MDDM Ch. 38 Summary & Notes

[Dave Monroe]

Who here first read the Duck as, if only by default,
male?  Raise yr hands ...
 
--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> 384.11 "an erotic Life"  I think Pynchon's point
> with Vaucanson's duck's intertextuality with 20th
> C. cartoons might have something to do with the
> Warner Bros character's apparent  androgyny/
> asexuality. Most of those Warner Bros characters
> (excepting Pepé le Pew), in fact ... unlike Disney's
> characters, whose domestic arrangements often mirror
> conservative family values, and which, by comparison
> in the Pynchonian universe, are just so much bad
> opera .... (?)

>From Kevin S. Sandler, "Gendered Evasion: Bugs Bunny
in Drag," Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner
Bros. Animation, ed. Kevin S. Sandler (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998), pp. 154-71 ...

"In Gender Trouble, [Judith] Butler arguies that
gender attribution results not from an expression of a
'true' masculinity or femininity but from a practice
of what masculinity and feminity are purported to be. 
As a performance, gender is a 'doing' ....
   "Yet, over time ... identity can become a
culturally restricted principle of order, a coherent
set of contingent acts that create the appearance of a
gendered subject, a natural sort of being...." (p.
157)

   "Regulatory forces that demarcate and differentiate
gender also distinguish between sexualities.  The
category of sexaulity produces assumptions and
prohibitions that are 'natural' and 'normal' fo a
gendered subject.... 'compulsive heterosexuality' ..."
(p. 157)

"The lingusitic distinction of 'sex' didvides human
bodies into male and feamles sexes, first installing,
then securing and maintining the cultural and
political operation of compulsive heterosexuality....
the terms 'man' and 'woman' serve only to
institutionalize reproductive sexuality and
heterosexuality as 'authentic' and 'natural.'  Thus,
sex and sexuality, along with gender, are all
performances that naturalize and normativize the
dualist nature of human identity." (p. 157)

"... the penis functions as the only essential sign of
gender when the gender attribution of a new
acquaintance--the first attribution--is made.  That
the penis is almost always hidden from view is
significant; it suggests the penis sis assumed to
exist in th absence of contradictory cues (i.e.,
femininity) when presuming gender." (p. 158)

"... it is the lack of signs that assists viewers in
reading [a 'male' character] as 'male'; no clues
render him as female.  This is so, explains Chris
Straayer, because certain costume and makeup styles
have historically coded a woman's surface as sexual
....  If gender attribution is essentially sex
attribution, the historic absence from view of the
penis in cinema, argues Straayer, has allowed the male
body an independence from sexual anatomical
verification....  'male' is assumed in the absence of
female clues.
   "Popular animated animal characters like Bugs Bunny
can be read in a similar fashion as human characters;
they are also gendered.  The Warner Bros. Studio
Stores need only add a ribbon, eyelashes, and breasts
to a picture of Bugs Bunny on a box of underwear to
create a female Bugs Bunny....  anthropomorphism ...
attributing human characteristics to nonhuman
objects--naturalizes and normalizes strictly defined
gender norms and heterosexuality by engendering animal
characters in exactly teh same way we humanize humans.
 Gender imitation in animal characters does not copy
that which is prior in humans since gender already is
a fiction; it copies what is already assumed to exist
in humans.  Anthropomorphism can be viewed, then, as
an imitation of an imitation of an imitation, a copy
of a copy of a copy....  Anthropomorphism reiterates
the schema of gendeed bodies as fact, not fiction, by
its imitative nature." (pp. 158-9)

"Since ungendered subjects, argues Annette Kuhn,
cannot be human, anthropomorphized animal characters,
in this view, must be read as either masculine or
feminine, male or female, by the spectator." (p. 160)

"In 'Seduced and Reduced: Female Animal Characters in
Some Warners' Cartoons,' Sybil Delgaudio argues that
dress and behavior play important roles in assigning
gender to animals in animated cartoons.... the major
difference bwteen those characters percieved as male
or female is the degree and type of abstraction in
their impersonation or imitation of human traits....
recognizable masculine traits ... are diametrically
opposed to recognizable feminine traits ... in
animated texts.  An animal character becomes
immediately recognizable as a 'woman' ... by what
Molly Haskell calls a 'set of external playable
mannerisms,' whereas the idea of man is 'unlimited as
the ocean.'" (p. 160)

