More on Let's Dance and cross-dressing

(For continuity's sake, here's what I've posted as a comment on my last post on Let's Dance:)

I think it was definitely at least in part because he passed that he was taken seriously. (And by the way, thanks for bringing that up, as I hadn't thought of that at all and I'm looking at passing in terms of theory at the moment.)

I would be lying if I said there wasn't any humor in it at all - at one point, he does kiss on of the male judges. Part of his success might be in that Noel Fielding is in "real life" a rather androgynous person (though he doesn't look "girly," exactly). A lot of people, judges included, thought the dance was gorgeous, and if you've ever seen the original Kate Bush video for "Wuthering Heights" (there are two; Fielding uses elements of both), he's actually surprisingly good.

Actually, the audience is really interesting as he goes through the dance - it opens with giggles and people finding it funny, and then it sounds like they're taking it much more seriously, as a genuine performance. Once you get about two-thirds of the way through and he's doing the more technical stuff, they get pretty loud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du4uH1fC9B8
(That's the dance, if you're interested.)

(And this one is Jarred Christmas, though I find his performance less interesting:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKc3Vwg1tAM

I think another part of this is that Noel Fielding took the dance very seriously; he has a lot of respect for Kate Bush. They've actually got a scene where they play a message she recorded for him, and he's visibly touched. That was interesting, as well - that he felt a connection with the song and that he elected to do something "beautiful" rather than something "sexy" (which is also true of several other men who have successfully cross-dressed for Let's Dance - it's ALWAYS something sexy, and very often by Madonna).

I'm so glad you commented on this one, as it's pretty much my favorite post thus far. I think I'm just going to go turn this into another post now, as I've got more I want to say and this comment is getting ridiculously long.

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Now then.

I took another look at the men who have cross-dressed, and it's all mostly sexy stuff. This makes sense, in a way; Let's Dance for Comic Relief is, in fact, intended to be humorous. Makes sense. Cross-dressing/drag here is a way to be funny, and I can't help but wonder if some of it isn't actually negatively impacting the gender binary. There are certainly other ways to be funny in dancing; the winners from this year, for example, did an extraordinarily cheesy (but quite good) tap routine.

I want to take a quick look at some of the other male contestants who have done drag. I've covered Noel Fielding, who's more or less the odd one out here in that his female performance is meant to be "genuinely" (for lack of a better word) feminine, or perhaps it would be better to say that it's his goal to genuinely pass.

Some of the others' performances are similar to Christmas's dance. His is rather extreme, as he isn't really passing. So I have to question these...

The winner from 2009 was comedian Robert Webb, who performed in - you guessed it - a leotard. Shocker. He did Flashdance, and interestingly enough, both he and Christmas came onstage fully covered/clothed to do a dramatic strip-down, revealing said leotard.

Right, I should probably mention they all have introductions before their dances (I'm all over the place), and Webb's is him pretending to find Flashdance an incredibly sad film about a girl who is "living the dream" as a welder and then has to go to dance school. I'm not sure what to make of this; I know he's kidding, and I've never seen Flashdance, so it's hard to make too many judgement calls. I do think it's interesting that he deliberately points how the main character is "transformed" from a welder (a "man's job") to a dancer (a "woman's job").

(And then again, we have Christmas's intro where he waxes his legs... Fielding's intro is about his inability to dance and never even hints that he's going to be dressed as/performing as a girl.)

But yeah, Robert Webb. His dance starts off with him pretending to weld, and then his torch "fails" so he is forced to literally throw it aside, rip off his clothes, and dance "properly." And in fairness, the audience definitely appreciated his dancing ability - he was really good - I just don't know where to factor in shock value.

And then a year or two later, Russell Kane did "Crazy in Love" dressed as a woman. And people loved that, absolutely loved it. That was really overtly sexy, even though he wasn't wearing a leotard. Out of Christmas, Webb, and himself, Russell definitely passed the best (obviously I am not including Noel Fielding here).

