BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  Then there’s the final pitfall of being the darling of a literary trend: Stray from the pigeonhole into which you’ve been placed, and you can kiss your darlinghood good-bye. Two years after her Beautiful Person crowning, Arundhati Roy cut off her long hair, telling The New York Times that she doesn’t wish to be known as “some pretty woman who wrote a book.” Instead of another work of fiction, she has produced two books of essays, The Cost of Living and Power Politics, and wholeheartedly thrown herself into activist work, protesting the influence of Western corporations in the developing world, the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, and dam-construction projects that would make hundreds of thousands of Indian citizens homeless.

  But the reception of Roy’s radical activism has been far from supportive in both the United States and India—perhaps showing how bringing the implicit politics of fiction into explicitly and confrontationally political nonfiction can make critical acclaim waver. Instead of seeing Roy’s lifelong commitment to the “small things”—poverty-stricken farmers, “the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans,” as she writes in The God of Small Things—Roy’s critics see her as an uppity lady biting the hand that feeds her. How could she write searing indictments of the Indian bourgeoisie that would garner electricity from the dams, decry the nationalism that lauded the nuclear tests—when she, as much as the “modern” dams and tests, has been hailed as part of India’s success story? For Western critics, her intense scrutiny of the World Bank and globalization marked her as just another famous face touting the political cause du jour.

  Just as being too politically ethnic can make one unpopular, not being culturally ethnic enough can also bump a writer from the in crowd. Aspiring authors attending November 2001’s South Asian Literary Festival in Washington, D.C., told stories of dealing with editors who declined their manuscripts, asking why their work didn’t deal with traditional Indian life. Their works were, in essence, too American.

  The food metaphors that permeate literature by writers of color are useful here; the critic Amitava Kumar once wrote, “If immigrant realities in the U.S. were only about ethnic food, then my place of birth, for most Americans, would be an Indian restaurant.” This language of cultural consumption is particularly apt—at the trend’s worst, South Asian and South Asian-American writing is just so much tasty food to be chewed, digested, and excreted without a lot of thought. But hope springs eternal. Perhaps Americans, having tasted something delicious, will seek out books that outrage and challenge as much as Roy’s unflinching resistance to Western power and Indian complacency, narratives written from the diaspora or in translation that don’t rely on bindi or kulfi to make their points.

  I’m banking on those contrary writers. I’m banking on those readers who read with sensitive curiosity, who aren’t afraid of pointed words about poverty, colonialism, and racism. I’m banking on publishers who are willing to take a risk on books that break the mold, works in translation (only 5 percent of India’s one billion people speak English, after all), books that challenge as much as they entertain and uplift. This is a lot to bank on, certainly, but who would have thought that a first-time female novelist from India would have had such a strong impact on the American reading world in the first place? In the meantime, South Asian and South Asian-American writers are making themselves at home on the New York Times bestseller lists and within literary-prize committee sessions—but they have their eyes wide open. “I would be wary of the notion that South Asia is hip and can attract publishers,” said Yale English professor Sara Suleri at the literary festival. “Those fashions come and die. Maybe in five years, we will be hunting for Tasmanian writers.” Maybe so, but maybe some readers will demand more, and writers will be able to find success while defying trendiness. Perhaps we can all wedge the door open a little more firmly, making room for stories that will last longer than a peel-off mehndi tattoo.

  The Black and the Beautiful

  Searching for Signs of Black Life in Prime-Time Comedy

  Lori L. Tharps / SUMMER 2002

  ONCE UPON A TIME, TELEVISION BROUGHT ME GREAT JOY. Before there was cable, when a dish was something you served dinner on, our family’s sixteen-inch RCA kept me entertained for hours on end. The love affair started early. At ages three and four, it was the commercials: I memorized every jingle and tagline and would perform them as a sort of one-woman show for anyone who cared to listen. When I was five, my mother and I bonded while watching As the World Turns and Guiding Light every weekday after my half-day kindergarten. When I turned seven, I started watching Good Times, The Facts of Life, and, later, Punky Brewster. I also liked What’s Happening!!, The Brady Bunch, reruns of Family Affair, Happy Days, and Laverne & Shirley—the last two earned extra points because they took place in my hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  These days, however, I turn on the TV only to feel betrayed by my former friend. As a cable-deprived, thirty-year-old black female pop culture fanatic, I stare at the whitewashed screen, remote control in hand, wondering, Where am I? According to network prime-time sitcom lineups, I no longer exist.

