Recently, Dove launched a new Twitter campaign called #LoveYourCurls. While this hashtag was clearly meant to generate a positive message for women with curly hair, it is also problematic, as the campaign fails to acknowledge the hair textures from which much of their campaign stems.

To begin with the positives, with its campaign, Dove encourages both girls and adults to embrace their curls. There are many women who feel that their naturally curly hair isn’t beautiful, and they prefer to wear it straight because it makes them feel more attractive. According to a Huffington Post article, after Dove launched the campaign after conducting a survey of 859 women in three countries, only 10% of the U.S. respondents said that they “feel proud” of their curly hair. Here, we see a divide where women with straight hair are traditionally praised or valued, and women with curly hair are downcast. This causes women to be critical of their own hair and that of others, using hair type to add to, subtract from, or determine their beauty and, essentially, their worth.

Dove elaborates on this sentiment in their commercial, which features girls aged 5, 6, 9, and 11 initially explaining why they hate their curly hair, but has a positively encouraging (and adorable!) ending with the girls’ family members showing them how to love their curls by being examples of women who embrace and flaunt their own hair.

 

Despite many criticisms of the commercial, I think that it is in fact representative of different hair types and curl patterns. The commercial works to inspire the unification of women despite physical appearance.

My issues with the campaign arise with its Twitter posts, specifically about protective styling. Hair, as with most other topics, becomes more complicated as it becomes racialized. And Dove definitely complicates their hair campaign with their tweets about protective styles. Protective styling includes twists, braids, buns, and using satin as protection against surfaces that tend to pull hair out. Due to the physical structure of curly hair, it is more easily prone to breakage. People with kinky hair, specifically black people, are aware of this fact from a young age: we grow up watching our mothers and grandmothers going to bed with satin scarves, and so the action becomes ingrained.

When I saw Dove’s tweet about protective styling, I was among one of the many people on twitter who were confused but not surprised by the fact that Dove talked about protective styling without using an image of a black woman, who the styles benefit most due to the nature of their hair type.

The people behind the Dove campaign appropriate a black hair method for their economic gain, but fail to represent a black woman while doing so; instead, they use a white woman with looser, more socially accepted curls. By adopting an element of black culture and then failing to give credit by not showing a black woman or at least kinkier hair in the photo, Dove effectively erases any trace of black femininity, giving us another example of the way in which white femininity is often used to represent all femininity.

Related: curlynikki natural hair movement 

The music video for Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” set primarily in a steamy tropical jungle, is 4:50 minutes of Minaj and her equally well-endowed girlfriends shaking their butts in a remarkable display of sensuality and athleticism. Yet many women praise Minaj’s “Anaconda” as an anthem of female sexual liberation.

Manaj samples “Baby Got Back,” which also focuses on a love for women’s (large) butts. Minaj is a self-identified feminist, so it’s reasonable to suggest that “Anaconda” is, at least in part, a feminist response to the Sir Mix-A-Lot song. In “Baby Got Back,” the objectification of women’s butts comes from a heterosexual male’s perspective instead of from the perspective of the women on which the generously-sized butts are located, as it does in “Anaconda.”

Now, that’s not to say that “Anaconda” removes sex from the equation. In fact, Minaj unapologetically amps it up. While the “Baby Got Back” women wear booty-shorts, the “Anaconda” women spend most of the video in thong bikinis. The major distinction between the two, however, is that the women in “Anaconda” always appear to be in control. Sir Mix-A-Lot raps, “If you want to role in my Mercedes, then turn around, stick it out,” but Minaj has her own car, so she decides when to “come through and fuck ‘em in [her] automobile.” Furthermore, throughout the song, she describes what she will “let him” do. Even while she gives Drake a lap dance she’s in charge. Drake sits submissively as she dances around him, but when he tries to touch her, she knocks away his hand and struts out, leaving him alone to pine after her.

I certainly believe that woman, like men, are sexual beings and should have the right to demonstrate their own sexuality through a lens other than that of a heterosexual male. If that is the video’s message, I’m totally into it. Such was not the take-away message for feminist writer, bell hooks, however.

bell hooks, most famous for her book Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, led a panel called “Whose Booty Is This?,” during which she argued that by reducing women’s sexuality to their butt (a butt without a face, if you will), a question necessarily arises of “who possess and who has rights in the female body.” As feminist as “Anaconda” may seem, when a writer as important and influential as bell hooks says that something’s wrong, you start to reevaluate.