I'm also not sure why Fielding passed quite as well as he did, to be honest. With Russell, he did look feminine, and he could pull off the traditionally-female "sexy" dance moves. With Noel, I think it's still fairly obvious he's a man. It's his face. He has a very square jaw and a strong jawline, and even in a wig and dress it is still possible to tell he's a man. The thing is, though, that rather than experiencing the jarring feeling of looking at someone performing as a female and being able to see it's a man, he really does seem like a "genuine" woman performing as a woman... he just happens to be biologically male.

UPDATE-ish thing: was watching Robert Webb's dance and they're complimenting not only his sexiness in the leotard but also on the complexity of the dance and dance moves (I guess pirouettes and such happened??). But they've definitely mentioning his girly legs... Maybe passing at least a little is a requirement in being taken seriously in a cross-dressing gender performance?

By the way, a little more on the girls - Katie Price cross-dressed as Freddie Mercury - wait for it - while he was cross-dressing. So she had the sexy thing going on (and I beileve an exagerated feminine figure), but also a mustache and fake underarm hair. I liked the idea, but the dance was a bit crap (and I don't even want to start analyzing particular elements of the dance, especially the girls dressed as cows thing). There were a lot of negative reactions to her performance, and I'm not sure if it was the lack of dancing or the fact that it was Katie Price (evidently she's not well-liked?), or something else entirely at work. Lulu's cross-dressing performance as Soulja Boy WAS well-received, though, and she only barely lost (to Noel Fielding, interestingly) and by a rather arbitrary judges' vote. (I say arbitrary because it was 1-1 and it took the third guy forever to finally yell out a name.)

Butler in action! (Not my actual weekly post)

So here's something interesting.

I was getting a haircut tonight after class at Douglass J, right? (I promise this is going somewhere.) And the woman checking people in recognized Undoing Gender (or rather, recognized the author), as evidently she'd been a woman's studies minor in college. So the guy cutting my hair overheard this, and we had a really interesting conversation, the main point of which being this:

He'd recently started a relationship with a new guy, and (he actually said this in so many words) they were still in the process of figuring out who's who in the relationship, i.e. domestically. He was talking about how being in a relationship with someone different actively changed who he was within the relationship. Isn't that interesting? And then, I suppose on a more basic level, it also changed sort of his public role in the relationship from being the more masculine one in most of his old relationships to being the more feminine one. And he articulated that it was kind of weird he felt obligated to figure out the masculine/feminine thing, but that people expected it, so he just unconsciously felt obligated to figure it out.

So yeah, that's not my blog post for the week, but it was a really interesting conversation. He had some really interesting points about gender performatives and discourse on sexuality, as well. So if anyone needs a haircut soon, I have a recommendation. ;)

Crossdressing in the media

I was watching BBC's Let's Dance for Comic Relief, which aired fairly recently - I think the start of 2011? Notably, several of the participants elected to perform - quite literally - as the opposite gender. I do not mean performance as in drag shows, but they were dressed as the other gender, and they were obligated to dance in a manner that indicated that they were indeed that gender. So clearly, in that sense, this is an instance of gender performance.

There are, in Let's Dance, several preliminary episodes covering the initial rounds, culminating in a single episode that covers the events of the final round. In the second episode (again, this is part of the preliminary rounds of the competition), I believe there were a total of four (out of, like, eight) contestants who elected to cross-dress, two male and two female. The first woman, Lulu, performed a rap song; she is in her 50s, and overall the performances was basically considered "cute." Another woman performed as Freddie Mercury and received similar reactions. I'm wondering if that's a weird gendered thing; after all, it's more "shocking" to see a man playing a woman's role than vice versa.

So here's what interests me. In show 2, two men - Jarred Christmas and Noel Fielding - elected to cross-dress in order to dance to songs by Madonna and Kate Bush, respectively. Notably, they were dressed (accurately) as their selected singers. What I'm interested in is their motives in cross-dressing and in performing as women.

