In reaction to Gender Performance in Butler

In the reading, Judith Butler describes the performance of sexualtiy and gender. She proposes that although gender is a recognizable act - straight and queer masculinity and femininity  - these acts are not natural to anybody. A drag queen is no more of an imitator of femininity than a woman- although obviously these two takes on femininity are performed differently and for different reasons.
I personally appreciated Butler's musings on the song by Arithra Franklin since that song was related to my first experience seeing drag. I was a camper at a log cabin summer camp in northern Washington. In the middle of a dull account of the camps history, the song came on a boom box. The councilor stopped speaking and started stripping, revealing a red dress underneath. Dancing and lipsinking to Arithra, he made we two dozen pubesent boys gasp, blush, and laugh.

Later, when meeting for he firsr time in a year, after their coming out as gender-queer, I felt the same kind of shock.

When gender performance falls out of your expectation of the  norm, it can be shocking. But, like Butler explains. Nobody owns gender exclusively.

Judy B., Natalie, Laura Mulvey, and Performativity

By Jack Flynn

They all rhyme. They also all totally feed off each other and inform each other.

I mean, I think Black Swan itself is a work of art, but I also think its meaning is complicated by Butler's work on the performance of gender and sexuality. Considering the idea that no sexuality is owned by any group in a true sense, I think that Nina's performance of lesbianism can be seen as something subversive. It allows her to opt out of the heterosexual system and find a sexual outlet sans Mr. Creepy-No-Boundaries-Instructor-Man. 

On the other hand, I think Mulvey would pretty squarely disagree that the movie's depiction of lesbianism is purely subversive. After all, the fact that Brokeback Mountain is termed a gay movie and Black Swan isn't probably tells you a great deal about who the movie caters to. It certainly isn't catering to the lesbian eye, considering the only lesbian experiences the movie seeks to emulate are lesbian fantasies. And the cinematography throughout the lesbian sex scene seems to be more interested in the character’s bodies as moving, sweaty pieces than as entire sexual agents. I would say that it’s a scene that invokes that male gaze, but I hate that phrase because it’s pretty damn heteronormative. After all the male gaze of straight men isn’t the same as the male gaze of male gays, right? (BA DUM CHH) Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that I think spectral lesbianism is invoked in Black Swan not as a way to subvert heterosexuality, but as a way to displace Nina’s sexual agency in favor of a straight male fantasy. So, we queer folks win and lose in this movie, but speaking personally, I feel like we mostly lose.

As a side note, for anyone who struggled through Butler and thought, “Damn, she’s kind of a crappy writer”, I think you’ll enjoy these two articles:

1. Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Butler’s writing and politics

http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf

2. Butler’s really crappy defense of her bad writing that attempts to coopt the fight against slavery as a part of her argument about her writing:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE5D61531F933A15750C0A96F958260

To be clear, though, I do love me some Judith Butler and Giving an Account of Myself is one of my favorite books ever. I just think her ideas exceed her writing ability.

Should We Blame Ballet?

Nina is an incredible dancer. She has achieved a level of skill that most 12-year-old girls in ballet class will never have. To do this, she has put her whole self—her energy, personal space, mental and physical health—on the line. In growing as a dancer, she was stunted in so many other ways, as evidenced in her pink bedroom and her mother’s constant babying of her. In short, the correlation between ballet and Nina’s many issues seems extremely strong.

However, after thinking about the movie, I asked myself if it was ballet that made Nina this way or if it was something else. I mean, is it possible to develop schizophrenia due to ballet alone? Are we to believe that Nina would not have had the issues she did had she not been a ballet dancer? I see no reason why her perfectionist anxiety could not have manifested in another field.

Lily serves as an example of a ballet dancer that seems relatively normal and even happy. This only solidifies the claim that it is not necessarily ballet that made Nina who she became. Both Lily and Nina are ballet dancers, so what is the differentiator? Why is Nina an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, while Lily seems, to a great degree, to be a relatively normal 20-something year old?

With all this said, though I don't think we can blame ballet completely for Nina’s issues, I do think that ballet is notorious for the toll it takes on those who perform it, as well as for providing an especially perfect medium to express obsessive-compulsive an perfectionist tendencies.

Girls' Night Out: Lily, Nina, and Molly

 There’s an extreme juxtaposition of two very different worlds clashing when Nina and Lily go on their wild night out. Aronofsky clashes the beautiful and graceful world of ballet, with the harsh party world of the EDM scene. In fact, this whole movie is filled with juxtapositions and opposites: perfection vs. passion, and old vs. new. Yet there was something particularly enticing about this scene. It seems to be Nina’s turning point.

"You've never rolled before?" 

Molly… Ecstasy… MDMA… whatever you choose to call it, it sets Nina free, and it seems to also set the viewer free. From the very beginning of the movie it seems like you’re right there with Nina. You’re stressed out hoping that everything goes right for her. Hopefully her moves are perfect, it pains you to see Thomas constantly yell at her, sexually harass her, and work her to the point of insanity. In a sense you’re just as innocent as she is, until Lily comes to take her out. And all of a sudden, that innocence is destroyed by alcohol, ecstasy, and sex. Again the juxtaposition: vices and virtues.

