his misunderstanding. In addition, the brothers often used Margaret Dumont’s rich upper-class society woman as the foil for their lower-class immigrant “other.” In Animal Crackers, he asks both Mrs. Rittenhouse (Dumont) and another New York socialite to marry him (at the same time). As he proposes to both of them, he says, “why you’ve both got charm, beauty, money – you have got money haven’t you? Because if you haven’t, we can quit right now,” (Animal Crackers).
The Marx Brothers gained popularity during a time of transition in the United States: World War One was sinking into the past, the Roaring Twenties were a joyous part of the present, and the Great Depression loomed in the future. They took this unique moment in time to take the New York City experiences they had shared and bring them to national audiences, allowing others, whether outsiders or not, to feel included in the mirth of the motion picture form. The city allowed them to cross cultural lines and thus, transcend the Jewish restrictions given to them in this time period. Groucho was able to wobble his way up the social ladder while zinging Margaret Dumont and letting her fall, just a little bit. Chico and Harpo gave immigrant humor a voice and together, they broke down some social barriers using one simple tool – laughter.
Monday, March 28, 2011
A Place to Hang Your Hat
Through the “meaning-making process” of commodity consumption working class women were not merely the passive peons of the capitalist and the bourgeois housewife, rather they found autonomous agency through the subjectivities formed in their relationship to commodities. In other words, consumerism was not a sign of women’s mass deception.
According to Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, commodities offered women an empowering “new range of representations, symbols, activities, and spaces with which to create class gender and ethnic identities.” Enstad attempts to disprove that a coherent subject is at the root of political action. Constantly citing Judith Butler, she argues that identity categories are necessarily based on exclusions that carry an inherent tyranny; for, “labels shape identities and experiences” – in the case of Enstad’s study, those oppressive classifications are “worker” and “woman.”
The attack on women’s popular culture activities by privileging representations of the “rational,” “serious girl striker” (both during the 19th century and in our modern historical narratives) undermines the critical process of shaping the female worker identity. “Working women’s version of ladyhood differed greatly from middle-class ideals: it challenged middle-class perceptions of labor as degrading to femininity and created a utopian language or entitlement rooted in workplace experiences.” Likewise, “Their style was not an imitation of middle class identity but an appropriation of a valued set of codes.” Through ready-made evening gowns, silk underwear, and “Peg O’ the Movies” the working-class women stood outside the dominant middle-class discourse of film and fashion and part-took in a culture of inherent resistance.
Liberal critic Thomas Frank has drawn a parallel between the emerging consensus of the 1980s “New Economy” and the widespread acceptance of commodity consumption as a means of asserting agency. Frank is dumbfounded by the absence of analysis of American business culture (the defining landscape of the 1990s), never mind dissent from the academy regarding corporate interests. He satirically writes, “Cultural Studies was teeming with stories of aesthetic hierarchies rudely overturned; with subversive mallwalkers dauntlessly using up the mall’s air-conditioning.” By casting the caricature of the “elitists” critic (unhappy with the shift toward cultural democracy, desperately clinging to the mass culture critique) as the villain, “cult studs” got in line with the myriad of journalists, politicians, and media monguls relentlessly celebrating the revolutionary power of popular culture. Cultural studies trademark language of audience agency and subversive text mirrored all too perfectly the anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical rhetoric pouring forth from the conservative populist movement and boardrooms alike. Ultimately, Thomas Frank charges the “cult studs” academic radicalism with being an indistinguishable hegemonic function of the market.
Of course, Frank is driven by the question that has motivated many of the cultural critics we have looked at this semester: What is the best way to subvert the system? How can we overturn unjust capitalism? This is where I see Enstand’s critique diverge. Her work is not propelled by the proposition of a radical new order. She represents a history of how a group achieves some freedom, some decency, and a place to hang their hats within the existing system. In this way, citing the desire for silk underwear as a distinct political act, a form of agency that operates outside bourgeois epistemology, mirrors the theoretical foundation and implicit ambition of Enstad’s project. “Thus silk underwear signaled the invisible interior ladyhood, similar to that promised by the dime novels, to which working women laid claim”(82). Enstad successfully marries politics and culture because of the way she defines political action. Acute policy change, a shifting of the cultural terrain to the interests of an oppressed group, dignity through identity formation, these are significant forms of political action to Enstad, and it seems that an investment in this kind of political action is best expressed through Cultural Studies.
Other thoughts:
-Veblen, can imitation can be radical?
-Ironically, Enstad priviledges a distinct female working class narrative. For example, in New York City at the end of the Civil War there were upwards of six hundred brothels. In 1846 a police source estimated the number of prostitutes in New York City to be 7,000 (10% of young females) while an alderman and minster source estimated the number to be 20,000 (28% of young girls). Regardless of the exact figure, these staggering official approximations indicate prostitution’s unavoidable physical and social presence. In 1855 tailor shops had the highest cash value, $7,592,696, of manufactured articles/goods in New York City. Tailor shops were followed by prostitution which brought in an estimated $6,350,760 in 1855. While prostitution did not involve the production of goods, it became a highly visible and exceptionally lucrative business.
