Jones, Rachel 2018 Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Thesis
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Jones, Rachel 2018 Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Thesis Title: Daring to Gaze Back : Using Queer Opposition to Deconstruct the Care Politic in Black Female Media Representations Advisor: María Elena Cepeda Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Vivian Huang Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No Daring to Gaze Back: Using Queer Opposition to Deconstruct The Care Politic in Black Female Media Representations By Rachel Jones María Elena Cepeda, Advisor Vivian Huang, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors In Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts May 14, 2018 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 2 Preface: A Note on Process 3 Introduction 4 A Note on Positionality 13 Chapter 1: Who is the Fairest of the All? Subverting White Heteronormativity in The Bachelorette 15 The Bachelor Franchise: A (Racist, Heteronormative, Classist) History 20 Emotional Vulnerability under Surveillance 23 Agency in Representation: Opposition as Transformation 30 Concluding Thoughts: Unlearning the History 42 Chapter 2: Insecure as Me: Racialized Blame and Intimacy in Black Female Friendships 49 “Insecure as Fuck”: Black Female Friendship as a Source of Love and Care 52 Critiques: Consequences of the Care Politic 71 Concluding Thoughts: Combating Internalized Blame 80 Chapter 3: I ain’t Sorry: Radical Healing and Queer Redemption in Beyoncé's Lemonade 82 Before Lemonade: Locating Beyoncé within White Desirabilities 83 Continuing the Care Politic: Infidelity as Metaphor 91 “Sorry”: Black Female Reclamation of Apology 97 Critiques: Where Lemonade May Go Sour 106 Concluding Thoughts: “All Night” and the Queering of True Love 113 Conclusion 119 Bibliography 125 1 Acknowledgments Thank you to everyone who supported me during the process of writing this thesis. I began and completed this work during a particularly transformative, painful, and emotional time in my life. I am amazed by the many wonderful people around me who reached out, listened to me, and never wavered in their support and care. I see you, I appreciate you, and I am eternally grateful. First, I want to thank my advisors: María Elena Cepeda and Vivian Huang. Professor Cepeda, I am continuously humbled and stunned by your willingness to work with me, especially during your sabbatical. Your patience with and faith in me has given me tremendous strength in completing this work, and it has truly been an honor and privilege to work with you. Professor Huang, this thesis would not be what is it if you had not agreed to work on it with me. Your thoughtfulness and attention to me throughout this year has been invaluable, and your support means so much. To both of you, thank you for the incredible guidance and for always encouraging me to grow throughout this year. Second, thank you to Rachel Lindsay for agreeing to interview with me for this project. Not only was your perspective an extraordinary addition to this work, but also speaking with you was instrumental in my own understandings and reclamations of my own personal agency. Next, I want to thank my parents. Thank you for always allowing me to speak my mind, to be critical (especially when it is sometimes of you), for accepting every single part of who I am. Thank you for being the first people to show me what true love and care look and feel like. Thank you as well to my (little) brother, Quincy Jones. You are my whole heart. Lastly, I want to thank my friends, my chosen family. It would be impossible to adequately mention, thank, and honor all of you in a way that expresses the love and appreciation that I feel. Please know that I would not be who I am without you, I am overwhelmed with how profoundly lucky I am to know all of you. 2 Preface: A Note on Process On Monday April 9th, 2018, Junot Diaz1, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, came to speak on Williams’ campus. Although his books explore a cultural context to which I have only a partial connection - Diaz is Dominican American with roots in the African Diaspora - his stories of heartbreak, racial trauma, and pain resonated deeply with me from the first moment I read Drown in middle school. Microphone in hand, sauntering around the mainstage in my college’s performance center, Diaz created a space exclusively for the people of color in the room, asking questions explicitly directed at us. Several times he asked, “what is it like being a student of color on this campus?” and everytime, my heart almost skipped a beat. I felt frozen in my chair, wanting to call out in response, to scream every thought in my head, but I stayed quiet, immobile. Although being spoken to and being allowed to speak, I was still surrounded by this place, surrounded by the overwhelming Whiteness, the heteronormativity, the constant feeling of not belonging, of not being wanted. What is it like to be a student of color on this campus? What is it like to live and breath and learn in this space? What is it like to feel sad in this space? What is it like to feel nothing? To feel everything? I think about the past eight months and the process of writing this thesis. Over this time I have been depressed, I have been heartbroken several times in several ways, I have fallen back 1 During the final editing stage of this work, several women of color accused Diaz of sexual misconduct and harassment. In a public response, Diaz noted that he was taking responsibility for his past and emphasized the need to teach men about consent and boundaries. I acknowledge and in no way condone the immediate, tangible, and vicious harms that these women experienced. As my thesis centers the stories of women of color, I find this news horrifying, unsettling, and deeply disappointing, particularly as Diaz’s words touched me so deeply. His words and their meaning still remain for me; I find this news to be emblematic of the racialized structures of care that define this work, structures that consistently abuse people of color, particularly women and femmes. As a survivor himself, Diaz is part of a cycle, a fact that in no way condones, but instead contextualizes his actions. I have decided to include his words, showing thus the ways that Diaz, although speaking to and presenting care for women of color, is as well an active perpetrator in structures of harm and trauma. 3 into patterns of disordered eating, I have felt hope, and loss, and many different types of love. I think about this campus: the constant suffocation, the loneliness, and the anxiety. I think about the condition of being black and queer and female in a space like this: the constant feelings of inadequacy, the need to apologize for taking breath, the drowning, the invisibility. The process of writing this thesis was exhausting, of writing out all of my insecurities, pains, and traumas, of writing in spaces with people who have hurt me, of writing while feeling uncared for. I think about writing this thesis, and I think about all the days I didn’t write, all the days I couldn’t write. I think about trying to work and produce and excel within a space where that is not meant to happen for people like me. This thesis work is unfinished, this work will always be unfinished, this work is meant to be unfinished. I think back to Diaz’s question, and I have my response for him now: being a person of color on this campus is a continual state of erasure, of neglect, and of trauma. I hope this work, this thesis conceived of and birthed in this space, shows the messiness, the pain, and the refusal to be silenced. Introduction Under capitalism, modern day media attempts to appeal to mass audiences, garner support and profits, and rely on social norms and understandings in order to attract consumer-citizens. Clarifying the underlying intentions of media requires understanding the cyclical nature of production and consumption. Stuart Hall (1980) posits that production constructs messaging and that for media images and productions to continue, they must invite and attract a meaning, one that mass audiences and viewers can detect and receive. For Hall, “if ‘no meaning’ is taken, there can be no ‘consumption’,” demonstrating that viewers will only continue to consume media if there is a legible narrative that can be easily understood and 4 consumed. Hall thus offers a process through which to decode these messages, interpret these media meanings, and understand the hegemonic ideologies that dominate social norms and feed into these ideals for profit. For Hall, this process is cyclical: as the media perpetuates dominant norms, “the discourse must then be translated –transformed, again– into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective” (Hall, 1980, 91), showing thus that the media not only reflects existing social norms, but perpetuates these ideas as well. Media therefore becomes a mechanism through which to understand cultural expectations, morals, and stereotypes; yet how then does the media interact with harmful, controlling, and degrading cultural assumptions? When navigating within a society founded on a legacy of racial, gendered, and sexual injustice and violence, in what ways is the media implicated in maintaining these foundations? Following Hall, what do media images tell us about social structures and about how we interact, view, and treat each other? With these questions in mind, this thesis interrogates the ways that media representations of black womanhood are not only emblematic of insidious historical positionings of black women, but as well serve as a mechanism through which these stereotypes are perpetuated on an interpersonal and emotional level.