Objectify This

Untitled, 2004, by Emma Bee Bernstein

Hello lovely revolutionaries! Welcome to 2010! ObjectifyThis has recently relocated to New York, delaying posts on this blog in favor of searches for shelter, income, and long-lost friends.

However, I’ll be sure to get back atcha as soon as my schedule allows. I look forward to any semblance of monotony, believe me.

In the meantime, here’s an intense and haunting memorial to Emma Bee Bernstein, a feminist and photographer after Francesca Woodman’s troubled and troubling vision of the female.

Let’s celebrate her insight and her work while recognizing that, as her collaborator and friend Nona Ellis Aronowitz reminds us more than once, suicide is not romantic.

Emma and Nona waitressed and hostessed to afford a heady, two-month road trip across the U.S, speaking to women along the way about feminism and the roles that sex and gender play in their lives. The book of their writing and photography, GirlDrive, is an informed, intergenerational inquiry into the meaning that the women’s movement has or can have, and the obstacles to a unified, positive identity for women as a political group with common needs and communal power.

Nona continues their work together with a hard-hitting blog, in which she argues, amongst other things, that there might be logical reasons that young women were inspired to vote for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.

This week, driving to New York with a car full of worldly goods, I shook my fist at an NPR piece about women and power parroting the same outraged quotations from Geraldine Ferraro (the first female vice-presidential candidate) that Nona decries.

I didn’t feel comfortable voting for Hilary because, while I believe that women can run countries, I didn’t like her politics. Ultimately, she is another politician. Ultimately, she is deeply allied with an administration that strengthened big business’ hold on the senate during its time in power, an administration that whose largest single day of bombing in the Balkan conflict occurred the same day as the Columbine High School shootings and Clinton’s heartfelt condemnation of the “terrible” events in Littleton, Colorado.

And most importantly, wouldn’t it be just as insulting to vote for her because she’s a woman, because her victory would be historic, as it would be to deny her a vote because she’s a woman? In the NPR piece, Anne Kornblut tells Tom Ashbrook that she’s not sure that Americans will elect a woman anytime soon, but fails to recognize that this job is hardly a prize.

As she notes, politics is an ugly place; it is especially ugly for women, because of our culture’s relative tolerance of sexism. But there are women who succeed in politics; it’s not too ugly for women. And there are male politicians who have ugly experiences in poltics; it’s not just ugly for women.

The Onion was right to run the headline Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job when Obama was elected. So far, we have seen him lose popular support as he prioritizes and appears to move away from his broad promises of “change” we “can believe in.” We have seen racist cartoons, we have seen the widespread celebration of the 2009 Lynyrd Skynyrd ballad “That Ain’t My America,”– with its veiled racism, which is reminiscent of the hotly contested veiled racism of their other work. We have seen the president attacked for taking his wife to musical in New York, we have seen insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry thwart a real overhaul of the healthcare system, we have seen him choose to continue a war in Afghanistan in spite of the knowledge that counterinsurgency is unlikely to succeed, at best. (See Nasser Hussein’s forthcoming article in Boston Review, which will be online 1/14/10).

Yet, despite all of this ugliness, despite his compromises, I am glad to have Obama as our president because I believe that he has the right intentions, and that he is doing what he can to bring about some positive social change. If Hillary were in his place, I wouldn’t have that faith; I think she’s been accepting corporate handouts for too long. But in her defense, she would have fired Blackwater. That’s a step in the right direction.