Recently, I stumbled upon the website of a new documentary, “Miss Representation.” This documentary focuses on the under-representation of women in influential positions in mainstream US media. The documentary aired at the Sundance film festival this year. The film’s makers also started an organization that aims to change representations of women in the media. One of the things that their blog encourages readers to do is to refrain from buying products from companies that portray women in sexist, sexualized, or degrading ways. (I’m somewhat afraid that this doesn’t leave very many companies to actually purchase things from…)
However, the graphic that went along with this blog post (http://missrepresentation.org/advertising/this-holiday-season-sexism-wont-sell/) caught my eye. The words, “This holiday, sexism won’t sell. #Notbuyingit,” are written on a red background next to a World War 2 – era Rosie the Riveter (from the J Howard Miller poster “We Can Do It!” – not the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post one). However, we now see Rosie coming through a computer screen and she is holding an iPod. It’s certainly an unusual representation – one that emphasizes power rather than beauty or sexuality. It also emphasizes electronic power, rather than the physical power that the original Rosie did.
It’s taken me awhile to decide which theorist I should apply to this situation: Killingsworth? Butler? Someone from the agent/cy unit? But what about text/uality? Or anti/signification? This image, I think, fits every single unit we’ve had this fall. It causes me to question, who has agency? How does agency relate to power in this #notbuyingit situation? But then, how are the signs and symbols at work? What does Rosie signify? How is this a text? What other texts are present in this image? What possible genre is this? And, of course, what does this image represent? I’ve applied Campbell and Spivak because I think they reveal a link between agency and representation.
Agency is, as Campbell wrote, the capacity to speak or write (or act) in ways that are understood by a discourse community (“Agency” 3). There are a couple of discourse communities at work in this graphic. First, refusing to purchase something is, I suppose, an agencial action. (Although, it is a rather unspecific one unless accompanied by some other communication about why you’re refusing to purchase the item.) However, this ad also invites the viewer to participate in the Twitter/Facebook discourse community using the hashtag #notbuyingit to signify that they are refusing to do something on principle – and this expression of agency will be heeded in that community. Writing “#notbuyingit” in a post is not only an expression of a particular kind of agency within the larger Twitter/Facebook communities, but it also means that a person is electing to be part of a community (group) of people actively engaged in not buying representationally objectionable items. Thus, they are using agency to (slowly) change representations of a target group in a target culture (women in mainstream American media/advertising). Alternative representations inspire folks to express agency is certain ways in discourse communities
This issue of “how can we represent _________ faithfully/with complexity/well/without essentialism” is a tough one, and I don’t feel equipped to answer it. I do feel equipped to answer questions about how discourse communities use agency to change re/presentation.
Although Spivak does not address agency explicitly at length in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” I think that it is at work implicitly when thinking about how misrepresented groups come to have a voice or come to change their own representations. (Note: I am not equating American women with the subaltern – I am merely co-opting part of Spivak’s theory for my own purposes. J) She states specifically that the subaltern’s identity is its difference (803). There are multiple discourse communities which object to representations of American women in US advertising. These groups are not asking for a single, universal representation – rather, it seems that many are saying that the heterogeneous identities of the women who constitute these groups are not reflected in the media. That is, the identities of these groups are that they are different from whatever is portrayed in mainstream advertising. Thus, I think that the #notbuyingit campaign is not asking merely for “a” better representation: they are asking for multiple, diverse, different representations – ones that do not essentialize. Just as “women” as the subject of feminism is essentialism, “women” as represented by American advertising is also essentialism. To say: “That is not me. I am different from how you represent what you claim is me,” is quite a powerful expression of agency.
Newsom, Jennifer, “This Holiday Season, Sexism Won't Sell.” Miss Representation.org Blog. WordPress. 1 December 2011. 4 December 2011. (http://missrepresentation.org/advertising/this-holiday-season-sexism-wont-sell/).
This is a throughtful post, and you touch upon most of the glaring topics we have discussed so far. I appreciate your inclusion of Spivak, because I feel that she is an interesting figure Spivak is an interesting figure in the Re/Presentation discussion. I think that her essay on the subaltern goes along well with Butler and her assertion that the representation of the other, such as women, is based on difference itself. The act of representing a subject, such as a woman in any discourse is based upon preconceptions of difference between one individual and another, such as man and woman, king and peasant, high caste or low. These representations are based on dissimilarities, not representation of seperate identities. According to Burke, In identifying with one thing, we disidentify with another. This is where representation fails, and mis/representation occurs. For Spivak, this results in identity of the subaltern being limited, or even "voiceless." The subaltern can only represent its identity based on its disassociation with the larger population. For Butler and Spivak, these are problems of representation, and problems that do plague the representation of women and other groups of people that are simply portrayed and considered the "other". The dissimilar. But these groups of people have an identity that is more complex than its represented, something that popular representation and categorization has limited. For Butler, the representation of the gender of the "woman" has suffered this fate.
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