Okay, so I’ve read this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and now this. (Oh, and this. I have no doubt that by the time this post goes up there will be more.) And I had promised myself, really I had, that I would say nothing, but the longer this got dragged out, the more it ate away at my self-control. And so here I am.
I wrote a long time ago in this space about my then-nascent belief that maybe, just maybe, there was a place for a certain degree of generosity in feminist discussions. Since I wrote that post – almost a year ago now, God – I have only become more convinced of it. Unfortunately I think it’s made me a lot shittier of a blogger than I used to be, because it means that when I am tempted to write a screed, I have to sit on my hands, or just get up and walk away. Because I’m trying to live by my rules for others, and it’s a really fucking hard thing to do, and a good three-quarters of the time I’m not even successful at it. But I still believe that the quarter of the time I do manage it is worth the effort.
I say that not because I think anyone owes Tina Fey in particular any obligation of generosity. I watched the clip everyone’s currently complaining about, the SNL Women’s News Segment in which she tears into Michelle McGhee, Jesse James’ mistress. I cringed at the whore stuff, and the tattoo stuff (I myself will be getting a tattoo at the end of this month, with BeckySharper squeezing my hand!) and the overall lack of comment on the shitty behaviour of men which leads us to even be aware of the women Tina Fey was criticizing. It was a bad sketch. I have yet to see any commentator anywhere defend it on the grounds of overall funniness. So taken on its own terms, as a “comedy item,” the segment was a failure. Point final, as my French-Canadian grandmother would say.
No, I say it because the enormous amount of brainpower and pixels devoted to Tina Fey’s various fuckups seem to me equally enormously out of proportion with the original offense.
And that’s partially, sure, because the woman in question – Ms. McGhee – appears to be a white supremacist. In no universe am I interested in even vaguely implying that she is owed solidarity as a result of her identifying with the same gender I do. That’s part of the context here, and that’s worth considering.
But mostly I object to it because I think of it as a fight that is definitionally alienating to a significant swath of women – namely, the millions upon millions of women for whom the question of whether identification with Liz Lemon/Tina Fey isn’t really, well, a question. And I don’t just mean that in terms of the fact that she’s fictional. The Liz Lemon/Tina Fey archetype is far from the lived reality of so many women who: (a) do not live in New York; (b) do not have “creative class” and/or professional careers; (c) are not straight; (d) are not white; (e) are not able-bodied; (f) are not cisgendered; (g) are not college graduates; (h) are not American; (i) are not thin; and/or (j) some or even all of the above, plus their hundreds of other distinguishing characterisics. Liz Lemon/Tina Fey, in other words, is somehow both an abstraction and a very particular sort of one, with a very particular appeal.
And I guess what I am saying is that as a result I am confused as to the “feminist value” (if I can call it that) of this entire discussion.
Don’t get me wrong. What we might call “intra-disciplinary criticism” in feminist thought has a long and proud history. I’m not suggesting we all let each other off the hook for obvious fuckups. Nor do I want to in any way imply that women who feel excluded from feminism, for whatever reason, shouldn’t be able to voice those critiques. Making those voices central is key, it seems to me. And if callouts make some space for other voices to be heard, well, more power to the callouts.
(Also, sometimes the callouts are extremely witty and I enjoy them in a Michael-Jackson-popcorn-eating-gif kind of way. So there’s that.)
But I have always found, as in the case of arguments over the sanctity of Liz Lemon/Tina Fey, is that they’re hardly bringing the margin into the center. Usually, they’re the center fighting over control of the center, so to speak. You can tell these apart from genuine attempts to engage with exclusionary tactics in feminism by gauging the participants. Not that I can speak to every commenter on every site involved in this hullabaloo, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the vast majority of women who have passionate views on this particular, narrow subject, are women who answer to a great many Liz Lemon/Tina Fey-esque characteristics. (Frankly, I do too, though less than people on the internet seem to believe me to.) And while, to an extent, I’m all in favour of self-criticism and awareness, there is a point at which navel-gazing itself excludes other participants from the debate. In brief: I think we have reached that point in this particular discussion.
I don’t mean to accuse anyone of not caring about other intersections, here. I am sure that every single person who’s so much as made a blog comment on this issue somewhere on the internet could show, if it were necessary, that their commitments to social justice are well-focused on the margins. I’m just saying that if the point of this whole episode was to highlight the exclusivity of certain consumer-friendly brands of feminism (because, in the end, that’s all “Tina Fey” is in this debate – a brand), that eventually gets lost when the people whose interests we are all allegedly defending aren’t much present in the debate.
Now, please make my death by snarky rejoinder painless and swift.
“And I guess what I am saying is that as a result I am confused as to the “feminist value” (if I can call it that) of this entire discussion.”
THIS. This is my ultimate issue with this whole hullabaloo. Were the sketches somewhat offensive and were there points that could be made and lessons learned? Yes. But the continued hue and cry just seems so ridiculously out of proportion.
As I commented earlier, I look forward to the 30 Rock episode that will parody this clusterfuck.
Makes me glad I don’t watch SNL.
I’ll be honest, I never understood the arguments for Tina Fey as feminist (icon?) in the first place. I mean I share a lot of superficial things in common with Fey/Lemon (including a physical resemblance that people tend to comment on), but I’ve been watching her make jokes since her snl days and have never found her to be feminist. I guess that shows how much benefit of the doubt she has been given simply for coming across as smart and not quite fitting the mold of the usual comedic actress.
This is the most intelligent thing I’ve read on the whole debate. I’m so glad you wrote it…so glad!
