Beyonce Wishes for Us to Re-Build, Not Live in the Ashes

By: Keaton Wilder Marcus

On the cover of Beyonce’s eighth studio album, “Cowboy Carter,” the artist is captured in time like a wax figure. The photograph is as much of a reworking of American history as the music the album contains, and it’s shot like a piece of history itself; decked in cowgirl, blue-and-red Rodeo-queen attire with hair dyed silver to blend with the horse she proudly perches on, Beyonce grips a massive American flag like she’s marking her territory within not just the crowded genre of country–but of music and how essential the creativity of Black people–and Black women–is for an industry that takes them for granted. 

The controversy concerning “Cowboy Carter” is wide-ranging and refuses to be generalized by the racism within the country-head community or by media coverage that pressures the album to be a poster girl of rebellion against country music tradition. The popularized face of country music–and what some may call the roots of country music–is an echo chamber of white–particularly male–ballads and simple form stories with folk-like lyrics and instruments ranging from banjos to fiddles to harmonicas. If we are to address the seemingly synonymous relationship white people have with country music, we must examine what is believed to be the root of country music. 

The idea of “Cowboy Carter” was conceived because of controversy in the first place, and according to Beyonce, “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed.” Andre Gee of Rolling Stone suggests that this “experience” was the 2016 CMA Awards performance Beyonce shared with the Dixie Chicks following the release of her album “Lemonade.” Her performance of the song “Daddy Lessons–” and the track itself–is what truly sparked an outrage ranging from a woman yelling “Get that Black bitch off my stage!” to a #BoycottCMA movement. The song may open with a prolonged “Yee-Haw!” The song’s lyrics may chronicle a tumultuous father-daughter relationship filtered through country-centric themes of liquor and guns to twangy country-centric instrumentals that include acoustic guitar and clapping hands; but The Recording Academy refused to label it under the genre of country music at the 2016 Grammys. Beyonce was nominated in nine other categories that same year.

And if the genre of country has recently been defined by controversies like Beyonce’s CMA performance; by Billboard removing Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from the Hot Country Top 100 (Hill) because Nas’ self-proclaimed “trap country” ballad didn’t align with the genre’s “values;” or by contemporary country’s biggest star Morgan Wallen being excused for using a racial slur in 2021 after apologizing: “...But I’m really not that guy;'' then Beyonce taking to Instagram 10 days prior to the album’s release with the caption: “this ain’t a country album, this is a Beyonce Album'' suggests a justifiable distancing from the genre of country. 

Within the same Instagram caption, Beyonce also addressed the fact that her single, “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM,'' became the first tune by a Black woman to achieve number one status on the “Hot Country Songs” chart; and despite the honor she feels from this achievement, she also imagines a future in which the media doesn’t feel the need to make a distinction between an artist’s race and the genre they temporarily have a chokehold over. Achievements by Black artists are seen as achievements for Black people while a white artist’s achievements are seen as musical achievements, and so Beyonce must advocate for the media not prioritizing race in discussion of her achievements. But according to Tressie McMillan Cottom of the New York Times, “Beyonce has made a political album” simply because of her existence as a Black woman and a global popstar phenom. This could make room for criticism over the idea that Beyonce may be neutering the controversy that much of the music in her album addresses; the notion that the 32-time Grammy-winning, eight number one Billboard hit-having artist with an 800 million dollar net worth may be the exception to the rule of a Black country artist under fire for being Black. 

But if Beyonce is less interested in anything it’s playing by the rules that country has placed her under. ”They used to say I spoke ‘Too country…’ And the rejection came, said I wasn’t Country ‘nough,'' she harmonizes on the album’s opening track: “AMERIICAN REQUIEM.” The music industry only qualifies Black-made country music as not country enough because it isn’t white enough; and yet it’s impossible to address country music at all without addressing the Black people and instruments it wouldn’t exist without.

Put otherwise, banjos can be traced back to 17th century slave ships in the form of akontings; enslaved Africans were forced to perform with those akontings for their white masters at plantations; and if legendary country music star Johnny Cash dubs Jimmie Rodgers the “father” of country and the 1927 Bristol studio sessions as its “big bang,” then what may he call the archival video footage of African American musician Uncle John Scruggs playing the banjo as early as 1855? (Smith). 

Enslaved Africans are credited with singing the very gospel at white churches that rhythmically and thematically inspired country music; Black street performer and blues musician Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne mentored the first country superstar, Hank Williams, on how to play the acoustic guitar (Momodu). The “call-and-response” musical style of the aforementioned Jimmie Rodgers was inspired by African American railroad workers in his hometown and “the blues songs they sang” (The Birthplace of Country Music). To explain traditional country music history is to erase Black music history; “Cowboy Carter” isn’t a country album because it’s a Beyonce album, but that’s only because the label of country has historically erased what Beyonce has intended to pay tribute to. So if Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” is a sprawling tribute to who made country what it is today, let this essay be the album’s accompanying history lesson. 

“Cowboy Carter '' is a reclamation of the marriage between country and blackness, but it’s only seen as a reclamation because that marriage has been erased by a false tradition in the genre and culture of country. The culture of country being referred to, of course, is lost culture. The word “reclamation” is frequently used in this context in an attempt to illustrate an empowering sense of presence for Black artists in the genre; but reclamation implies an ownership or, at the very least, a previous presence in the genre that was somehow stripped away. That claim is in no way intended to discredit the manifold country artists visible as legends, such as the aforementioned Rodgers and Cash, but rather to bring the artists who inspired those legends into that same level of visibility. 

What’s curious is that no one seems to be interested in how country was taken from the enslaved Africans and Black artists who had such an invigorating part to play in the genre’s inception; instead, we’re moreso interested in pretending like country is a white-founded genre with Black newcomers. Perhaps that’s because the music industry has an additionally curious tendency to reduce achievements in the genre by Black artists with backhanded pats on the back like in the case of “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM;'' perhaps that’s because the music industry forces Black artists to “reclaim'' what was originally theirs; and perhaps that’s because the music industry has marketed artists by race since before the 1920s.