Why is prostitution so clearly excluded from a historical narrative to which is belongs (even on page 28 the citation of the “Bowery Ghals” speaks to the significant presence of the brothel culture).
- Funny to see one of T.S. Eliots most significant arguments regarding culture, “cultural consumption without taste will lead to moral fall,” was originally championed by the indistinct body of middle class women.
-Dime novels about working class girl marrying millionaires, etc. seriously discredits Langland’s argument.
According to Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, commodities offered women an empowering “new range of representations, symbols, activities, and spaces with which to create class gender and ethnic identities.” Enstad attempts to disprove that a coherent subject is at the root of political action. Constantly citing Judith Butler, she argues that identity categories are necessarily based on exclusions that carry an inherent tyranny; for, “labels shape identities and experiences” – in the case of Enstad’s study, those oppressive classifications are “worker” and “woman.”
The attack on women’s popular culture activities by privileging representations of the “rational,” “serious girl striker” (both during the 19th century and in our modern historical narratives) undermines the critical process of shaping the female worker identity. “Working women’s version of ladyhood differed greatly from middle-class ideals: it challenged middle-class perceptions of labor as degrading to femininity and created a utopian language or entitlement rooted in workplace experiences.” Likewise, “Their style was not an imitation of middle class identity but an appropriation of a valued set of codes.” Through ready-made evening gowns, silk underwear, and “Peg O’ the Movies” the working-class women stood outside the dominant middle-class discourse of film and fashion and part-took in a culture of inherent resistance.
Liberal critic Thomas Frank has drawn a parallel between the emerging consensus of the 1980s “New Economy” and the widespread acceptance of commodity consumption as a means of asserting agency. Frank is dumbfounded by the absence of analysis of American business culture (the defining landscape of the 1990s), never mind dissent from the academy regarding corporate interests. He satirically writes, “Cultural Studies was teeming with stories of aesthetic hierarchies rudely overturned; with subversive mallwalkers dauntlessly using up the mall’s air-conditioning.” By casting the caricature of the “elitists” critic (unhappy with the shift toward cultural democracy, desperately clinging to the mass culture critique) as the villain, “cult studs” got in line with the myriad of journalists, politicians, and media monguls relentlessly celebrating the revolutionary power of popular culture. Cultural studies trademark language of audience agency and subversive text mirrored all too perfectly the anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical rhetoric pouring forth from the conservative populist movement and boardrooms alike. Ultimately, Thomas Frank charges the “cult studs” academic radicalism with being an indistinguishable hegemonic function of the market.
Of course, Frank is driven by the question that has motivated many of the cultural critics we have looked at this semester: What is the best way to subvert the system? How can we overturn unjust capitalism? This is where I see Enstand’s critique diverge. Her work is not propelled by the proposition of a radical new order. She represents a history of how a group achieves some freedom, some decency, and a place to hang their hats within the existing system. In this way, citing the desire for silk underwear as a distinct political act, a form of agency that operates outside bourgeois epistemology, mirrors the theoretical foundation and implicit ambition of Enstad’s project. “Thus silk underwear signaled the invisible interior ladyhood, similar to that promised by the dime novels, to which working women laid claim”(82). Enstad successfully marries politics and culture because of the way she defines political action. Acute policy change, a shifting of the cultural terrain to the interests of an oppressed group, dignity through identity formation, these are significant forms of political action to Enstad, and it seems that an investment in this kind of political action is best expressed through Cultural Studies.
Other thoughts:
-Veblen, can imitation can be radical?
-Ironically, Enstad priviledges a distinct female working class narrative. For example, in New York City at the end of the Civil War there were upwards of six hundred brothels. In 1846 a police source estimated the number of prostitutes in New York City to be 7,000 (10% of young females) while an alderman and minster source estimated the number to be 20,000 (28% of young girls). Regardless of the exact figure, these staggering official approximations indicate prostitution’s unavoidable physical and social presence. In 1855 tailor shops had the highest cash value, $7,592,696, of manufactured articles/goods in New York City. Tailor shops were followed by prostitution which brought in an estimated $6,350,760 in 1855. While prostitution did not involve the production of goods, it became a highly visible and exceptionally lucrative business.
Why is prostitution so clearly excluded from a historical narrative to which is belongs (even on page 28 the citation of the “Bowery Ghals” speaks to the significant presence of the brothel culture).
- Funny to see one of T.S. Eliots most significant arguments regarding culture, “cultural consumption without taste will lead to moral fall,” was originally championed by the indistinct body of middle class women.
-Dime novels about working class girl marrying millionaires, etc. seriously discredits Langland’s argument.
