After a hiatus of a
few weeks, I would like to change course in my posts and reflect on the ways we—our
individual selves, our society, and our ideologies—dictate reading. My last
series focused on the ways in which one particular organization, Jumpstart,
mediates questions of policy and literacy—a fairly explicit conversation about
reading, what to read, who can read, and the values of reading.
However, it’s easy
to forget that official institutions and organizations are not the only
mediators of our day-to-day reading practices.
Last week I attended
a panel on Mad Men through the Chicago Humanities Festival; the conversation—a still
mediated but less formal version of a traditional panel—featured Lauren
Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert Rushing, all three professors from the University
of Illinois who edited Mad Men, Mad
World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, and WBEZ's Alison Cuddy
discussing various readings of Mad Men. Questions were opened by the audience,
and a reception afterwards guaranteed that attendees had plenty of time to
discuss the panelists’ perspectives in contrast with their own. For a few
hours, Chicagoans listened to interpretations, did their own readings, and
raised questions in pseudo- and actually academic ways, all about an object of
popular culture.
What was striking,
though, was not the idea that one might have a rigorous, academic reading and
discussion of popular culture, but the ways in which certain readings or interpretations
were perfectly acceptable while others were unanswerable or even taboo.
Panelists were happy
to tackle questions about gender, even criticizing the show’s perspective—Mad
Men explicitly depicts misogynist characters, perspectives, and events—while questioning
the show’s motive: the misogyny in Mad Men often makes the viewer
uncomfortable, forcing the viewer to assess why a given interaction feels so
very bad, rather than reiterating misogyny in a positive light. Questions from
the audience regarding gender, the interactions between men and women in the 1960s
as viewed from today, and women’s rights were welcomed and garnered a lot of
response from the panelists, who were enthusiastic about reading the show under
these lenses.
Yet when one
audience member raised a question about sexual violence against women on Mad
Men, the panelists were silent for what felt like minutes. The audience too,
became particularly quiet. When they finally mustered up their voices, they had
very little to say, and none of the panelists offered a willingness to read the
show with sexual violence in mind.
What determines our
readings? How is one topic—women’s rights pertaining to education, employment,
and families—a perfectly good lens through which to read and critique pop
culture, while another—sexual violence—creates a void of silence in panelists
and audience alike?
Of course, setting
plays an important role in what kind of conversations are allowed (explicitly
or implicitly) to take place: in a setting like the Chicago Humanities
Festival, which takes itself to explicitly be dealing with questions of what it
means to be human, more controversial readings of topics like race and
sexuality can take place quite easily. On the other hand, in a space which
revolves around a (relatively) short hour-long conversation which is predicated
entirely on the support of audience members—the Chicago Humanities Festival is
non-profit—the conversation needs to leave audience members with some kind of satisfaction
or affect which will both enable them to feel their time reading Mad Men has
been worthwhile and create a desire for audience members to come to more
events.
The perplexity of
what kinds of reading are acceptable, which extends beyond questions of gender
to those of sexuality, race, ethnicity, politics, economics (the list goes on
and on), will be the subject of my next blog series: questioning the ways we
read, how we read, and what we read in terms of what is socially accessible.
While I can’t promise some concrete answer to questions of accessibility, nor
even a map of all the ways our social relations dictate acceptable and
unacceptable readings, I hope to explore a few of the ways in which thinking
critically about reading mass culture can in some ways reveal more about our
own relations to the world than about culture itself.
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