Body Politics and the Fictional Double

[8] Women Singing, Women Gesturing: Music Videos

women singing, women gesturing 131 [8] women singing, women gesturing: music videosMAUREEN TURIM From the suggestive, masturbatory images of a singer stroking herself in a video clip to the subtle directional movement of an actor’s eyes in a closeup image in which nothing else moves, filmic and televisual gesture cover a wide range of coded, and yet elusive, movements of the body. I will look at how such gestures are understood and will specifically explore the meaning of the sexualized gesture as used differently by white and black women, straight women and lesbians in videos from the years 1993–94, when the emphatic sexual gesture hit its stride. Displays of sexuality by vocalists and lead instrumental performers have long been an element of musical stage and club performance. In fact, flirtation is central to many operas, from La Noce di Figaro to Carmen to Lulu; flirtation, whether by tenors or sopranos, but especially by sopranos, depends in modern stagings on the corporeal as well as the vocal gesture. So it should be no surprise that in the even more adventurous and youthful theaters of blues, rock, and hip-hop, popular musicians have long been testing how suggestive or direct the evocation of sexual desire, availability, prowess can be. Music video performance grows out of these traditions, performative Maureen Turim 132 and narrative, but with a different history constraining its mass dissemination , a history that has been fraught with a struggle with internal censorship . This struggle has been heightened by music video’s obvious appeal to a very young and very large audience. Issues of racial and gender inclusion and parity have haunted the music video industry, and have been the subject of much of the critical and theoretical writing on it. My purpose here is to focus on the specificities of visual gestures in music videos and address issues that are the concerns of this entire volume, concerns about how bodies are presented as implying or creating meanings that affect the psyches and beings of women. Representations of women ’s gestures are inherently available to regimes of invigoration or betrayal , substantive expression or equally substantive deception, and the manipulation of identities. Music video offers us one example of an extremely commercial and masscultural formatting of bodily representations, and one in which many talents construct a performer’s body, voice, narratives, and myths. Here I focus on analyzing the videos as representations of women’s bodies, and use the question of gesture as my means of entry. Preliminary to that entry, I find I must start by indicating how the study of gesture in general is at a certain impasse, and what directions I propose as I move into this look at women’s gesture in music video. A telling entry in Griemas’s 1986 dictionary of semiotics under “gesture” indicates this impasse, while still mapping in detail the advances made to date and the promise of future research, not the least of which is his Semiotiques des Passions, recently translated as Semiotics of Emotions. Griemas offers a concise delineation of the problems of a semiotics of gesture, which can be summarized as the difficulty of moving beyond taxonomies of the most clearly coded gestures of direct communication. The semiotic dream of a comprehensive classification often moved the study of gesture into scientific observation, measurement, and categorization. While advances in zoosemiotics and semiotic anthropology (including books on French and Central African gesture, as well as a cultural history of gesture ranging from the medieval period to the twentieth century) are in many ways impressive, the impasse is most evident in the textual inscription of gesture, where far more fluid and contextual methods are needed. Analysis here must be open to idiosyncrasy and inventiveness, as well as irony and poetics. A poetics of gesture, a theory of gesture, promises a move beyond the image, a life beyond the signs of a dead end. In the writings of Julia Kristeva both the genotext (in opposition to the phenotext) and the semiotic (in women singing, women gesturing 133 opposition to the symbolic) bear traces of the gestural that is brought to the fore by her work on Bellini. Barthes’s “third meaning,” as well, could be reinterpreted as a contemplation of the gestural traced in the image as an excess. Damisch, in addressing the history and limits of iconography and its debt to the uncovering of forgery, focuses on the specificity...