Women at work

Back in late January, I revisited “Making Plans for Nigel.” In a blog post on the best musical moments of 2012, a post-doc in my program compared Santigold’s “Disparate Youth” to the XTC single. Point taken. The riff and the hook are strikingly similar. But knowing that the final semester of course work was fast approaching, and especially knowing that I was putting together an independent study on gender and labor, I kept reflecting on the lyrics.

As a kid, I liked this song. But it wasn’t until I was fresh out of undergrad, editing training courses at an e-learning company, that I began to think of this song as a possible critique on labor (or parenting, but often biological and corporate parentage uphold and recirculate the same ideals). Eight hours under fluorescent lights can do that to you. The song is told (with tongue in cheek) from the perspective of Nigel’s masters, who believe that selfless diligence and deference to management will guarantee their charge’s happiness. Yet as I was preparing for the semester–pulling books from the library, writing reading notes, drafting pre-lims reading lists, revising writing and teaching materials–I kept returning to the line “Nigel is happy in his work.”

Nigel’s masters are speaking for him. They’re assuming he’s happy in his work. But what if he is actually happy in his work? Happy the way Peggy Olson is happy when she’s stumbling out of her office after 6 p.m. to stretch and steal a cigarette from the typing pool. Happy the way I am happy when I’m writing and completely lose track of time. Sure, happiness is a moving target when it comes to labor. Those of us who tend to overwork ourselves must advocate equitable treatment and insist against self-exploitation, especially if we are women and there are gendered expectations that we’ll overextend ourselves. Self-care is real, y’all. As a feminist media scholar who studies gender and labor–mainly because I think the ways in which women’s labor is valued in the media industries needs to be studied, but also to some extent because I’m a woman who is never not working–I keep thinking through the negotiation between loving your work and making a commitment to learning to love yourself.

In many ways, I’ve been thinking about this well before I went back to grad school. Those who have followed this blog from the beginning (i.e., April 2009) know that I came into the MCS PhD program with a very clear idea of what dissertation I wanted to write. Because I was writing it into this blog. While maintaining this space, I reflected quite a bit on my memories of my experiences in college radio. I worked for four years at UT’s station, 91.7 KVRX. During this time, I was simultaneously developing my feminist politics. It was through my involvement with Alliance for a Feminist Option, a campus feminist sorority, that I read Gloria Anzaldúa and Patricia Hill Collins and became friends with brilliant women who were thinking through a lot of the same stuff I was processing. Working at KVRX allowed me to apply my feminist education. Because while I eventually thought of the station as home, I also saw a lot of sexist bullshit go down.

I was one of many of the women on staff could (and did) trade cautionary tales about listener harassment. The most common offense female deejays confronted was the unidentified, disembodied male voice who would call in to inform us—often accompanied by grunting and/or contemptuous laughter—that we sounded sexy. Speaking for myself, I went on the air because I had records to play. I was trying to share knowledge. The amount of research that went into my shows was comparable to the research I do as an academic. Many of the songs I played were from records that were out of print, released on labels that no longer existed, and were recorded by artists—many of whom were women, many of whom identified as queer—relegated to the footnotes of history, if they were even granted such a citation. To reduce my work to the assumed seductive properties of my voice was insulting, and it was an insult waged upon many female deejays. This resulted in me taking down my email address. I stopped giving out the station phone number as frequently during my broadcasts. And I got good at hanging up on rude callers. But each time I did, I wondered if I lost an opportunity to chat with a female listener. Rarely did women call in during my show (at least not women who were not my AFO grrrlfriends). When they did, they usually wanted to talk about who I was playing.

These were not problems my male contemporaries (including my partner, who hosted the blues program and served as music director) seemed to have to deal with. We certainly had allies. But male deejays did not seem to need to engage in the same tactical maneuvers as their female counterparts. It was common for women to serve as co-hosts and/or bring friends and partners to the station for protection. It was less common for women to agree to do a radio show alone and/or in the late evening and early morning when public transportation was unreliable and the streets were empty. Yet amid all that nonsense, I still lived for programming a radio show. I still lived for reviewing albums and going to shows. And I wasn’t alone. So on the one hand, there’s a negotiation for self-worth and equitable treatment. On the other hand, there’s the distinct pleasure of being happy in one’s work, despite (and sometimes because of) this sexist bullshit.

My blog changed with time. I used to update every day, chasing various news items and writing 300-word posts about videos I liked. I don’t do that anymore. I prioritize my time differently. As a grad student, I have to. More to the point, as a grad student I feel like I have to do research and piece together as much context as I can before I attempt to write anything. But I’m also trying to learn to listen to what I need, particularly because grad school provides a lot of opportunities for labor and leaves you with the task of determining whether that labor is beneficial to you. Grad school requires you to make time for things. But it doesn’t give you much time. It assumes that you’ll make these choices for yourself. This can be difficult, particularly if you internalize the ways in which labor expectations privilege masculinized norms of self-sacrifice and individual achievement.