Working Class People as People
Brit
As I was reading Race Rebels, I was struck by the fact that it seems as though the author grew up in working class conditions, although I couldn't verify it. This seems important because he understands working class conditions because he lived them. As I was reading the introduction I was struck by this paragraph:
As I was reading Race Rebels, I was struck by the fact that it seems as though the author grew up in working class conditions, although I couldn't verify it. This seems important because he understands working class conditions because he lived them. As I was reading the introduction I was struck by this paragraph:
“Like most working class people throughout the world, my fellow employees at Mickey D’s were neither total victims of routinization, exploitation, sexism, and racism, nor were they “rational” economic beings driven by the most base utilitarian concerns. Their lives and struggles were so much more complicated. If we are to make meaning of these kinds of actions rather than dismiss them as manifestations of immaturity, false consciousness, or primitive rebellion, we must begin to dig beneath the surface of trade union pronouncements, political institutions, and organized social movements, deep into the daily lives, cultures, and communities which make the working classes much more than people at work. We have to step into the complicated maze of experience that renders “ordinary” folks so extraordinarily multifaceted, diverse, and complicated” (3-4).
The reason this paragraph seemed so pertinent, besides the fact that in many ways it outlines the author’s main points, is that the author understands what working class people are going through. If he grew up in that situation, then he is coming from a point a view that we cannot grasp in the same way. I liked that he acknowledged that if we are to get to know working class culture/movements/struggles better, we have to get to know the people. We have to understand what their daily lives entail to better understand what is important to them as well as how they approach their work. It seems so obvious, but many times I feel like we categorize the working class solely on their work, and often overlook many other factors that may affect/determine how they go about social movements, or how they try to create a better work environment.
retail empowerment
i also really enjoyed Enstad's discussion of the ways in which working-class women harnessed fashion as a means of empowerment. i loved that these women striked out of a desire for, among other things of course, a place to hang their hats. since my final research project is on fashion and consumerism, this struck a chord with me especially because i often think, as Enstad is also refuting, that fashion is seen as another example of women's "frivolity." fashion doesn't matter, because it is what women are primarily concerned with. but as Enstad argues so undeniably, fashion is an extension of political, social, and individual values.
the hat, the French heels, the cheap dresses–while they are symbols of the poor quality of clothes allocated to working women, they are conversely symbols of the way in which working women expected to be treated. clothing has always been steeped in purpose since the beginning of human history, and today whether or not we believe we are fashion-conscious, we always are nevertheless very socially conscious of what we put on our bodies every day, and of what we expect from others based on what we wear. you don't wear your tuxedo to class without at least understanding that someone, somewhere, is going to look at you differently. these women struggled against a division of clothing-construction that sought to keep them from elevating themselves to the status of the middle class; and yet they used these same cheap items as very powerful tools for advocating for their status as ladies. the poorly made shoes and hats that the middle class declared were evidence of their vulgarity and impurity, became part of the visual discourse that working-class women created to advocate for themselves.
i was also struck by the fact that buying hats and shoes was a way that women demonstrated the value of their own labor. as Enstad points out, the traditional–and respected–icon of the worker was male, skilled, and probably wearing some boots. the pride of a young working-class man was that he could have enough leftover money to buy himself some finery. the yield from a woman's labor, however, was seen as the property of her father, or if she were married, of her husband. what women produced was not only considered less valuable, but it wasn't even considered their labor at all (bet those families would notice the difference in income of the "non-labor" were that girl to lose her job, however). consequently the wearing of hats and shoes was a major statement for women to visibly demonstrate their own sense of self-worth. one of my proudest moments of high school was taking the money i had earned from the first paycheck of my first job, and buying myself an expensive and pretty roxy wristwatch from the jewelry store in my town. i still wear that watch.
Micro-politics of Resistance
What I found interesting in both Kelly's Race Rebels and Enstad's Ladies of Labour is the idea of working class identity and modes of resistance to exploitation as heterogenous and contingent. Further, their analysis reveals that political action doesn't always have to take prescribed paths (such as strikes or revolution) for it to become meaningful. Kelly notes how the forms of resistance that African American and Chicano workers practiced at Mickey D are culturally and context specific and a set of every day practices, rather than organized political action. But, Kelly argues that these actions were significant for the workers as a way of countering exploitation and authority and informing their sense of self.
Enstad's contention that the identity performed by working class women is outside of the normative construction of the 'worker' - 'white male worker' - points to the heterogeneity and the complexity of identity formation of workers along the axes of gender (and race). While the more institutionalized labour organizations attempted to impose a monolithic identity of a 'worker,' these women were able to form an alternative identity via their consumer habits and tastes. This resonates with the study on female garment factory workers in Sri Lanka, which I read for the book review. It indicates how female garment factory workers consciously attempted to signal their difference from "respectable" middle class women by wearing flashy clothing, an excess of jewelry and make up or openly flirting with men in public spaces. Although these acts are carried within a capitalist consumerist logic, it enabled the female workers to develop an oppositional consciousness in constructing an identity that is different from both other women and male industrial workers.
Thus, all the workers don't develop a political consciousness as workers in a prescribed or monolithic way and their resistance to exploitation can take different forms. What is important to note is that these acts are capable of making some sort of a difference in the absence organized political action.
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