If we are referring to the industry prior to the 1920s, Stephen A. King and P. Rennee Foster believes “it deserves additional attention” that American record companies marketed music performed by Black artists to white audiences. If there was such a deep-rooted, racist assumption that Black audiences didn’t have the “buying power” to purchase music, how were those Black audiences supposed to recognize their own influence on the genre–or in music in general? It was only as a response to this racism that “Okeh records and an increasing number of record companies” decided to label music performed by Black people as “race records.” 

And if a Black artist wasn’t marketed to white audiences, the industry would make it unclear that the artist was Black altogether. That was the “business savvy” decision that RCA Records made to “obfuscate” the racial identity of Charley Pride–one of country’s preeminent Black artists (King and Foster). In the name of marketing and business, studio executives find it easy to deny claims of racism; yet during the peak of his career, Pride was the only visible Black artist in the genre of country. King and Foster explain that Pride was “an important figure of inspiration and identification” for Black listeners despite the fact that Black listeners weren’t aware of his race for a certain period of time. 

In addition, the lack of Black country artists at the time made it difficult for Black people to not only listen to the genre but to identify their place within the genre; instead, they identified with where they saw themselves: genres like rap and R&B and soul while the public was oblivious to how those latter two influenced country itself. Perhaps that’s why Shelby Singleton Jr. sought to capitalize on that current lack of Black presence in the genre with Linda Martell; Martell, born Thelma Bynem and raised in Leesville, South Carolina, was an aspiring popstar in a Southern girl group called the Anglos before she was introduced to Singleton, “who suggested she ditch pop for country” (Browne). If the fact that Singleton’s label name was Plantation records doesn’t tell you enough, the fact that Singleton signed Martell on the label before eventually diverting its attention to more marketable white country singer Jeannie C. Riley will do you the favor.

That is precisely why Beyonce avoids definitions and labels on her new album; and it’s why Linda Martell, the first commercially successful Black female country artist, narrates the album as a rebellion against definition from a genre that recognizes her talent–and infusion of gospel and R&B into country–as first and foremost commercial. And that's an infusion in the popular eye–an eye ignorant to the fact that gospel aided enslaved Black people to freedom all while its rhythmic, religious nature influenced a genre that tries to cover up its roots and write “do or do not” lists for its originators. “This particular tune stretches across a range of genres,” Martell asserts on the interlude before “YAYA–”spearheaded by Beach Boys interpolations and chants of “fuck it, we shakin’, we swimmin’, we jerkin’, we twerkin’.” And if Martell’s interlude functions as the album’s one mission statement, it suggests that the album isn’t concerned with any one mission. 

And the album in concern is full of swearing and hooting and hollering, clapping and percussion and personality; if a beat was a nasty stank face and sweaty young people smoking weed and swimming in mosh pits, it would belong to the track “SPAGHETTII–” an aggravated two minutes of Beyonce rapping and remixing and proving the living hell out of what she claims on “DAUGHTER:” “I’m the furthest thing from quiet boys and alters, but if you cross me I’m just like my father…I’m as cold as titanic water.” And that’s when Shaboozey: rapper, singer, filmmaker and mortal enemy to labels, rocks back and forth on an acoustic guitar like a cool reflection on the fire Beyonce spat–she means every word, and the song means it further with a beat switch. 

Indeed there is a cover of Dolly Parton’s country classic “Jolene–” but Beyonce’s interpretation stems less from jealousy of another woman and more an unbreakable bond the song’s female protagonist shares with her husband. If Parton’s jealous of a prettier woman stealing away her man, Beyonce warns the woman that she doesn’t have shit on her; if Paul McCartney wrote “Blackbird” for the Little Rock Nine with wordplay on “Black girl–” Beyonce puts her voice on the track and an extra “i” on the title as an additional excavation of a past time is terrified of; and if Big Country is “the Nashville-controlled, pop folk music that commodifies rural American fantasies,” Beyonce’s country is a toast to grills and cowboy hats and everything in between.

The “genre” of country music was built upon the shoulders of Black people. The label of country as a term is white-founded, but a label is what we give something we’re terrified of to make it seem safer for ourselves. On “Cowboy Carter,” Beyonce could not care less about definitions or labels or genres; the genres that kept Black people from seeing their influence on what in 1974 President Richard Nixon called “as native as anything American we could find.” If the Black history that predates country’s history has tragically been burning since before any of us can remember, Beyonce is telling listeners not to live in the ashes; here, she rebuilds an amalgamation of tribute to those who influenced her and those who came before her influences–and it’s best not to put a genre on the tracklist. 

Works Cited

Country music roots traced to slave ships, 5 August 2019, https://www.dispatch.com/story/entertainment/local/2019/08/05/country-music-roots-traced-to/4530820007/. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Browne, David. “Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' Includes a Shout-Out to Linda Martell -- Who Is She?” Rolling Stone, 29 March 2024, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/linda-martell-beyonce-country-cowboy-carter-1234995662/. Accessed 8 May 2024.

“Celebrating Jimmie Rodgers: A Short Lesson in His Guitar Style - The Birthplace of Country Music.” Birthplace of Country Music Museum, 26 May 2022, https://birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/celebrating-jimmie-rodgers-a-short-lesson-in-his-guitar-style/. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Cottom, Tressie McMillan. “Opinion | Beyoncé Asks, and Answers, a Crucial Question in Her Latest Album.” The New York Times, 4 April 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/opinion/beyonce-cowboy-carter-country.html. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Gee, Andre. “Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' Album Cover Invokes History, and Provocation.” Rolling Stone, 2 April 2024, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/beyonces-cowboy-carter-album-cover-controversy-1234997470/. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Gee, Andre. “Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' Album Cover Invokes History, and Provocation.” Rolling Stone, 2 April 2024, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/beyonces-cowboy-carter-album-cover-controversy-1234997470/. Accessed 8 May 2024.