So as this blog developed, I became interested in labor as a subject of study. Maintaining a blog to break up a work day can do that to you. In December 2009, I wrote a short post on music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas. It would ultimately lead me to my dissertation topic. I am a feminist media scholar who studies the intersections of gender, labor, and music culture in a post-network era. I have come to these intersecting subjects of study through my own experiences, questions of identity (or, because intersectionality matters, identities) always come first for me. One reckless habit I have cultivated as a graduate student is not worrying about whether other research projects bear similarities to mine, thus occluding me from committing myself further to particular subjects and lines of inquiry. In point of fact, a number of people have already written on similar topics. I am preparing to write a dissertation about women’s intermediary labor between the music, television, and new media industries. Taking Vicki Mayer’s organizational schema from her book Below the Line, I will pay particular attention to positions such as booking, promotion, licensing, and music supervision.

The last area has already cultivated a sizable body of knowledge within media and film studies (see: Aslinger, 2008; Klein, 2009; Barnett, 2010; Lewanowski, 2010; Anderson, 2011). However, there is still more to explore. We can think through how this field of labor is intertextual and relies upon laborers’ accumulation of cultural capital, fluency in copyright law and business practices, negotiated knowledge of several industries and their distinct needs, and the sensitivity they must demonstrate to the ways in which certain musicians and affiliated genres are deployed to hail particular audiences. Furthermore, supervisors’ labor relies on and has been shaped by the industrial practices of licensing, promotion, and booking. Finally, greater attention must be paid to how labor identities and gendered assumptions about labor shapes this work.

Women contributed a largely ignored history of work in these areas that has only recently cultivated a (compromised) visibility. Women’s work seems to have been delegitimized in these fields for a few reasons. For one, these labor positions are historically perceived as catalysts for struggle to penetrate various barriers to entry. If industrially or culturally sanctioned “auteurs” like film director Wes Anderson and Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner want to place a Beatles’ song in one of their projects and the music supervisor or licensor cannot negotiate a licensing fee that fits within the budget (Beatles’ songs are notoriously expensive to license), the burden of responsibility (or blame) tends to fall on the laborer who cannot ink the deal.

There is also an assumption that labor that relies upon technical skill and is organized by craft unions and guilds is not as valuable because it is perceived as dependent upon and subservient to “creative” labor like writing, directing, producing, and acting, thus “justifying” and reinforcing the industrial hierarchies of above- and below-the-line labor. Booking, supervision, licensing, and promotion all qualify as below-the-line labor and thus tend to be delegitimized. The line between work and fandom is often blurred for these particular laborers, which can cause further perceptual delegitimation within the media industries. Finally, pervasive sexist and misogynistic assumptions remain on what it means for women to enact these labor roles. Much of this work takes place in meetings with artists, label representatives, legal teams, and publishers. Many of these exchanges take place through electronic communication channels, in offices, or in conference rooms. There are gendered assumptions in place even in these exchanges.

However, a good bit of this work still takes place at industry festivals like SXSW or backstage at concerts. As scholars like Sara Cohen have noted, such cultural spaces are historically off-limits or available in a restricted capacity to women because of minimal concerns for individual safety to, from, and at a gig, which is usually booked after-hours in poorly-lit metropolitan areas with limited public transportation and parking accommodations that many of their male counterparts rarely had to consider (Cohen, 1997). Hence why a number of artists associated with the riot grrrl movement repurposed second-wave segregationist practices by holding female-only shows or insisting that male audience members stand in the back. Hence why more shows were all-ages events in repurposed performance spaces that took place earlier in the evening.

Because there remain pernicious assumptions that women and girls simply entering into a venue space must have heteronormative sex-based ulterior motives for contact, as the idea of women and girls who turn their music fandom into a livelihood (coupled with the cultural degradation of groupies’ labor and the sexist assumption that women and girls at a concert must be groupies) is unconscionably foreign to many people. What is more, there is an assumption that all people go to a concert to hear live music. As I’ve written (and will continue to write) since January 1, 2012, there are consequences for this not always being the case.

