Still thinking about Bad Girls, and also Gurlesque

I was looking at a dialogue that Jessica Smith and I did for an forum on poetry and women's embodiment in the second issue of Traffic (2006-2007)--it occurs to me that we were talking about some issues relative to good girls and bad girls in art, and what to do with the cultural pressures we've grown up with. I'm still thinking about Silliman's post on Chelsea Minnis and also the forum on the Gurlesque up at Delirious Hem.

JS: “…[I]t’s not all bad—the fractured, fragmented, nervous sounds of sexual violence performing itself on and off the page—it can also be that culture/class specific impositions (‘a good girl must do x’) can bring interesting otherness to the table. Of course, ‘interesting otherness’ can come from all directions, but I want to celebrate rather than hide at least one of these odd, culturally enforced ‘instincts’: the pressure on women not to ‘make it new’ (faster cars! smaller computer chips! bigger bombs!) but to ‘make it pretty.’

“(A hastily sketched aside: ‘make it pretty’ as a response to—a backlash against?—the postmodern art of the last quarter century that celebrates the ugly and grotesque. A move toward the embellished, decorated, made beautiful, as you put it, ‘not clear…what is artifice and what is authentic.’)”

KLG: “…I’m usually torn between wanting to celebrate my interesting, culturally enforced otherness and wanting to reject/question it. So, while I read about Martha Graham and her versions of Greek heroines, I’m attracted to Merce Cunningham’s rigid and ‘unnatural’ movements and the cultural critiques they imply. Perhaps, like you, I want to explore what is, as you say, ‘embellished, decorated, made beautiful.’ But I admit to still being focused on the perverse and grotesque.

I'm thinking about this part of our dialogue (which was quite long, and covered a lot of ground in addition to what I've quoted) relative to some of what Ariellle Greenberg says on Delirious Hem about the Gurlesque in poetry, and how it has something to do with being "unabashedly girly, to talk about things like ponies and sequins, while also trying to be fierce, carnal, funny, political, irreverent…all these things at once."

A few things strike me: embellishment is a way of being unabashedly girly. The frames of reference that Greenberg mentions on Delirious Hem are mostly pop culture ones--popular Feminism of the 1970s and the pop culture of the 1970s. But she also mentions the carnavalesque as being a common element in a Gurlesque poem--which makes me think Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes and, before them the gender-bending and exoticism of Decadence.

I'm not sure what to say about narrative.

And camp has to be important, too.

Shame and so on

Mark and I were talking about shame and badgirldom (badgirlness? being a bad girl? writing bad girl poems?) last night, prompted, yes, by Silliman's post and the footnote in his post:

"Schneeman was never a “bad girl” that I can tell since she has always lacked the one thing that binds all the bad ones together – a sense of shame, some concept of all this being somehow dirty. Hers truly is a sex-positive position, with no sense of what Sianne Ngai calls Ugly Feelings. It’s interesting to contrast how Acker relies on this framework of social (and self-) condemnation whereas a later writer, such as Dodie Bellamy, is far more playful with these borders, able to evoke & examine but not be ruled by them."

Being a "bad girl" does require that there are very real social and cultural forces at work that 1) try to prevent you from asserting your subjectivity in the way that you want and 2) condemn subjectivities that they don't approve of but which are asserted anyway. You can't be a bad girl unless someone with more power than you points at you and says that you are bad.

If no one is there to tell you that you've done something wrong, then there's really no point in being a bad girl. This is one of the reasons why I like reading Acker and Mina Loy but could never get into Sex and the City--it was boring. I'm not that interested in free-spirited wildness and sex in the interest of finding The One and having a great career and looking professionally cute and stylish.

I'm not sure how to connect this all to bad girls in writing, or bad girl writing, or bad girl personas in writing.

Abjection and negativity must be a part of this, too.

Shame is one of those cultural narratives--whatever form we make it in--that we all rely on to make sense of abjection.

Abjection and negativity (which I love love love) are pretty standard avant-garde fare, no?

It's probably the "girl" part of the "bad girl" that interests me most. At least in terms of the term.

Bad Girls

Ron Silliman's recent post on Chelsea Minnis reminded me that I have a whole finished but unedited manuscript that's a vaguely procedural rendering writing through/of/with the Be a Bad Girl journal by Cameron Tuttle.

I'll have more thoughts about bad girls etc in about a week, well after blogland has grown bored with the discussion, I'm sure, if they haven't already.