In the pre-dance interviews (if you've ever seen a competitive dancing show before, then you know how that works)/opening skits, Christmas's sketch revolved around getting his legs waxed (accompanied, of course, by all the gendered jokes that always go along with that sort of thing - namely, it's painful and guys can't handle it). He was aware that Fielding physically surpassed him in his ability to appear female, and perhaps as a result of this, Christmas's dance incorporated a fair amount of comedy. (In fairness, the man was in a hot pink leotard, blonde wig, and heels - hard not to be at least a little self-referential about that.)

By contrast, in Fielding's introductory skit (which I can confirm he wrote himself - I think the same is true of Christmas), he elected to focus not on the comedic difficulty of performing as "woman" but instead on the comedic difficulty of learning to dance. There were literally no jokes made about his outfit by Fielding himself. Interestingly, Fielding opted to modify Kate Bush's original costume from her music video by adding tights underneath the dress, thus precluding any jokes regarding waxing as a feminine beauty ritual and its strangeness when adopted by a man.

(Off topic, but still interesting to me - men who wax seem to be on shaky ground, and there are, of course, very specific areas which are "acceptable" for men to wax. The legs are not one of them; that is very specifically a female beauty ritual.)

Particularly interesting is that Fielding did indeed look like a woman (at least to some extent - he has very masculine facial features), and his dance was praised in terms of actual dancing ability rather than the fact that he did it in a dress. There was humor in Fielding's dance as well - both he and Christmas are, after all, comedians - but it was derived from the arrival and performance of backup dancers.

Also interesting is that Fielding's two backup dancers were women dressed identically to him, whereas Christmas's backup dancers were deliberately attractive men. His interactions with them were at least flirtatious, if not sexual, and this served both to create humor within the performance and to draw attention to Christmas's biological sex.

Another interesting thing: both men had sideburns. Fielding's were less noticeable; in fairness, it helped that the wig he wore was a similar color. Christmas, however, kept his prominent brunette sideburns, which were noticeable against his blonde wig. I'm wary of reading too much into this - it could very well be that the two men were simply unwilling to drastically alter their haircuts for a single performance. That said, the effect of Christmas's sideburns/wig combo was indeed somewhat funny. With Fielding, I was much more willing to ignore his sideburns entirely.

I think the crux of all this is that while Fielding was performing "woman," his performance itself (i.e. his dance) did not at all rely upon humor but instead upon technique. Christmas's dance was much more based in humor; that said, I don't want to disservice him by pointing that out, as he did perform well. I think the key difference is that Fielding's dance could genuinely be described as being beautiful; he was even likened to Kate Bush (and there's a great deal of interesting things I could be saying about her and her response to his performance, which I think I may later on).

Ultimately, Christmas did not receive enough votes from the viewers to go on to the finals, whereas Fielding continued on as a judge's choice - chosen over Lulu, the older woman who had cross-dressed as a man. But even then, I don't think that's something to read into; Fielding's dance was genuinely better, both from a technical standpoint... But again, the success of Lulu's dance hinged upon the humorous nature of an older woman dressing and performing as a young rapper.

More on this later; my brain's overflowing with ideas about this all at the moment, and I'd like to get some of it on my blog before I forget it all.

Queering up some children's books

I had fun queering Kitty's New Doll, but initially I got a bit stuck because there's a lot you can do with it. My original thought was to put Kitty in pants, but the tutu made it a bit difficult, so I settled for changing all of Kitty's pronouns from female to male. This puts Kitty firmly in the realm of that special "boys playing with dolls" pseudo-queerness that isn't as abnormal as we make it out to be yet seems to set off major alarm bells for parents everywhere. What I liked about the pronoun switch was that it felt weird reading the ending, where Kitty's mother explained to Kitty that he was the doll's father. It seems normal for a little girl to hold that view, but for little boys, it's even more queer than simply playing with dolls would be. It's interesting to me that we encourage that "maternal instinct" or role in girls but don't encourage a parallel paternal role in boys.