What does this mean for my scholarship? By extension, what does this mean for this blog? Or what some of you might really be asking: where’s your post on Beyoncé? Good questions all. I’ve thought a lot about Beyoncé as a site for understanding race, gender, and labor. Beyoncé has always been known for fancy footwork. This is really just an extension of how closely she controls her own image. A friend asked why Beyoncé ”let” Michelle Williams take the lead on their new single. My catty reply: “Beynevolence. That’s what her fifth album will be called” (I say this as a fan, B’Day 4 life). I keep thinking about the intense coordination of the Destiny’s Child reunion, the Super Bowl half-time show, the GQ cover story, the HBO documentary, and the announcement of her world tour. A lot of interesting discourse came out of this confluence of brand positioning. I thought Leah Carroll’s comparison of Life Is But a Dream and Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning was especially interesting in terms of their particular evocations of “realness.” I also thought about Beyoncé advantageously comparing herself to an athlete in her GQ cover story (a connection photographer Terry Richardson extended because his dick has no imagination).

I like Beyoncé. A major part of what I like about her–aside from her voice, songs, performances, and music videos–is her insistence of control. However, some may argue that such a need for control keeps Life Is But a Dream, which she directed, from functioning as a proper documentary. It often shuts down moments where we might learn something about the subject. Beyoncé won’t offer much detail on her relationship with her father and the decisions she made to be her own manager. More to the point, for all of her insistence on female solidarity, professional agency, and sexual fulfillment, Beyoncé does not seem to have much of a relationship with anyone. We barely see her with Jay. We see her with her nephew, but not her sister Solange. We see footage of her singing “Lovefool” with Kelly and Michelle from their Destiny’s Child days, but then they’re clapping for her from a distance at an awards show. We see a few moments where she asserts her authority backstage, but many of those are dropped in with little context and quickly backed away from. These are ruptures that demand questions the documentary can’t or won’t answer.

As I was watching, I kept thinking about bell hooks’ critique of Madonna: Truth or Dare and the ways in which the Material Girl pathologizes her back-up dancers in terms of race and sexuality and elects herself as their white savior (hooks, 1999). No such intervention from Beyoncé. However, as someone who is especially excited about her all-female band, I was sad to see little connection between Beyoncé and the Sugar Mamas. Furthermore, I was flummoxed by the scene where choreographer Frank Gatson orders Beyoncé’s dancers to sew their hats into their hair. A friend noted that one of the women he yells at is Ashley Everett, one of the pop star’s choreographers and dance captains. This scene gave me pause for a few reasons. For one, it’s a rare scene where another woman’s labor is acknowledged. For another, it’s a tense scene between members of the touring company and the interplay of race and gender frames the tension. Furthermore, Beyoncé is not in this scene. This distances herself from the labor that also helps create “Beyoncé.” Yet at the same time, this scene was included in the film by either Beyoncé or her editing team. Thus there is an acknowledgement of the dancers’ labor, yet Beyoncé’s connection to that labor is unclear. Being able to make those connections would help us better understand the star’s labor, as well as the surrounding labor that makes her stardom possible. But speaking to those absences and ruptures is a start.

I’m taking an independent study on gender and labor for my pre-lims and dissertation. I haven’t come up with my pre-lims question, but I’m noticing many themes. Some include: the processes of deskilling through technological changes and historical materialism, the assumption that women’s wages are supplemental for a family income, the identity-based connections between production and consumption, the struggle to articulate worth, the contingent visibility and shaping of race and gender by work environment and industrial definitions, paternalistic labor practices and educational opportunities, unions’ sexist obstructions toward female laborer participation, women entering into identity-based competitions with other women, the expectations of motherhood, and the contingent coalitions female laborers form and continue to form despite various oppositional forces. I’m also noticing that not a lot of media studies scholarship deals directly with gender and labor, though this is changing.  I’m putting together a mix CD for the indie study. The act of curating a mix is useful to me, and I might be able to pull out a question by thinking about gender and music as sites of labor. I’m struggling to find songs that don’t treat these subjects as inevitably vulnerable to exploitation and subjugation. I’m looking for music that gets at the nuances of negotiating a love for labor with an insistence not to self-exploit. Here are some songs I’ve chosen so far. I welcome other suggestions.

On Being Scared and Being Brave

In a recent interview with Jessica Hopper, Claire Boucher (alias Grimes) revealed that the song “Oblivion” addressed the constant sense of dread women deal with as they embark on a “masculine world associated with sexual assault.” Boucher was writing from her own experiences as a survivor. This was highlighted in Mark Richardson’s write-up on Pitchfork’s 2012 Top 100 Tracks list, on which “Oblivion” was named song of the year. On Slate’s Music Club 2012, Lindsay Zoladz put “Oblivion” in conversation with Angel Haze’s “Cleaning Out My Closet,” a harrowing song about the rapper’s personal history with child abuse.

