Anti-Feminisms in Media Culture

Michele White, Diane Negra, Michele White, Diane Negra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This important and timely collection examines the troubling proliferation of anti-feminist language and concepts in contemporary media culture.

Edited by Michele White and Diane Negra, these curated essays offer a critical means of considering how contemporary media, politics, and digital culture function, especially in relation to how they simultaneously construct and displace feminist politics, women's bodies, and the rights of women and other disenfranchised subjects. The collection explores the simplification and disparagement of feminist histories and ongoing feminist engagements, the consolidation of all feminisms into a static and rigid structure, and tactics that are designed to disparage women and feminists as a means of further displacing disenfranchised people's identities and rights. The book also highlights how it is becoming more imperative to consider how anti-feminisms, including hostilities towards feminist activism and theories, are amplified in times of political and social unrest and used to instigate violence against women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.

A must-read for students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies, gender studies, and critical race studies with an interest in feminist media studies.

1 Vernacular Feminism Whiteness, Femininity, and Gendered Discourses of Independence in 1920s Popular Fictions

Yvonne Tasker

DOI: 10.4324/9781003090212-2

Introduction: Post-suffrage Postfeminism

It is perhaps unsurprising that the popular culture of the post-suffrage 1920s can be read in terms of a postfeminist dynamic, articulating discourses of female independence and power on one hand while signalling profound cultural anxieties around class mobility and white femininities on the other. Postfeminism is a contested term that has been employed in multiple ways in the analysis of media cultures. I define it here quite broadly as a set of discourses through which industrialized societies with complex mass media systems simultaneously acknowledge the importance of gender equality and perpetuate profoundly hierarchical gender cultures. It is the doubled discourse highlighted by scholarship in this area that is particularly pertinent. Postfeminist culture frames feminism simultaneously in terms of past achievements (important battles won) and as having gone “too far,” demanding now seemingly unnecessary social change. Crucially for the arguments made in this book, postfeminist culture can be understood as a site in which feminist and anti-feminist discourses are tangled together, indeed mutually constitutive. I aim to suggest here how the media culture of the post-World War I years looks in both directions, mobilizing for female audiences and readers celebratory tropes of gendered independence entwined with conservative discourses around romance/marriage as a strategy for women’s social advancement.

British and North American women achieved the vote in this era following long, bitter, and at times violent campaigns. Against this background, popular texts of the 1920s engaged with feminist tropes and themes of gendered agency in complex, often ambivalent, and contradictory ways with a commodified feminism tending to equate white women’s freedom to vote with their freedom to consume. Arguments for women’s citizenship frequently involved an investment in discourses of femininity and respectability that were secured by whiteness and class privilege. As various scholars have shown, whiteness itself was a disputed category, one fractured by hierarchical understandings of ethnicity. (Brian Donovan observes, in the context of increasing US immigration in the first decade of the twentieth century, that “Many native-born whites … regarded southern and eastern European immigrants as racially distinct and inferior.”¹) As an industry cinema had been engaged in attempts to become more respectable for some years, wooing female audiences as part of that process.² Respectability was also a central discourse within African American culture, a response argues Jane Rhodes, “to the racist representations of and routine attacks on black female sexuality, character, and intellect.”³

The independent woman of 1920s media culture follows in a series of iterations of ‘new’ women associated, as Mary Desjardins notes, with “women in the public sphere working for political and social reform,” and more broadly with working class women “in the public sphere as wage earners and seekers of popular entertainments.”⁴ Associated with new forms of employment, and romantic/sexual independence, the 1920s version of the “new” woman is firmly linked to new forms of leisure as well as changing norms around dating. In both the economic and sexual domain, the interplay of feminist and anti-feminist discourses which are so characteristic of more recent postfeminist media cultures are clearly evident in the 1920s. This chapter argues that discursive patterns associated with the independent woman playing out in the post-suffrage period are revealing in at least three senses relevant to the contemporary debates explored in this anthology. An exploration of the 1920s suggests first the historical longevity of postfeminist themes and strategies, not least a characteristic pattern of simultaneous celebration and anxiety about gendered change. While celebration is linked to consumption, anxiety is linked to the emergence of anti-feminisms.⁵ Second, it is evident that both feminist and anti-feminist responses to, and imagining of, change are at work in vernacular culture. Third, it is apparent how clearly these dimensions of gender discourse are underpinned by social hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and class.

This nexus of issues is explored here through an indicative analysis of a best-selling British novel and a hit U.S. film, both of which achieved transatlantic as well as domestic success. Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, first published in 1924, was a best-selling novel in both the U.K. and the U.S. Widely praised, it was adapted for the British stage in 1926 (with Noël Coward as leading man) and three times for the cinema, twice in Britain (1928, 1933) and once in the U.S. (1943). Kennedy’s admirers were not limited to the Anglophone world: Italian critic Antonio Gramsci praised The Constant Nymph for “the psychological atmosphere and the world it describes,” while French dramatist Jean Giraudoux adapted the novel as Tessa, la nymphe au coeur fidèle in 1934.⁶ Praise for the novel was frequently tinged with misogyny. For example, Billie Melman reports that although Gramsci compared The Constant Nymph to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, he also deemed it “somewhat foolish” and expressed surprise that it was written by a woman.⁷ Faye Hammill too notes the manifest misogyny of responses to Kennedy and her surprise best-seller, citing A.E. Houseman’s praise for the novel as “the best product of this century” along with his regret that a woman had written it.⁸

In addition to its elaboration of an opposition between art and culture, Kennedy’s novel deals extensively with the sexual norms of “bohemian” life, with social ideals of femininity and marriage as an institution. Hammill is surely right that The Constant Nymph “cannot be described as a feminist text”; several commentators have pointed to its cultural and gender conservatism, its entrenched commitment to class hierarchies, and, as I discuss below, its persistent use of anti-Semitic tropes.⁹ While The Constant Nymph is not feminist, neither is it straightforwardly anti-feminist – indeed, the two discourses are entwined and doubled in a manner characteristic of the interwar period. Building on scholarly accounts of the novel, I argue that Kennedy’s book can be read as a post-suffrage/postfeminist work in which feminist and anti-feminist discourses are at work in mutually constitutive fashion. The novel’s themes of gendered independence, for example, are entwined within a narrative that showcases modernist male genius and celebrates the instinctive nurturing (that is, feminine) qualities of its tragic young nymph figure as well as her determination. I suggest that the central thematic constructions are underpinned by classed tropes that depend on an opposition between England and Europe, as well as racialized discourses that centre on the Othered figure of a Jewish man.

