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BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine
400
by Lisa Jervis (Editor), Andi Zeisler (Editor), Margaret Cho (Foreword by)
Lisa Jervis
BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine
400
by Lisa Jervis (Editor), Andi Zeisler (Editor), Margaret Cho (Foreword by)
Lisa Jervis
Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
In the wake of Sassy and as an alternative to the more staid reporting of Ms., Bitch was launched in the mid-nineties as a Xerox-and-staple zine covering the landscape of popular culture from a feminist perspective. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way the pop landscape reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch grew to be a popular, full-scale magazine with a readership that stretched worldwide. Today it stands as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the way pop culture informs feminism—and vice versa—and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind our favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like. BITCHFest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, the anthology covers everything from a 1996 celebration of pre-scandal Martha Stewart to a more recent critical look at the "gayby boom"; from a time line of black women on sitcoms to an analysis of fat suits as the new blackface; from an attempt to fashion a feminist vulgarity to a reclamation of female virginity. It's a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and an arrow toward feminism's future.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780374113438 |
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Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date: | 08/08/2006 |
Edition description: | First Edition |
Pages: | 400 |
Product dimensions: | 5.87(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.89(d) |
About the Author
Lisa Jervis is publisher of Bitch and a regular lecturer on media and feminism. Andi Zeisler is Bitch's editorial/creative director. Both women write regularly for newspapers and magazines nationwide.
Read an Excerpt
BITCHfest
Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch MagazineBy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374113432Excerpted from Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine edited by Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler. Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler. Published in August 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
introduction
the aztecs had quetzalcoatl and the underworld of Tlalocan. The Egyptians had Isis and Osiris. The Greeks had Homer. The Elizabethans had Shakespeare. We have American Idol, Us Weekly, and Angelina Jolie.
Actually, when Bitch was born we had Beverly Hills, 90210; Reality Bites; and Mademoiselle. It was 1996, but even then, before the popular advent of the Internet, reality TV, and blogs, pop culture comprised our contemporary oral traditions, shaped our modern myths, and provided us with our gods and goddesses. As freshly minted liberal-arts college graduates with crappy day jobs and a serious media jones, we were prime targets for movies, TV, ads, and glossy magazines, all of which fell over themselves telling us how to dress, what to eat, where to work, where to go after work, whom to lust after, and how to lust, period. More than that, they sought to tell us--as they seek to tell everyone--who we were.
The thing is, we pretty much already knew who we were--or at least who weweren't. We weren't breathy, baby-voiced Kelly, using her bruised-blonde shtick to steal Dylan away from Brenda. We weren't Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, shtupping Kyle MacLachlan in a pool in hopes of career advancement. We weren't the waifish, expensively clothed girls draped mournfully across the pages of Vogue and Bazaar. We weren't even Xena, warrior princess. What we were was curious about what those fictional women and their representational peers had to tell us about our cultural take on femininity, "proper" male and female behavior, and women's place in the world.
We were also obsessed with how pop culture treats--and by "treats" we mean ignores, sidelines, and denigrates--feminism. The mid- to late '90s saw the rise of so-called postfeminism. The concept wasn't necessarily new; it was associated with postmodernism and French feminism, and introduced to nonacademics in a 1982 New York Times Magazine article titled "Voices From the Post-Feminist Generation." But now, all of a sudden, there were books about postfeminism, references to it in film and literary criticism, even an entire website called the Postfeminist Playground where a group of women wrote about sex, culture, and relationships from a standpoint that assumed a world where the gains of feminism were unequivocal and its goals roundly met.
Postfeminism is, perhaps not surprisingly, very similar to old-fashioned antifeminism; at bottom, it suggests that the culture at large is just fine and that our pervasive, ongoing struggles with, for instance, workplace equality or work/family balance aren't societal problems--they're personal ones. And winking slogans like "Postfeminism: Boys Like It" revealed an image of feminism and feminists that was still loaded down with some very familiar, very unattractive baggage. The term was (and still is) an insult to the legacy of feminism, an eye-rolling suggestion that we need to get over it and move on, already. But postfeminism can exist only in a postsexist world, and we're not there by a long shot.
