Staging Dissent by Lisa Weems

Author:Lisa Weems [Weems, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781315454757
Google: LN5CDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-22T03:32:22+00:00

Conclusion

The first section of this chapter discussed how alternative patriarchies operate to construct racialized discourses on girlhood. To this end, I argued that “third world girls” occupy a particular discursive position in the academy and popular culture given the colonial dynamics present within transnational discourses on gender, globalization, and citizenship, and it illustrated how racialized girlhood is theoretically marginalized (or presented as an abnormal Other) within the fields of global youth cultures and girlhood studies.

The second section of the chapter uses M.I.A. as a case study to interrogate how representations of racialized girls are simultaneously politicized and trivialized. Third world girls are constructed as sexually innocent and highly seductive – either way, their citizenship is (hetero)sexually constituted. Situating this research alongside other transnational feminist scholarship, it demonstrated how racialization operates in tandem with nationalism(s) and discourses on citizenship. Thus, despite normative claims of cosmopolitanism and border-crossings as an accepted part of a new global economy, M.I.A. illustrates how certain transnational bodies and identities become the battlegrounds of regulation, censorship, domestication, and exclusion.

As a highly visible media figure, she embodies a type of imperial scopophilia of the third world girl. Her reception within U.S. mass media illustrates her position as a young subaltern female: her body repeats the discursive framing of the colonial desire to gaze at, yet she is formally excluded from participation in both the material and symbolic forms of cultural and political citizenship. M.I.A. is constituted by refugee chic as both a cultural producer and cultural production, but this position affords a contradictory celebration because she is excluded from access to mainstream media production. For example, she was banned from the United States even though she had a music contract in the country. From her representation as an ethnic hottie and cheerleader for terrorism, discourses on sexuality, nationalism, and race locate M.I.A. within the suspect space of brown deviance; as such, her work and its reception offer pedagogical lessons at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in transnational times and spaces.

To depict M.I.A. as a poster girl of transnational youth culture and racialized girlhood is certainly complicated and perhaps also problematic in many ways. Her body, identity, and performances are politically stylized as refugee chic – a characterization that is grossly offensive, dismissive, and commercial, and also indicative of the position of the subaltern celebrity and third world girls in the context of post-9/11 regimes of discipline and deviance that are associated with neoliberal subjectivity and citizenship. Third world girls are celebrated as the objects of nationalist agendas, such as cultural, educational, and political reform, as well as objects of contestation and protection from both domestic and foreign “abuses.” Yet, perhaps because of her celebrity status through refugee chic, M.I.A. is able to articulate the contradictory discourses, practices, and subject positions of third world girls. Through her music and interviews, she calls attention to how such girls are subject to multiple layers of domination, discrimination, and exclusion as transnational citizens in a global youthscape. M.I.A., as an

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