[Many thanks to Bitch | Lab and Ink and Incapability for including my posts on sexual validation and abortion debates in two recent carnivals. In the following discussion, I consider two recent debates over sexuality and sexual difference, together with their implications for our understanding of sex and normativity.]
“A desire to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it’s
certainly a big part of sex,” observes Charlotte Rampling in this week’s New Yorker, “To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.”
Rampling is speaking here of her new movie Heading South (Vers le Sud; Laurent Cantet, dir.), in which she plays the part of Ellen, a 55 year old Wellesley French professor who spends her summers in Haiti, where she pays a young man for sex. Rampling’s comments on the nature of normality, therefore, are framed by her strong feelings of personal distaste for the character she plays in the film:
None of the deeply disturbing characters I’ve played were as unnatural to me as this one. I find it infuriating that a beautiful, smart woman like Ellen is—at any age—so invisible to the men of her own world that she has to pay.
Although Rampling’s remarks on “discover[ing] what normal means” are made in the context of her critique of the “unnatural” sexual attitudes and practices of her fictional character in the movie, they are also relevant to our understanding of the status of normality and normativity within discourses of sexual difference.
More specifically, this summer’s US release of Heading South (the film entered the international film circuit last September, but was not officially released in the US until last week) coincides with two controversies over the use of statistics to specify (and challenge) the normative position of women in our society. These two controversies, moreover, resonate quite directly with Ellen’s status in the film as an unmarried woman of a certain age, on the one hand, and as a professor at a women’s college, on the other.
First, in early June, Newsweek formally retracted its notorious “Marriage Crunch” cover story from almost precisely twenty years earlier, in which it had direly predicted that a woman who remained single at the age of 30 had only a 20% chance of ever marrying, and only a 5% chance of marriage if she remained single at the age of 35. For 40 year old bachelorettes, the article concluded in its most controversial line, she would be "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to ever marry (reporter Eloise Salholz borrowed the line from an internal memo by San Francisco correspondent Pamela Abramson, but states that it was intended as hyperbole). In the retraction, Newsweek had conceded that it had misrepresented the basic statistics, introduced hyperbole for rhetorical effect, and had had a pernicious effect on the national psyche as a whole. As the NY Times recently put it, the “Marriage Crunch” article “seems to have lodged itself permanently in the national psyche.”
Second, shortly afterwards the “independent education think tank” Education Sector’s Sara Mead published “The Truth About Boys and Girls” which directly critiqued a Newsweek cover story from this past January, entitled "The Boy Crisis. At every level of education, they're falling behind. What to do?" ( “The Trouble with Boys” on Newsweek’s website). (Newsweek was only one of many publications to report on this so-called “boy crisis,” but, as with the “Marriage Crunch” headline, it proved to be unusually effective in capturing the national imagination.) The original “boy crisis” argument contended that the concerns about leveling the educational playing field in favor of girls had already come full circle, and that now it was actually boys who are systematically falling behind and, by implication, in need of aggressive “affirmative action” themselves.
Mead’s “Truth about Boys and Girls” report, meanwhile, argues instead that the “real story is not bad news about boys getting worse; it’s good news about girls doing better.” Using a detailed analysis of statistics from the National Assessment of Education Progress, Mead concludes that boys in general, and white middle-class boys in particular, are in fact doing quite well, and that, overall, “there has been no radical or recent decline in boys' performance relative to girls. Nor is there a clear overall trend—boys score higher in some areas, girls in others.” If anything, Mead notes, the more salient vector of analysis should be one of class and race, and she specifically points to a “disturbingly low achievement [in reading] for poor, black, and Hispanic boys.”
Mead also challenges the contention that “college campuses are becoming all-female enclaves, suffering from a kind of creeping Wellesleyfication” (we may recall that Rampling’s character in Heading South is herself a Wellesley professor), and concludes that, here too, men are continuing to improve, but women are simply improving faster and, at any rate, men still disproportionately hold positions of power within society as a whole (see last Sunday’s NY Times, however, for an article reaffirming the growing gender gap on college campuses).