Much like Zoladz, upon reading Boucher’s response, I heard “Oblivion” with new ears. Or rather, it confirmed my suspicions. Stripped of its robotic sheen, Boucher reminds me of Roy Orbison, an alien with an arrow in his heart, particularly with lyrics like “when you’re running by yourself it’s hard to find someone to hold your hand” and Boucher’s phrasing on the line “I will wait forever.” But I could never take these words at face value. The menacing, queer-masculine Casio chorus that overwhelms the song’s second half wouldn’t let me. Nor would the lyrics that bookend the song. Boucher begins with the admission “I never walk about/after dark/It’s my point of view/that someone could break your neck/Coming up behind you always coming and you’d never have a clue” and concludes with the foreboding promise to “see you on a dark night.” Nor would the video, with Boucher in a football stadium and a locker room amid a gaggle of sweaty, undressed young men. When I read Boucher’s interview and processed her intimation, I didn’t say “aha.” I nodded silently to myself. “That makes sense,” I thought. “I knew it.”

Misogynists might hear an erotic thrill in “Oblivion” and surmise that women like being caught. What’s powerful about this song–indeed, why I kept returning to it–is the unsettling juxtaposition of romantic longing and looming endangerment. But the presence of both elements doesn’t mean Grimes is compromising her need for consent. Rather, she’s expressing the constant negotiation and reconciliation women and girls have to do as sexual beings who are treated as objects and marked as easy targets by people who wish to do them harm simply for existing. “Oblivion” is about what it means to desire–often an ongoing internal debate–while keeping your guard up because of what your gender or sexuality represents to others–often a forced external battle. In Molly Lambert’s excellent review of Mad Men‘s “Mystery Date,” which uses the Speck murders as a thematic linchpin, she questions one character’s rape-fantasy pitch by suggesting that the woman in this scenario “wonders exactly what terrible, violent, and life-altering things would happen if she stopped looking out.”

Lambert identifies with Sally Draper, linking the character’s fear with her own recollections of the Polly Klaas abduction. Though she doesn’t address this in the piece directly, Lambert has probably felt the evil of assault in her adult life. I know I have. And I need to be careful with my language, because these aren’t my stories. I also need to be careful that my words don’t reinforce the myth of strangers lurking in the shadows, because statistically people are more likely to be hurt by friends and acquaintances. But I’ve had friends who were harassed on the street. I have friends who don’t feel safe on their own university campuses. A roommate cryptically implied an attack over a solemn brunch at Denny’s after a night out turned into a nightmare.

Of course, I have my own stories. I’m a survivor too. And as an adult, I’ve had multiple experiences of men barking at me (often from the safe distance of the passenger seat) while I walked to the grocery store, went out for a jog, or headed to a show. I remember yelling “don’t touch my fucking hair” at a stranger while I was outside of a bar with some friends in New Orleans. I remember being proud that I had the instinct to articulate my rage. Likewise, I remember being grateful that I had people around me while I did it. I also remember being furious that my guy friends who were chatting inside about Eastbound and Down had the luxury of walking to their hotel after 2 a.m. with minimal threat of harassment. What I remember in all those incidents–especially as I get older, the stories pile up, and I clutch my coat tighter–is that I was lucky.

In fall 2006, two family members were assaulted. The effects of this trauma were catastrophic and far-reaching. During the early stages of the aftermath, my partner’s mother gave me Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. I didn’t read it. At 23, I thought I was immune to pop psychology. As I get older, I keep thinking about the relationship between fear and bravery. I used to think bravery meant fearlessness. Last year was the first time I lost a friend in an assault. Esme’s murder was the defining moment of 2012 for me, and most likely one of the most significant events in my adult life. It’s hard to articulate the influence of Esme’s passing. I struggled with coming up with ways to express my grief. There weren’t words for it. I couldn’t write about it. Any attempt to turn it into something else felt shallow and opportunistic. As a feminist, I know that intersectionality is both an essential yet volatile framework. Esme’s murder brings up unresolved issues with gender, race, and mental health. I didn’t know what to do with people calling the African American male suspects “monsters.” I didn’t know what to do with the identified assailant killing himself. I didn’t know what to do with knowing that my friend would most likely be alive if she weren’t a small, attractive young woman. I didn’t know what to do with believing that Esme was brave for walking home from a show in her neighborhood instead of entitled to such freedom. But Esme was brave in so many ways, perhaps especially in her kindness.

A piece by artist Mark Aguhar, a question I continue to turn over in my mind.

A piece by artist Mark Aguhar, a question I continue to turn over in my mind.