I think the question now becomes, what if Minaj flaunts her butt not for her own pleasure but for the pleasure of the men she wants to entertain with her sexuality? Is it okay because she is pleasing men on her own terms?

I can see why bell hooks might answer, “No” – especially if reducing women (particularly women of color, in this case) to a sexual object promotes violence against them. But I also think it’s fair to argue that it’s okay for women to objectify themselves because, in doing so, they are taking ownership for their bodies and their sexuality. Women should have the right to be overtly sexual without fear of violence. During an interview, Minaj explained her own intention for the video as, “It’s always about the female taking back the power, and if you want to be flirty and funny that’s fine, but always keeping the power and the control in everything.”

This past January, Viola Davis won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for her role as Annalise Keating on ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder. In her acceptance speech, she thanked the show’s creator, writers, producers, and executives for “thinking that a sexualized, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old dark skinned African-American woman who looks like me.” Who is this character? For those of you not watching the show, Annalise Keating is one television’s newest anti-heroines. HTGAWM centers on Keating’s law school class and defense attorney practice, both of which earn her a tough reputation to say the least. Without giving too much away, affairs and murder slowly entangle Keating’s personal life with her professional one, challenging her moral compass and leading her to manipulate, deceive, and more. Sexualized? Messy? Mysterious? Check, check, check.

Anti-heroism isn’t new with characters such as Tony Soprano and Walter White ruling the screens for years. Anti-heroism also is becoming more common in female characters with the rise of Cersei Lannister and Amy Dunne. However, this subversion of idealized morality is not usually explored in people of color. Awfulness for characters of color tend to have roots in bad racial stereotypes, inextricably intertwining their race with their flaws, and are usually written as one dimensional—i.e. the black drug dealing gang member or the strict, overbearing Asian mom.

Annalise Keating is one of the few nuanced leading women of color on mainstream television. Throughout the show, Keating subverts conventional femininity in many ways. As a high-powered attorney and law school professor, she is a dominant alpha female who is at least equal to her psychology professor husband, if not the breadwinner of the family. Her character also opposes the traditional sweet, emotional female role with the notoriously tough, emotionless persona she takes on in public as she grills students and defends clients for the most extreme of crimes. However, Keating also uses her femininity to her advantage. She uses seduction and feigned maternalism to manipulate men into doing what she wants. Scenes of her taking off her makeup before putting herself into a vulnerable position and putting it on before going head to head with the police in a questioning liken it to a suit of armor that helps keep her protected. Finally, Keating submits to femininity, standing by her man as a loyal wife despite his great moral failings and acting as a surrogate mother to her cohort of interns when protecting them could lead to her downfall. What is powerful about Keating’s character is that she’s balanced. Her race is not fully ignored. It’s used in the show when it is relevant, and in fact, it was a key to one of the show’s most powerful displays of femininity in which she takes off her wig and shows her natural hair as a part of her end-of-day ritual along with removing her makeup. But the creative team focuses on writing the “sexualized, messy, mysterious” aspects of Keating as a woman, instead of centering her characterization on her race.

As a woman of color myself, I am just as thankful as Davis to the team that created such a character as Annalise Keating. They didn’t just put a woman of color in the story as a token minority for diversity points. They gave Keating a story. A complicated, fleshed out, interesting story of a three-dimensional human being.

The screen adaptation of E.L. James’ best-selling romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey opened this weekend, intended for Valentine’s Day yet more tellingly released on Friday the Thirteenth given the scary notions the film seems to promote. It chronicles the twisted “love story” of Anastasia Steele—a bookish, stunningly passive college senior—and Christian Grey—a young business mogul with a tragic past, an eccentric taste in eroticism, and a whole lot of issues. What began as a Twilight fan fiction still bears striking resemblance to its parent text—a clumsy, unremarkable girl meets a chiseled Adonis who exploits the power dynamic between them in an abusive relationship masquerading as love. Alarmingly, the film has millions of women around the world asking for this same kind of “romance”.

Anastasia is a weak protagonist by all standards—she has thick, mousy bangs, drives a manic-pixie-dream girl car, and has a penchant for tripping over nothing, only to fall into the arms of her lover. Upon meeting the famous Christian to interview him for her college newspaper—a meeting which, inevitably, she blunders—she describes him as “Polite. Intense. Smart. Really intimidating”. Their stark contrast of demeanors becomes more apparent as Christian decides that virginal Ana would be perfect as his next submissive partner and tries to persuade her to do so, despite her reservations.