"The strange thing about the narratives of Warner
Bros. cartoons is that they do not preoccupy
themselves with gender difference...  Seduction and
sexuality are hardly addressed because they are
inconsequential to the pursuit/capture plot of the
cartoon.  Nonsexualized natural opponents ... are not
romantically entangled like the characters in the Walt
Disney cartoons ....  However, we still
anthropomorphize and engender the Warner Bros.
characters because of their human actions: Bugs Bunny
... frequently masquerades as a woman.
   "Most critics describe any impersonation by Bugs
Bunny not coded as recognizably female in terms of his
'original' male gendered identity, which they have
never contested.  Roles not identifiable as 'woman'
are never the result of Bugs Bunny's impersonation of
'man,' but an extension of his very own masculine
personality and male sexuality....  In other words,
see someone as male unless proven female.  See someone
as male unless prohibited from doing so by
recognizable signs of female identity (i.e.,
feminity).  Male is always assumed; female has to be
explicitly called for.  Bugs Bunny is read as 'male'
because he exhibits no external characteristics
recognizable as 'female.'
   "It is not unreasonable to assume, then, that many
critics and viewers consider Bugs Bunny 'male; since
there are no clues to define him as female outside of
his transformation into 'woman.'  These corporeal and
behavioral distinctions are no different when they are
recognized by the interior or diegetic audience (e.g.,
Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam).  Elmer and Yosemite Same
construct Bugs Bunny as 'female' by the same sartorial
codes as the exterior or extradiegetic audience (p.e.,
viewers and critics).  Both interior and exterior
audiences see Bugs Bunny as 'female' only when he is
in the exagerrated, garish garb of the transvestite:
makeup, breasts, and a dress....  For the most part,
Bugs Bunny assumes the codes of the feamle gender for
the purpose of temporary escape, or, in other words, a
gnedered evasion.
   "The codes that signify Bugs Bunny as a 'woman' to
Elmer, Sam, and the exterior audience during a moment
of gendered evasion are no different from the codes
used with female chracters like Petunia Pig or Daisy
Lou Rabbit ....  Bugs Bunny's performance as 'female'
is defined by the same behavioral, corporeal, and
sartorial chracateristics as those defining Petunia's
and Daisy's representation." (pp. 161-2)

See, e.g. ...

http://www.geocities.com/bugsy3715/rabbit.html

Cf. ...

   "'Moi?  Female, as it happens.  The other, being
yet sexually unmodified, is neither,-- or, if you
like, both.  Any Problem?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 377)

As well as ...

"... it's doubtful if he can ever be 'found' again, in
the conventional sense of 'positively identified
and detained.'" (GR, Pt. IV, p. 712).  

"The Man has a branch office in each of our brains
..." (ibid.)

Works cited ...

Butler, Judith.  Gender Trouble.
   NY: Routledge, 1990.

Delgaudio, Sybil.  "Seduced and Reduced."
   The American Animated Film: A Critical Anthology.
   Ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary.  NY: Dutton,
   1980.  211-6.

Haskell, Molly.  "Women in Pairs."
   Village Voice, April 28, 1975, p. 77.

Herrmann, Anne.  "'Passing' Women, Performing Men."
   The Female Body.  Ed. Laurence Goldstein.
   Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991.  178-89.

Kuhn, Annette.  "Sexual Disguise and Cinema."
   The Power of the Image.  London: RKP, 1985.

Straayer, Chris.  "The She-Man."
   Screen 31 (Summer 1990): 262-80.
  
Though I wish he'd just write "Bugs" (vs. "Bugs
Bunny") once in a while.  By the way, note the cover
illustration here.  Talk about yr fetishism ...
 
http://165.230.98.36/acatalog/__Reading_the_Rabbit_350.html

And, again, see as well Kirsten Moana Thompson's "Ah
Love! Zee Grand Illusion! Pepé Le Pew, Narcissism and
Cats in the Casbah" (pp. 137-54) ...

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