Mead’s report was cited widely in the popular press (though not, apparently, in Newsweek itself), and I believe that her basic point is correct, though one might still quibble with her use of statistics (for instance, she challenges the “creeping Wellesleyfication” argument by pointing to a chart suggesting that the “number of men going to college [has been] rising” from 1970 to the present [from about 400,000 to what looks like a little over 600,000], but does not note that this trend in and of itself is meaningless without also taking into account the fact that the overall population of the US increased by roughly the same percentage during that period [from 200 million to just shy of 300 million]). The broader question raised by both the “marriage crunch” and “boy crisis” controversies, however, concerns how statistics are used to characterize both populations and individual subjects.
On the one hand, there is the pervasive use and misuse of statistics to characterize normative behavior—which has important implications for the way in which we understand the way in which populations are broken up into subpopulations, but also for how individual subjects understand their position these larger populations. That is to say, statistical analyses (such as Mead’s analyses of the NAEP data) which repeatedly single out the same subpopulations for particular attention (e.g., “poor, black, and Hispanic boys”) have the potential effect of further reifying those same abstract categories, reinforcing the contingent boundaries which separate those subpopulations from others, and eliding the inherent heterogeneity within the subpopulation. For instance, the category of “Hispanic” covers a very swath of the population, including individuals from vastly different cultural, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and linguistic backgrounds. Issues of racial/ethnic discrimination, language difficulties, poverty, etc., are undoubtedly very relevant to many Hispanics, none of these issues is by any means universal across the group as a whole.
On the other hand, there is the related question of how individual subjects come to position themselves within these quasi-arbitrary categories. In particular, I believe that Wendy Brown’s critique, in States of Injury, of a certain kind of identity politics grounded on a redress of presumptive injuries suffered by specific minority groups (in the case of “marriage crunch” controversy, the emphasis is primarily on the perceived injury itself, while in the “boy crisis” controversy, there is a bilateral attempt to transform these perceived injuries and exclusions [first suffered by girls, and then allegedly by boys] into social policy). Brown contends that, while well-meaning, this focus on the “’injury’ of social subordination” has the potential to “fix[] the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codif[y] as well the meanings of theirs actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning.” Therefore, Brown argues, a political project of grounding a collective identity and social policy around a politics of injury has the potential to reify the perceived injury into a constrictive designation of the (collective) identity itself.
I will conclude, therefore, by returning to the Charlotte Rampling quote with which I began. While one
might be inclined to read her remark that “To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness” moralistically, as an assertion that it is necessary to sample perversion in order to appreciate wholesome normality, in context it is clear that she is actually underscoring the fact that the “tide of weirdness” is actually not opposed to the normal, but rather an inextricable component of “normality” itself. To be “normal,” in other words, involves side-stepping the delimiting and constraining forces of statistical normalization.
I only learned of Wendy Brown recently (in detail) though I'd heard the name. Damn She's got some great stuff.
I was just at another blog explaining (or trying to) that we needed to stop seeing oppression as a product or thing, and see it as a process. Brown's identifying this in terms that work right alongside that analysis fairly well.
I'llhave to make some time to read more of her work but all I could say when I read one article was, "right on". I particularly enjoyed a similar analysis of Catherine MacKinnon's work where she argues that MacKinnon's rhetoric is extremely powerful and grips people because she has a symptomatic reading of the Patriarchy as pornography and thus her rhetoric ends up mimicking the rhythms of porn.
Posted by: Bitch | Lab | July 22, 2006 at 02:56 PM
I must pick up some Wendy Brown - I'm utterly uninformed.
I love what you're saying, Bitch, about her reading of Mackinnon.
Posted by: EL | July 22, 2006 at 03:03 PM
k and EL,
Many thanks for this.
Brown's discussion of MacKinnon is in "The Desire to be Punished," in Politics out of History, where she argues that MacKinnon's identity as a woman and as a feminist is grounded on a continual repetition of certain misogystic injuries, which she then projects symbolically onto third-party substitutes:
Posted by: crojas | July 22, 2006 at 07:42 PM
p.s., I just saw a great movie which is a perfect illustration of Brown's argument about the potential of "injury of social subordination" to "“fix[] the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions."
The movie is Monster House, and I'll try to write something about it if I get a chance.
carlos
Posted by: crojas | July 22, 2006 at 07:54 PM