His wooing is meant to be romantic, but really shows characteristic signs of emotional abuse: he “rescues her ”—without being asked—from a night out with her friends, takes her to his bed, and undresses her; he’s upset by her desire to visit her mother without him and flies across the country to show up unannounced at their breakfast table; he drafts a written contract of the sex acts that Ana would be willing to perform and attempts to coerce her into signing it as a means of surrendering all verbal consent. With Christian holding all physical and emotional control, Ana plays the role of the quintessential damsel in distress and submits to Christian’s intense fantasies in a dangerous embodiment of literary tropes and the patriarchal notion of weak femininity.

Though its story may be troubled, the 100 million copies of Fifty Shades sold have sparked a revolution of sorts,what’s been called the “mommy-porn” craze, a watered-down introduction to the world of BDSM (through weak prose and a stunningly frequent usage of the word “gasp”, which appears nearly every three pages). Hidden behind other books on subway cars and nestled among classics on Kindles, Fifty Shades’s covert but growing popularity inspired a dialogue amongst women and an opening to other means of sexual expression. In that regard, the concept became a tool of empowerment—a novel written by a woman, for women, with the goal of experiencing pleasure in a formerly taboo way.

If a medium ultimately leads to empowerment, despite romanticized abuse along way, do the ends justify the means? Is the plight of fictional Anastasia still problematic if it allows for the sexual expression of millions of real women?

“Are you mom enough?” Many criticized this cover photo in Time Magazine arguing of its promiscuity and provocativeness. The critics could not even believe that Time Magazine chose this photo to be their cover photo as breastfeeding is deemed to be somewhat of a private and sacred act. In addition to this factor, before even reading the article itself, the two bold letters of “MOM ENOUGH” and the breastfeeding young mother comes into mind; this fact tends to emphasize the association between being a “mom” and domestic responsibilities. However, unlike conventional roles of a mother who are thought to be more submissive, fulfilling their job as mere mothers and wives, the woman in the picture radiates a more assertive aura by literally wearing the pants and suggesting dominance. Her presence actually shadows one of the letters of TIME magazine as she has one hand perched upon her waist, suggesting a dominating presence. The question thus arises after analysis: What does being a mom in the current society resemble?

To answer the question above, we need to consider the growing number of career woman and the debate that has been surrounding them of their competence as mothers. Some critics argue that by trying to balance work and life, these career woman are neglecting and de-emphasizing their role as caretakers of the family. In addition, these critics believe that prioritizing work over family is a ludicrous thought that should not be breeding in these women’s’ mindsets. However, these conservatives fail to mention the complexities of a woman’s life in the 21^st century. In the 21^st century, women have gained more power and autonomy over what the priorities are; women are caretakers, workers, mothers, wives, employers, teachers, professors, judges, and are continuously in rising demand. The different roles and responsibilities of women do not necessarily mean that they are incompetent as mothers. For example, my mother has told me numerous stories about how she went to work until the day of her labor and would always go to work even when I was a young child. This factor does not suggest that my mother neglected her job as a mother; she merely did not believe as vehemently in the notion of attachment parenting and prioritized her job and work above anything else. On the other hand, the mothers in my friends’ families quit their jobs as soon as they bore children to dedicate themselves to their household and family; this factor implies that the priorities of these women were somewhat different than my mother’s. Times have definitely changed and there is no wrong in mothers wearing the pants in the family and voicing their opinions on their choice of being working moms or housewives.

I believe that in today’s society, being a “mom” does not pertain only to breastfeeding and taking care of children (as is what the Time Magazine cover is indirectly implying) but rather having the authority to balance one’s work-life and to have the say in what a woman truly wants in her life. Merely being a “mom” should not restrict a woman into quitting her job and her work if that is not what she truly wants. The deceiving cover photo of Time Magazine elicits unconscious responses from the audience and engraves a predisposed conception about the article before we actually have the chance to read it.

 

Fashion and fitness models have always been individuals of our society that are held on a higher pedestal because they represent the ‘ideal’ for what the average male/female should look like. Set in the “natural” setting of a crystal clear lake surrounded by pristine nature, the image of the first plus size Sports Illustrated swimsuit model has recently taken the world by storm. Sports Illustrated has long been a quintessential mirror that reflects what popular society ‘should’ think is sexy or attractive in a female body. As the Adonis Index exists to signify the ‘golden ratio’ of a perfectly proportioned male body with wide shoulders and skinny waist, Sports Illustrated has, over the years; almost singlehandedly spearheaded the movement to visualize the female ‘golden ratio’ of our times. However, while the rest of the fashion and modeling world still thinks of the ideal of heteronormative female beauty as a skinny (relative to the average), toned woman, with voluptuous assets that would be deemed attractive for the average heterosexual male, Sports Illustrated decided to buck the trend this year.