One thing that struck me from the pronoun story with Corduroy is that there is a definite rhetoric to children's stories that children pick up on pretty quickly (if the author's daughter is any indication). Glasses are for male characters for the most part, and, if they are on younger characters, glasses denote intelligence or even nerdiness (here I am thinking of the Berenstein Bears in particular). Pants are "for boys" because that's a way of signifying gender when the characters are animals who don't have other obvious gender indentifiers, such as long hair.

But just because that rhetoric exists doesn't mean that its existence is justified. What purpose is there in overtly characterizing protagonists as male or female? Wouldn't the child find out within the story whether the character was male or female? What would happen if we were to remove these visual cues?

I like the idea of queering children's books because at first glance, their gender stereotyping is not subtle so much as harmless in appearance, and so we let it go. What saddens me is that, back in 1968 or so when Corduroy was published, the author states there were few female protagonists; yet now, when we allegedly live in a society that pays attention to feminist goals and gender equality, we're providing girls with such thrilling literature as "Makeover Madness."

I didn't mention this in class, but that trend disturbs the hell out of me. Why are we convincing little girls that makeovers are a good idea? We've started seeing the trend of children dressing up in play clothes mutating into something more sinister: children dressing up in a more "serious" and less "play" fashion, with makeup and "adult" clothes. This frightens me, primarily the makeover aspect of it.

I don't have an easy answer for how to queer children's books while still rendering them enjoyable to children, but I really would like to take a stab at making one, if only just for fun. Maybe I'll put it online if I do.

Queer spaces

I found something really weird last night on Burcham Road. You know those little figures they paint on bike lanes to indicate that you're supposed to be riding a bike there? I found a headless one. The rest of it looked like it had been recently painted, too; it was just missing a head.

I'm not sure if that counts as a queer space, exactly, but it's really unsettling. Maybe that's more a comment on bodies than anything else.

One queer space? The botanical gardens over by (I think) the chem buildings. The garden is this really pretty space sandwiched by industrial buildings and bordered by sidewalks. The garden itself is queer too, though, because it's a metal and wood construct but covered by plant life. The metal, in particular, is an interesting juxtaposition, because it's not something I associate with gardens at all. It blends together well, though; I mean, I'd definitely give it points for being aesthetically pleasing.

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Back-posting because my interwebs apparently wouldn't let me post this one (thought it went through, but I guess not). More importantly, an update!

I'm starting to think what's really queer about queer spaces is that, in being queer, they're creating an idea of "normalcy" to which they are not complying. But when you think about it, there really is no "normal" space, is there? There's always something "different."

Take roads, for example. What's a "normal" road? Is it the kind of road we see most often - two-lane, dotted line down the center? Are areas where we aren't allowed to pass from one direction or another queer because the line is solid and the rules are different? Is the highway queer for having different speed limits and rules? Are intersections queer because they force us to negotiate the meetings of more than one road? An intersection abruptly forces a renegotiation of what we know; we learn how roads work early on in our lives (look both ways and all that), and then later we have to learn how cars are intended to behave at intersections.

And even those "normal" roads would necessarily be queer in their varying constructions - different levels of elevations, for example, or different curves in the road, or the paint could be faded. Or (like many roads in southern Michigan), they could be layers of old roads paved over in an attempt to smooth them out, which is queer because that's not really an effective way to fix a road and yet we accept that as normal here. Are all roads queer in comparison to a perceived "norm"? Is queerness really what's normal rather than normality itself?

Is this taking the idea too far? Probably. I don't know. I'm suspicious of the idea of something being "normal," but I'd buy "average," I guess. Maybe typical. Queerness is all based on learned behavior anyway, and it'd be stupid and pointless to disregard that we do have an idea of what is normal.