Last fall, I read Circuits of Visibility, an anthology edited by Radha S. Hegde about gender’s relationship to transnational media flows. Hegde contributes a piece about Indian Hewlett-Packard call center employee Pratibha Srikantamurthy, who was raped and murdered by a cab driver on her way to work in Bangalore. As I read this piece, I understood why a feminist academic like Hegde felt it necessary to write about it (and why it’s still relevant). I feel the feminist impulses of lending visibility and articulating rage in my bones. But I felt like any effort to use my work as a platform or outlet for my confusion, anger, and sadness over Esme would be self-serving and almost as hollow as the UT’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ awful co-opting of Charlie Chauvin’s Esme logo. It wouldn’t bring her back. The act of writing a proper conclusion was especially vexing. I didn’t want to paper over the reality of her death by focusing on her bright, young life, nor did I want to dwell on the brutal facts of her murder. Furthermore, the case was open at the time. But drafting a conclusion felt like lying. Even if the Austin Police Department closed the case–which they did in late December–it couldn’t make some of my friends feel safe to walk alone at night. It never could. The damage was done. Words were useless.

That last sentence is only a half-truth. As a writer, I recognize that the right words, persistently shaped by thoughtful research and personal insight, have tremendous healing properties. Summer Anne Burton’s “The Year Without Esme” found the words I could not and, importantly, shifted the grief outward to focus on how other people mourn and remember this miracle of a person.

Last year, I had trouble finding an outlet to express my feelings and turn them into something else. I fell out of the habit of writing. Well, this isn’t exactly true. I wrote. I completed revisions on an anthology chapter. I contributed reviews for Bitch Magazine and The Moving Image. I wrote four posts for Antenna and a post for In Media Res. Last week, I submitted an article for review. Next month, I’m due to submit another one. And then there’s all of the writing I didn’t share–term papers, weekly responses, notes, presentations, student feedback, marginalia. I channeled my creative energies elsewhere. But I questioned the validity and utility of my words in ways that I hadn’t before. In the past, I always savored conjuring sentences from my laptop like a sorceress manipulates the sky. But now, it feels like a luxury. Now I recognize the immanent critique’s connection not only to self-indulgence but to writer’s block.

Hopefully, such questioning leads to personal growth. Last year, other people’s words resonated where mine could not. I was struck by Angel Haze’s bracing candor, Fiona Apple’s poetic violence, THEESatisfaction’s off-hand introspection, Lower Dens’ muttering, Marisa Paternoster’s bellowing, Nicki Minaj’s blatant disregard, Santigold’s pop genius, Georgia Anne Muldrow’s incantations, Cat Power’s maturation, Grimes’ relentless shapeshifting, Icona Pop’s maniacal glee, Signif’s real talk, Yoko Ono’s couples therapy, Crystal Castles’ icy protest songs, Purity Ring’s heartfelt odes to abjection, and Julia Holter’s celestial hymns. I was particularly taken with the music and words that forced me not to look away, even when it scared me.

What I learned last year is that fear and bravery are usually connected. Fear is the manifestation of uncertainty over unknown entities or prospects. Bravery is the resolve not to be thwarted or to harm out of fear. It doesn’t mean we lose the fear. It just means we don’t let the fear consume us. It’s a difficult commitment and it never resolves itself. As Ann Friedman points out, we can’t guarantee social progress with premature proclamations that we’re moving forward. But let’s try to be brave this year. And let’s be good to each other so that we don’t have to be afraid.

Creating Space

Earlier this week, I launched my personal Web site through UW-Madison’s Comm Arts Department. I built the site as an assignment for my Digital Production class. I intended to use the assignment as a means to update my blog and integrate it into a larger, ongoing project of media-making that I believe is foundational to my scholarly interests in gender, labor, and music culture as a feminist media scholar.

I’ll start by saying a bit about the initial process of building a blog. At first, it was infuriating. It was especially frustrating because my ambition exceeded my reach. I drew out a detailed, multi-page layout. I have a very clear vision for how I want my site to look and what I want it to do. Ultimately, I want my Web site to have curated collections for previous and ongoing research. I also want it to have the capacity to stream my mixes and deejay setlists. But I needed to know how to create a style sheet first.

As a class, we used Dreamweaver to build our sites. This is software in which I once claimed proficiency based on watching friends use it to build their Web sites, but I never really played with it before. My experience as a blogger and freelancer allowed me to treat the Internet like a Word document, because someone else built the frame onto which my words, images, clips, and links appeared. We also read Jon Duckett’s HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites as a reference guide. Because of the accelerated nature of most graduate courses at R1 institutions, this involved reading 50 to 100 pages of the book at a time and (hopefully) absorbing the material as you went. Like many people essentially acquiring foreign language skills, I’m learning through error. I learned how to do something by spending hours figuring out what I did wrong, combing the book and other online resources, texting friends for advice, and toggling between HTML and CSS and doing minor tweaking that would either change nothing on the page or radically change the layout and design elements, depending on my commands.

