“That, Which Is Not There”
Last autumn, on a beautiful October day, my husband and I strolled through Copenhagen. As the usual harsh wind that comes from the sea was but a light breeze, we walked one kilometer after another until we found ourselves in a peculiar forest of saplings on planters filling up a yard. We had stumbled upon Yoko Ono’s art installation called “Wish Tree”. The instructions were clear:
“Make a wish. Write it down on a piece of paper. Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree. Ask your friends to do the same. Keep wishing. Until the branches are covered with wishes. Yoko Ono 2015”
We started looking for the pens and papers. My initial wish was simple: “I wish I had a kiss and a beer.” Giddily, we started reading other people’s wishes. Some were very sweet. People wanted adventure, purpose, and health, the usual stuff. However, after a while, there it was: “I wish that Yoko Ono didn’t split the Beatles up.” Not this again, I moaned. Still holding the pen and paper, I wrote down “I wish this misogynist bullshit wasn’t still a thing (Yoko Ono, Courtney Love)”, which we attached next to the wish blaming Yoko Ono for splitting up The Beatles in her art piece.
Upon leaving the site of the installation, my brain was buzzing with annoyance. How do strangers have the nerve to do that to someone who tragically lost her husband? So what if John Lennon did not want to be in the band anymore? It is hardly something you should drag a person for forty years and counting. Same goes for Courtney Love, as even nearly a quarter a century later any video comments section on YouTube of her own successful band Hole will contain the claim she both killed and was less talented than her husband Kurt Cobain.
Thinking of these two women, both artists in their own right, a sad, yet inevitable conclusion came to my mind. It seems that women and women artists still occupy a space very different from their male counterparts.
Flash forward half a year, I found myself in a seminar for comic studies. To write a text on a comic that interested me, I dug up the dog-eared copy of my old favorite Buddy Does Seattle by Peter Bagge, a collection of Hate comics vol. 1. The now middle-aged character of Buddy Bradley first appeared in the early 1980’s as a semi-autobiographical teenage character living with his parents. Since then, the story of him maturing through being a young bum, moving to Seattle, moving back to New Jersey, settling down with a family, and finally getting a decent haircut, has been covered in the various comic books by Bagge. For many aficionados, the Buddy Does Seattle era Buddy is the definitive one: his moping habitus finally had perfect timing in Seattle during the burst of the Grunge era as he, the beer-drinking antihero in a flannel shirt, became the definitive character of the slacker of the Generation X. On the back of the publication by Fantagraphics Books, Seattle Weekly is quoted with the statement “Twenty years from now, when people wonder what it was like to be young in the 1990s Seattle, the only record we’ll have is Peter Bagge’s Hate.”
In spite of my admiration for the comic, as I was re-reading the book, I had another realization: this is a comic for dudes. In an effort to avoid the depiction of “easy-going alterno-Friends lifestyle as so revoltingly portrayed in films like Singles and Sleepless In Seattle”, as worded by Everett True in the Fantagraphics Introduction (8), Bagge’s Hate suddenly appeared to have entered another stereotypical portrayal: the alterno-Married With Children. As the women in the comic were all depicted as crazy and hysterical girlfriends, Buddy Bradley suddenly appeared to me as Al Bundy, and perhaps this interpretation is not too far off. Nonetheless, it was a breath of stale air from the 90s, and that just did not sit with me anymore, at least as well as it used to.
So say Buddy Bradley is a tragicomic figure with unstable girlfriends and the emergence of the grunge scene in Seattle personified. It is a comic. Where is the problem in that? The problem lies in representations. Any keen music fan can form an idea of a rock group in their heads. Most of the time, this imaginary rock group will consist of all-male musicians. Perhaps there is one female member. If the band is exceptional enough to consist of only women, as many bands do of only men, it will cease to be a band and enter the domain of the girl rock band instead. Compared to the association one would have of, say, a violinist or an opera singer, the discrepancy makes itself visible. How come is it that women are perfectly capable of becoming violinists, which requires extreme cognitive, musical, and motoric skill, but not bass players in a crappy rock band, at least not on the same scale? Conceivably, the representations of the kind of instruments and musical styles played by musical performers that are already present in our cultural imagery affect the types of music making different genders tend to turn to. As the musically untalented character Stinky gets to front his band Leonard and the Love Gods, Valerie and Lisa are stuck as Buddy’s girlfriends, passive in everything but their insatiable sex drive and the need for drama.
In fact, the study of representations is nothing new in cultural studies. For decades feminist theorists have demanded an investigation of the images and representations in the shared cultural unconscious. Particularly useful in the case of comics’ studies has been the application of cinema studies to create new theoretical readings on comic books. The Cinema Journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies is one recent example. After already producing one issue on comic studies, they created another one focusing on gender in the comics in the year 2015. In defense of the Cinema Journal’s choice of exhibiting feminist readings of comics, the journal stated that “what is for some, in terms of representation and diversity, a “predictable parade of scholarly concerns,” is for others a similarly predictable parade of elisions, evasions, and errors” (Kirkpatrick and Scott 121). Laura Mulvey, to whom I will return later, is another example of approaches in cinema studies applicable to other disciplines, modalities, and media.
Later on in the same Cinema Journal, Carlen Lavigne argues that like other cultural products (think comics), “of course, games may also actively reinforce preconceptions about gender, sexuality, race, or class by restricting user choices, distorting user experiences” (135). Lavigne then notes that by reinforcing the preconceptions, the games waste their “transformative potentials”. Bringing the argument back to the Hate comic, the whole story of Buddy’s years spent in Seattle could be seen as a waste of transformative potential.
