Web Roundup: Having a Moment: Ruminations on Women, Hysteria, Stress, and the Pelosi Backclap - Somatosphere
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Science, Medicine, and Anthropology
http://somatosphere.net
http://somatosphere.net/2019/having-a-moment-ruminations-on-women-hy
steria-stress-and-the-pelosi-backclap.html/
Web Roundup: Having a Moment: Ruminations
on Women, Hysteria, Stress, and the Pelosi
Backclap
2019-03-31 20:52:30
By Stephanie Palazzo
Women are having a moment. At President Trump’s State of the Union
address, Democratic women wore white as a nod to suffragists and female
leadership, and Nancy Pelosi’s backclap went viral. At the 2019 Oscars,
women of color made history, receiving an unprecedented number of
awards, and Period. End of Sentence. (2018),a film about menstruation in
rural India,won best short documentary. The presence of women of color
in the historically white-dominated awards show prompted a whirl of tweets
and articles, insisting “Dear Hollywood: More of this, please!”
Nike played an ostensible role in the Oscars’ feminist makeover. The
company first aired its “Dream Crazier” commercial, narrated by tennis pro
Serena Williams, during the awards show. The ad is the sister (the
she-quel?) to the 2018 “Dream Crazy,” which featured numerous
bodies—disabled, raced, gendered—training to do the presumably
impossible. “Dream Crazier” is a celebration of the dedicated female
athlete (and to be clear, Nike means cis- or biologically sexed female).
Seizing on the “moment” (and the show’s female audience members),
Nike focused on the insults hurled at female athletes and women’s
historical association with emotion. “If we get angry,” Williams narrates,
“we’re hysterical, irrational, or just being crazy.” She dares viewers,
“Show them what crazy can do.” The internet erupted with praise, calling
the commercial “moving” and “empowering.” New York Times reporter
Maya Salam saw the advertisement as reclaiming the trope of the
hysterical woman.
And there are reasons to be hysterical. During his State of the Union
speech, President Trump pivoted from paid parental leave to outlawing
late-term abortion to increased expenditure on military defense in five
dizzying minutes. His points landed. Several weeks later, Mississippi,
Georgia and Ohio each passed the “Heartbeat” bill, making abortion
illegal at the detection of a fetal heartbeat, and male Republican New
Hampshire representatives donned pearls in response to (hysterical)
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“pearl-clutching” proponents of heightened gun control. Meanwhile, the
theme of this year’s International Women’s Day, celebrated on March
8th, was #balanceforbetter. The campaign called for a gender-balanced
world, showing pictures of people posing with their hands held out to the
side like a scale weighing opportunities for equality—yet, as gendered and
raced bodies are made urgently precarious by the whim of legislation, the
stance feels more like a shrug.
Women are indeed having a moment.
In 2014, women were taking to Facebook holding signs proclaiming “I am
not a feminist.” Today, the future is suddenly female. As a white cis
woman PhD student, I am torn. I want to mobilize, to cluster, to congeal
around the moments celebrating women and their feminisms, but
acknowledging them as such—fleeting reactions to a patriarchal political
administration—feels like we have already admitted defeat, that “we” are
somehow temporary, only seen in the time of the reactionary, or worse, as
a reflex.
In the context of this particular moment, how do we understand “Dream
Crazier”? As a provocation, a call to action, a stealthy advertisement?
When the media grants women the permission to be “crazy,” what are
they doing? And, as academics trained in the practice of critique, what
might we read in such permission? I get goosebumps every time I watch
the ad, but it also deeply unsettles me and I’m not sure it reclaims the
hysterical woman.
At first blush, it is easy to see the problems with the advertisement. Nike is
a major international company notorious for its exploitive sweatshoplabor
practices. With women and children making up the majority of sweatshop
employees, it is likely they are the invisible labor producing the clothing
featured in and sold through the ad daring women to “dream crazier.”
Nike is capitalizing on the feminist-as-fad moment to sell their products, all
while obscuring the unethical, predominantly international femalelabor that
produced them.
Further, we can consider the problematics of this same company
re-appropriating the socially fraught labels “crazy” and “hysterical” to
describe female athletes’ public- and mobility-based forms of protest.
These words are not innocent. Nor is the act of re-appropriating them.
They carry violent histories that a company such as Nike whitewashes and
perpetuates when it uses them as a marketing device.
In fact, the Nike advertisement is unsettling because it purports to be
radical by wielding the tools of critique—re-appropriating oppressive
language, de-centering the male subject, insisting on being seen—while
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rendering a specific body visible. But simply describing it as such and
stopping there is not enough. As academics, we need to acknowledge it
as a cautionary tale of when our impulse to critique, as both a generative
and destructive force, becomes a reflex that obscures more than it reveals.
To be clear, I am critical of Nike, but I don’t want to dismiss the women in
the ad as pawns of the company’s grand capitalist scheme. I don’t want
feminism to be a fad. I want to ruminate on hysteria a little longer—to
understand why feminism resonates now and what this moment might still
generate.
I won’t repeat the important work tracing the genealogy of hysteria—one in
which the Greeks’ wandering wombs travel through Freud’s
phallocentricism, to the DSM’s body to its index, before second wave
French and American feminists reclaimed it as a psychosomatic mode of
resistance to patriarchy (Devereux 2014). Instead, I want to emphasize
that hysteria as a bodily female affliction is still roaming within the capitalist
imagination.