When you’re also balancing the expectations of coursework, a TA assignment, and other administrative duties, it’s easy to freak out. I freaked out at least once. After a particularly unproductive day in the lab that culminated in me putting a picture on top of the header, I felt myself reverting to that day in freshmen geometry when everyone seemed to get proofs but me. I wanted to cry. Unfortunately, I share an office with five other teaching assistants and had an hour before facilitating four consecutive discussion sections. So I took several deep breaths, let a friend hug me, tabled it, and taught undergraduates about the political underpinnings of television’s transnational practices of importation, formatting, and co-production. Then I had dinner with a friend. Then I talked to a couple of people in my class who were having trouble or experiencing anxiety about the project. Then I went back to my layout design and attempted to break up the assignment into small, discrete chunks. First I’d create the “About” page. This involved building a header in Photoshop. I took a picture of myself reaching for a copy of The Gossip’s Arkansas Heat (originally used as the header for this blog), cropped and resized the image, added a layer of text with my name, positioned it in a place where it would be clearly visible, and saved it for the Web. Once I had the layout the way I wanted it, I could easily transfer it to the CV page, the Research page, and the Playlists page. Then, I poked around WordPress and found a layout that more or less matched my Web site’s layout and design (960 grid! Helvetica!). I originally conceived of redesigning the blog to match the site layout, but this was an easier solution. As I worked, I developed a better understanding of HTML, CSS, and Photoshop. I started to love working on my site. I started to realize that, like my blog, this space would undergo an unending process of construction. I built myself a home. Two days after I turned in the assignment, I built the site’s splash page.

This assignment made me remember why I’m taking this Digital Production class, which I forgot during the constant negotiation of coursework expectations, lesson plans, grading, and deadlines for future projects. I’m invested in university production programs doing right by their female undergraduates. I want more women to be media literate and I want more women to be media-makers. I don’t presume an additive approach will “fix” the television and film industries. More women working in television and film won’t inherently make those industries commit to more progressive hiring and retention practices. It won’t end sexism, racism, colorism, homophobia, transphobia, sizeism, ableism, and ageism. But education is never a loss. Educating women should always be a priority. And educating men and women to work together in an equitable manner will enact positive social change. As someone who teaches a studies course about post-network era television to undergraduates who want to work in the television or film industry, I want them to acquire the vocabulary and critical thinking skills in order to interrogate the processes by which television is created, distributed, and consumed. As a feminist media scholar who studies women’s below-the-line intermediary labor in the music, television, and film industries, I’m invested in helping close the gender gap. I’m invested in eventually teaching production classes so I can help create a space where students acquire skills that allow them to rethink what’s possible and to destabilize potential assumptions of who gets to enact that work. And as an instructor, I’m committed to the ongoing process of learning through teaching students how to think and work together.

Just as I’ve made peace with the fact that I can’t control how my words are interpreted by others, I’ve embraced that this Web site is a public work in progress. I designed it on a Mac. It currently looks weird in Internet Explorer, though it appears to be compatible with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. It looks okay on my phone. I still have a lot of work to do. I need to add anchors to my CV in HTML. I need to include a contact page. I need to add credits for Girls Rock Camp Rhode Island and Scratched Vinyl editor Chi Chi Thalken for their images that I used in the Home and About pages. While I wanted it to be clean and uncluttered, it might be a bit too minimalist. I might be oppressing you with Helvetica. Finally, how do I maintain a Web site without giving in to the governing logics of branding that I believe to be antithetical to the larger political project of cultural studies?

For my final project, I’m working on further developing the Research and Playlist pages. Currently, my Research page consists of three images that link to my PowerPoint presentations of a Girls Rock Camp workshop, a guest lecture, and a conference presentation. Pretty lo-fi. Taking a cue from Miriam Posner, what I’d ultimately like to do is curate an interactive collection for each workshop, lecture, and presentation that incorporates text, images, AV material, and secondary research. I won’t be able to do this for every conference presentation and guest lecture I’ve done by the end of the semester. So I’ll start by curating a collection on the Girls Rock Camp curriculum I designed with my friend Kristen. I’ll bring in the images and videos we collected for our workshop and integrate songs from the supplemental mix CD we made for our workshop into this collection.