KING, STEPHEN A., and P. RENEE FOSTER. “‘Leave Country Music to White Folk’?: Narratives from Contemporary African-American Country Artists on Race and Music.” The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music, edited by Mark Allan Jackson, University of Massachusetts Press, 2018, pp. 214–35. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3t5qf4.12. Accessed 8 May 2024.

Don't Tell Petra Collins How to Paint Her Landscape

By: Keaton Wilder Marcus

In John Berger’s second episode of “Ways of Seeing,” he delves into male perceptions of women and the pressure women face being perceived by men. In the opening two minutes, Berger outlines how women’s bodies and beauty are visualized in two ways: One, by men who only appreciate how women present themselves in manners that sexually cater to them; and two, women either in their own private spaces obsessively creating a hyper feminine avatar for themselves to later present to men, or envying and judging other women based on how attractive they appear by male standards. Berger observes that “behind every glance is a judgment,” meaning that male eyes looking at women and female eyes looking at other women–and the art (paintings, film etc.) everyone creates about women–-always have a lick of looking down or at women. 

Berger then observes that “in European tradition, the nude implies an awareness of being seen by the spectator. They are not naked as they are, they are naked as you see them.” The word tradition is essential here because it implies something stereotypical in how men see naked and scantily clad women in ways inaccurate to their experience; or how they re-purpose women in art to nurture their own sexual desires. In these re-productions, women cannot simply exist because that would imply their beauty is for something outside of male pleasure or jurisdiction, and god forbid women pose or act for themselves only. Berger uses the painting “Vanity” by Hans Memling as an example, suggesting that there’s a deeper hypocrisy in men painting women looking at themselves for men’s own personal pleasure. 

In the painting, a completely nude woman simply stares at her reflection. Memling, the male artist, has painted a nude woman for no reason besides pleasure, yet he believes the act of placing a mirror in front of his female subject is justifiable enough to condemn her under the label of “Vanity.” Men have the privilege to capture and judge nude women while simultaneously resenting the fact that a woman may examine herself under the perverted watch of a man. Berger makes a distinction between nakedness and being on display; he describes the former as “to be without disguise, and the latter as “to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body–turned into a disguise.” In “Vanity” or “The Judgement of Paris” among the several other examples Berger uses, Memling and Peter Paul Reubens and the other male artists mentioned are evidently crafting this “disguise” where women only appear for men and as men want them sexually. The women featured in these paintings are homogenous in their physical appearances–they’re all drawn with large breasts and butts and voluptuous hips and they’re all conscious about the fact that leering men are perceiving them. 

 What must be questioned, then, is the relevance of Berger’s 1978? observations. Women formatively seen as sexual sights to behold for the male eye instead reclaim their bodies for themselves with the lens of a phone and the figurative middle finger to voyeurism that is a selfie. In 2024, Women–particularly teenage girls–have the ability to picture their own selves and actively depict only what they’re comfortable with showing to others online. In a world five decades later where anyone can call themselves an artist and re-produce imagery of themselves and others, are Berger’s words on the performative aspect of female beauty and nudity still applicable? 

Petra Collins–Canadian photographer, director, model, and so-called “it” girl–would like the opportunity to object. Perhaps it’s the fact that Collins has earned deals with Adidas and Gucci and Bluemarine that makes her voice worth listening to; or how she’s garnered over one million followers on Instagram from photography and music videos and short films endlessly praised as poster girls for the “female gaze” and popularizing Gen Z’s trademark hyper feminine, dreamy vision of girlhood; or how on that same social media platform, her account was temporarily suspended for posting a picture of herself in panties with an unshaven bikini line. This essay is less interested in the brouhaha over Collins’ brand deals or controversy, however, and more her fierce challenge to the fact that women’s bodies are so widely seen and depicted for men in the media; and how her work can be both radical rebellion to that male gaze while additionally representing a level of femininity that blurs the lines between reclamation of that femininity and catering to the gaze that fetishizes it. 

Whether a work of Petra Collins depicts a vision of who teenage girls want to view themselves as or who they are in reality, there is an unflinching honesty evoked in her photography that most are too afraid to uncover. Perhaps it’s with “The Teenage Gaze,” Collins’ series of portraits spanning from 2010-2015, where she most unlocks a documentarian style reflecting slices of female adolescence rarely deemed worthy of visual representation. These are the quiet moments and memories in a girl’s life that we either find too mundane or invalidate as grossly sexual. Three girls sharing a cigarette on a bed become nostalgia envisioned for the present as the viewer is forced to focus on the smaller details: the faded, dirty film aesthetic or the facial expressions that evoke a silence that isn’t awkward–but more a mutual comfort that only the closest of friends have.

In the world of Petra Collins, a girl falling asleep on textbooks becomes a visual staple of high school torture; a girl sobbing in the hallway is no longer an act of dramatic passivity but rather vulnerability brought to life in a manner we’re forced to confront; bras and underwear and skirts and knee high socks disconnected from the remainder of the subject aren’t simply clothing but rather iconic aesthetic manifestations of girlhood; girls getting drunk at parties they likely didn’t enjoy and twerking on teenage boys they likely didn’t find attractive are scenarios that fell short of that “last night was a movie” pipe dream–but are still realized on film before your eyes. Collins doesn’t glamorize these moments or alter them to be something they’re not–because that would strip the uncomfortable realism from them–but she takes them seriously so that viewers do too. 

It’s difficult to describe these portraits as under the lens of Collins because, stylistically, it seems more like the photographer (and everyone who views her photos) is being given the privilege to be a part of the lives of the photographed–not vice versa. Whether she’s framing girls brushing their teeth or checking their make-up or even zoning out while smoking, there’s not a single picture where they’re looking towards the camera–realizing that their lives are being captured and looked at; blurry, likely handheld shots of girls sharing kisses or letting showers rain on them while still partly dressed–or fully undressed–are sexual without sexualizing because it’s the moment itself not the boobs or the lips or the legs; the subjects aren’t posing for anyone or looking at anyone or inviting anyone to look at them–they’re presenting themselves as they are and refusing to apologize; look if you so choose to and fuck off if you’re too scared to. 

