I loved Susan Fraiman's talk today, despite my familiarity with ehr work on Jane Austen and Victorian literature, I think she made a very compelling and cogent argument about 'a bathroom of one's own' - a space that is more interior than the interior, more real than the real, the place of pure expressivity and grossness. She drew a very useful distinction in her analysis of Girls, Broad City and Insecure between white femininity and black femininity. While the bathroom has had a renaissance in feminist TV, there is a difference between black bodies and white bodies in their proximity to bodily emission and general grossness - while white women uninhibitedly peeing or shaving on TV desecrates ideal white femininity, black women encounter bathrooms as a space of introspection, a space of multiple selves and psyches, which works as an important resistance to misogynoir. For Issa Rae's Insecure, the woman is positioned with respect to the mirror and the shower, more than the sink or the toilet, showing them negotiating with self and other in the self-reflexive space of the bathroom.
Fraiman analysed several key sequences from all three shows, linking them to a positive recuperation of the feminine mundane as a site of embodied feminism. The arrival of the bathroom as one of the "realism effects" or technologies of realism ranks it among other literary and cinematic devices that demystify the real by breaking it down into its components, which is especially important for women, as their "ordinary" is too often censored, leaving out the menstrual, the sexual, the fecal.
However, as Tania too pointed out, the valourization of bathroom realism may fall into the trap of ahistorical post-feminism. I would add to this by saying that female embodiment through interior spaces, especially in front of mirrors, should also be problematised as a site of self-disciplining. The bathroom is, in colloquial meme-speak, a save point - confronting oneself in the mirror, looking at oneself, especially if one is female, can be seen as a reassertion of the superego. Voyeurism can also extend, as Margaret Atwood puts it, to the voyeur in one's own head.
Fraiman analysed several key sequences from all three shows, linking them to a positive recuperation of the feminine mundane as a site of embodied feminism. The arrival of the bathroom as one of the "realism effects" or technologies of realism ranks it among other literary and cinematic devices that demystify the real by breaking it down into its components, which is especially important for women, as their "ordinary" is too often censored, leaving out the menstrual, the sexual, the fecal.
However, as Tania too pointed out, the valourization of bathroom realism may fall into the trap of ahistorical post-feminism. I would add to this by saying that female embodiment through interior spaces, especially in front of mirrors, should also be problematised as a site of self-disciplining. The bathroom is, in colloquial meme-speak, a save point - confronting oneself in the mirror, looking at oneself, especially if one is female, can be seen as a reassertion of the superego. Voyeurism can also extend, as Margaret Atwood puts it, to the voyeur in one's own head.
Strong point Laboni, and I wonder too how your questions about self-regulation and voyeurism might dovetail with Karen Tongson's question and concern in Fraiman's Q&A about a show like "Work in Progress." In one episode of the show, its protagonist - a butch lesbian with OCD - actively encounters the female restroom as a space of anxiety and (to primarily comic effect, of course) an understandable level of defensiveness concerning normative representations/valuations of performed femininity. Perhaps even more than understanding oneself as "a woman with a man inside watching a woman," we might also intervene in the generativity of these spaces by considering the optics of femininity and who is allowed the mundanity of the womens' restroom.
ReplyDeleteI've been absolutely DYING to watch "Work in Progress"! Fraiman's argument can't really contend with non-gender conforming bodies, for whom the bathroom isn't a site of letting go, but dysmorphia or even fear of bodily harm. Then the bathroom becomes a reminded of the insufficiency or instability of the body, rather than a space of permissiveness. Karen's question must also have been based on all the terrible news about all-gender restrooms being violently opposed, and even instances of hateful rhetoric and vigilantism.
ReplyDelete