I want all of my deejay setlists to be available through SoundCloud, so I will make one playlist streamable. I want to stream my setlists through my site for a few reasons. One, I want listeners to have access to my research. I use the word “research” purposefully, because I discovered that Cathy Dennis’ “Touch Me” references Wish & Fonda Rae’s “Touch Me (All Night Long)” through doing the same kind of digging that I have done through scholarly and trade publications to write a term paper. I think of my Queens deejay sets as aural histories of women’s contributions to soul, hip-hop, and R&B. But as a feminist, I’m conscious of who my deejay nights exclude. There are geographical barriers. My sets certainly aren’t available to people who live outside of Madison. My sets may also be inaccessible to people who live with physical disabilities or social anxieties. Going to the Alchemy requires transportation. It also requires feeling comfortable in loud public spaces. It may also presume that you’re a social drinker, which prohibits potential listeners who are sober or in recovery. It may also be unfeasible to attend if you can’t frequent local establishments due to a limited budget or particular familial responsibilities. Finally, I’m especially aware of how holding a deejay night on a Friday or Saturday evening might prohibit people who don’t feel safe going out alone or in small groups late at night. Let me be clear: I want people to see me spin in person. But I also want to give listeners options, because being complicit with exclusivity means perpetuating inequality.

In addition to building a database, converting vinyl to a digital format, and creating streamable mixes, I want my Playlist page to enact another function. Around Halloween, I had a conversation with a friend about how to celebrate while using it as a platform for creating awareness and challenging social practice. My friend was especially upset about a local ad that showed a woman being dragged inside a haunted house. It was hard for her to separate the image from a recent news story about a woman who was murdered in her own home. It was hard for either of us not to think of how we lost Esme and how her murder continues to influence how we carry ourselves at night. Thinking about this in relation to my upcoming deejay gig, I thought about how it might be nice to link a seemingly fun event to larger social issues. So I’m planning on picking one song from a setlist and relating it to one regional non-profit that is seeking to end violence against women and children. For example, how might we put Millie Jackson‘s “It’s All Over But the Shouting” in conversation with the Settlement Home for Children in Austin?

These are big ideas that I’m trying to take on a little bit at a time in the ongoing development of my site. I welcome any and all ideas people may have regarding both design and content. Let the great (ongoing) experiment begin.

Being Your Mountain: Trailing Tim and Jeff Buckley

A few weeks back, the trailer surfaced for Greetings From Tim Buckley, the first of reportedly two Jeff Buckley biopics in the works. The one that is currently in production attempts to take on the singer-songwriter’s brief career in its entirety, all the better to showcase its acquired rights to his original material. It boasts a cast of name actors. It also promises to make a star out of Reeve Carney, the British singer-actor who bears more than a passing resemblance to the alt-rocker. For some people, this is kind of a big deal. As a long-time Buckley fan who has followed trade discourse on a number of potential and aborted biopic projects since the late 90s when early cheerleader Brad Pitt trumpeted his interest, I’ve been concerned about who would tell the story and what such a film would focus on. I’ve been particularly interested in casting rumors and maintain that 2006-era James Franco would have been the way to go.

The other film, which made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival to some acclaim, appears to be a different animal. Penn Badgley—best known as Gossip Girl’s Dan Humphrey and also received attention for his work in Easy A and Margin Call—plays Jeff. However, rather than attempt to take on the young singer’s career, the film centers on his promising debut at a tribute concert for his late father, folk singer Tim Buckley, the man from whom he inherited an otherworldly voice but otherwise never knew.

Bracketing off the remainder of Jeff’s career is a smart move. For one, this story is arguably the most compelling portion of David Browne’s Dream Brother, a biography that dialogues father and son’s personal lives, professional trajectories, and untimely deaths. Focusing on a time before the son wrote his own material is perhaps a clever way to hide that the production didn’t receive permission from Jeff’s mother, Mary Guibert, who oversees his estate.

Situating Greetings within the music biopic’s governing conventions, the decision to build a film around one minor but important legend is also a way to potentially distance itself from the genre’s limitations. Stated broadly, music biopics are boring. They essentially tell the same story. A musician—usually male—cannot handle the pressures of fame. He indulges, he betrays trusts, he self-medicates, and he overcomes his vices—either through posthumous legacy or with a second wife. This makes it ripe for parody, whether we’re talking about Walk Hard or Behind the Music.

These are a set of conventions that are hard to rework or overcome. Arguably–and I say this as a fan–not even post-modern, self-aware music biopics like 24-Hour Party People completely pull it off. For all of Tony Wilson’s winking at the film’s construction of his record label’s mythology, all the conventions are in place. Ian Curtis commits suicide. Shawn Ryder succumbs to decadence and hurts the label in the process. Martin Hannett substitutes one addiction with another and dies. Factory Records loses its money through a series of poor business decisions and has to shutter the label and its night club, where Wilson gets to dance with his ghosts one last time. Given the film’s proclivity for postmodern asides, it misses an opportunity to not better integrate female artists who had minor or tangential relationships with the label and its scene. Linder Sterling made fliers for the Buzzcocks and fronted Ludus. ESG performed at the Haçienda’s opening night and recorded with Hannett. Happy Mondays’ backup singer Rowetta Satchell reportedly survived an abusive relationship with Ryder.