The drug is the catalyst; it set the transformation in motion. Nina loses control for a “couple hours tops”. And in reality, although the drug itself wore off Nina was too far away from her old self to return to that state of innocence. And so is the viewer. Everything becomes a little bit darker, there is a lot more screaming, and the creepiness factor increases (when Beth starts stabbing herself in the face… SCARY). Nina keeps losing control, moving farther and farther into the world of vice, and into the world of insanity until we see the greatest juxtaposition in the movie: the white swan and the black swan.

-Ameet Eini

How Nina Lost to Win

Initially, Nina is pure and dedicated, swathed in pretty pinks and grays, which expose her untouched, unscarred naiveté to the audience. Then we see the scratches on her back, the first to mar her delicate purity. We feel her horror as she yanks out her hangnail at the announcement of her starring role in Swan Lake, and cringe when she cracks her toenail during a particularly intense series of pirouettes. The scars on her back deepen and spread until finally, her dark side—the black swan—literally bursts through her flesh and consumes her. 

 

At first, what was jarring to me was the fact that no one noticed what was going on with Nina. I realized, however, that the reason why no one was concerned—except for Nina’s mother, who was the only one who saw her daughter in her most vulnerable state—was because no one was trying to harm her. Lily was simply to trying to be a supportive friend, Tomas was just really committed to making his show the best it could be (even his creepy sexual advances were meant to help her performance, to help her break past the creativity-stifling confines of her innocence), and despite initial tension between Nina and Veronica, the other ballerinas were just doing their jobs. Yet, Nina immediately believes that everyone is out to get her. As Nim quoted, “The only person standing in your way is you. You need to let her go. Lose yourself.” But then Nina proceeds to the stage, where, as she is being lifted into the air amidst the other dancers, she sees herself glaring back at her from every direction. 

Nina resorts to blaming everyone for barring her from perfecting her role, but she never understands that the only person who needs to change is herself. And change she does, but every fiber in Nina’s rigid body fights that change because Nina is so used to strict routines and regimens that the freeing spontaneity of the role ends up tearing her apart. Even after her inner black swan broke free of her restraints, Nina is still the perfectionist we saw in the beginning, as the last words we hear from her are, “I felt it. Perfect. It was perfect.” Her idea of victory all along was a flawless performance, which she achieved, but was it really worth everything that she lost?

-Ly 

The Final Solution

I first watched this movie with my roommate about two weeks ago. I'm a wuss when it comes to blood, so she warned me it would get gruesome really quickly. Armed with that clue, about fifteen minutes into the movie I looked at her and asked, "She's going to commit suicide, isn't she?" The response was in the affirmative.

The reason this is relevant is because the entire time the movie unfolded, I was thinking about how she was going to do it, and how the director was going to portray it (mostly out of self-interest, I was worried about it being too gory). Seeing the movie from that perspective, there are many, many instances where the scene is set to intentionally make it seem like she's about to do it; every time Nina held Beth's nail file I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and until the scene changed I was convinced she was going to drown herself in the bathtub. These, amongst other instances, made the moment when she did kill herself... anticlimactic.

Seeing as her self-harming was so frequently and blatantly alluded to throughout the movie, and the fact that she was going to kill herself pretty inevitable, why did the writer/director choose to make her suicide, well, not really a suicide? Psychologically, she never actually stabbed herself; her hallucinations are so powerful she obviously fully believed in them. And yet, once she's done it, she doesn't try to help herself or fix the situations. It's almost like she just let her suicide happen, passively. There was no "okay I'm going to do this now" the way it would have been if she had hung herself, jumped off a bridge, poisoned herself, etc.

While she does ultimately dramatically jump off of the stage-cliff, she and we as an audience know she was already dead/dying (another discussion point in its own right) when she did it. So the question rests, which was her suicide? Did she actually commit suicide? And, probably most importantly, why did the writer/director make her suicide so ambiguous?

-Christine Jarjour

PS. Why is Natalie Portman just the most wonderful talented person ever?

Rest Room?

What made Black Swan so cringe-worthy to me, other than the obvious moments of blood, vomit, and the occasional disfigured and bruised foot, is that so many scenes occurred in bathrooms. Bathrooms are often not very pleasant places for obvious reasons, but for Nina this is especially true. Whether vomiting up her most recently eaten meal, peeling off an exceedingly long and bloody hangnail, or hallucinating someone (possibly herself?) staring at her from above the water, bathrooms prove to be a horrible place for Nina. 

Despite all this, bathrooms provide some relief for Nina. The notion of "restroom" as a place of privacy and rest becomes especially important, as Nina is constantly under the eyes of her director, peers, and mother. Unable to be alone at both the studio and at home, Nina finds her few moments of solitude in the bathroom. Alone, her true self is able to come out. This true self is very disturbing. As I have already mentioned, it is in some of these moments where the worst things happen. 

Mirrors, found not only in bathrooms, but also in Nina's changing room and dance studio, also play a big role in revealing Nina's character. The function of a mirror is to reflect one's appearance (and beauty or lack thereof) as it is. Yet what is often reflected for Nina is not reality, but her disturbing and conflicted view of it. She looks into mirrors and sees herself peeling off a chunk of skin on her finger, her bloodied and scratched back, and overly red and bloodshot eyes. She finally imagines killing Lily/herself by smashing her(self?) into a mirror, then stabbing her(self?). As she smashes the mirror, she destroys the current reflection of herself, the white swan, and allows the transformation to the black swan to be complete. It is poetic that what reveals Nina's troubled character is also what ends her life, as she stabs herself with a broken shard of mirror.

-Andrew Thvedt