Collins’ “Selfie” is a series of photographs that began in 2013 with a mission statement described as “examining selfie culture in teenage girlhood and the power for young women to create, curate, and distribute their own imagery” (Collins). In the aforementioned Hans Memling example, the male painter depicts a fully nude woman for himself and decidedly puts a mirror in front of the woman in order to label the work “Vanity–” re-purposing its intentions as a product of female selfishness rather than his own. “Selfie” then functions as an unconscious modern parallel to the imagery Memling presents. Instead of a mirror, there is a cell phone; instead of condemning women for looking at themselves, there is admiration and appreciation for it. Collins is picturing young women outside of Memling’s male realm and inside of a female one grounded in depictions of digital euphoria for the subject and not against the subject. 

The portraits are all rather aesthetically unglamorous, and fortunately so because the glamor in them is depicted within the photograph–unaltered by the power of Collins’ camera. She is framing women and only women–picturing them taking pictures of themselves in naturalistic and tender manners that evoke such freeing joy for an act so ruthlessly condemned as a selfish measure of oneself. A group of girls huddle together with unblemished smiles on their faces as they all eye a singular phone without a lick of envy and self-hatred or the “vanity” that Memling believes he portrayed; the models pout their freshly applied lipstick and tilt their heads and scroll on their beds and occasionally give the phone’s camera–and Collins’ camera–complete neutrality. 

How can we know? That’s because there are no requirements for the subject’s behavior in this example of Collins’ work–which can ultimately be described as an nearly unfiltered depiction of an aspect in girlhood so commonly re-purposed for men to scoff at or lust over–or perhaps, hypocritically, both. Collins strives to put these quieter moments of femininity on blast, thus reclaiming the concept of a mere selfie into monuments of women capturing each other on film. Whether you like it or not, there is magic in how Collins frames two girls against posters of Lana del Rey and “Bonnie & Clyde,” as if she’s demanding that these moments share a stage as significant as these iconic images of pop culture. 

In the Berger text, an unidentified woman claims that “women are always dressing…to show the kind of character they want to represent.” The work of Collins carries an essential sense of universality, but in instances, it’s appropriate to contend that she projects more desirable versions of herself onto the models she photographs. In a 2019 interview with Minya Oh, Collins explained that during puberty she “had serious body dysmorphia” and was unable to conceptualize what she looked like then but rather what she aspired to look like in the future. Collins still holds the advantage in the inevitable relationship forged between the photographer and the photographed. Even as she is determined to innovate beyond the traditional purpose of a camera from simply capturing moments to creating mutual bonds with those moments–or endorsing conversation with her models and processing their ideas into her own–her work will never not cater to some aesthetic desire or nostalgic need that slightly alters the reality she is attempting to portray. 

In terms of nostalgia, Petra Collins is now 31 years of age. The fact that her models are still commonly adolescents speaks to her artistic drive to grasp onto a past that may have escaped her. In an interview with The Talk, Collins explains how, as a teenager herself, photography was akin to socializing “because I was literally taking photos of my peers.” Reminiscing on that period, she “feels more like a voyeur now.” In one sense, Collins’ depictions of younger girls may be reflective of her own experiences as a teenager. In another, Collins’ camera is an instrument of her perception of those featured in the pictures she takes. 

For example, following the growth of her hips and thighs in adolescence, Collins had her first “identity crisis.” In “The Teenage Gaze,” Collins depicts visual motifs of hips, thighs, and legs as well as the shorts and underwear that accentuate the awkwardness of developing female bodies. In further detail on this “crisis,” Collins believes that the ideal vision of femininity implemented on her younger self was something skinny and rather pre-pubescent; therefore, the growth of her body during puberty was conversely a destruction of the beauty standards she was told to aspire to. Returning to “The Teenage Gaze,” the girls featured in the series–as well as the vast majority of her models–are skinny and white and all dealing with realistic, if privileged, issues of body image and sexuality. Collins prefers photographing what she knows, but there is an unwavering honesty in the stares and silhouettes of these girls; there is a timelessness in how Collins excavates past insecurities and implements them on her models. She is living vicariously through who she photographs–and her art’s permanence is gorgeous. It’s the fact that all these girls look like her that may limit the audience she is hailed as the modern voice of.

Collins herself claims that her own portrayal of femininity can tend to be a product of a certain dreaminess or self-realization that her own adolescence lacked, suggesting that she’s “sort of creating a world that I wish I was accepted in, or that I wished I lived in.” The volatility of Petra Collins then must be championed as well as challenged as we examine pieces of her work that put a larger emphasis on making her models and the worlds surrounding them as gorgeous and aesthetically unreal as possible. There is a vagueness that forces us to wonder whether Collins’ imagery is a product of how she interprets girlhood or how she wishes to interpret girlhood.

If thus far we’ve explored how Collins immortalizes her past through depictions of adolescence, maybe it’s time to examine instances where she strays from that course and navigates waters outside of her grasp. Perhaps girlhood is where she sees herself while womanhood is less focused on introspection and more on Trinidadian rapper Cardi B in her “Bartier Cardi” music video. Collins directs her decked in Swarovski crystals and red lingerie spitting braggadocious bars like: “Diamonds all over my body, shinin’ all over my body, Cardi got your bitch on molly;” The pinks and reds and grainy film aesthetic that give the video a heightened, fantastical quality stay true to the roots of Collins–but instead of girls taking selfies it’s Cardi keeping men on leashes and twerking on her husband in the backseat of a Lyft car. There’s swagger and style that’s easy to dabble in with this fur-filled Old Hollywood mirage, and it’s evident Collins is living by the motto she used in reference to Georgia O’Keefe: “They could tell you how they painted their landscape, but they couldn’t tell me to paint mine.” It’s additionally evident that Collins did intend to shine a female-centric light on the video, explaining that she wanted “every single woman in every single scene to be like, a goddess.” Collins is demanding nuance in how we see depictions of femininity and what’s considered empowering versus what’s not; who’s really to say why women consciously owning the parts of her body that trigger sexual pleasure can’t be seen as validly feminist? 

