mal brough’s bad accent
I’ve got a bunch of posts stored up to write about things that are making me very mad right now. The Bill Henson thing, for one. — Except that people have already responded in ways that do not require repetition. To wit: archive, on the way Henson’s photographs implicate the viewer in thinking about the awkward sexuality of adolescence, and comments on the spuriousness of many critics’ desire to draw an easy distinction between art and porn; and also Stop Anne Geddes, which ought to have been done a long time ago.
On the other hand, here is something else. Mal Brough, the ex Minister for Indigenous Affairs, architect of the Northern Territory Intervention into ‘child sexual abuse’ and a prospective Queensland Liberal leader, apparently, did a press interview at his house in which he and his son put on fake Aboriginal accents and mimicked/mocked “traditional” Indigenous practices, playing didgeridoos and clap sticks. Putting on the family fun for the benefit of a journalist. As Ana points out, apparently they thought they were just having a laugh. Like blackface is a joke, or the Stolen Generations was a joke, or black deaths in custody…
Apparently, in the privacy of one’s own home, it’s more than acceptable to mock people you once talked about saving. I would like to engage in some critical discussion of this, in light of how the Intervention has passed from the headlines, and now that the panic-mongers have found a new arena in which to police sexual normativity. Under K-Rudd, the Intervention continues to spread to other indigenous communities in South Australia, as Ruth McCausland’s excellent commentary in the National Indigenous Times points out. But I’m trying to finish a chapter, so it will have to wait.
Hello, belated comment.
Censorship is bad, and it’s not long after they come for Bill Hensen that they’ll come for me (on the Niemoller scale), so it would be ridiculous for me not to support him…
but oh, how I wish I could support the thirteen-year-old grrrl whose pictures of adult male dicks are being censored, instead. WHERE IS SHE. I mean, yes, hooray for pictures that implicate the reader in the production of the awkward sexuality of adolescence and don’t just collude in ’stateporn’ (excellent word from archive there) but, you know, are there not ways of doing that that don’t involve an adult male photographer taking pictures of naked twelve-year-old girls? I’d like to think so!
(It sort of reminds me of the fight between John Fiske and Susan Bordo over Madonna - like, ‘See how Madonna turns the male gaze back on itself and subverts the tradition of positioning women as objects!’ and ‘See how she does that by adding a few more examples to the long list of music videos which show thin young white women stripping!’ Yes, subversion, and close reading, and not to assume a single meaning/type of power relation at work in all cultural productions which seem to have the same kind of ‘content’, and ‘diversity’ doesn’t only exist on the level of a simple kind of representation, and all of that. But at the same time, why are so many of these interventions that we celebrate only taking place on the level of re-inscribing and re-investing more of the same old stuff? Not that there’s a way of simply stepping out of the same old stuff, I don’t mean that either, but, but, but…)
I guess one thing is that it seems to me that in the Hensen debate, the only people talking about adult power over children, and the problems around the representation of children’s bodies for adult pleasure, are conservatives. And if we concede all of that ground to them, that’s not a good thing.
Comment by Ika — June 12, 2008 @ 10:51 am
I’m commenting back late, because this gave me lots to chew over. You’re absolutely right about the importance of locating the 13 year old girl whose pictures of male dicks are…. where? And I assume that somewhere out there, she exists, and she probably is being censored — by her parents, teachers, peers who think her drawings are disgusting, and probably by herself, because she would have to know that she isn’t ’supposed’ to be making art like that. Or, like Sadie Benning, she’s making home videos and waiting for the interminable drag of high school to end so she can make art independently.
And on the other hand, I need to disagree with you, because I’m not sure I agree that the only people talking about adult power over children and problems of representation of children’s bodies for adult pleasure are conservatives. At least I don’t think conservatives are the only people thinking about this. But yes, the terms of the debate in the media have been so fixed, on the ‘progressive’ side, to parsing a distinction between ‘art’ and ‘porn’ that people aren’t necessarily talking about what they should be talking about.
