Core Response #4 - Kallan

The pieces by McRobbie, Banet-Weiser, and Butler felt particularly timely this week. After finishing Butler’s article, I opened Instagram and quickly came across a story that perfectly spoke to Rosalind Gill’s conception of “postfeminism as a sensibility” (Butler, 44). In this story, the (white female) poster showed her followers a set of candles in the shape of what can only be described as dismembered female torsos. These “body candles” all have huge breasts but otherwise, I found, come in three sizes: impossibly thin (Lulu, "known as our Femme Candle”), “curvy” (Freya, “a goddess who represents love & beauty), and pregnant (Mama, "This cute feminine body candle looks great in a bathroom or baby nursery). The instagram bio for the seller reads: “We believe you are enough,” “Learning to Love Our Human Form” and “Empowered. Vegan. Light.” The candles come in a range of skin-tones, including an impossibly white ivory and, for some reason, lavender. Also for sale are “Identity Cubes,” which are candles that look like Bucky balls and claim to represent “all the facets of your identity.” Everything about the website and Instagram page screamed commodity feminism to the point of satire—the seller equates the purchase of candles in the shape of nude female torsos with empowerment. It reminds me of what, in my head, I call “the turn to boobs,” when all of the sudden every woman that I knew had an illustrated art print of boobs of different shapes and sizes hanging on their wall (including me—I bought a throw pillow with a line drawing of boobs in the fall of 2018).

I don’t mean to pick on this particular candle business—which seems to be less a company than it is one white woman in Seattle—but it’s just such a good example of the kind of knowing postfeminist naturalization of the objectification of the female form that pervades daily life now and that, I think, has taken on a new timbre in the Instagram age. As Butler discusses, this naturalization implicitly suggests that debates within feminism about sex and sexuality are settled, a thing of the past. It also positions the “empowerment” gained from purchasing a “body candle” as separate from any material or bodily realities connected to struggles for actual empowerment. This candle producer is not by default un-feminist but represents the complexity, contradiction, and ambivalence of contemporary postfeminist discourse. This complexity emerges on Instagram as a particularly contemporary version of the idea that “women ‘get it’ about objectification, and because of this understanding it is acceptable—indeed, even ironically empowering—to objectify women’s bodies in the most blatantly demeaning ways” (Banet-Weiser, 211). While part of me would like to dive wholeheartedly into critical candle studies, the relevant media studies point is that these are products made for our contemporary Instagram/Etsy moment, a visually driven avenue to tap into the present’s “generationally specific notions of cool” (McRobbie, 60). These notions manifest in my corner of the white millennial female demographic as an Instagram persona who is savvy but #spiritual, body positive and pro-nudity (#freethenipple), unproblematically comfortable with commodity feminism, and “inclusive” of all races, even if they are primarily targeting their candles/skin care products/self-help courses/meditation videos towards other white women. Cultural capital in my Instagram feed is built on a performative (and often commodified) “getting it” about both race and feminism. 

This is a form of visual representation that is tied to TV (and filmic) representation. The body candles took on a new light when, in the same Instagram scrolling session, I came across Variety’s article on Hollywood’s complicity in the racist, anti-Asian, misogynistic mass murders in Atlanta. While one white woman is aligning the purchase of dismembered torso candles with “smashing the patriarchy,” six Asian women were murdered by a racist misogynist who engages post-racial language to deny his racism and excuse his sexualized violence. The racist hate speech in the comments of the Variety post, including the many white women who code their racist outrage as sensible post-racial anti-PC straight-talk, was so disgusting and disheartening that it’s hard not to feel that, no matter how far ahead work by scholars like Butler, Banet-Weiser, and McRobbie push feminist discourse within academic circles, it will be a long (and violent) time until these debates meaningfully reach the public, let alone prevent murderous assholes from carrying on, with sympathy from the police. I’m not sure what to do to change this or even just to feel less depressed about it, other than to maybe step back from social media. I do still feel certain that work that grapples with the complexity of contemporary feminisms and postfeminism is necessary, and I’m grateful that scholarship like we read for this week exists. And if anyone wants to (ironically?) buy a curvy torso candle you can check out @soulecandles.