Amy Newman certainly wants a say in the matter. In her 1990 essay “Aestheticism, Feminism, and the Dynamics of Reversal,” she contends that postmodern feminism’s reversal of patriarchal ideologies tends to swap the oppressor and the oppressed instead of making them equal–as per its intentions. Newman utilizes the words of psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin in parsing how aestheticizing female bodies contributes to the constant objectification of women in the media. Benjamin claims that in this cultivation of aesthetics, the artist has opted to “eroticize suffering–” and the product gives viewers sexual pleasure in something already relentlessly drooled over and voyeuristically abused by the patriarchy that governs it. According to Benjamin, this uniquely postmodern “romanticization of victimization devalues the subjectivity of others.” In other words, female sexuality has already been stamped as something for men and in competition with other women, and so depicting female sexuality merely caters to men despite possibly feminist intentions. 

Benjamin’s musings work in tandem with those of Berger’s in the sense that “Ways of Seeing” establishes a certain male tradition in how female sexuality is portrayed in art. Berger uses Peter Paul Rubens’ “The Judgement of Paris” as an additional example in how men tend to paint other men judging naked women as the women judge their own nudity under the male eye; the male artist crafts a painting featuring nudity for his own pleasure while projecting his desires on the men within the painting. Berger then claims that “amongst the tens of thousands of European oil paintings of nudes, there are perhaps twenty or thirty exceptions–paintings in which the artist has seen the woman.” When men paint naked women, they aren’t seeing the woman for their vulnerable, naked self but rather the physical aspects of her naked body that please men. This idea is the pre-conceived control men have over women in art that Benjamin believes invalidates portrayals of female sexuality under a feminist label. And what Benjamin and Berger could interrogate Collins on is the reason behind filming a video with Cardi B twerking in lingerie. If we as a society have become so desensitized to objectifying female bodies, does Collins expect us to be media literate enough to make a distinction between what’s for Cardi B–and women–or what’s for the leering men that Berger describes?

Collins may not be the answer, but she asks a question in return: “Why did being alive and being a sexual creature make her a monster?” This quote is an excerpt from what could be described as a devilish aesthetic twin to “The Teenage Gaze.” Collins dubs it “Fairy Tales,” a photography book of erotic fairy tales and surreal portraits featuring Euphoria’s Alexa Demie. If the former was a series highlighting how sexual discovery peels the layers of our body back to its vulnerable center, the latter depicts how women evolve and change with puberty into something visually inhuman. As a result, Collins shoots portraits of Demie in various forms–whether that be fairies or sirens or mermaids–as hypersexual femininity in a girl’s headscape brought to the screen before you. 

Demie’s presence is made imposing and larger-than-life as she graces a stripper pole decked in see-through black lingerie and fin-covered arms; her skin is tinted golden, her lips glistening, and her jet-black hair whips in elegant, carefully prepared movement. An image that could be simply reduced to “sexy” is instead so textured and cinematic because Demie’s character is unapologetically full of herself in this moment completely alone in the spotlight; she’s reclaiming the scandal and the sexiness as her own characteristic rather than a compliment from someone watching her. 

The female aesthetic and gaze must come in manifold forms, and women should have the choice to embrace lust and sexual power in untamed, unchecked manners of how they portray themselves–even if it’s only in a traditionally unaccepted path of their imagination. And there is real ugliness too: like when Demie portrays a woman traumatized by sexual violence that left her feeling as worthless and inhuman as the black goo covering her hands and body. The glitz and glossiness of the stripper wouldn't be complete without the aesthetically uncomfortable trauma goo, and neither would paint the full picture without the beckoning and lust of Demie looking towards the camera tied in pink bondage. And an intriguing aspect in Demie’s performance is how often she stares down the lens; it isn’t necessarily kind to whoever's behind the camera, but rather seductive–embracing a macabre sexuality and exploiting a vulnerability in whoever views the image.

But there is still room for dialogue between the likes of Collins and Benjamin. The latter, in reference to bondage (which Collins depicts frequently), believes that feminism shies away from submission “for fear of admitting women’s participation in the relationship of domination.” In other words, a woman tied in bondage evokes a sense of another–possibly male–presence that she has let manipulate and control her for personal pleasure. In the case of Collins and Demie, the rope’s end is invisible to the frame and so is the existence of a male character; Demie has an autonomy that reclaims a sexual device that would otherwise demean her, and an aura mysterious and distanced enough from the real world so that it seems internal–for her character and her character only.

If the intimacy of Alexa Demie’s piercing gaze doesn’t sum up Petra Collins, the stunning recklessness of her “good 4 u” music video for then teenage popstar Olivia Rodrigo is her thesis statement. Berger contends that men have established an entitlement over perceiving women, but what’s stopping Rodrigo from stripping cameras from the older men who film her as she slyly slams her ex-boyfriend for broken promises? Benjamin contends that a woman’s body will only be an inevitable display for men to lust after, but what’s stopping Rodrigo from dolling herself up in make-up and miniskirts only to buy a gallon of kerosene and burn her oil-flooded bedroom to the ground? One thing is for certain: no one is stopping Collins from capturing it on film as Rodrigo sticks her face inside a ring light chanting “Well screw that, well screw you.” There is a uniquely female rage in how Rodrigo stares down the camera–ever so slightly charismatic and sarcastic as if she’s playing the part spectators want her to be before screeching the chorus in their faces. This performance isn’t for the old men filming Rodrigo and it’s not for us either. Perhaps as Rodrigo stands in the center of her flaming bedroom, Collins is setting everything and everyone that tells her how to paint her landscape aflame as well.

Works Cited

YouTube: Home, 3 June 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nybfKycotU&t=1776s. Accessed 14 March 2024.

