Twerking and ... le difference

So, apparently fans of Postal Service (the indie rock band, not the actual U.S. monopoly in overland mail) dislike twerking. Or Big Freedia. Or, according to Katie Ryder at Salon (see above link), they just don't like black people. But Ryder (a fine writer and thinker) is wrong on this one, and wrong in a way that is actually quite important.

Her short Salon piece analyzed some of the tweets from fans of the Postal Service following the admittedly bizarre choice of choosing Big Freedia to open for one of their shows. People were apparently put off by the twerking. I don't really know how to explain twerking in writing except to say that it is a gyration of the buttocks in a particular way and that it is performed quite often by strippers, or at least I have a hazy recollection of strippers doing it when I used to frequent strip clubs. (Actually I never frequented strip clubs. They were too expensive. But I did visit them on occasion, and I definitely saw some twerking.) Postal Service fans were offended, and several of them complained.

Big Freedia's recent act wasn't all twerking, but rather in the "Bounce" style. It is a purely performance based rap style. Ryder explains it thus:

For the uninitiated, bounce is New Orleans-flavored rap, around since the early 1990s.  It’s based on samples — often from a 1986 recording called “Drag Rap” or 1991’s “Where Dey At,” the song that solidified bounce as a distinctive local style — high-tempo beats; repetitive lyrics, chants, and call and response.  It’s also all about dancing, and a performer like Big Freedia is usually accompanied by seriously skilled movers, working below the waist in ways many can only aspire to in dreams. Raps are heavily inflected with dance directions like “shake,” “twerk,” “pop,” “wobble” and “bounce.” Dancers — men and women — get real low, real bent over, and lyrics can be super-sexual. One of Freedia’s hits is called “Azz Everywhere” and that’s where you’re moving from when you bounce to it.

Postal Service fans were not amused. The pairing of The Postal Service's angsty suburban love songs with twerking Big Freedia might be odd (I admit to never having seen or heard Big Freedia), but so what? I've seen some pretty weird opening acts in my day. Who hasn't? So it should not shock anyone that a segment of the fans found it weird, off-putting, tongue-in-cheek, or *gasp* offensive.

But Ryder is not having any of it. She points out that no one has reacted this vehemently to Miley Cyrus's recent twerking. Actually, Miley Cyrus is a great stooge for Ryder because she illustrates the age-old theme of white appropriation of black art. Miley's most recent album was written to "sound black," claims Ryder. I cannot verify or dispute this because I have not heard it. I did watch one of Cyrus's videos with the sound off, and she was indeed twerking. It was a pathetic attempt (Ryder notes this). But that is not the point. Cyrus's venture into aural and visual blackface should surprise no one. White musicians have been doing this for decades.

Second, she's not letting the Postal Service fans off the hook. She found their tweets "strangely aggressive." Behind it, she suggests, lies something sinister:

Within the context of the white twerk trend, the Postal Service fan reaction seems disturbing: We’d like our booty shaking, but when we ask for it, and also when we do it ourselves. An uninvited performance by a raw, aggressive MC like Big Freedia, on white music-goers’ home turf, and not on their own terms, was received as a whole different game: a confrontation.

Ryder's analysis then turns to the differences between Miley Cyrus's genre tourism and Big Freedia's transgressive style, essentially concluding that the negative reaction by Postal Service fans indicates just how much people don't want to be pushed past their safe little boundaries.

Well, okay. But this analysis is fatuous. First of all, its evidentiary base is severely flawed. Twitter lends itself to abbreviated and facile commentary. Given that the youth use this technology with reflexive ease, it is not surprising to find troll-like responses. To anything. I stopped being shocked by this a long time ago, and eventually have gotten over my dismay. Everyone has opinions and always has. Social media has suddenly given us a window into their quotidian expression. Not surprisingly, some of them are quite inappropriate. This cannot be the basis for a one-off analysis of cultural trends. It could describe any group of people in any era. There is no sense of historical change or representative sample. There is no there, there.

Nor can one necessarily conclude that fans who posted negative comments about twerking were inadvertently pulling back their mental curtains to reveal inner racists. Or, as I believe I understand Ryder, that they are trapped in a racist discourse that forces them to see the "other" (Big Freedia) as ugly, awful, or worse. If Big Freedia's style is deliberately transgressive, then part of her performance art should be eliciting shock from the squares. That becomes the basis for a dialectical conversation about aesthetics, gender, sex, and race. One of the reasons that Miley Cyrus will not start these conversations is apparent in the video I watched (with the sound off). Miley is not doing anything differently from any of the exploited female entertainers of the last few decades. She shows off her gym-sculpted body, makes suggestive motions, and invites young boys to fantasize about what it would be like to be in a grainy black-and-white video with her. Parents and social conservatives may grumble, but that has been a common refrain since Madonna. The rest of us (including the squares who aren't that square) chuckle.