The chapter’s second case study is the star-making film It (1927) and the celebrity persona of Clara Bow. Bow has long fascinated feminist scholars; for Marsha Orgeron she is “an actress who became simultaneously a dynamic and a troubling symbol of the New Woman of the 1920s.”¹⁰ It was adapted from her own story by another British author, Elinor Glyn, who appears briefly in the film.¹¹ Under the rubric of the deliberately vague but compelling concept of “IT!” the film playfully develops themes of female autonomy, sexuality, and working-class assertiveness through its use of Bow, its re-working of Glyn’s magazine writing, and the familiar formula of the shop-girl romance (Bow’s character Betty Lou sets her sights on Cyrus Waltham, owner of the department store in which she works – see Figure 1.1). As Katherine Mullin writes in a British context: “Shop-girl fiction most obviously flourished during the suffragette years between 1900 and the Great War.” At a time of considerable economic and social change, the genre worked “to negotiate a new sexual politics running alongside more explicitly politicized suffragist campaigns.” For Mullin these novels “articulated a more muted model of emancipation, characterized by economic self-reliance, professional competence, and metropolitan savoir-faire.”¹² It is telling that the aggressively “new” woman embodied by Bow in It draws on a formula established for decades, but also that the figure of the shop-girl and the public femininity that she encapsulates mobilizes both feminist and anti-feminist tropes.

Figure 1.1 Shopgirl Betty (Clara Bow) admires her as yet oblivious boss in It (1927).

In her discussion of It, Orgeron highlights the congruence of star, roles, and fans with contemporary discourses of femininity, observing that “The 1920s New Woman, at least as she was configured by the popular press, was largely working class, like the shop girl that Bow plays in her definitive It role.”¹³ As this suggests, class is a crucial intertext for media discourses of the New Woman and the figure of the ‘flapper’ in the 1920s. Race was also a vital intertext in formulations of public femininity in the so-called Jazz Age. As Chani Marchiselli writes, new African-American musical modes seemed to express the different speed of modern working life and leisure practices/spaces such as dance halls, with the term Jazz Age delineating “an era of auditory and kinetic sensibility.”¹⁴ Thus she suggests, “much of the controversy surrounding the figure of the flapper involved cultural fears about literal and figurative miscegenation,” finding at work in commentary of the time “not only a discomfort with white women’s presence on the streets and in American public life, but concern about the widespread adoption of kinetic styles associated with black and working-class music and dance.”¹⁵ Thus, a public performance of femininity – of gendered independence as I’m very broadly thinking of it here – draws on and speaks to patterns of movement, codes of dress, and other elements of social behavior that in turn relate to discourses of not only gender but also class and race.

In his exploration of U.S. radio, William Barlow suggests that the desire for generational change in white America evidenced in the “middle-class ‘flappers’ and ‘flaming youth’” saw “these young rebels” turning to “African American culture – particularly music, dance, language, and humor” in ways that were “symbolic of their generational revolt against the established order.”¹⁶ As Barlow observes, such fashionable status was a “form of selection expropriation” which had negative consequences for those African Americans whose musical innovations were appropriated and whose access to emerging broadcast media was curtailed and constrained. Such inequalities speak to the resonance of the texts considered here for this anthology’s consideration of feminism and anti-feminism today. Tanya Ann Kennedy teases out such connections in the early 1990s, observing that not “only does postfeminism seek to narrowly interpret feminism as personal choice, but it also engages in a racial policing that keeps feminism white.”¹⁷

Given their commercial popularity and reach it is not surprising that both The Constant Nymph and It have been productively and quite extensively discussed within feminist scholarship in media, literature, history, and culture. Building on these analyses, this chapter sets out to analyze these fictions as sites that also inscribe discourses of femininity and agency in both classed and racialized terms. It considers the different ways in which tropes of whiteness frame the oppositions of nature/culture, class/commerce which are at work in these popular texts. In doing so it seeks to tease out some of the ways in which the vernacular feminism of the period managed the challenges posed by suffrage, and indeed a fast-deve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• An Introduction to and Critique of Anti-feminisms
• 1 Vernacular Feminism: Whiteness, Femininity, and Gendered Discourses of Independence in 1920s Popular Fictions
• 2 “A Matter of Survival”: The National Welfare Rights Organization, Black Feminism, and a Critique of Work
• 3 Policing Integration, Punishing Sexual Freedom: Reactionary White Male Violence and the Politics of Rape in Civil Rights Exploitation Films
• 4 The Illegibility of Asian American Feminism On Screen
• 5 Something Else Besides a Feminist: Little Fires Everywhere and Hollywood Anti-feminism
• 6 White Feminism and White Tears as Bad Objects
• 7 Making Kin with Whiteness: Feminist Seductions of the Unwatchable
• 8 Beware the Dancing Communist: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Snap-lash, and the Politics of Embodied Joy
• 9 Natural Hair Matters: On Autobiographical Black Girlfriend Selfie Culture and Social Media
• Index