Hysteria has made a reappearance as the black box “stress” has become
as a medical cause, symptom, and disease. Stress causes sleeplessness,
irritability, anxiety, changes in appetite, menstrual irregularities, tremors,
as well as full-blown autoimmune disorders, which proliferate and
disproportionately impact women (Gleicher and Barad 2007). It is the
biomedical gloss to make sense of how non-material or social causes
materialize in the bodies of individuals and particular populations. Theories
of “allostatic load” (Sterling & Eyer 1988) and the “weathering effect”
(Love et al. 2010) quantify the detrimental impact of chronic stress on
individuals as well as generations as an effect of racism and sexism. But
even in these latter theories, which gesture towards rather than directly
address a capitalist system that bears down and wears out bodies, stress
is the burden individuals should be able to manage, mitigate,
and balance—because medicine and society cannot.
The figure of woman, the categories of hysteria and stress, and the Pelosi
backclap are all excessive. They leak out, overwhelm the patriarchal mode
and so become oppositional. They are forms of resistance-by-being—being
excessive, irritable, unruly, ironic, even ambivalent. In an atmosphere that
calls for balance only to exploit anger, they occupy the problematic space
of the excess and are iterations of the not always productive ways to live
within it (see Berlant 2007). Their genealogy is not linear. It’s a spinning
rumination, comprised of complicated origins and ambivalent afterlives.
Today, part of feminist critique is to understand this ambivalence. The
contemporary category of “woman” (epitomized by Serena Williams) has
become a placeholder for something broader. This placeholder, as
established by the media, both expands to consume some groups and
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contracts to exclude other, non-normative, queer, disabled, trans bodies.
Feminism-as-fad in 2019 is not a coincidence. It is symptomatic. At a
moment when America is hysterical—that inchoate and overwhelming
feeling of being the excess—it pulls from the margins for a vocabulary to
articulate such anxieties. These margins are invariably black feminist, crip,
queer, and indigenous theory. The result of jerking the margins into the
center is sometimes generative, sometimes exploitive. Sometimes it
challenges us to think in new ways, and sometimes it de-historicizes and
decontextualizes these concerns, ideas, strategies from their origins (such
as appeals to self-care following Trump’s election that failed to mention
Audre Lorde or black feminism). We should take care in how we move
these margins to the center. We should take care in what we dismantle
and how, and who that displaces.
Acts of resistance are never momentary but citations that carry life worlds
within them. María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) calls for speculative
engagement as a mode of thinking and caring that imagines an otherwise
and worlds it into existence. Part of such speculative engagement, I argue,
is following and citing the genealogy of such acts as ruminations that
circulate in productive and non-productive ways, discerning why and by
whom they are taken up, and imagining what they might yet work
towards. Speculative engagement is excessive. It does not fit neatly into
tidy, ready-made academic boxes of empowering/disempowering,
conservative/radical, object/subject, practice/theory. It spills out and
implicates academics in the worlds we critique.
Works Cited:
Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral
Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33:4 (2007): 754-80. doi:10.1086/521568.
Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge Press.
Devereux, Cecily (2014). “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The
Case of the Second Wave.” ESC 40:1, pp. 19-45.
Gleicher, N & DH Barad. (2007). Gender as risk factor for autoimmune
diseases. Journal of Autoimmunity, 28, pp 1–6.
Love, Catherine, Richard J. David, Kristin M. Rankin, James W. Collins
(2010). “Exploring Weathering: Effects of Lifelong Economic Environment
and Maternal Age on Low Birth Weight, Small for Gestational Age, and
Preterm Birth in African-American and White Women,” American Journal
of Epidemiology, 172: 2, pp 127- 134, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwq109
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Puig de la Bellacasa, María (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in
More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Sterling, P. & Eyer, J. (1988). “Allostasis: A new paradigm to explain
arousal pathology”. In Fisher, S.; Reason, J. T. Handbook of life stress,
cognition, and health. Chicester, NY: Wiley.
AMA citation
Palazzo S. Web Roundup: Having a Moment: Ruminations on Women,
Hysteria, Stress, and the Pelosi Backclap. Somatosphere. 2019. Available
at: http://somatosphere.net/2019/having-a-moment-ruminations-on-women
-hysteria-stress-and-the-pelosi-backclap.html/. Accessed April 1, 2019.
APA citation
Palazzo, Stephanie. (2019). Web Roundup: Having a Moment:
Ruminations on Women, Hysteria, Stress, and the Pelosi Backclap.
Retrieved April 1, 2019, from Somatosphere Web site: http://somatosphere
.net/2019/having-a-moment-ruminations-on-women-hysteria-stress-and-th
e-pelosi-backclap.html/
Chicago citation
Palazzo, Stephanie. 2019. Web Roundup: Having a Moment: Ruminations
on Women, Hysteria, Stress, and the Pelosi Backclap. Somatosphere. http
://somatosphere.net/2019/having-a-moment-ruminations-on-women-hyster
ia-stress-and-the-pelosi-backclap.html/ (accessed April 1, 2019).
Harvard citation
Palazzo, S 2019, Web Roundup: Having a Moment: Ruminations on
Women, Hysteria, Stress, and the Pelosi Backclap, Somatosphere.
Retrieved April 1, 2019, from
MLA citation
Palazzo, Stephanie. "Web Roundup: Having a Moment: Ruminations on
Women, Hysteria, Stress, and the Pelosi Backclap." 31 Mar. 2019.
Somatosphere. Accessed 1 Apr. 2019.
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