Category Archives: cultural studies

January 15, 2012, 2:29 pm

The End of Miss America: Feminism Didn’t Kill the Pageant, But Boredom Might

Miss Wisconsin, Laura Kaeppeler, being crowned Miss America 2012

Last week I was writing a chapter of my new book about radical feminism and decided to begin with the 1968 Miss America Protest organized and executed by New York Radical Women. I may ditch this opening: the more I dig back into the secondary material on women’s liberation, the more I see it turning up as a hook. However, as a result of pursuing this narrative strategy I did something last night that I haven’t done in decades.

I watched the Miss America Pageant.

I didn’t intend to watch it — in fact, it took me by surprise, since for many years the pageant was a summer event. However, the show I really wanted to watch (a complex legal drama called The Firm that seems to have several plots running at once and involves the witness…

November 15, 2011, 3:47 pm

Rejoining the Parts: A Conversation with Jane Lazarre About Race, Fiction, American History and Her New Novel, Inheritance

By Claire Potter

Jane Lazarre is a writer of fiction, memoir and poetry who has published many books, beginning with her memoir, The Mother Knot (1976; reissued in 1997 by Duke University Press) and most recently, Inheritance, A Novel (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2011). She has taught writing and literature at New York’s City College and at Yale University; and for many years directed and taught in the undergraduate writing program at Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Tenured Radical: The title of the book — Inheritance — asks the reader to think about what is passed down, generation to generation. But in the first chapter we are confronted with Sam’s frustration and anger that, as a young woman with a white and a black parent, she knows so little of her family history. We come to understand that our historical “inheritance” not only can’t be taken for granted and but also sometimes requires a…

November 4, 2011, 6:12 pm

You Know All About Eve: A GLQ Special Section on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

By Claire Potter

Who has time to read journals in November, you ask? Sometimes you just have to stop and do it: it is so much easier to neglect journal-reading now that many of us access them electronically. Remember? They used to pile up next to the desk until either vacation would come, or you would clear the decks for three intense days of reading and throwing them away.

In any case, take the time now for one issue. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 17 no. 4 (2011) has devoted a special section to the memory of literary critic, poet, feminist and queer studies scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (May 2 1950 – April 12 2009). It includes an essay on James Merrill by Sedgwick, introduced by her husband Hal, followed by reflections on Sedgwick and her work by Henry Abelove, Michael Moon, Kathryn Kent and Neil Hertz. (more…)

October 27, 2011, 11:05 pm

So It Wasn’t The End of Days After All: The Return of Edge of the American West

By Claire Potter

Lord Keynes would have been a blogger at EotAW too

Today I reset my RSS feed for the Republican primary season. You know what the keywords are: “Mitt Romney,” “Michelle Bachmann,” “polygamy.” Since the political news in the mainstream is usually a version of what I heard on NPR earlier in the day, I set the feed for blogs and — lo! What should come up but The Edge of the American West, one of the smartest and most fun history blogs around, but that ditched out on us last spring. A group effort coordinated by Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman of UC-Davis, EotAW put itself into hiatus on May 10 2011. I used to check every once in a while to see if they had reconsidered, but eventually stopped because it made me blue that they seemed to be gone forever. So imagine my delight when I saw a series of bright…

October 20, 2011, 3:32 pm

When A Student Newspaper Stumbles, Who Is To Blame?

By Claire Potter

Long-time readers of the Radical know that I rarely write about my own institution. There are good reasons for this, other than getting raked over the coals by the National Review Online, which can really bump readership big time. But today I want to stand up for a student who did kind of a dumb thing. Since this was an entirely public thing, is all over the interwebz, and the student is not my student, it falls well within the boundaries of Good Taste to comment on This Bad Thing.