I took a class on fan culture and fan communities a couple of years ago and both my (many) fannish experiences and that class lead me to believe that your question is an astute one. In other words, in my opinion, this isn’t primarily a political issue. This is an issue of a fan community feeling betrayed by the object of their fandom. It just so happens that this fan community and the feminist community have a strong overlap and the nature of the betrayal is such that it’s easy to analyze with a feminist lens. But as for it being a feminist issue? Not unless Liz Lemon was ever a legit feminist icon in the first place, and for all the reasons you’ve pointed out, saying that she was is problematic (also, because a ton of people watch 30 Rock and I’m willing to bet a lot of them aren’t feminists and don’t think of Liz Lemon that way either).
As far as I’m concerned, this is a question of fandom and fannish indignation. I don’t think that indignation is unmerited, from this point of view. But I think for a lot of people who are upset about this, they don’t consider themselves to be fans of 30 Rock in a fannish way but actually in a feminist way (I think this happens for other media objects as well, esp. Mad Men — that liking a television show is conceptualized as a feminist act) and when you spend so much of your time wielding a hammer, every problem begins to look mostly like an opportunity to smash the Patriarchy, you know?
baraqiel:
That makes a lot of sense, I think that the progressive community is does the same thing to Pres. Obama. It’s like every time he does the not most progressive thing possible, we forget that he has told us over and over that he is not an idealist but a pragmatist.
I don’t follow Tina Fey, but does anyone know if she ever even said she was a feminist role model or did people place her in that role without asking her opinion?
I haven’t heard of Tina Fey declaring herself a feminist or a feminist role model, but I think there is a tendency to implicitly confer that title on any woman who comes across as independently funny and smart, given how few such women there are in mainstream media, and then hope that she lives up to it. So, when said implicitly feminist woman puts her foot in it, a lot of people get upset because her behavior is suddenly, jarringly out of line with what we want to see. That’s my theory anyway.
Oh and that’s not to say that we *shouldn’t* want to see such women or that projecting what we want to see on the few approximations of ‘strong’ (for varying values of strong) female characters that we find is bad or wrong. It’s making the most of a lousy situation, I think. In the absence of declared feminists/ role models (and I’m not saying there aren’t any – just not nearly enough), we do what we can with what little we get.
Maybe fans have projected too much feminism onto Tina Fey, but I think feminists are always frustrated by misogynist comedy, and there’s something particularly awful about watching an intelligent woman engage in it, self-described-feminist or not.
The SNL episode felt like the culmination of my long-time uneasiness over 30 Rock. I think Sady at Tiger Beatdown and Jessica at Slate said the same thing. Tina Fey can be awesome–and yet she is ALWAYS doing the pathetic lonely single career woman jokes.
I’m with you, Spark. I’ve always been a bit meh toward that side of Fey’s comedy, but I just love the rest of 30 Rock so much that I can’t quit it.
That said, I’ve never considered Fey one of my feminist heroes, but I think the backlash (mini-backlash, forelash, what-have-you) is a clear example of people feeling betrayed by someone they respect.
Now, Samantha Bee? There’s a woman in comedy who’s doing feminist right, IMHO.
@Queenie and Spark: I think my point is not so much that there isn’t criticism to be made of Tina Fey. My point is that the enormity of the appetite for it is a little unsettling, and often seems out of proportion to its stated purpose – i.e. to kick her in the ass for attacking other women in the name of making feminism less upper middle class and white. That’s a valid criticism, and certainly one no one should be interested in silencing, but when this gets dragged out to a thirty-five blogpost fight among largely ladies who answer to the Liz Lemon paradigm… I get suspicious. I mean if this were women of colour, or women with disabilities, making this kind of argument? That would be one thing. But they seem disinterested, and so I’m wondering if this is as crucial an issue as the tenor of those posts suggests.
This whole line of thought sort of came out of some posts by Nitsuh Abebe, a music critic who writes for Pitchfork among other things – actually to Sady Doyle, though re something else entirely, and though her response has disappeared it’s worth noting she responded positively at the time – where he is talking about, as he puts it, his “general weariness with being a non-white person who’s spent too much time watching white people in the internet accuse one another of being white, or too white, or just generally playing a game of white-baiting in which the rest of us humans begin to feel like weird symbolic projections of the various neuroses of being white and feeling weird about it.” I think you can extrapolate that observation to all kinds of axes. And it’s thus something I now try to keep in mind whenever I, as a white lady with a fair amount of economic/cultural privilege, start going after another person with similar baggage. I mean, if I’m so concerned about the exclusion of voices, I’m beginning to wonder if the way forward isn’t for me to start elevating other kinds of voices rather than just taking for myself the position of the critic who’s “really in touch with the people,” so to speak. Sometimes it’s necessary for me to be the one speaking to get the criticism heard, of course, so it’s not like there’s any hard and fast rule here. But it is something I think about a lot lately, whether my efforts need to be concentrated on white-lady feminist infighting or whether they really need be elsewhere.
Okay, so that’s turning into a post of its own I guess, for another time.
As for Sam Bee, she isn’t my cup of tea, which pains me as she’s both Canadian and a feminist, but she too got some hell for that dick jokes/porn guy thing she did a few weeks ago, which was pretty not-super-feminist either. Not to say let’s revoke her card, just to observe that it’s not like anyone’s figured out how to do perfect feminist comedy.
Except, umm, Sarah Haskins.
God, Sarah Haskins – you’re so right. And, I agree: it’s not that there aren’t valid critiques of Fey’s work to be made, but the heat of the current flame feels a bit out of proportion to me. It also feels really sudden, like things turned on a dime.
Interesting about Sam Bee. I’ve been out of the Daily Show loop for the last couple of weeks; I’ll have to go watch this porn guy thing.