If we were, feminism wouldn't still have this persistent image problem. A gorgeous woman like Ashley Judd can be loud and proud about being a feminist--even appearing on the cover of Ms. in a T-shirt reading "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like"--but when tasked with conjuring up feminism, most of the mainstream media still sees lumpy, frizzy, hairy she-trolls advancing with castrating knives in hand. It's this persistent misconception that sometimes makes our f word seem so much more controversial than that other one. Every young feminist has a story about the time she had a run-in with it. Maybe it was chatting with a high-school classmate about an upcoming march for reproductive rights, only to hear her deliver the gentle dis: "Well, I believe in equal rights, but I don't need to march for it." Maybe it was overhearing a male peer complaining in the college dining hall, "I'm here to learn, not to hear about women's issues." Maybe it was a new friend responding to an offhand comment about not fitting the girly-girl mold with, "You're not one of those militant feminists, are you?" As twenty-three-year-old women in 1996 (and as thirtysomethings now), we found it ridiculous and enraging that such simple concepts--that women deserve equality, that gender shouldn't determine the course of our lives, and that the world we live in is often arranged in a way that does not serve these goals--freak people out so much. And the sparks of indignation we felt ignited a burning need to correct the record about what both women and feminism can and should be.
That indignation is a big part of why we chose to call the magazine Bitch. (If you were wondering about that name, you're not alone.) We'd argue that these days the word "bitch" is as loaded as the term "feminist"--both are lobbed at uppity ladies who dare to speak up and who don't back down. This is not to say that Bitch is down with being gratuitously mean or catty; no, we just know that taking a stand is usually more important than being nice. 'Cause here's the thing about "bitch": When it's being used as an insult, the word is most often aimed at women who speak their minds, who have opinions that contradict conventional wisdom, and who don't shy away from expressing them. If being an outspoken woman means being a bitch, we'll take that as a compliment, thanks. And if we do, the word loses its power to hurt us. Furthermore, if we can get people thinking about what they're saying when they use the word, all the better. Last, but certainly not least, "bitch" is efficiently multipurpose--it not only describes who we are when we speak up, it describes the very act of making ourselves heard.
That said, we are aware that the word carries a difficult, complex legacy (though the many people who call the office to berate us about the title may think it's all too simple), as well as the fact that its popularity as an epithet is more sanctioned than ever. And yet we still think, ten years later, that it's the most appropriate title for a magazine that's all about talking back.
And what better to talk back to in this intensely mediated day and age than the boundless source of material that is pop culture? Anyone who protests that a focus on pop culture distracts from "real" feminist issues and lacks a commitment to social change needs to turn on the TV--it's a public gauge of attitudes about everything from abortion (witness all the convenient miscarriages that befall characters torn between keeping and aborting their pregnancies) to poverty (two words: welfare queen) to political power (if Commander in Chief is accurate about nothing else, it nails the fact that our first female president will be scrutinized through the lens of gender every day of her working life), Contemporary feminism has always had ties to popular culture and its representation of women: Gloria Steinem's first big break was "I Was a Playboy Bunny," her exposé of the working conditions of the cottontailed waitresses in Hugh Hefner's Playboy Clubs; two of the highest-profile early women's-lib actions were a protest of the Miss America Pageant and a sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal.
The notion at the heart of Bitch is simply this: If the personal is political, as that famous phrase goes, the pop is even more so. And like that other maxim, its truth doesn't mean that we can ignore the other things that are also political. On the contrary, they all go together--living-wage campaigns with critiques of Maid in Manhattan, antiviolence organizing with questions about why the Lifetime channel loves its women so victimized--informing each other to keep this movement vital. The world of pop culture is, in a metaphor that has turned out to be all too close to literal, the marketplace of ideas; if we're not there checking out the wares, we won't be able to respond effectively--or put our own contributions on offer.