The end result is that we treat performers like Miley Cyrus and Big Freedia differently. Cyrus is a product of corporate marketing and self-promotion. She has never been asked to be taken seriously (at least not to my knowledge), and she has not earned any right to be taken seriously. When she twerks, we all laugh. Big Freedia speaks to fans of Bounce, which is not mainstream. To put Bounce where it doesn't fit is to encourage a spectrum of reactions from bemusement to stimulation to horror and from acceptance to indifference to repugnance. One cannot then self-select the disgusted reactions and claim that the thin curtain of social equality has been peeled back to reveal the dark, racist core of American identity. Rather, Big Freedia has done exactly what she set out to do.

But there is still another reason why Ryder's kind of cultural analysis misses the mark. She compares Bounce to polyphonic New Orleans jazz of the early twentieth century. Both broached issues like sex and race, she points out. And white audiences recoiled from both. And so this brings us to a rough kind of equivalency, or at least a historical trajectory. Jazz leads to Bounce. Ryder is able to achieve this because her cultural analysis--postmodern at least on its surface, focusing on social discursive techniques which marginalize mythic, frightening "others"--lacks any appreciation of aesthetics whatsoever. In fact there is no real aesthetic for Ryder. Bounce, a repetitive pastiche of samples and commands to dancers, is essentially the same as five technically-fluent musicians working from charts and spontaneously improvising music. There is no question for Ryder of the difference implicit in musical skill or creativity across genres. Anything creative is inherently equal to something else creative. Artists are judged not by their substance but by their proximity to the marginalized. I find this a pernicious form of cultural criticism. And not to mention aesthetically bankrupt.

At which point doubtless many are wondering what this has to do with Constitutional Studies. Well, social equality and racism are two fundamental subjects of study in constitutional history. And so too is postmodern theory, with which I have become quite familiar through examination of critical legal studies. There are at least six other reasons I could cite. And, well, these ten(uous) reasons ... connect twerking and the Constitution. (Due apologies to the profession.)

Klarman, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights

Klarman's work was both excellent and informative and made for very interesting reading.  He demonstrated an unusual capacity to shuffle the legal deck a bit and show how notably human the judicial decision making process has so often been.  The transformation from Plessy to Brown was legally historic by any standards and Klarman illustrates it was a change that resulted from modified societal and judicial attitudes rather than from changes in statute.  For those who believe decisions are formed from law and precedent, this should come as somewhat of a surprise.  He gives other examples and even cites a case (Shelley v. Kraemer [1948]) where the eventual Supreme Court ruling virtually ignored clear precedent in its decision.  And, in the case of black law school applicant Virgil Hawkins, he demonstrates how lower courts can frustrate judicial rulings that have been rendered even by the nation's highest judicial body.  Throughout, he emphasizes the role of attitudes - by citizens, judges, adversaries, and others - in the long and often convoluted process that leads to formulation of a somewhat finalized legal product.  Klarman supplies a lot for the reader to consider and digest.

Connecting back to Kramer

The discussion of amicus briefs had me thinking back to Kramer's notion of popular constitutionalism.  Here again we see people outside the Supreme Court weighing in on the meaning of the Constitution.  I am wondering how much weight justices give to these briefs when writing their decisions.

This week's readings - 27 Feb 2013

I didn't much care for the Grossberg article.  His approach is very abstract and I left the article with the sense that he stood alone as the only historian who knew anything of value about the legal history of the American family.  In fact, he claims a "historical void" was present in family law and "a history of the law of the family does not exist."  There is quite a substantial gap between asserting existence of a "historical void" and tempering things a bit to say - for example - that there are historical gaps or deficiencies in the matter under consideration.  Hyperbole usually ends up undermining the credibility of its author and it usually isn't a stretch to identify its misleading characteristics.  To confirm the point a bit, I'll cite one example.  On page 845 of his article, Grossberg conveys that historian/lawyer James Schouler had written "The Law of Domestic Relations" in 1870, a work Grossberg identifies as "a comprehensive presentation of family law" that is "a summary of...nineteenth century American family law."  In a general manner, he supplements this theme by often referencing how "not much attention" has been paid to this or that.  That can pretty readily be taken as a broad, presumptuous, overreaching, and difficult to prove contention.  Consistent with what I saw as a negativity that prevailed throughout the article, he didn't have much good to say about his fellow historians, either.

I found the other two articles much more useful and insightful.  The Gordon article on Utah/Mormon polygamy was especially good at pointing out how often polygamy caught suffragettes in Catch 22 situations.  I found it particularly interesting how those who supposedly supported women's suffrage were simultaneously able to argue that women's suffrage in Utah was unacceptable.  There is a lot to be learned here about modern day political rhetoric and its inherent and consciously crafted duplicity.

