Featured two years ago in NYLON’s music issue, this picture of Beth Ditto is one from an eight-page editorial on the fashion icon. Besides winking and flaunting a winning hand, we see Ditto dressed a certain way that could allude to a westernized “Geisha” look. Digressing from the stereotypical performance of racialization, what’s more interesting about this photo is what we don’t see— in this case the woman of color housekeeper. In Mimi Thi Nguyen’s blog “Background Color,” presented on Threadbared, the use of a person of color as landscape in fashion editorials is examined. Nguyen is most concerned about how the background woman, “who may or may not be a real housekeeper at the motel at which this editorial was photographed,” represents a thick history of fantasy imagery in which “exotic locals,” are adorned in “traditional and time-bound” clothes, while being set against “colonial regimes of power and knowledge.” As Ditto is vibrantly dressed, she powerfully gazes at the camera representing control, while woman of color, dressed in a drab uniform, expresses a, “weary… and guarded expression,” as she gazes at Ditto. Besides being denied power, the woman of color is also denied a story. In studying the picture Nguyen wonders:
“…she has just been forced to play cards with a guest — not because she wants to, but because she could lose her job if she doesn’t. Nor does the game even feel like a break from her domestic labor; this sort of affective labor is no less taxing. In her mind (in the story I imagine about this editorial), she calculates how much longer she’ll have to stay and clean in order to meet her day’s quota.”
The point is: besides not knowing the woman of color’s story, we aren’t supposed to care, let alone acknowledge her presence at all. Existing only to make the white woman’s privilege become more relevant, the woman of color becomes a landscape. This image is not new, as Nguyen writes in a later blog. She states, “I think it’s clear that the aesthetic conventions of the NYLON editorial are both jarringly new and disturbingly the same.” Take Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), for example:
In comparison, the Ditto editorial now represents an, “example of the long duration of racisms and their entanglements with other vectors of power, including gender, sexuality, empire and labor.” Besides recreating this message, what I find most troublesome about Ditto’s editorial photo is the medium in which it’s presented— NYLON. How could a magazine deemed “hipster/alternative,” and that’s read by, “fashion-forward," and “in the know,” readers convey such a inherently racist image? Besides pointing out the “world of NYLON [as] glaringly white,” Nguyen argues that this picture in such a magazine, “reinforces the distance between the presumed viewer and the housekeeper who is not included in this wink, and who is not imagined to share this same base of knowledge.” With this said, I began to leaf through the piles of NYLON magazines I have showcased on my home bookshelf. Out of the twenty-some issues I have from the past two years, only four feature a woman of color on the front page: Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam (M.I.A.), Zoe Saldana, Lily Allen, and Jessica Szohr. In a similar blog on Threadbared titled, “Letter to the Editor” Nguyen includes this letter issued in one “Denim Issue” of NYLON:
Dear Nylon,
Your ass history piece in the April issue is fucking laughable. You can give props to Applebottom Jeans all you want; the only ladies of color in the magazine were in the street fashion spread.
Olivia – Urbana, IL
Igniting an investigation in my favorite magazine’s rhetoric, I then started coming across similar messages. For example, this article emphasizes, “while black magic is evil, white magic is always good.” While that article can be seen as a stretch, I ponder: is NYLON conveying a different sort of “racism”— a “hipster racism”? Reading up on “hipster racism” makes me wonder are the messages and photos in this “alternative” magazine, “meant to denigrate another's person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning "ironic" nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy”? In saying this, perhaps those in charge of Beth Ditto’s photo shoot were well aware of the “deeply embedded” racisms of the image, and did so to play on the themes in an ironic way.
The trouble with this sort of alleged "hipster racism," is that the irony is assumed by those still in power, and thus the joke is still on the invisible oppressed. The irony imposed by the "hipster" is that they are "not" racist, and obtain the knowledge to recognize a racist image/message as wrong, so thus can redistribute this image/message as funny, because of their "in the know" original disposition. How ironic. How witty. How troublesome, because when the viewer (or more importantly the oppressed body) isn't "in on the joke," then the image is just really racist. Just look at this allegedly witty cover of The New Yorker.
Again we see an "satirical" image of the Obamas, where as Howard Kurtz said, “I talked to the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, who tells me this is a satire, that they are making fun of all the rumors." This "Hipster racism" is still racism, and makes us ask, how can the bodies that matter, be the only bodies "in the know"? The real irony with the Ditto editorial is the body of the housekeeper (or those bodies who also associate with her gaze) are still not in on the joke, and again this image is packed with, "disturbingly" similar rhetoric.
What are your thoughts?
Work Cited:
Definition and critique of "hipster racism" found on this blog:http://meloukhia.net/2009/07/hipster_racism.html
Critique of "hipster racism" in The New Yorker found on this blog:http://www.racialicious.com/2008/07/14/the-new-yorker-and-hipster-racism/
Threadbared blogs referenced:http://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/2008/07/19/background-color/
http://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/background-color-redux-ii/
http://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/letter-to-the-editor/
I agree with you on the notion that the messages will be seen as racist to those invisible groups who are not "in the know." I, though I am not part of the victim group, am not "in the know," and assumed that the image was racist. Those images are offensive to me, because they produce the Obamas as stereotypical, racialized groups: the Middle Eastern terrorist and the "Sista girl" black woman. In fact, I didn't even realize that the material could be a joke until I read your commentary on it. Good job. :)
ReplyDeleteI never heard of hipster racism before this post, but now that I have I can see it absolutely true. But I feel like hipster racism is something that not just hipsters have. This excerpt from the Hipster Racism blog link makes me feel this way:
ReplyDelete“Hipster racism often hides under the unassailable guise of satire. People who suggest that something is racist, and not actually funny, are told that they obviously just don’t get it, and that the whole point of humour is to push boundaries.”
It made me think of the recent movie where Robert Downey Jr. put on blackface for the entire (I’m guessing, I never saw it) movie. This wasn't an indie movie. It was a huge mainstream production. And from the trailers and commercials for it, I was shocked that an actor nowadays would agree to do something like that. But most people’s (at least from what I can tell) reactions were that it was funny. Maybe I’m weird and lack a sense of humor, but nowadays I seem to constantly be offended by things that others think are funny.