Archive for July, 2007
Gayle Rubin and Cooper’s “The Spy”: War, Trauma, Rupture, and the Traffic in Women
James Fenimore Coopers revolutionary war novel “The Spy” (1821) foregrounds the trafficking of women in a male patriarchal society, a representation that can be closely analyzed alongside Gayle Rubins well-known essay The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex (1975). The ambiguous nature of female identity during this period relates to a breakdown of fundamental assumptions underlying the traditional structure of the sex/gender system. Close bonds formed between men during war challenge the power of heterosexuality that constrains female sexuality. As Coopers men are traded back and forth between loyalist and rebel camps, the clear line between the traders and the traded becomes ambiguous. Women can use this opportunity in the breakdown of gender roles to inscribe themselves into a traditionally male-dominated sphere. The juxtaposition of Frances with her sister Sarah in Coopers novel highlights fundamental differences in these two contrasting sex/gender systems. Sarah represents a more traditional victim of the traffic in women, while Frances is ambiguously an active participant of, and victim to, this same system. Trauma felt by Sarah occurs in an instantaneous manner, and repeatedly haunts her throughout the novel. Frances, on the other hand, escapes the most severe forms of this experience. War ruptures this characters maturation process from youth to womanhood, and allows her to participate in male systems of exchange as a result. The revolutionary war, in this context, serves as a particular moment in history when traditional social structures are temporarily challenged by an ambiguous displacement of gender roles.
Blurred Borders: The Thin Rhetorical Line Between Audience and Text in Participatory Entertainment
With the recent explosion of participatory digital media, rhetorical reality is quickly catching up with rhetorical theory. The idea of audience participation in texts is at least as old as Aristotle; now that theory is made manifest by digital media. We have long accepted a rhetorical view of reading as a transaction in which we re-create, or even re-write, a text each time we read it, but todays Digital Generation students take that theory to an entirely new level, often actually creating the narratives as they experience them. While the impact of music downloading on contemporary views of intellectual property is well-documented, the Internet and other digital media offer a related realm that is just as rhetorically powerful: participatory entertainment. Under this rubric, we see such active digital engagement with popular culture as fan fiction, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), and even Fantasy Football. As Jane Espenson, formerly a writer on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, suggested at the 2006 World Science Fiction Convention, there is a thin line between fan and pro when it comes to Internet fandom, reflecting this rhetorical blurring between receiver and sender. › Continue reading