I also found the Tanenhaus article very informative and well done.  His use of the Illinois Supreme Court and its relevant deliberations gave clear insights into some of the more essential family law deliberations.  And - like Novak had done last week - Tanenhaus was able to connect the Reconstruction Amendments to a much broader range of civil liberty considerations than that which the subject amendments were originally drafted to encompass.  



 

Don't touch my drink!

The idea of the sanctity of a person's right to drink - as discussed a bit in the 20 February class - struck me as a rather interesting area in which to attach so much significance.  In that week's reading, we had seen how homes and businesses had been destroyed by governments - absent compensation or reimbursement - without causing a huge public stir.  But the notion of depriving a person of his or her right to drink seemed to rise to a much higher level of affront and personal contentiousness.  Are we now seeing the same level of contentiousness and individual resistance in the ongoing matters of gun control?  Does a woman's "right" to abortion rise to a similar level?  Did civil rights protests and Vietnam demonstrations - and the recognition of the liberties they sought - generate the same degree of widespread majoritarian emotionalism?  

What might be some of the other liberties that American citizens have found critical, personal, and worthy of emotional individual defense?  Why do they attach so strongly to one issue - like the right to drink - and less so to others?  What causes one issue to take on a plain "near and dear" identity whereas another issue - which on its surface may appear to rise to a similar level of individual significance - causes hardly a public stir?  

The People's Welfare question

In Chapter 1, Novak describes the two forms of modern liberal mythologoy: liberal constitutionalism and legal instrumentalism.  I confess that I did not understand what he was describing on p. 23, about legal instrumentalism.  It seemed to have something to do with an overemphasis on the economy, but otherwise I'm not sure.  Private law related somehow or was a component, but I wasn't sure what that meant either.  Is private law property and contract law?

The People's Welfare

I am a little confused by what Novak means when he uses the the word "liberal."  I understand on page 22 the liberal theory that the rule of law protects the people from both "the private other and the public state." (I assume that by "private other" he is referring to unregulated capitalism-feel free to correct me if I am incorrect.)  However on page 84 he refers to the "ascendancy of liberal constitutionalism and free-market economics" as if they were complementary or connected.  To my 21st century mind, free-market economics is a conservative mantra.
Likewise, back on page one, his thesis is that the existence of extensive regulation in the nineteenth century explodes the liberal (?) myth of governance during that time.  Again, I admit to being stuck in the 21st century, but that sounds like a conservative myth to me.

THe People's Welfare

Hi All- just about to start reading The People's Welfare.  In case you are looking for a complementary reading for this book for this week, I'm presenting B. Zorina Khan's article "Justice in the Marketplace": Legal Disputes and Economic Activity on America's Northeastern Frontier.  Her article provides an interesting case study of Maine from its colonial era as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony through its statehood in 1820.  What I found interesting was that she (or he....not sure- I will look that up) argued market transactions in colonial Maine were orderly in a "pre capitalist" or even a pre-industrial America.  The courts transitioned from hearing a majority of "moral economy" cases that involved charges of, for example, fornication, to those relating to debts, property, and economic transactions.  IN contrast to other scholarly theses that the rise of job specialization and division of labor broke down community bonds and interpersonal exchanges, Khan asserted specialization of labor led to the formalization of the legal system in Maine with trained professional lawyers where the courts, which were pretty democratic, were open to people of all socio-economic statuses to file suits.  I hope this gives everyone a glimpse into Novak's book and some things to think about for Wednesday.

Have We Been Taught Marbury v. Madison Wrong?

One of the most striking parts of Kramer's The People Themselves has been his discussion of Marbury v. Madison. As someone who has taken numerous U.S. history classes and even an American legal history course in undergrad, this is the first time I was exposed to this considerably different interpretation of the significance (or lack thereof) of Marbury. It seems that Marbury is not revolutionary, but rather reactionary. Marbury did not create, much less expand, the power of judicial review (as we teach students). Instead, Marbury defended the departmental understanding of the power of judicial review against a perceived attack by politicians.

Although this is certainly a more complex understanding of Marbury, I'm upset a little upset to know that we have oversimplified this case to such a degree. It gets included with landmark decisions like Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, when it is really on the same level of significance (at least in my mind).

Emory Law's 2013 LAWS Annual Conference

This was just brought to my attention today, but I thought I'd share this in case anyone else was interested.

This Saturday, February 16th, is Emory's 2013 LAWS Annual Conference, and the topic is "The Changing Face of Reproductive Privacy."

It's free to attend, but you need to register in advance if you want to attend the lunch and the keynote presentation, which is going to be given by Sarah Weddington, the lead attorney who represented Roe in Roe v. Wade.

http://www.law.emory.edu/academics/conferences/2013-laws-annual-conference.html