If you look at that photo, and by looking at it, you’re implicated in the awkwardness of the model, don’t you have to think back to your own adolescence? Don’t you have to remember, maybe, what it was like to be that age, and to be so awkward? Is there necessarily an objectification that takes place (children’s bodies for adult pleasure)? Do [x people] automatically respond with [sexual] pleasure to an image of a naked young person? Because my response to that particular photo feels more like identification than objectification. I recall how at 12, I wanted to keep being able to take my shirt off in summer without being told I had to keep it on — because apparently my chest was now something ’sexual’ and had to be covered up. In fact, there is a photo of me with my dog, and I’m probably about 12, and I’m not wearing a shirt… I can’t remember who took the photo, it doesn’t matter. I concede that the Henson image — that particular one — is generically distinct from happy snaps, because it’s produced in a studio, and the model is a ‘model’, and in a way she is being asked to produce a citation of the artistic nude. And we know about the gender politics implicit in that genre. (This reminds me to tell you about how we were teaching John Berger in gender studies last semester, and in the tutorial exercise for that week the students were asked to write the most interesting thing they’d learnt — a hilarious number cited the difference between ‘naked’ and ‘nude’ as something new and exciting!) But it seems to me that the furore over this particular photo is all about the occulting power of the image. Despite assurances that the girl’s parents were there, and the material scene of making the photograph was not harmful, the potential ‘bad magic’ of people spectating that image in a wrongly sexual way is imagined to harm the subject of the image. Which is really the same weird occulting as the conservative desire to prevent anyone with sexual feelings towards children from looking at images of children, at all. (That’s the logical conclusion, right?) That’s precisely where the Anne Geddes joke gets its power.
But Henson has done much more interesting stuff, you know? It’s one photograph. And he only gets to be well-known because he does something ‘mainstream’ and slightly dodgy in a way that makes you seriously want to look at his work all day, it’s so beautiful/scary/intense. There are far more interesting queer artists talking about adolescent sexuality, in a way which incorporates a critique of gender and heteronormativity. So, for sure, let’s talk about other artists, let’s talk about Sadie Benning. But blame the mainstream terms of the ‘Henson debate’ for that.
Comment by Az — June 14, 2008 @ 4:48 pm
Oh, thank you for this! And yeah, I shouldn’t take it out on Henson, you’re right. And I’m glad that there are people on the progressive ’side’ talking about children and adults and girls and men and power, and you’re right that it’s the (mainstream) framing of this particular debate which doesn’t let that stuff in to complicate things. At least I think you are. But where does the frame end and the picture begin??? (sorry)
But yeah. One of the things that the debate brought up for me, but I didn’t have room/time to get to in my (very-curmudgeonly-on-rereading) comment, was exactly this idea about spectatorship. I mean, that’s my job! (My job title is ‘lecturer in reception’ and I’m writing a paper right now on whether the reception of texts/images is the site of resistance or precisely the site of sovereignty, which sounds like it should intersect with this whole debate but somehow just doesn’t, which is currently causing my head a bit of overstretching…) But this:
the potential ‘bad magic’ of people spectating that image in a wrongly sexual way is imagined to harm the subject of the image
is exactly right. It’s kind of scary from my professionalized point of view, like ‘we’ (by which I mean Roland Barthes) went on for a few decades about how the meaning of art/texts/images was produced by the reader/spectator, not by the author/producer, and now the mainstream have ‘got’ that… and they’re using it to police art in the name of the magically-powerful bad-looking of the paedophile. So weird. (And where/when did this magic power start being attributed to the paedophile gaze? I’m so drawn to doing a research project on the cultural history of paedophilia, but on the other hand so drawn to a quiet life…)
Comment by Ika — June 14, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
Quiet, schmiet :) I have no idea when that magical power of the gaze began to be attributed to the pedophile, but I’m interested in someone finding out!
Comment by Az — June 16, 2008 @ 6:58 pm