In her
talk “Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV,” Susan Fraiman spoke to the
use of bathrooms as sites of connection for female characters -- to the self or
to other female characters – where emotionality around self-preservation or girlfriend
bonds primes, and where matters conventionally hidden or beneath consideration are
revealed and explored. Through examples from Broad City, Insecure, and
Girls, Fraiman illustrated what she
calls the realism of the feminized ordinary.
She
situates feminine realism, which privileges the small and ordinary and often
takes place in the domestic sphere, in contrast to a more masculine realism which
privileges violence (she mentioned Tarentino’s Reservoir Dogs) and saga stories (such as Mad Men). Fraiman pinpoints that, in female realism, the impulse is
to showcase vulnerability and intimacy.
Fraiman talked
about her Realism Project through which she aspires to reclaim contemporary
spaces of intimacy, such as bathrooms, as the locales of feminine realism. She
praised the makers of the women’s shows
above for taking the lead in the kind of reclamation she aims for by turning a female
gaze onto women in these spaces: portraying female nudity in nonsexual contexts
and breaking new ground by representing
the conventionally ugly (like women sharing about bodily excretions) that is
deemed unbecoming of women in the patriarchy.
Fraiman decried
that in less forward-looking media, domestic practices are at risk of being
left behind by serious thinkers and artists –– on grounds of the triviality
that gets pinned onto domesticity.
We are familiar
with the masculine being deemed more important than the feminine as an underpinning
of major thrusts of Western society. As Virginia Woolf put it in A Room of
One’s Own: “This an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals
with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of
women in a drawing-room.” It sounds to me like the bathrooms are the
contemporary equivalent of the drawing rooms Woolf was referring to.
Furthermore,
Fraiman said that domestic practices are at risk of being left behind by the Left.
I believe she meant that this is happening on grounds that domestic practices
echo a kind of traditionalism which inherently supports the patriarchal status
quo whereby women ongoingly confront disadvantages in society.
This idea
of not leaving the domestic or ordinariness realm behind reminded me of an opinion
piece by actor/writer Brit Marling, “I Don’t Want To Be The Strong Female Lead,” that appeared in the NYT last month. In it she deplores
the fact that once trends move away from objectifying women in media, the next
hurdle is the fact that stories that privilege femininity rather than the more
masculine hero’s journey are yet to prevail
in order to give women an authentic voice in the media. Marling writes that when
it came to strong female lead roles, she “became aware of the narrow specificity
of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused
rationality. Masculine modalities of power.” She notes: “It’s difficult for us
to imagine femininity itself — empathy, vulnerability, listening — as strong.
When I look at the world our stories have helped us envision and then erect,
these are the very qualities that have been vanquished in favor of an
overwrought masculinity.”
Marling is
calling out for more feminine women roles in our media, and I believe that what
she writes echoes Fraiman’s idea that the realism of
the feminized ordinary as a strong avenue to achieve that. In stories like Broad City, Insecure, and
Girls the women get to exercise their
feminine powers of empathy, vulnerabillty, and intimacy –– through the realm
that has always been associated with women although it’s always had to suffer the injury of being deemed
futile and insignificant. Props to those creators who are able to remind us
that femininity is not weak and that it has a place in a modern world that progresses
away from predominantly patriarchal structures –– and in its media.
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