I have a hunch, though, that even as I might be the only person who thinks the blackfacing/whitewashing issue is still relevant in the face (ooh pun!) of a global political drama, I do think it’s more complex than it may at first seem. It’s about a type of movie, made for a certain kind of person, and right now there’s a certain kind of Hollywood actor responsible for cultivating this kind of audience. These are the people who bring us Syriana, Babel, and now, A Mighty Heart. From other niches in the entertainment industry they also bring us {red} products, and Vanity Fair issues “dedicated” to Africa.

And, to be honest, these are all cultural products that I generally consume and enjoy– but I can’t help but catch a gentle whiff of something ever-so-slightly amiss…

Even in the language of global awareness and education that we also know we so desperately need. I’ve added the video below, and also one to my previous post on Pearl and Jolie, because it’s one of the ones I’m watching and listening to in my attempts to grasp this thing I feel:

The second thing I was thinking about is why I am obsessed with chicness as feral. To be ‘feral,’ as you probably already know, is be wild. But not quite wild like “girls gone wild,” (although…) but more like raised in the wild, like raised by wolves.

According to feralchildren.com, feral children “are children who’ve grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.”

Hmm. Today’s celebrities: survivors? — check (Kate Moss has been in the news for almost 20 years!) Denied normal interaction? — check. Raised by animals? — well at least there’s a good metaphor there.

Anyway. Maybe we like our girls feral because we like them at best beyond human–and all equivalent notions of sustenance. Or at worst, we simply like them desperate.

At the heart of this chic thing, the gamine thing, the hungry, I’m-gonna-eat-you-look thing, there is something interesting about femininity as sexual yet not reproductive. The unnaturally childlike body reinforces this, its hungering look promising consumption and consummation without reproduction.

I am not hard on this idea of consummation and consumption because I believe that it is wrong to distinguish between female sex and female reproduction. Frankly, I’m in favor of such distinctions– because I am in favor of female sexual pleasure independent from makin’ babies.

But I have to be suspicious about our growing cultural desire to have all things both ways, and how, if we aren’t careful, the negative energy generated between desire and its material limits will always take someone victim, often a woman. Women should work, but there has been little integration between childcare and labor structures. We want to reduce teen pregnancy, but don’t want sex education. We want peace without the hard work of making justice. We want sexual pleasure without reproduction. In each of these examples, there is some kind of financial “out,” but they are loopholes, not solutions.

To use an over-simplified example: I always want new clothes. If the producers of clothes all made living wages, I could not always have new clothes, unless I were wealthy. I want the people who make clothes to earn living wages, because I want workers in general to earn living wage. Business owners know, however, that even though I want others to earn such wages, I will not stop going to the store. They know that I, perhaps innocently, want to have it both ways. I will never ask the question: what I am willing to give up? To make the example less trivial, substitute “food” for “clothes.”

Earlier in this post, I wondered if we like feral girls because we like our girls without suggestion of sustenance. Not only might their bodies not suggest reproduction, they don’t even need to be fed! They are outside of social relation. There is no marrying them (they’re celebrities), no feeding them (they don’t eat), no making a living with or for them (they’re rich). Apparently, we only need to wait for them to become legal.

They are perfect embodiments of desire. They’re girls gone wild!

And I am pretty sure that there is something I am supposed to like about this. I am not being sarcastic: I like wild. So why this feeling of dis-ease? For what will this mean for regular girls? Everyday girls? Girls who must navigate the wilderness we grow in their images?

Anyway, on my way out, I just happened to catch sight of a Natalie Angier article from 1993–”Fashion’s Waif Look Makes Strong Women Weep” (If you don’t get TimesSelect, you can click here to read it). It shot me back to college, to when waifs–and their attendant “poverty chic” and “heroin chic“–were new and news.

Angier, a New York Times science writer, sets it up like this:

After a long spell of the lusty, towering glamour queens, of the women with physiques hammered out at the health club and often perfected at the surgeon’s office, of the Cindy Crawfords and the Claudia Schiffers, the fashion industry has pulled another of its tectonic shifts and declared this the year of the gamine. Now it is time to celebrate the saucy little street urchins, the winsome starvelings. The mature, big-haired and big-breasted look is out, and the short, waiflike and wafer-like look is in….

Huh. It’s a good point. It didn’t seem so at the time, but looking back to the eighties, Crawford and her ilk look positively BBW next to the constantly youngering and smallerifying models who would come to define the next fifteen years. I mean, Dakota Fanning for Marc Jacobs? Cute or Creepy indeed! (thanks tweenscene and eccw.) Faced with the newest trend, Angier asked some good questions back in 1993:

Fashion is supposed to be part fantasy, of course, and its every attempt at novelty probably should not be taken to heart. But the latest paradigm switch in body type is so extreme that it cannot help but raise the question: What does the gamine girl mean for real women? What does she say about the culture’s judgment of women, of how comfortable it feels with the power they have seized? Are women once again being portrayed as skinny and childlike because the larger and more sophisticated images became too threatening?

Some good questions, no? Intrigued by this article, I went back through her NYT archive. I love her stuff! In fact, I might do a whole post on how she has already written with authority on everything I have ever thought of thinking about. (She was well into her career while I was still working to disavow Kriss-Kross!)

Back on track: What I found most interesting about the article was my own response to how Angier’s questions still stand fourteen years later. Historicization is always a relevant concern for cultural studies: what are the questions we should be asking? And how are those questions addressed, suppressed, or expanded over time?

In that vein, it is interesting to map other pop culture shifts, which really over time index historical shifts, alongside this one that Angier has named. In the article, for instance, we are reminded that the waif-look was supposed to be seen as anti-establishment, as

in keeping with [the day's] more liberal tone, a rejection of conspicuous wealth and an embracing of the organic, the gritty, the ethnic — poverty chic, as many call it.

In observing the many ways celebrity-watching has become a mainstream obsession– and how uber-thinness, if anything, signifies wealth and whiteness– how might we talk about the ways in which the waif look quickly moved from being countercultural to being an absolute signification of capital, in every sense, but particularly as social capital?