At the time we first ventured into the Xerox-and-pasteup world of zine making, we were frustrated readers as much as burgeoning activist writers. We wanted to read something that would put the lie to the cliché of young women the nation over saying, "Well, I'm not a feminist or anything," before voicing their desire for equal treatment. We wanted to read something that would call the news media on its ghettoization of feminist viewpoints and its vicious stone-casting at women like Anita Hill and Patricia Bowman, who stood up to abusive behavior from a future Supreme Court justice and members of the Kennedy family, respectively, and were dragged through the mud for their efforts. We wanted to read something that talked about why all the actresses on the cover of Vanity Fair and Details and all the female musicians on the cover of Spin or Rolling Stone were dressed in lingerie with their mouths hanging open. We wanted to read something that talked back to the forces that had been talking to us for years: the ones telling us and countless others that, say, men are useful only for the two-carat diamonds they provide, that without children our lives will be sad and incomplete in spite of dazzling careers and intense friendships, that consumer freedom is just as good as social equality.
We realized that if we wanted to read something like this, we would have to write it ourselves.
As the magazine took shape, we saw in it the potential to be more than a forum to air our complaints--we saw that it could be an agent of real change. If we asked more girls and women to stop and think critically about the pop culture they're encouraged to consume unquestioningly, we figured that maybe in some small way we could contribute to changing its messages. If we could encourage a generation of young women and men to look at the culture around them through a lens that prioritized gender representations, they'd be inspired to protest that culture--and maybe by the time those people became ad executives, TV producers, and studio heads, they'd be creating a pop culture that truly reflects all genders accurately. We wanted to remind people, ourselves included, to ask questions about the messages in their media and to speak up--to each other and to the corporations and culture makers behind those messages.
We still do.
Continues...
Excerpted from BITCHfest by Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ForwordMargaret Cho
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Hitting Puberty
Amazon Women on the Moon: Remembering Femininity in the Video Age, Andi Zeisler, Winter 1996
Rubyfruit Jungle Gym: An Annotated Bibliography of the Lesbian Young Adult Novel, Lisa Jervis, Winter 1998
Stormin' Norma: Why I Love the Queen of Teen, Andi Zeisler, Winter 1998
Sister Outsider Headbander: On Being a Black Feminist Metalhead, Keidra Chaney, Fall 2001
Bloodletting: Female Adolescence in Modern Horror Films, Tammy Oler, Summer 2003
The, Like, Downfall of the English Language: A Fluffy Word with a Hefty Problem, Gus Andrews, Summer 2003
Teen Mean Fighting Machine: Why Does the Media Love Mean Girls?, Gabrielle Moss, Winter 2005
CHAPTER 2
Ladies and Gentlemen: Femininity, Masculinity, and Identity
Urinalysis: On Standing Up to Pee, Leigh Shoemaker, Fall 1997
The Collapsible Woman: Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse, Vanessa Veselka, Winter 1999
The Princess and the Prankster, Two Performers Take on Art, Ethnicity, and Sexuality, Karen Eng, Fall 2002
What Happens to a Dyke Deferred?: The Trouble with Hasbians and the Phenomenon of Banishment, Athena Douris and Diane Anderson-Minshall, Fall 2002
On Language: You Guys, Audrey Bilger, Fall 2002
Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Dresses the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels, Julia Serano, Fall 2004
Fringe Me Up, Fringe Me Down: On Getting Dressed in Jerusalem, Danya Ruttenberg, Winter 2005
Screen Butch Blues: The Celluloid Fate of Female Masculinity, Keely Savoie, BITCHfest 2006