Yesterday a friend posted this piece about single-sex education published at Jezebel to my Face Book page. With a zinger headline you couldn’t resist, “Women’s Colleges Promote Sweatpants & Poor Tampon Hygiene, Says Wesleyan Student,” (October 18 2011), blogger Margaret Hartmann, a Wellesley grad, takes on Zenith soph Vicky Chu. A Zenith transfer student, Chu trashes the single-sex school where she …

October 7, 2011, 3:18 pm

Is Steve Jobs’ Life An Inspiration To All Of Us? A Meditation On The Difference Between Having A Life And A Lifestyle

By Claire Potter

Great minds so think alike. Following the death of Steve Jobs, Historiann asks whether the outpouring of grief over the death of this brilliant and peculiar man is yet another symptom of anxiety over national decline. Oh yes — and, since our friend brings up the exploitation of Chinese labor by Apple — I would add that Apple is a potent nexus for the ambivalent historical relationship that American politicians and manufacturers have with China. Apple products are one of the very few consumer objects that people around the world seem to crave, much as American merchants have craved unfettered access to Chinese consumers since the 1870s. Simultaneously, Chinese consumers have craved the American consumer culture that is shamelessly knocked off there and sold to billions of people from Beijing to Times Square. An iPhone also closes the circle between a Cold War capitalist model and 2…

September 20, 2011, 3:39 pm

Anything Can Happen To Any Bunny: A Review of “The Playboy Club”

By Claire Potter

I got out of the salt mines early today, and the first thing I did was read Historiann, who made a great catch on Nora Ephron’s response to the new Mad Men rip-off, The Playboy Club (stay tuned for Pan Am, premiering on ABC September 25.)

The second thing I did was microwave some lunch and settle down in front of the DVR to watch me some Bunnies.

The verdict? It’s bad television, not because it celebrates sexism (which it does) but because it does so in a way that does not permit a transgressive identification, or perhaps any identification, with any character in the show. Now, I would disagree with at least one of the points that Ephron makes about The Playboy Club: “Trust me, no one wanted to be a Bunny.” No one wants to take comprehensive doctoral exams either, but that’s hardly the point. Even though most committees don’t make you wear skin-tight sateen, spike heels and…

September 10, 2011, 10:46 am

After 9/11 — What? A Historian Contemplates the Future of Memory

By Claire Potter

Commemorations of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and of those murdered on a third plane brought down in western Pennsylvania, began long ago and will culminate tomorrow. Here at Tenured Radical we have promised you no commemoration. Other media have a grander scope than we do, and ours will be trivial by comparison, even though memories of that day occasionally cause us to tear up unexpectedly. We also believe that life can sometimes become so saturated with commemoration that as citizens we become besieged by memory and unable to recall what it is, exactly, we experienced.

September 11 2001 is perhaps as fine an example of the role of simultaneity in generating nationalism as Benedict Anderson, or any American Studies scholar teaching Anderson, could invent. As I drove up to Northampton yesterday, where la famille Radical is spending the weekend, I was listening to an…

August 30, 2011, 9:06 am

News Flash: Hollywood Still In Closet, Drag Kings Freak Famous Christians Out

By Claire Potter

I will be one of the first to admit that I don’t really get Lady Gaga, not the way other people do. But I’m starting to.

The first time I saw her was on American Idol, doing a hit song that I had never heard, “Poker Face.” I Tweeted to FaceBook, “Who *is* this Gaga person?” One of my cultural studies colleagues from the South, whose partner wrote the music for the biggest trans off-Broadway hit since Rocky Horror, shot back, “She is a *genius* — that’s who she is.”

Suddenly a song that had just been blending in on my car radio made itself obvious, and I began to follow Gaga’s rise to super-stardom. Like many campy performers, she is particularly popular among gay men. However, unlike some of the more famous disco queens (here I would cite Donna Summer’s long reluctance to connect to gay fans and the ever-ungrateful Gloria Gaynor, who said in 2007 that she viewed her…

August 21, 2011, 3:46 pm

For Colored Only? Understanding “The Help” Through The Lens Of White Womanhood

By Claire Potter

Full disclosure: I was raised almost entirely by my white biological mother without the assistance of paid domestic labor. This is neither a good thing or a bad thing. It just is.

I decided to begin this post with a title that would make my white readers uncomfortable in a way that “The Help” (Tate Taylor, 2011), and the Kathleen Stockett novel it is based on, will not. Although I have overheard the word colored used intimately and fondly, I am outside a community that privileges me to actually speak it except when I am giving a lecture about segregation.

Which I am about to commence.

For a white person to describe African-American people as “colored” is too closely associated with the forms of thinly-veiled race hatred masquerading as civilization that characterized middle class white racism in the 1960s. White courtesies — like substituting “colored” for the curse…