One possible reason why this film genre retraces the same narrative conventions is that the life of a touring musician is potentially a boring subject for a feature film. A concert can be a magical experience, a site of interpersonal conflict, or just another show. Otherwise, a tour is often a series of interchangeable cities, hotels, interviews, stage setups, vehicle breakdowns, and fast food restaurants anchored by a bus and limited wardrobe that adopts a stench which blooms and stagnates the longer you’re away from home. It’s tough to make this glamorous or narratively compelling for a feature film, which may explain why musicians’ lives and performances have arguably been better served by documentaries and concert films. David Byrne unveiling the oversized suit in Stop Making Sense is exciting. The countless moments where he and the rest of the Talking Heads engage in passive-aggressive sparring or ignore each other is not.

So where does this leave Greetings? Based on the trailer, Badgley does a capable job mimicking Jeff’s voice, mannerisms, and odd charisma. However, I worry that the film (or the studio) doesn’t trust its audience enough to recognize Badgley’s effort. The scenes selected for the trailer bluntly underline how much he looks and sounds like his father and that his performance at St. Ann’s Church was transcendent. Importantly, they use other people’s reactions to illustrate Buckley’s otherworldly star presence and artistry rather than trusting that filmgoers might be caught up enough in Badgley’s performance to make that leap for themselves. It’s especially intrusive at the end of the trailer when Jeff covers “Once I Was.” The camera lingers on reaction shots—particularly his lover’s tear-streaked face—instead of his performance.

I would imagine the primary motivation behind relying on other characters to tell the audience just how engaging Tim and Jeff Buckley were as performers is so the film to get around the potential liability of its subjects’ relative obscurity. Many people, if they know Jeff at all, are only familiar with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which scored several 9/11 montages and Seth Cohen’s summer retreat and was performed by a few American Idol contestants. Critical estimation of Grace, his only album, grew after his death. It certainly influenced a number of vocalists—Thom Yorke, PJ Harvey, Maxwell, Duncan Sheik, Chris Cornell, Chris Martin, John Mayer, Rufus Wainwright—most of whom were more commercially successful. Tim’s work was well regarded by critics and peer musicians, particularly his early output, which sought to broaden the scope of folk music by folding in the textures and improvisatory impulses of free jazz. But he never had a proper hit record.

This makes the film’s title potentially confusing for people who are not familiar with either musician. Greetings takes its name from the tribute concert that helped establish Jeff’s presence in New York’s underground music scene and piqued the curiosity of major label A&R representatives. The title assumes that you know who these men are and their (non-)relationship to each other while the trailer hedges its bets by having virtually every character remind Jeff of his connection to Tim and his own artistic potential. The title is also potentially insulting to Jeff, who in some sense is once again overshadowed by his father’s legacy.

But I’m actually more concerned with what Greetings does to Rebecca Moore, Jeff’s former girlfriend. Moore did not give this or any other production permission to use her name and likeness in the film. I respect her decision. For one, she was with this man a long time ago and was the subject of many of his songs (most notably “Lover You Should Have Come Over”). More importantly, she’s always had her own thing going on. She is the daughter of Peter and Barbara Moore, an artist and historian associated with the Fluxus art movement. She is a fixture in New York’s avant-garde theater and music scene who received attention for protesting Lower East Side redevelopment initiatives. She is also a multi-instrumental independent recording artist. When she met Buckley, she was already an established presence in this scene. In the trailer, despite Imogen Poots’ best efforts, she’s reduced to a starry-eyed intern named Allie with a crush on her boyfriend’s father.

Another noteworthy figure in Jeff’s romantic life was Joan Wasser, who was in a relationship with the singer at the time of his death. Like Moore, Wasser is an accomplished veteran of New York’s independent music scene. It’s my understanding that she also did not grant permission for the use of her name and likeness in any related film project. One of my favorite parts of Dream Brother is Wasser’s recollections of the first night she spent with Jeff while their bands embarked on a tour together. Though Jeff had a reputation for being a player, many of his friends and romantic partners were creative women who had little to no interest in being part of the same industry with which he made his bed. I recognize that these productions must avoid reproducing too close a likeness to these women for legal reasons. But by parroting conventional representations of women in music biopics as blindly supportive and caught up in their lovers’ mystique, Greetings‘ filmmakers potentially do a disservice to their subject, a young man who had a bit more going on than his father’s voice and cheekbones, and the people who were part of his life.