On the (anti)feminist implications of the “strong woman”

I want to make some comments on the phrase "strong woman," because I see it frequently, and not just in the context of this class. This post isn't intended as a reprimand to anybody, but rather a suggestion that we work toward more specific and more considered terminology.

The phrase "strong woman" is usually invoked as if it were some kind of feminist term. As far as I’m concerned, however, any claim that the phrase has feminist or pro-woman implications is bogus. In fact, I contend that the phrase reinforces sexist norms. Here are my reasons.

1. Invocation of a stereotype

I usually see the phrase “strong woman” being used as if a “strong woman” were some kind of rarity. For instance, in discussions of Zenobia and Priscilla, Zenobia, the “strong woman,” is held up as the exception to the rule, even though there are only two important female characters in The Blithedale Romance. Somehow the “weak” Priscilla is the default. There is a stereotype that holds that women are generally “weak.” But according to the UN, women make up about 46% of the world's official labor force, but on average also do twice as much unpaid work as men (usually domestic labor). (source) Isn’t it time we stopped being shocked when women are strong?

Of course the stereotype still persists, but talking about “a strong woman” as if she were some kind of wild one-off exception does nothing to undermine that stereotype; it only makes strong woman after strong woman the exception that proves the rule.

2. The masculinist ideology of strength

Let's take another look at the logic behind the phrase "strong woman." It buys into a stereotype that says that women tend to be weak and men tend to be strong. So in fact, if we celebrate a few women as “strong women,” all we are doing is celebrating them insofar as they are exceptions to normative womanhood, i.e. insofar as they are (supposedly) like men. By that logic, a woman can only be admirable by aspiring to be like a man, reinforcing an ideology of male superiority.

What's more, except when applied to physical strength (and perhaps even then), "strong" is a hopelessly vague adjective. If one has a "strong mind," does that mean that one is intelligent, or merely stubborn? The phrase "strong woman," because it banks on a sexist stereotype, invites a slippage between the many legitimately admirable meanings of strength (the vague category of "strengths" one might have, which might otherwise be phrased as "good attributes") and the form of physical strength that is stereotypically associated with aggressive masculinity, i.e. the kind of strength least typically associated with femininity. In this context, the kind of strength being celebrated is a stereotypically masculine one -- not endurance or intelligence or versatility, but force.

But what’s so good about being forceful in the first place? Sure, it lets you get your way, but is it morally admirable to steamroller over others? Should we really value people on the basis of their strength, rather than on the basis of their humanity? To valorize force is to invest in a might-makes-right economy of aggression in which the last resort is physical. Women as well as men who don’t meet the masculine ideal of forceful strength (or its concomitant, size) are damaged by this ideology. Wouldn’t it be more productive to reorient toward a society not based on force?

To valorize women for being “strong” is to buy into a gender stereotype (that it is unusual for women to be strong) and then, on the basis that stereotype, to mark as admirable a particular version of strength (force), more for its association with masculinity than for any legitimate social value. If this is actually pro-woman, then I’m Harold Bloom.

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(I note with interest that it is actually pretty difficult to find a still of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the actress playing Buffy actually looks threatening, rather than sexy, head-tilty, and vulnerable. Even when she is posing with a wooden stake.)

Potter Abstract

In this post, I'm pasting (below) the abstract I submitted to the MLA panel chair, Jacqueline Horne. I wrote this abstract long before I wrote the paper, but you can see from the abstract that I already had a pretty good idea of where the paper was going to go.

For one thing, as you can see from the abstract's epigraphs, I had a few specific passages in mind that I was planning to analyze. These passages struck me as important, and indicative of the kind of difference I was seeing between Harry Potter and earlier "medievalist" fantasy literature. These later made their way into the paper.

The abstract also flags the kinds of research I was planning to do.

The words "media and history" in the title, as well as terms like "information age," suggest that this paper is informed by the work of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Jean Baudrillard (this last a much more recent theorist). Media theory examines how different communications media alter the way we think, act, and communicate. Harold Innis, one of McLuhan's great influences, proposed that any given media environment corresponds with a "bias" in the senses. Living in an oral culture, for example, would correspond with an aural bias; if the main way that you receive information is through the sense of hearing, then your sense of hearing will be well developed, and you'll pay a lot of attention to it.

The abstract also mentions other texts against which I plan to compare Harry Potter: works by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Diana Wynne Jones. (In the paper I also consider Susan Cooper.)

And finally, by bringing up Harold Bloom, the abstract shows that I'm taking on the problem raised by Bloom's articles, namely that Rowling's writing is not "literate." (I could have flagged it more clearly and deliberately, however.)

So the abstract announces a problem (Harold Bloom's "literacy" problem), a specific literary field against which I was going to compare the Harry Potter series (post-WWII Oxford fantasy), and a theoretical paradigm that I was going to use to investigate these novels (media theory).