B, Cardi. “Cardi B - Bartier Cardi (feat. 21 Savage) [Official Video].” YouTube, 3 April 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXnMSaK6C2w. Accessed 14 March 2024.

Berger, John. “Ways of Seeing.” YouTube: Home, 3 June 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1GI8mNU5Sg&rco=1. Accessed 14 March 2024.

“Commercial.” Petra Collins, https://petra-collins.com/commercial/. Accessed 14 March 2024.

“Georgia O'Keeffe – Interpreted by Petra Collins.” YouTube, 19 July 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDT_RaEq0dI. Accessed 14 March 2024.

“The Indy.” The Indy, 12 April 2018, https://www.theindy.org/1442. Accessed 14 March 2024.

Robertson, Emma. “Petra Collins.” The Talks, 21 September 2016, https://the-talks.com/interview/petra-collins/. Accessed 14 March 2024.

Rodrigo, Olivia. “Olivia Rodrigo - good 4 u (Official Video).” YouTube, 14 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNi_6U5Pm_o. Accessed 14 March 2024.

Newman, Amy. “Aestheticism, Feminism, and the Dynamics of Reversal.” Hypatia, vol. 5, no. 2, 1990, pp. 20–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810153. Accessed 15 Mar. 2024.

Demystifying the Mystification of the Feminine

By: Keaton Wilder Marcus

In her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey contends that the restrictions of our patriarchal society have ingrained themselves into the very structure of cinema. Employing psychoanalysis and leaning on the minds of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Mulvey establishes how essential it is to more consistently represent the female form on-screen. Referencing Freud’s “paradox of phallocentrism,” Mulvey introduces the idea that “it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world.” In other words, male sexuality is dominant in our society largely due to the privilege that comes with the possession of a penis. Because a woman lacks a penis or phallic shape between her legs, her form is somehow incomplete compared to that of a male under Freud’s perspective. Through the lens of phallocentrism, the phallus signifies power and presence whereas a vagina is considered something lesser and inferior. 

In addition, the phallocentrism Mulvey critiques and reconsiders sees that a woman “symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis” (Mulvey). In this formulation, men not only see a vagina as a lack of the penis that they possess, but also the result of a “castration” or the loss of their own proximity to power–thus a deep-rooted fear and resentment of women. In essence, “woman’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound,” so women lack meaning to men outside of a loss of power and the ability to service them with a child (Mulvey). A woman’s ability to bear children is tragically invalidated under the concept that pregnancy is a wound rather than the symbol of growth and life that distinguishes the female from the male. Here, because the phallus has been pre-determined as the norm, a lack of one is othered as “alien.” Under the lens of patriarchy, women are a loss, an absence, and the carrier of an unnecessary wound that men will never deal with. As a result, women are “the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning” (Mulvey). Men construct the very symbolism that diminishes the power of a woman. 

That symbolism is framed by Mulvey’s titular introduction of “cinema” in order to depict how the dominant male culture has conquered the artform. She notes that the patriarchy is “unconscious” and even likens it to a “language” (“formed critically at the moment of arrival of language”). Male dominance and the alienation of women has been implanted in our sense of physical and emotional self since before any reader can remember. Cinema is a visual language–which makes it such a convenient target for the patriarchy. Humans love watching, men love watching. Watching brings a sense of control to the viewer and strips the agency of its subject, in real life or on the silver screen. Mulvey contests that the “dominant order” has seethed its teeth into the cinematic form, and so film has become advantageous for men to project the erotic pleasure they receive from the act of “looking.” 

Mulvey further contends that due to the “dominant order” upholding patriarchal ideologies, it’s the woman that’s trapped as the “looked at” and never the “looker.” Observing the subject on-screen–or constructing fantasies about them in one’s mind–comes with a sense of safety and privilege that veils the observer from the observed. Mulvey, in close reference to Freud’s idea of “scopophilia,” (the sexual pleasure from watching), observes that this gaze produces “obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.” Mulvey is condemning the extreme nature of scopophilia because of its one-sided nature towards the subject. These “obsessive voyeurs” and “Peeping Toms” take pleasure in watching because it invalidates mutual sexual gratification with who they’re watching. There is a manner of control and a lack of consent that comes from the ability to fantasize about someone without them realizing they’re being fantasized about.

As a result, “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey). The images we see on-screen are mere projections of the human imagination; the male-curated images of women we see on-screen are reduced to erotic fantasy by its maker and subjected to the voyeurism of the male gaze by its viewer. Women in this formulation can only be objects on display for the male watcher, stuck in a passive dollhouse waiting to be tweaked and toyed with to cater to the active male fantasy. As a product, a woman’s sexual power–or a stereotypically female characteristic that’s been legitimized by society–is defined by a man drooling over scantily-clad pictures of women. But the “dominant order” is not the only order, and cinema is increasingly a conversation–not a statement. What happens when a woman takes part in a cinematic conversation governed by men? What happens when she challenges, responds to, and frames a male gaze with her own recontextualization?

Sofia Coppola’s 1999 directorial debut, “The Virgin Suicides,” an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of the same name, is what happens. The film is both a stunning audiovisual experience and a blistering commentary on society's ignorance towards teenage girls. Narrated by a group of neighborhood boys in a Detroit suburb, the subject of both their eyes and our eyes are the Lisbon sisters. The Lisbon sisters are five deeply complex girls–beautiful and almost angelic in appearance but entrapped by their strict Catholic parents to the confines of their home as well as to the shallow sexual fantasies that these teenage boys hold for them. The film has two different timelines. The tale of adolescent angst set in 1975 is spliced with documentary-style interviews 20 years later featuring the aforementioned boys, now men, reflecting on both their voyeuristic behavior towards the sisters as well as their successive suicides. Coppola and her cinematographer, Ed Lachman, parallel the boys’ perspectives of the girls by lulling audiences with a dreamlike, fuzzy aesthetic. The atmosphere paints a gorgeous veil that thinly hides the cufflinks of the male gaze and the aching depression that chains the Lisbon girls both figuratively and literally. 