I'm going to stop because I'm not entirely convinced I'm making sense anymore.

Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies

I almost forgot to blog about this, but Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies got me thinking about what's "normal" in terms of bodies. The idea of a "normal" body has bothered me for ages, because everybody's more or less got something "wrong" with them, be it cerebral palsy or a latex allergy or even just asthma. I can't imagine there's anyone out there in the world with an absolutely "normal" body; that body seems to be created simply through defining other bodies as "wrong" or incomplete.

So why make this distinction in the first place? Of the four approaches to disability Eli Clare outlines in the essay, I think medical is probably the most difficult to negotiate. With charity, we can recognize the problematic pity and its negative effects; morality is obviously problematic but perhaps in general fairly recognizable/avoidable. But from a medical perspective, if a problem CAN be "fixed," then shouldn't we fix it?

And even if, in the case of diseases like CP, medication can potentially make someone's life better - improve their quality of life, lifespan, etc. - it is then increasingly difficult to make peace with one's own body, because taking medication in some respects does seem to be "admitting," in a way, that there is indeed something wrong with it. Diseases and disabilities that can be treated or medicated or simply regulated in general make it difficult for people to accept their bodies as "good" or positive; instead, it is the negative aspects, what people can't do, that are focused on.

I am not saying we shouldn't treat what we can or that disability is a positive thing. But saying there are ways to make a condition more manageable and saying that there is something wrong or bad about their bodies is, I think, a different thing. Clare accepts that his or her (I am unsure of the author's gender) body is "irrevocably different," and it is - most people don't have CP. And CP is a difficult thing to live with; it would be even if we were to only view it in terms of its tendency to separate those who have it from those who don't. But that a lover is able to say to Clare, "I love your CP" is a very powerful thing. It becomes, then, not a matter of simply living with it or coping with it. I don't know if it's a matter of acceptance, exactly, but I thought that bedroom scene was a very powerful moment within the essay. Thoughts, anyone?

Freud! (pre-blog ramblings)

I almost forgot to blog this week, and I've had this post saved up since last Sunday. I thought I'd post it anyway and come back to it later, just so I've got something up.

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I wanted to ramble a bit just to get a feel for some of these readings.

So Freud! Hey! Freud. And I quote: "...we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind" (246). This is about melancholy, mind. But isn't that interesting? Dwelling on our (perceived) inadequacies is 1) a symptom (condition? state of mind?) of melancholy, and 2) it's this system of thought that enables us to be accessible to said truth.

And accessible! As in, we're open to the truth; we're able to perceive or accept the truth. That's interesting language on Freud's part.

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Right, so this finally makes some semblance of sense to me, and I'd like to jot that down before I forget it or get confused.

Mourning is healthy. Melancholy is not.

The thing is, I don't know how much of Freud I'm meant to take "seriously." Does that make sense? I mostly mean that much of what he says is very weird to me (in fairness, I am not a philosophy major, and I know surprisingly little about Freud). I understand that the point of mourning is to accept the loss of the opposite-gendered parent as the object of desire, but why are they the object of desire at all? I have a hard time accepting that, I guess.

ALSO. I realize there isn't a working Freudian model for homosexuality, but I have a lot of questions about that in the first place. Why couldn't a homosexual also experience mourning for the loss of the object of desire (assuming he is male, the father)? Would that mean he would identify with the opposite sex rather than his own? That almost forces a sort of feminine characterization on the subject, which is obviously problematic.

I've also finally wrapped my brain about the relation between incest and homosexuality, which is basically as simple as that they're taboos/failings of the system. That's really the two main groups you aren't meant to desire, isn't it? Incest in any form, because it means you've failed to redirect your desire to someone LIKE a family member who isn't one, and homosexuality because there isn't even a model for that. It's easy to try to explain it as simply being attracted to the same-sex parent, but that ultimately throws your relation with the other parent into chaos. And there's no clear answer to which parent the homosexual identifies with.