To clarify this argument of the wasted transformative potential, a look could be taken to another musical subgenre that came to be in parallel to grunge, that of the riot grrrl movement, with bands such as Hole, Babes in Toyland, and Bikini Kill. Musically very similar to grunge, these bands enjoyed a wide popularity while consisting of mostly women and often having a feminist agenda. There were even examples of female grunge, like the band L7. Then how come has riot grrrl not entered the musical canon in the same way grunge did? During my time as a music studies student, grunge was brought up several times, Nirvana was played in class, but L7 definitely not, and riot grrrl has only been mentioned in queer studies texts. Thinking of representations again, the male grunge musicians, such as Tad, are granted an appearance in Buddy Does Seattle, but riot grrrls shine with their absence. The other musician’s existence is noted, while the other figure in the same subcultural setting is not granted existent. When that sort of a female character is finally seen in the comic, it is in the form of Sasha, a music fan wearing a baby doll dress paired with combat boots. Her bookshelf consisting of feminist literature is shown and ridiculed, and ultimately she, too, is portrayed as a bimbo infatuated with Stinky, and ending up trading sex with Buddy for a backstage entry to a Leonard and the Love Gods show while blowing bubble gum balls. It seems the female in the music scene was just not a serious something to be serious in the comic universe created by Bagge. Sadly, this notion is not limited to Bagge’s comic or even the 90s. But perhaps if Bagge had described the women around her, or the riot grrrls differently, that would have had the transformative potential described by Lavigne: riot grrrl and L7 could have entered the musical canon with a stronger position that they now hold.
Another example from film studies useful for comic studies is the work of Laura Mulvey. Her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” uses psychoanalysis as a tool to examine the presence of women and men in cinema. Notably, she discusses the male gaze, which the female character in film is created to please, and exists to be looked at. Her analysis of the women characters in cinema is as such applicable to the treatment of the women in Buddy Does Seattle, who exist only in relation to Buddy. As well as creating a way to understand Valerie and Lisa through her argument of sexualized objects created to satisfy the (heterosexual) male gaze, Mulvey’s essay highlights the other argument I brought up earlier, the lack of female agency as musicians, or people in general, in the Hate universe. Both Valerie and Lisa, as well as the absent riot grrrl musician, are the figure of the “woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (Mulvey, 834).
But this is not the way the Buddy comics are usually read. In fact, many will feel it unreasonable to read Peter Bagge through feminist theory. Even I, as the author of this text, start to doubt myself: am I too polemic? Am I looking for trouble where it does not exist? Perhaps my self-doubt itself can be returned to Laura Mulvey’s critique of the figure of the man as the norm against which all else is seen. Many things have changed since the early 90s, in subcultures too, and hopefully both their representation and self-representation, but yet my doubt and the sad demographic of musicians remains engrained in the cultural conscious.
Moreover, as long as someone like Courtney Love is not given credit for her musical accomplishments, but even many who enjoy the music of her band Hole credit its value to either her deceased husband or the only male member of the band (the brilliant Eric Erlandson, who deserves all the praise coming his way), the effects cultural representations have in creating social realities and interpretations cannot be ignored. As the example of Yoko Ono being ridiculed in her own work of art illustrates, perceptions in culture turn to acts in the material world and affect for example who is allowed to act and exist as an artist.
My wish is that the gaze, turned away from the man as a looker, and the female as something to be looked at, could put in reality the transformative potential of comics. Additionally, in the discourse of the year 2017, speaking of men and women when discussing feminism already turned intersectional, is outdated. Thus I also wish to underline that the turn of the gaze would allow the various ways various gendered identities and bodies exist in spaces to be seen. My choice of speaking of men and women has to do in part with the historical frame of the sources (Mulvey extending all the way to the 70s), but also the fact that the dilemma of men and women remains still unresolved in the popular music discourse. I want to acknowledge that there exist other groups that are in more fragile positions than the white women not represented in the music scene, even if I discussed the relationship of men and women in this text. And recognizing that, I want to note that the previously mentioned dilemma of the man and the woman as creators need to be extended to these identities. Allowing people other than cis men to be seen as creators, and musicians will help not only women but everyone who does not fall into the category of man that for us means the norm. In fact, it is imperative for musical subcultures to be honest about recognizing agency outside the male musician.
By writing this text on Hate, my wish is not to blame Peter Bagge of creating a sexist comic. The story of Hate exists, it is already done, and as such, it is both a valuable cultural document and an excellent comic. I allow him the benefit of a doubt that he really set out to just describe his own lived experience. What could be argued however is that as subcultures are not free of the perception of rock music as an inherently masculine cultural space, Bagge happened to describe an inherently masculine cultural space. Still, instead of trying to diminish the value of Bagge’s comic, I want to encourage another way of looking and asking questions: When reading something, to look for what is missing. What is that, which is not there? And who has the potential to show it?
If I were now at the Wish Tree, I would hang up a new wish. I would write in my little paper rectangle the wish that Yoko Ono would be credited for her amazing music, such as Walking on Thin Ice, and her impressive art. I wish the comments under the Hole YouTube videos to recognize the incredible sonic power that is the album Live Through This and not be about Kurt Cobain. Preferably during my lifetime.
And I would still like to have the beer and the kiss, please.
Sources:
Bagge, Peter. Buddy Does Seattle. Fantagraphics Books, 2007.
Kirkpatrick, Ellen and Suzanne Scott. “Representation and Diversity in Comics Studies.” Cinema Journal, vol. 55, no.1, 2015, pp. 120-124.
Lavigne, Carlen. “I’m Batman (and You Can Be Too): Gender and Constrictive Play in the Arkham Game Series.” Cinema Journal, vol. 55, no.1, 2015, pp. 133-141.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 833-44.