If Eugenides' novel is heralded as a male author reflecting on his own gender’s failure to understand the nuances of teenage girlhood, Coppola’s adaptation is the delicate, tragic response that depicts the lives of women behind the rose-colored windowpane that men see them through. Eugenides, reflecting on his book, disapproved of the idea that actors should embody the Lisbon sisters “because the girls are seen at such a distance” (Temple). Coppola successfully establishes the male perspective of the Lisbon sisters with a luminous aesthetic that stuns as much as it challenges the viewer to see past the sunny, sexualized, and god-like manner in which the girls are constructed in a teenage boy’s mind; be that with an oversized, superimposed image of Kirsten Dunst’s Lux breaking the fourth wall with a superficial smile and a dreamy wink or with the neighborhood boys clumsily translating the musings and chronicles of a girl’s life once they obtain Cecilia’s personal diary. 

Mystery, or what gender frames the mystery, is an idea that the gaze of Eugenides versus the gaze of Coppola introduces. Eugendies may be similar to the male characters he’s crafted in the sense that he creates a false mystery by not attempting to understand the women the mystery surrounds. These boys observe girls for an entertainment value that consciously avoids the answer to the mystery, which, of course, ends up faulting the male gaze. In that sense, the voyeuristic quality of the male fantasy, in reference to Mulvey’s arguments on scopophilia, is akin to a detective intentionally incompetent at his job. It’s not simply the boys’ perplexed response when faced with the girl’s diary entries (or what they refer to as “data”), but their self-aggrandizing of the presence they have in them. Instead of respecting the entries with the rather mundane information they provide (whether that’s Cecilia’s passion for whales and trees or Lux’s fleeting crush on the garbageman), they assert themselves as storytellers for these girls. The narrator, reflecting on the diaries, explains that the boys “knew that the girls were really women in disguise. That they understood love and even death, and our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.” From what viewers are able to gather from the diaries, the girls don’t showcase much more than small, vulnerable snapshots into their lives, or even “fascination” with the neighborhood boys. 

Take the key difference between the novel and the film’s depiction of the relationship between Lux and her male infatuation: Trip Fontaine. The homecoming dance is a pivotal moment in both texts, and so is Trip’s treatment of Lux after the dance. Eugenides depicts a secondhand portrait of Lux’s experience followed by Trip’s cold, blunt reflection. The two have sex on a football field after the dance, Trip wakes up in the middle of the night and abandons a sleeping Lux in the field. “I walked home alone that night,” he says. I didn’t care how she got home. I just took off…It’s weird. I mean, I liked her. I really liked her. I just got sick of her right then.” Examining the passage, audiences are forced to imagine the empathy for Lux that’s simply shown to us in Coppola’s film. Eugenides creates an unnecessary aura of mystery around Lux’s reaction to Trip leaving her because as a man, he’s unable to put himself in her position. Trip is oblivious to his loss of affection for Lux, and 20 years later, still mystified by why she asphyxiated herself in the garage. Coppola’s camera doesn’t leave anything up to imagination. She forces viewers to confront Lux’s first hand experience with an overhead of her figure sprawled out on the turf, isolated and unimportant; an extreme close-up of her tired face as she wakes, drenched in chilling blue lighting; a shot outside-in of the cab window she leans her head against with a piercing gaze that reeks of deadness and disappointment. Lux is a mystery. Lux is an idea. Lux isn’t a human being. Lux is your first wet dream. Wait till she takes her own life.

Eugenides, as he describes, or creates--his own portrayal of the Lisbon sisters, still upholds the qualities of the voyeuristic male gaze. He watches, like the teenage boys, from a distance. It is a case of the way men craft convoluted mythos and diagnosis in order to parse the mundanities of girlhood because women must provide a sense of “otherness” and the “alien” to distract them from their own lives. The troubling nature of a “gaze” as a concept is that it always intrudes but never embodies or relates–spying from a secondhand perspective like the boys do across the street with a telescope. Men witness and scratch their heads at women, but they’ll never experience being one. Femininity in “The Virgin Suicides” then acts as a humbling embodiment of the firsthand. If understanding the Lisbon girls is a puzzle, the female gaze is the missing piece that the male gaze is unable to acquire. 

The argument that Susan Sontag makes, in her 1975 essay “A Woman’s Beauty–A Put Down or Power Source,” is less of a contrast to Mulvey and Coppola and more of a recontextualization. “To be sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly so. What is lamentable is that it is the only form of power that most women are encouraged to seek” (Sontag). Sontag does recognize the strength in beauty, but like Mulvey, she notes that “this power is always conceived in relation to men.” When a woman is told what to wear or how much make-up to apply or how her ass isn’t big enough–it’s to adjust herself for a man’s pleasure. Even when a woman dresses herself up how she wants or applies make-up because it makes her feel gorgeous–her looks will eventually come across the eyes of a man who doesn’t like how her clothes fit her figure, or who points out the ignorant falsity that make-up disguises a lack of beauty. Being called beautiful and acknowledging your own beauty under female agency is what Sontag refers to as a “flattering idealization of their [the female] sex,” but men still use a woman’s beauty and sexuality to nonsensically argue that good looks and competence are mutually exclusive.

Coppola’s gaze showcases the tender, tragically rare moments of girlhood that reflect a beauty unseen by men. It’s Coppola’s depiction of the dailiness of the Lisbon sisters’ lives that provides not only a response to the film’s omnipresent male gaze, but a demystification of the ignorance produced by that same gaze. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon uphold strict Catholic ideologies that often confine the Lisbon sisters to their bedroom–stunting their sexual exploration and adolescence—but that very room is hidden behind doors of which men are unable to poke their eyes, or rather are too threatened to enter into. Coppola is constantly framing the unglamorous moments of femininity with the utmost glamor; splashing moments of the girls merely lounging around their room with flashes of popping pastel and placing them in mise-en-scene that treats improvisational hang-out spaces like they’re meticulously planned Vogue photoshoots. Glamor, to Coppola, is Cecilia’s crippling depression that goes over the heads of male doctors, or Lux’s yearning for Trip Fontaine; perhaps it’s various snapshots of the sisters doing their nails or geeking out over fashion magazines or even menstruation. Glamor is clusters of communal female memory in a bubble decorated with sparkling, glitzy camouflage as a disguise from male surroundings. If Sontag and Mulvey contend that the image and beauty of a woman is passivity conceived in relation to its active male creator, Coppola takes a camera and actively shows the feminine in a colorful, floral, and sensitive nature.