Nonetheless, you can see from the first sentence of the abstract that I wasn't quite sure what I was going to write. The paper "undertakes to consider" a "relationship" -- pretty vague stuff! That's because I didn't figure out what I thought about that relationship until I was deep into writing the paper.

Here's the abstract:

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From Stone Tablet to Pensieve: Media and History in Children’s Fantasy

“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.”

--C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, which was the only one taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff room fire and got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates, and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball all mixed up.

--J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

My paper undertakes to consider the relationship between children’s fantasy, history, and media. As I will show, Harry Potter marks a departure from its fantasy forebears (what Maria Cecire calls the Oxford School of children’s literature) in its positioning vis-à-vis postindustrial information culture. For while the Oxford School constructs fantasy worlds in which the lore (OE lar, learning) of the humanities scholar—history, textual scholarship, hermeneutics—takes on life-or-death, will-the-world-survive importance, Rowling’s fantasy world—like our contemporary one—depends on information, information delivered just in time, transmissible by ordinary speech, and platform-independent. Text rarely figures prominently in the world of Harry Potter, and never as a source of knowledge, wisdom, or pleasure (except in the case of Hermione Granger, whose pleasure in reading — always nonfiction — is cast as humorous). Instead of fetishized inscriptions or codices, or even whole courses in the lore-logic of the fantasy world (for instance, the sequence of books sent to educate Polly in Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock), Rowling creates a world of hypermimetic media: photographs and portraits that go ordinary images one better by moving, for instance, or the Pensieve, a recorder of memory that one actually enters and experiences. This is a world without a paper trail, instantly changeable and ahistorical. In fact, the curriculum of Hogwarts Academy reflects this ahistoricity: in the world of magical media, one learns skill sets rather than arts and sciences, and history itself is so archaic as to be dead—as is its professor, the ghost of someone who is “very old indeed.”

Yet if the Harry Potter series exists within a postindustrial informational episteme in which history is continually effaced, it also wears the medievalized skin of so many of its Oxford School antecedents — what Harold Bloom derisively calls “the magical mirror of Tolkien.” Rowling’s medievalism is largely style, but it is a defining style. In Harry Potter, medievalized stylings signify an archaic mode of playful inefficiency (imagine actually writing with quill pens) that is not opposed to, but rather inseparable from the hypermimetic magical media that characterize Harry’s world. In this sense, Harry Potter confirms the influence of the Oxford School in the breach. For the Oxford School of children’s fantasy invests in a vision of premodern humanistic knowledge, as viewed through a Victorian lens, offering the modern, print-acculturated protagonist (and the reader) access to that premodern episteme—which is why it is so often important that the fantasy protagonist be a reader. Harry Potter decidedly does not access a medieval episteme, but rather negotiates an uneasy alliance between the premodern and the postmodern, the technologically backward quill pen and the magically hypermimetic Pensieve, introducing an element of inefficient play into information culture. If Rowling fails to continue the tradition of the Oxford School, her work is perhaps its logical consequence in the information age.

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Previously:
Thinking about research projects (July 13)

Thinking about research projects

As you think about your research projects, I wanted to give you all an example of a research project that I’ve done. At first I thought it would make sense to tell you about the research I’m doing now, but a couple of things have stopped me from doing that.

First, my current project is a dissertation chapter on Émile Zola, so a lot of my source material is in French, which wouldn’t be very helpful for most of you.

Second, it’s a big project, about 50 pages. That’s a lot to read, just for a sample research project.

And third, it would require a little background in film theory to read it, which isn’t fair to expect of you at this point.

Instead, I’ll present you with a paper on Harry Potter that I delivered at the Modern Language Association in December, 2007. It has the advantages of being short, 100% in English, and concerned with familiar texts. This will be a series of posts; today I’ll write about how I arrived at a research question. Future posts will discuss my abstract, observations and close reading, research, drafting, and revision.

Without further ado...



This paper, like most papers, started with some observations that yielded a research question. When I began working on the project, Harry Potter was at the height of its popularity, and the seventh book had not yet been released.

Harry Potter and the book market. The series was being hailed by parents and teachers as the savior of childhood reading. The series was also transforming the children’s book market by focusing it on fantasy. In particular, the popularity of Harry Potter precipitated the re-release of older fantasy books (books by Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner, and others) and the publication of a host of new ones (by Garth Nix, Cornelia Funke, Angie Sage, Eoin Colfer, and the unfortunate Christopher Paolini, to name a few).

Harry Potter and the film market.At the same time, Hollywood started making, in addition to the Harry Potter films themselves, a number of big-budget fantasy films, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and installments of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (There was even a truly execrable adaptation of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, although that film fortunately died a quiet death.)



Many of these films were noted for their use of special effects; perhaps the culmination of this phenomenon was in the recent Beowulf film adaptation, which rendered an ur-text of Tolkien’s as a (very misogynistic) technological spectacle. In addition, most of these films were marketed along with video games.

