Girlie Schmirlie

Dear Dec,

Sarah Blackwood's argument in the article "Sugar and Spite" seems to be that girl-culture broadens feminism, "opens the club," so to speak. Girl-culture brings in the diverse viewpoints and opinions of people previously not considered under the feminist ambit. This, like everything multiculturual, ethnic, wide open, and hip sounds very plausible; my claim is that there is a possibility of a retention of the same old judgmental attitudes which Blackwood seems to be trying to avoid in girl-culture.

To begin with, notice the (to lift a term from one of my professors) metaphoric of verticality we find in Blackwood's discussion of the e-zines which are her topic:

"Geek Girl is an example of surface theorizing; it deals with important issues superficially and, weirdly, ends up dealing with the issues more effectively than, say, a ponderous essay would. It is a perfect example of the aforementioned wry glance ... Geek Girl runs a comic strip ... (which) is utterly sarcastic and superficial. But beneath superficiality lies a ruthlessly feminist critique of our world's social organization ... Superficiality is being redefined in girl-culture. Once devalued and easily dismissed, it is now being realized as the level where most social interaction takes place. Through their use of sarcastic humor, these 'zines embrace our love of surfaces while showing the absurdity of the importance we place on them."

This surface/depth distinction strikes me as problematic because the one always already presupposes the other. To expound: at one point it seems that Blackwood is valorizing surfaces in favor of depth; but ultimately she rejects this valorization -- "but beneath superficiality lies a ruthlessly feminist critique ... embrace our love of surfaces while showing the absurdity of the importance we place on them" (my italics). Blackwood is creating a problem here by surreptitiously contradicting her claim that girl-culture is essentially about a campy wry glance, for we can now see that for Blackwood, what is important is not the campiness but the "ruthlessly feminist critique" which is hidden behind the campiness. In fact, strip away the concern with zits, tits, and boys (or girls), and essentially we are left exactly where we started, which is to say with the same definition of what it is to be a feminist. Blackwood seems to be valorizing the surface, the campiness, but she is actually valorizing the depth, the Feminist Eye, by making the distinction between surface and depth at all, Blackwood is complicit in ways of thinking which are ultimately going to limit the possibility of truly redefining feminism.

Furthermore, I find that this is somewhat patronizing because if one couples the claim that the distinctive feature of girl-culture is that it celebrates the surface (though the really important stuff is beneath the surface) with the claim that girl-culture broadens the ambit of feminism by including "women who love pornography, women who want to be dominated, women who want to be girls," then the implicit connection between these claims becomes apparent: these women are attracted to feminism because of these surface features, but are not able to appreciate the truly important depth features -- because the depth features are the same as they were before these women were attracted to feminism. These new viewpoints are capable only of appreciating what is, for Blackwood, the unimportant surface campiness. These women are capable only of the wryness, but not of the glance, the penetrating Feminist critique. This, if true, is obviously a patronizing and centering attitude to take towards these women who are supposed to redefine feminism.

Sincerely,
Vincent Chao