In all of its allure, however, it’s appropriate to challenge Coppola’s framing of girlhood as something grounded in magic and fantasy. She soberly establishes that the boys are able to fantasize about these girls as long as they’re seen as complex, “alien”, and ultimately inhuman–but what was her intention when splicing images of a unicorn with shots of the girls as they narrate their diaries? Is Coppola commenting that even in the quieter moments told from the female perspective, girls are still chained to a male vision of them? Or is Coppola herself stuck in relation to the male gaze? Is this even truly the male gaze, or something that the male gaze has re-purposed for its own pleasure? There’s an ironic touch to the visual style of the golden-tinted, fantastical aesthetic that serves as the backdrop for the unflinching honesty in the voiceovers. Perhaps we’re just supposed to sit back and gaze, not understand.

Mulvey argues that the concept of beauty has been poisoned too deeply by the male gaze, and therefore should be “analyzed and destroyed” because it’s been turned into a male-oriented idea. Sontag’s response deals with the fact that under female agency, beauty can be reclaimed as a powerful symbol of sexual prowess and femininity in general. “The Virgin Suicides” doesn’t neccessarily take a definitive stance with either argument–and that’s because the issue can be reduced to anything but just two sides. The boys featured in the movie fantasize about the girls on a purely physical, surface level; whether that’s in the intrusive “diary entry” scene as they obsess over Lux’s sexual exploration as a teenage girl or when one of them imagines a whimsical road trip sequence with a girl-on-boy ratio that’s gratifying to their erotic fantasies. 

Mulvey suggests that the female lack of a phallic shape between her legs creates a “castration anxiety” within men. In “The Virgin Suicides,” the boys are able to quiet their fear of girls by not only reducing them to objects–but analyzing them in dismembered parts. Freud may not be as fashionable as he once was, but it is still possible to say that in rejecting women’s humanity, the male anxiety that a girl represents the loss of a phallus disappears. Instead, boys section off parts of the female body–whether that be legs and lips or breasts and butts–and repurpose their functions solely in service of their own fetishistic desires. In simply gazing upon them as stunning furniture (and blurting out lines like “girls make me crazy, could I feel one of ‘em up just once?”), girls represent the canvas on which the boys have free reign in smothering paint over. In Mulvey’s arguments, perversion from afar is the most representative description of how these boys interact with girls. Men who indulge in scopophilia do take pleasure in gazing upon the female body, but that’s because they’re threatened by what could happen during a genuine conversation–whether that be rejection or a personality that taints their misguided fantasies of women as unblemished decor.

Coppola depicts a striking male vulnerability in a scene that sees one of the boys wandering into the Lisbons’ bathroom while over at their house. He experiences the ethereal scents of femininity as he sniffs their make-up and perfume with an orgasmic expression on his face. But when he comes across a cupboard of tampons–a physical representation of teenage girlhood–his fantasy is abruptly cut short as he slams the doors closed, distraught. Male infatuation with the scents and aesthetics of a woman hit a fault when he realizes she’s a menstruating human being with her own pain, feelings, and desires. Women are taught that beauty is their sole purpose; an obligatory “face card never declines” privilege that recoups for a lack of stereotypically male characteristics like intelligence and independence. In this mindset, a woman’s beauty isn’t judged on her own accord. She’s told to analyze every section of herself: whether that be breasts or butt or hips–and degrade herself accordingly if it doesn’t fit a man’s image of a woman. She must be a fully shaved, skinny but curvy, unattainable masturbatory fantasy that deems a woman worthless if not flawlessly met. She is then told to compare herself to other women and discover the faults of her own body in relation to others. The oppressor thrives on the oppressed quarreling with each other–and so men thrive on women turning against women. 

In turn, the minds of Mulvey, Sontag and Coppola must be put in conversation with each other rather than against each other; they must function as extensions and responses to one another’s arguments and not contradictions. If Mulvey establishes that women–and the concept of their beauty–is under an impenetrable government of the phallocentric male gaze, Sontag gives life to beauty as a realm of flattery despite its inherent relation to the patriarchy. Coppola’s seat at the dinner table is filled more than two decades later as she adapts a novel from the male gaze and challenges its purpose, validity, and influence over a group of teenage girls. Each singular text is without an answer to the question of women existing out of male jurisdiction, and each woman at the helm of the texts has an idea that another lacks. If three writers have seats at the table, let this fourth chair be a reminder that men clumsily trying to control and comprehend the female perspective pales in comparison to women in discussion with other women; the firsthand with the firsthand. Let the male gaze be a lens on a telescope, observing the female experience but never experiencing; and let women be the unattainable instead of creating the unattainable for them.

Works Cited

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Laura Mulvey [This article originally appeared in Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), 6-18.] Introdu, https://ia802801.us.archive.org/4/items/visual-pleasure-and-narrative-cinema/Laura-mulvey-visual-pleasure-and-narrative-cinema.pdf. Accessed 17 November 2023.

Coppola, Sofia, director. The Virgin Sucides. 1999, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRPXQ3XcpKc.

Johnston, Amanda, and Dan Sheehan. “Does The Virgin Suicides Hold Up 25 Years Later?” Literary Hub, 19 March 2018, https://lithub.com/does-the-virgin-suicides-hold-up-25-years-later/. Accessed 26 December 2023.

Sontag, Susan. "A Woman's Beauty--A Put Down or Power Source," by Susan Sontag (1975), https://www.wheelersburg.net/Downloads/Sontag.pdf. Accessed 17 November 2023.