agrammar:

anythingcouldhappen:

Anwyn Crawford’s essay on female fandom is the most provocative/right-sounding discussion of this subject I’ve read:

Wordless, intensely emotional and undeniably sexual – this is the state in which teenage girls are understood to connect with music, and with those performing it. It is all in their bodies: they do not intellectualise; their opinions are instinctive rather than considered. Without rational judgement or the ability to articulate it, a teenage girl will always be a fan, never a critic.

I don’t have access to the full essay, but I’m assuming Crawford is presenting a caricature here, and goes on to explain what’s so bothersome about this attitude? It’s a way of thinking that gets trotted out a lot, though, and a lot of the time it wants to be a compliment, a tribute to raw passion. And I can remember something similar irking me from Caitlin Flanagan, once:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

This sounds romantic and is being used as praise, but I think that’s precisely what’s dangerous about it. And when it comes to teenage-girl fandom and music criticism, I’m incredibly, massively skeptical of the kind of claim Crawford’s outlining up top, even when it’s put in romantic, complimentary terms.

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This whole thing is so good! I am always really alive to the role of affect and sensation and how difficult it is to put into words, so I was way into this. Best part:

The difference, in this discussion, is that a lot of boys and men have been inducted into a framework — a way of talking and thinking, a set of codes and habits, possibly called “criticism” — that allows them to talk about their gut instincts in a way that feels rational and analytical. It’s a language that some people get lots of chances to pick up and others don’t. The language is different from the instincts it’s used to talk about. And when you start saying that teenage-girl instincts are just inherently different — more physical, beyond articulation — you are basically creating a rationalization that tells them to give up. Don’t bother trying to learn the framework other people use to talk about this stuff. Don’t bother trying to change that framework. Don’t bother trying to create a new or different framework. Don’t bother engaging at all.

The message remains that you might as well just sit silently in the corner and leave everything to guys — except now you can console yourself by feeling superior about it, because your feelings are so primal and passionate and above being expressed. And hey, I am not above feeling smug about things I feel shut out of — it’s a pretty reasonable response — but it doesn’t exactly accomplish much.

And I will totally confess to and own the possibility that I have a pretty masculine mentality about this stuff, because one solution that sticks out to me is just to participate anyway. Learn the existing language, or make your own language, or whatever, but please just do it. I know: the world does a ton of insidious stuff to people (women) to make them feel like they’re not allowed to participate in things, or erode their confidence about it, and some folks will go out of their way to perpetuate that. I know: there is a bunch of personal privilege and arrogance involved in my telling anyone to just do it. But still.

This is a really great insight. But, for me, the whole point of a lot of these romanticizing conversations is a feminist suspicion of the entire critical edifice, which is built to exclude (and deny) these kinds of relationships to culture. It isn’t so much that girls have a relationship with Twilight that is fundamentally different from the relationship boys have with Star Wars - but the focus in conversations about Twilight winds up being on the emotional element because we don’t have a language to talk about Twilight in any other way.* (I substitute movies for music in these converations because it’s what I know. I also will admit to not really understanding boy culture.) Twilight makes those affective, body-centred reactions so overwhelming that you have to address them. That’s what makes it interesting, for me, anyway. Since we don’t really have a language to talk about this stuff - at least not one that I have found to be satisfactory - we wind up dancing around it.

But we wind up dancing around because language has limits. Language is rational and formal and finite and bounded by history. We didn’t get to make up the words - any of us, boys or girls, men or women. And we can’t just make up a new language with no relation to any historical language we had before. Obviously this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, that we shouldn’t push language, and push the conversation, because it’s the language we have and we should try to make it better - but some things are beyond words because there are no words for them.

*Well, you probably could, I’m sure I could write something about the first movie using a bunch of well-honed critical apparatus about gaze and fabula vs. sujet, and all that, but it would be boring - and it wouldn’t really be equal to what I was hovering around.