Dead Man Walking: Masculinity's Troubling Persistence, Brendan O'Sullivan, BITCHfest 2006
CHAPTER 3
The F Word
And Now a Word from Our Sponsors: Feminism for Sale, Rita Hao, Fall 1998
I Can't Believe It's Not Feminism! On the Feminists Who Aren't, Julie Craig, Spring 2002
Celebrity Jeopardy: The Perils of Feminist Fame, Rachel Fudge, Winter 2003
Unnatural Selection: Questioning Science's Gender Bias, Keely Savoie, Spring 2004
On Language: Choice, Summer Wood, Spring 2004
Laugh Riot: Feminism and the Problem of Women's Comedy, Andi Zeisler, BITCHfest 2006
Girl, Unreconstructed: Why Girl Power Is Bad for Feminism, Rachel Fudge, BITCHfest 2006
CHAPTER 4
Desire: Love, Sex, and Marketing
In Re-Mission: Why Does Redbook Want to Keep Us on Our Backs?, Amy Harter, Spring 1997
Hot and Bothered: Unmasking Male Lust, Lisa Jervis, Fall 1997
I Heard It Through the Loveline: And Misinformation Just Might Make Me Lose My Mind, Heather Seggel, Spring 1998
The New Sexual Deviant: Mapping Virgin Territory, Carson Brown, Winter 2000
Envy, a Love Story: Queering Female Jealousy, Anna Mills, Summer 2001
Fan/Tastic Voyage: Rewriting Gender in the Wide, Wild World of Slash Fiction, Noy Thrupkaew, Spring 2003
Hot for Teacher: On the Erotics of Pedagogy, Jennifer Maher, Spring 2004
Holy Fratrimony: Male Bonding and the New Homosociality, Don Romesburg, Summer 2004
CHAPTER 5
Domestic Arrangements
The Paradox of Martha Stewart: Goddess, Desperate Spouse-Seeker, or Feminist Role Model?, Jennifer Newens, Fall 1996
Double Life: Everyone Wants to See Your Breasts—Until Your Baby Needs Them, Lisa Moricoli Latham, Fall 2002
Queer and Pleasant Danger: What's Up with the Mainstreaming of Gay Parents?, Margaret Price, Fall 2003
Mother Inferior: How Hollywood Keeps Single Moms in Their Place, Monica Nolan, Fall 2003
Hoovers and Shakers: The New Housework Workout, Sarah McCormic, Winter 2005
CHAPTER 6
Beauty Myths and Body Projects
Plastic Passion: Tori Spelling's Breasts and Other Results of Cosmetic Darwinism, Andi Zeisler, Fall 1998
Vulva Goldmine: The New Culture of Vaginal Reconstruction, Julia Scheeres, Winter 2000
Are Fat Suits the New Blackface? Hollywood's Big New Minstrel Show, Marisa Meltzer, Winter 2002
Busting the Beige Barrier: The Limits of "Ethnic" Cosmetics, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Fall 2004
Your Stomach's the Size of a Peanut, So Shut Up, Already: An Open Letter to Carnie Wilson, Beth Bernstein and Matilda St. John, Fall 2003
Beyond the Bearded Lady: Outgrowing the Shame of Female Facial Hair, Aimée Dowl, Spring 2005
CHAPTER 7
Confronting the Mainstream
Pratt-fall: Ten Things to Hate About Jane, Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, with special guest vitriol by Rita Hao, Winter 1999
Marketing Miss Right: Meet the Single Girl, Twenty-First-Century Style, Andi Zeisler, Winter 2000
The God of Big Trends: Book Publishing's Ethnic Cool Quotient, Noy Thrupkaew, Spring 2002
The Black and the Beautiful: Searching for Signs of Black Life in Prime-Time Comedy, Lori L. Tharps, Summer 2002
I Kissed a Girl: The Evolution of the Prime-Time Lesbian Clinch, Diane Anderson-Minshall, Winter 2004
XXX Offender: Reality Porn and the Rise of Humilitainment, Shauna Swartz, Fall 2004
Bias Cut: Old Racism as New Fashion, Rachel Fudge, Fall 2004
CHAPTER 8
Talking Back: Activism and Pop Culture
Please Don't Feed the Models: A Day in the Life of an Urban Guerrilla, Kathy Bruin, Fall 1998
Refuse and Resist with Jean Kilbourne: How to Counteract Ad Messages, Laura Barcella, Winter 2001
Full Frontal Offense: Bringing Abortion Rights to the Ts, Rebecca Hyman, Winter 2005
Meet Anne: A Spunky, Adventurous American Girl, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Spring 2005
How to Reclaim, Reframe, and Reform the Media: A Feminist Advocacy Guide, Jennifer L. Pozner, BITCHfest 2006
The BITCHfest Resource List
About the Contributors
Acknowledgments
From the B&N Reads Blog
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