While the average American woman is size 14, the model pictured above – Robyn Lawley – is size 12. This ‘plus size’ model’s inclusion in the swimsuit edition is historic as she is officially the largest model in the long history of the culture-defining magazine. Sports Illustrated editors’ decision to take the step to redefining the attractive feminine body this year is ironic considering that, a little over half of a century ago, a curvaceous body on a woman was seen as the epitome of beauty as curves signified prosperity in a time when food was a valuable resource. In today’s world, with the explosion of chemically-produced fast food and snacks throughout the late 1900s and 2000s, we have seen a rapid increase in health awareness and the “diet” movement that aims to slim bodies and eliminate or hide the cellulite and plump waists that are an undesirable consequence of processed food consumption.

We know that fashion moves cyclically – trends come in and out, and “retro” is often the new standard of “cool”. The question thus arises: is this the beginning of the movement back to the 1930s standard of physical beauty – a curvaceous body with more natural proportions akin to the average American woman? Although many in the modeling industry seem to think that Sports Illustrated took a large leap of faith in casting Robyn, one can still see the stereotypically surreal aspects of ‘feminine’ model beauty reflected in this picture – the high, chiseled, and toned cheeks (an aesthetic that would be hard to achieve for any average woman that had similar levels of body fat in the belly, as fat is usually deposited in the face and cheeks in correspondence with increasing belly and hip fat), the relatively skinny arms and legs (again another unrealistic standard that the average woman of this hip size can’t fit into without the aid of genetics), and the usual voluptuous breasts found on other models. It is conceivable to see how men would be attracted to this image – but isn’t Sports Illustrated still ultimately falling into the age-old fashion-marketing trope of presenting a “just out of reach” ideal of beauty such that women will continue to buy products in the hope of reaching the ideal?

Because fierce femininity is partly about spectacle to me, it’s unsurprising that I associate it so much with the figure of the rock band front woman. Part of what interests me so much about the front woman is that, like the front man, she essentially “stands” for the band, synecdochally. She is also the literal voice of the band, and so all of the songwriting–be it from a male, female, or gender-neutral perspective–is essentially filtered through a female voice and female embodiment. But because the vast majority of rock bands are predominantly male except for the front woman, the centrality of the front woman puts her in productive tension with the dynamics of both the rock genre and the music industry.

The front woman is at once the embodiment of her band, and yet she also recedes into the music itself. As a voice, she is somehow everywhere and nowhere, present and absent, central and subsumed. These tensions register sharply, sometimes, in the dysphoria one feels at seeing a band’s performers for the first time, especially. “Oh, the band I love looks like that?” Musical performer’s bodies somehow seem to get in the way. And yet, a good front woman–like all performers–must make a spectacle of herself.

Emily Haines, front woman for the Canadian band Metric, represents these paradoxes in the 2005 video for “Poster of a Girl.” In the video, Haines portrays at least four women. The first appears as the eponymous poster of a girl; a black-and-white “fiche d’une fille” who moves across various advertisements for a Metric performance. The second Haines appears as a performer on stage at the show itself. This Haines, too, is strangely disembodied, her hair covering her features as she bends self-effacingly over a microphone, crooning song lyrics and visually lost amongst a crowd of hyponotized onlookers.

By contrast, the third Haines is initially situated as our own filmic gaze. Clad inconspicuously in a trench-coat as a neo noir femme fatale. Visually curious, this third Haines moves uneasily into the performance venue, and then the video cuts to an peep show, where the third Haines watches the final Haines, who wanders blindfolded in lingerie across a small, enclosed stage. This final Haines somewhat lackadaisically bends and sways before removing her blindfold and turning to the peep hole, where she startles the third Haines. The video then transitions to the third Haines back at the show, cautiously approaching the stage with one hand shielding her view. There she comes face to face with her doppelganger on stage and, dazzled and disoriented by her own image, she is literally taken aback.

In several key ways, “Poster of a Girl” responds to an archive of feminist film theory, and especially Laura Mulvey’s classic notion of the “male gaze.” For Mulvey, narrative cinema continually stages women’s bodies as objects that are “to be looked at” by male spectators. Men look and women are looked at, for Mulvey, and importantly this presumption operates regardless of the particulars of sexuality or gender pertaining to actual viewers. When we watch mainstream film, Mulvey argues, we are always already forced to watch it as straight men who desire and consume the images before us. As a result, we can only take pleasure from mainstream film if we accept our interpellation as straight male viewers.

