The Best Things I Read Today

This Is What I Mean When I Say “White Feminism”

Please, everybody: read this article!

Terrific Design Matters interview with New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, whose illustrated memoir is a masterpiece of humor and wisdom. 

Design Matters, which celebrates its 11th year in 2016, is one of these 9 intelligent podcasts for a fuller life. Subscribe here. 

Is it a co-incidence that the three white cisfemale leads of three Oscar-nominated films are called Joy? Inside Out (Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen), Joy (David O. Russell) and Room (Lennie Abrahamson) all have this nominative determinism/irony in common. Inside Out’s Joy is the embodiment of the emotion of that name, living in the head of a girl called Riley (also the name of the displaced DJ in Sense8 [The Wachowskis and J. Michael Strazynski, and one of the most popular non-gender-specific names in the US right now, curious sidebar). Joy (Jennifer Lawrence) is based on the historical figure of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop. Joy Newsom (Brie Larson) is mainly known as Ma by her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), but remembers her own name and offers it to him at a crucial juncture.

All three Joys are sad. All three embody the premium on positive thinking (particularly for white women) that Barbara Ehrenreich sums up as Smile or Die, and all three posit the power of discovering alternate emotions, particularly grief and rage. In one of the most powerful scenes in Room, Joy explodes at her mother (Joan Allen), yelling “Maybe if you hadn’t told me to be so fucking nice I wouldn’t have gone to help that man with his dog.” Niceness is an aspect of happiness and vice versa, forms of accommodation with the world, of being no trouble at all. And, moreover, the promise that if one accommodates, is resilient, pleasant and pleased, one will accrue actual joy. Aka, the life of Riley (not such a sidebar, I guess). Smile now, be happy later.

Why is this joyful sadness/sad joyfulness/joy as clown mask for rage and grief appearing now? What is invested in white women’s joy and its slippage? All three Joys appear in stories about economic precarity: Riley and Joy have to learn to be sad partially because Riley’s parents have downsized their accommodation and household economy in order for her father to build a digital app business in San Francisco; Joy Mangano is a classic mother of invention, a “broke single mother of two” (to quote the Telegraph review) whose neo-liberal can-do resilience enables her to rise to economic safety on the back of a plastic cleaning device; and part of the impetus for Joy Newsom to plan an escape from her captor is the revelation that he has lost his blue-collar job and can no longer afford to buy her and Jack vitamins and other carefully-planned necessities.

There’s a particularly potent paralleling of Joy’s situation with two other precarious situations when she sings “Big Rock Candy Mountain” to Jack in an early scene. It raises interesting questions about who she was when she was at home to know this song first recorded by Harry McClintock, better known by his hobo handle, Haywire Mac. Its best known film use is probably in O Brother Where Art Thou?, playing non-diegetically as the three prisoners escape the chain gang together, and so is cinematically associated with the idea of escape and return home; perfectly placed by Donoghue and Abrahmson. But it’s also an odd song choice for a middle-class white woman, and Larson delivers it with a distinctive Appalachian lilt.

In this, as in many things Joy Newsom is by far the most interesting and complex of these joys, the one named with most ironic awareness by screenwriter Emma Donoghue, adapting her own novel into a film with Canadian and Irish funding. Brie Larson’s performance is exceptional, although strongly marked by the look-no-makeup model of Hollywood verisimilitude, and hers is the character most troubled by any idea of (a return to) bourgeois normality. Joy’s escape plan is successful, but she finds herself in a different form of captivity, an adult woman living in her parents’ split-level suburban house, with no social or economic independence. Her solitary, all-consuming parenting of Jack has been dissipated by the availability of other adults and safe spaces, and by her own reckoning with her life: her “nice” middle-class upbringing and the vacuum she now faces. 

Unlike eponymous lead of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Joy Newsom is breakable – broken by the very media exposure that enables Kimmy’s independent existence in New York. The constellation of resilience, media exposure and the feminised imperative to be happy plays out across both of these narrative responses to the multiple news stories of kidnapped girls and women being released after years in captivity. There are multiple points of concern for each, including the way in which each makes clear the analogy between the captor and a “normative” husband or father – Kimmy and Joy experience an extreme form, but on the continuum, of heteropatriarchy.

It’s also fascinating that both the TV series and the film, with their apparent feminist premise of a close focus on a female protagonist, have been so successful in the mainstream. Like Jessica Jones, they present an easily assimilable equation that being female = being traumatised; that is to say, the texts explore multifariously and committedly the ways in which heteropatriarchy traumatises women, but at the same time produce familiar figures for mainstream consumption. In fact, Kimmy Schmidt and Room resonate with one of the key tropes of American literature: the captivity narrative, and the attendant mythos of the white slave trade.

Donoghue and Tina Fey are in no way endorsing or reviving these tropes; or, insofar as they do so, they both point the finger clearly at white masculinity as the dominant predator (Kimmy Schmidt cleverly casts the debonair Jon Hamm as the mole women’s captor, and shows how his normative physical embodiment and charisma allows him to dominate and persuade a courtroom). But at the same time, they play - however unconsciously - into the media narrative that privileges white femininity as at once breakable and invulnerable; that is to say, as valuable.

Kimmy Schmidt and Room are feminist texts that show women as agents, as both intelligent and affective at once (and interconnectedly), as more complex than joy. But they also foreground normative white cisfemale embodiment and narratives regarded as exceptional or extraordinary in relation to “everyday” stories of the disappearance of women and transpeople of colour that are not narratable within the mainstream as either heroic or, in Judith Butler’s word, grievable. Thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women, Two-Spirit and trans people remain unmarked by high-profile fiction features (as well as as-yet-unmarked by state investigation).