  Even though some of my beloved shows were all-white, while I was growing up I saw several versions of myself on network television. The Facts of Life‘s Tootie was my preteen role model. She was the youngest of four roommates attending boarding school at Eastland, and even though she was “the black one,” she wasn’t also “the poor one” (that role was reserved for Jo, the tough scholarship student). Tootie was decidedly middle-class and dreamed of being an actress, just like me. I wanted to wear roller skates in the house like Tootie, curl my bangs like Tootie—I even begged my parents to send me to boarding school. (Thankfully, they refused.) But The Facts of Life wasn’t the only show I could tune in to and see someone who looked and behaved like me. Punky Brewster’s best friend, Cherie, could have been my city-mouse doppelgänger. There was Dee on What’s Happening!!: a wisecracking, devious child always ready with a righteous tongue-lashing—too mean to emulate but so much fun to watch. And, of course, there was Penny on Good Times, who later turned out to be Charlene on Diff’rent Strokes, who later turned out to be Cleo on Fame, who later turned out to be Janet “Miss Jackson if you’re nasty” Jackson—but I digress.

  In my teenage years, I copied the hairstyles, fashions, even some of the mannerisms of the girls in The Cosby Show’s Huxtable clan and the coeds attending Hillman College on the Cosby spin-off A Different World. And I didn’t mind when people on the street told me I looked just like Tempestt Bledsoe or “that girl from Family Matters,” even though I didn’t. I felt that my existence in the social fabric of American life was validated by these black pop culture icons. But then something changed. And now, even though a recent TV Guide article tells me that there are more African-American actors on television today than ever before, finding examples of black women on network sitcoms that in any way mirror my life (or the lives of any other black people I know) feels like an exercise in futility.

  At this year’s Black Arts Festival at Harvard University, New York University professor and author Tricia Rose broke it down like this: “While we have much more space to be visible in American popular culture than [at] any other moment in its history, [black women’s] images are extraordinarily narrow.” Narrow and, I would add, embarrassing. I’m looking for black characters I can identify with and respect; what I find instead are black comic actors who have been reinvented as homeboys and hoochie mamas ghettoized on inferior networks created just for colored folk. The number one show in black households, UPN’s The Parkers, offers us a single mom raising a daughter who’s as dumb as dirt. Mother and daughter attend community college together, where the mother spends most of her time chasing after a man who doesn’t want her. Shows featuring black and white actors together on a regular basis—à la Diff’rent Strokes and The Jeffersons—have been eliminated. According to a recent survey conducted by childadvocacy group Children Now, white shows are getting whiter and black shows are gett
ing blacker. During the spring 2002 season, only 7 percent of network sitcoms featured “more than one primary cast member of a different race than the show’s stars.” In essence, we have arrived at de facto Jim Crow television, with the networks adopting a practice of segregated programming. And, not surprisingly, separate is far from equal—making the outlook for black women in prime-time comedy particularly bleak.

  In the mid- to late ’70s, black sitcoms like Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!!, and Good Times were applauded and watched by many black Americans and plenty of white ones. Although most of the characters were poor and struggling to get by, strong family values were emphasized and a lot of African Americans were just happy to see themselves included in prime time. The early ’80s signaled the end of black welfare-family sitcoms, which were replaced with the scenario of pseudosubordinate black characters surrounded by a lot of well-meaning white people: Witness Gimme a Break!, Diff’rent Strokes, and Benson; and let’s not forget Webster. In 1984, of course, came The Cosby Show, the first show with an all-black cast to become a hit with audiences across race lines. By the end of the ’80s, buoyed by Cosby’s success, a flood of black shows had hit the airwaves. From Amen to 227 to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, an unprecedented swell of diverse characters and storylines for my kind of people was seen and supported by the major networks. Steve Urkel, Family Matters’ nasal-voiced übergeek, gave cause to celebrate Hollywood’s willingness to expand its view of the black male. A Different World showed the nation that young black women aspire to be doctors, museum curators, army sergeants, and mothers. In the early ’90s, Living Single showcased twentysomething black women who were independent career gals instead of welfare recipients. I’d never argue that every black female character (or black male character, for that matter) in this period was an ideal depiction, but prime-time comedy was finally starting to touch on the real-life diversity of black Americans.

  Today it feels like we’ve taken a giant step backward. Sitcom writers cannot seem to come up with a decent premise to bring black people into prime time besides the male-comic-with-a-family routine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that premise—but the results are fairly limited. The Bernie Mac Show and My Wife and Kids, driven by the talent of their I-was-a-comedian-in-a-former-life leads (Bernie Mac and Damon Wayans, respectively), have been well received by black and white audiences, but the actors playing these men’s wives—Kellita Smith and Tisha Campbell-Martin—never rise above supporting-role status.