Mulvey’s essay–“Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema”–was groundbreaking for its time, and it speaks to ongoing debates about what happens when media makers assume that their audience is straight, white, and male by “default.” Indeed, Mulvey’s notion of the gaze is positioned alongside the privileged and “neutral” binary elements explicated by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. For those subjects who do not occupy privileged or neutral positions, filmic pleasure and enjoyment can be hard to come by. Thus, Mulvey’s argument is about desire and identification as much as it is about politics.

But for all the strength of its critique, Mulvey’s essay is just as important for the feminist interventions it prompted. In this vein, “Poster of a Girl” at once dramatizes and complicates Mulvey’s ideas about the male gaze. Throughout, the camera’s point of view plays with the gendered assumptions we make about the subjects and objects of looking. So, while Haines #4 seems like the embodiment of everything wrong with the male gaze–she is fetishized, passive, demure, and incapable of looking back–she also immediately turns the gaze back on itself, removing her blindfold and investigating t her onlooker.

The subject of that gaze, it turns out, was Haines #3 all along, and #3’s flight from the scene suggests that the female gaze is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, Haines #3 is clearly curious, and interested in women as the objects of her (distinctly queer) gaze. On the other, because Haines #3 is a woman, this pleasure in looking –what Mulvey calls “scopophilia”–coincides with the fact that Haines #3’s body is also available to others as an object. To gaze as a woman, the video offers, requires both identification with an object and identification as an object.

This ambivalence resonates with the song’s sexual ethos, too. Haines offers that she will “avoid beginners / who long to shut [her] mouth” until she “takes one of them home” because she knows “how it feels” to be left “filling in the blanks.” If the notion of “woman as lack” has served as a longstanding sexist trope, then Metric’s song turns the tables there, too. Being an object of desire, it turns out, can feel deeply empowering because it suggests that one is deeply necessary to another. More than this, because Haines’ filmic alter ego “knows how it feels” to ineptly fawn for someone, the cruel optimism of “looking on the bright side / when there is no bright side” becomes a point of connection across the subject/object divide.

The lyrics for “Poster of a Girl” suggest that ennui, detachment, and fetishization operate in tandem with the front woman’s erotic empowerment and spectacular mediation. The video takes this idea one step further by presenting Haines as profoundly alienated from herself as much as her suitors. Indeed, moments of contact between the Haineses continually pose something of an existential threat. Haines #3 retreats from Haines #4, and her encounter with Haines #2–the rock star alter ego–leaves her wrecked and inert, rather than empowered by identificatory extension. Doubling (or quadrupling) here is more a matter of diffusion and dilution than it is flexibility.

“Poster of a Girl” speaks to Haines’–and Metric’s–more general concern with the possibilities and pitfalls of authenticity in Canadian pop culture. Where the United States’ model of the cultural “melting pot” suggests a mode of  that diversity is inevitably dissolved into a larger whole, the Canadian ideal of the “cultural mosaic” has been read as embodying a more thorough respect for difference as such. And yet, even as the mosaic’s pluralism suggests a nice alternative to the American politics of assimilation, it presupposes that cultural groups and identities in Canada need to remain both recognizable and stable: as part of a mosaic, one ought to know who one is so that one can know one’s place and have that position respected by others.

In their 2012 album Synthetica, Metric supposes that such a cultural project can turn authenticity into a bit of a fetish. In a musical mise-en-scene populated by robots, clones, misrecognitions, and “Dreams So Real,” notions of being “really” oneself are at once incredibly valuable and undeniably precious. On “Clone,” for example, Haines muses that the nostalgic act of looking at a photograph can retroactively empty out our past experiences; the mere representation of the event somehow comes to feel more satisfying than the event itself. So, too, does “Poster of a Girl” depict Haines numbers 1 and 4–the paper and the playmate–as agents who somehow exceed their objectified status.

Moody and dizzying, “Poster of a Girl” connects tensions between visual objectivity and subjectivity to a larger set of issues the representation of femininity. But rather than offering an optimistic vision of a woman finding her “true” self amid all her mediations, “Poster of a Girl” suggests that mediation results in representations that are conflicted and perhaps mutually exclusive. In this way, the video contends that the figure of the front woman occupies a deeply ambivalent position as both producer and consumer of her own image. While that position may be disorienting, it also offers the front woman an inventive alternative to the imperatives of authenticity.