Harry Potter and the critics. In addition to a widespread cultural love for Harry Potter, a few lone, cranky voices questioned whether it deserved to be so popular. The most famous of these criticisms were made by Harold Bloom, a prominent Yale literary critic. To give you some context, Bloom has written a number of major, extremely influential works of literary criticism; he’s also known for his conservatism and, in particular, a tendency to scorn efforts to open the canon to women and ethnic minorities. In some ways, he’s a symbol of old-guard literary criticism, the kind that considers cultural gate-keeping part of the job. The articles he wrote on Harry Potter were not academic articles, but public rants in mainstream newspapers.



Bloom’s July 11, 2000 article for the Wall Street Journal (then pre-Murdoch) was amusingly titled, “Can 35 Million Book-Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.” In the article, Bloom locates Rowling’s two main influences in Tom Brown’s School-Days, a nineteenth century British boy’s school story (Bloom claims that it is “still quite readable”; he is mistaken, however) and in “the magical mirror of Tolkien.” His main criticism of the series is that it is not very “literate,” although he doesn’t really explain what he means by that.

In his 2003 Boston Globe article, Bloom continues to argue that Harry Potter represents a “dumbing down” of American readership. His main fear seems to be that popularity will be mistaken for quality, a fear contextualized in Bloom’s feeling that the academic study of literature has been polluted by the study of authors who “just can't write.” (The authors he names, purely coincidentally I am sure, are all women.)

Although I disagreed with Bloom about a lot of things (and I especially disagree with his claim that the study of literature has been “debased” by a widened scope), I did feel that he was onto something. There was, I felt, something qualitatively different between Harry Potter and a lot of the texts he names, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Bloom argues that Rowling’s work, unlike Carroll’s, is not “literate,” a notion that ran directly counter to the widespread acclaim that Rowling was getting as the savior of literacy.

As a reader, I felt that this was in some way right, but the way that Bloom approached the argument seemed to me reductive. Bloom’s argument seemed to be based, above all, on his own implicitly superior literary sensibility, in contradistinction to that of the unwashed masses. He offered no rigorous explanation of what constituted “difficult,” “literate,” high-quality literature. In fact, the logic of Bloom’s argument was rather like that of Harry Potter itself – a good-against-evil model in which the forces of bad literature were threatening all that was sacred about good literature. Harry, Bloom seemed to be saying, was Voldemort.

I was not interested in establishing a good-versus-evil narrative. In my view, the popularity of Harry Potter is simply not a moral question. Instead, I decided to investigate what makes a fantasy novel “literate.” Hence my research question: How does the Harry Potter series participate in the models of literacy found in fantasy literature?

As you know, a research question generally suggests a research plan. Now, I had to narrow down my field a little bit; I wasn’t really interested in comparing Harry Potter to all fantasy works ever. In fact, I already had a subfield I was interested in. My sister Maria, who is also an English grad student, specializes in children’s literature and had identified a fantasy subgenre that she calls the “Oxford School,” due to the heavy influence of the University of Oxford as an institution. It seemed clear to me that Harry Potter was drawing on Oxford School fantasy – as Bloom put it, “the magical mirror of Tolkien.”

So my research plan was as follows: to try to understand literacy in Oxford School works, and compare it to the model of literacy that I found in Harry Potter. This meant reading several other novels in the genre and analyzing their treatment of reading.

In my next post, I’ll show you the abstract I sent to the panel organizer.

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Image sources:

http://harrypotterbooks.in/images/harry%20potter%20and%20the%20philosophers%20stone.jpg

http://www.filmposters.it/imgposter/grandi/gollum.jpg

http://www.saltpublishing.com/assets/authors/bloom_harold.jpg

In other words...

Here's the example I wasn't able to project in class today. In this essay the author, Miriam Bratu Hansen, rephrases an idea, not once, but twice. When you find yourself doing that, backtrack and clarify!

Whether motivated by postmodern critique or the search for alternative traditions of modernity, this attack on hegemonic modernism runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing the same epistemic totalitarianism that it seeks to displace. For one thing, it reduces the contradictory and heterogeneous aspects of twentieth-century modernisms to the claims of one dominant paradigm or, rather, the positions of a particular, canonical set of modernist intellectuals. For another, this attack collapses the discourse of modernism with the discourses of modernity, however mediated the two may be. That is, the critical fixation on hegemonic modernism to some extent undercuts the effort to open up the discussion of modernism from the traditional preoccupation with artistic and intellectual movements and to understand the latter as inseparable from the political, economic, and social processes of modernity and modernization, including the development of mass and media culture. In other words, the attack on hegemonic modernism tends to occlude the material conditions of everyday modernity which distinguish living in the twentieth century from living in the nineteenth, at least for large populations in western Europe and the United States.

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. "America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity." Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.