  And integrated sitcoms have become rarer and rarer. The only consistently and thoroughly integrated sitcom of recent years has been For Your Love, which revolved around the lives of three suburban Illinois couples, two black and one white. Created and executive-produced by Yvette Lee Bowser, who did the same for Living Single, For Your Love premiered on NBC in 1998 and was quickly shuttled to the WB after a dispute with network execs. It lasted five seasons before being canceled this year due to low ratings. But were the ratings low because crossover audiences—audiences for shows where black people and white people are friends and neighbors—are hard to come by, or were the ratings low because the network did very little to promote and/or support the show?

  I blame this state of televised segregation on The Cosby Show. The success of its warm and fuzzy spin on black domesticity spurred many advertisers and industry execs to realize the potential in black programming. Then, faster than you can say “bamboozled,” more black-themed shows started finding their way onto the air, and, a decade after Cosby, the WB and UPN netlets sprang up and were soon catering to black audiences almost exclusively (though the WB has since moved on to blindingly white programming like 7th Heaven and Gilmore Girls). The networks seemed to have no qualms about putting the most uninspired and offensive versions of African Americans on the air, indicating the TV industry’s low opinion of black people’s entertainment expectations. (Do I even have to mention Homeboys in Outer Space?) On these shows, black women had to be neck-rolling, fingersnapping, loudmouthed aggressors, while their men, for the most part, were clowns, ministers, or working-class clichés. In addition, these new sitcoms were more urban-focused and less mainstream-friendly. Shows like Martin, Moesha, and The Jamie Foxx Show were grounded in an all-black world that made no effort to be inclusive, and the effects were far-reaching. White people tuned out, taking their potential advertising dollars with them. In the meantime, industry insiders assumed blacks were happy watching the baby nets—so there was no longer a need to be inclusive with mainstream shows. Now the white shows are really white (see Frasier, which in nine seasons has featured approximately one black guest star and zero regulars) and the black shows are really black (see The Parkers, which has one regular white character with no real purpose), and no one is bridging the gap.

  What’s worse, the so-called black shows, besides lagging at the bottom of the Nielsen ratings list, have inferior writing and content. Instead of offering clever dialogue or mining real-life situations for plots, these segregated sitcoms tend to derive all of their laughs from physical humor and trash-talking characters. The Jamie Foxx Show and Martin are prime examples, relying on the crazy physical contortions and goofy facial gestures of their male leads, not unlike the days of minstrel-show shucking and jiving. I’m not surprised that such shows barely register on the ratings radar—but there are some equally tacky white shows that do garner more attention simply because they have network support on their side (see just Shoot Me). Fledgling networks seem to be willing to air black programming but not to commit to its quality or support it through advertising. Whereas NBC promotes Friends with a billboard in New York City’s Times Square, a few dozen bus signs, and dozens of prime-time teasers throughout the week, UPN advertises The Parkers only on Monday nights, when the all-black comedies air. No billboards. No city-bus signage.

  It should not be too much to ask that Hollywood’s sitcom writers come up with a way for white and black to share the small screen on equal terms. How about a black friend to hang out with the gang at Central Perk? Why not an ultrafierce black fag hag to spice up Will’s life? The possibilities are endless. And audiences might even enjoy the variety if they were given the chance. White people seem eager to listen to black music, eat black food, co-opt black fashion and hairstyles; why wouldn’t they take to a more integrated experience on the small screen as well? Not to mention the fact that very few people live the segregated life that’s depicted in sitcomland, espycially in New York: Are we really supposed to believe that the Friends gang has never known or seen any black people except for Gabrielle Union that one time in 2001? Or that neither Will nor Grace knows one black guy?

  I recognize that my feelings of being abandoned by the television industry aren’t exactly normal. The fact that Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, and Ross don’t have a black friend is not about me personally. Yet it still hurts—I feel left out of the lovefest because America cares so much about these six fictitious people, and not one of them looks like me. I’m sick of being the universal mother figure (from mammy to Oprah) or the ultimate sex goddess (from the Hottentot Venus to Lil’ Kim) but not the businesswomen, teachers, chefs, journalists, and the like who populate white sitcoms. I miss the days of Tootie and Dee and Khadijah, Maxine, Regine, and Synclaire. I know if we were calling the shots in Hollywood, things would be different; Girlfriends creator Mara Brock Akil and Living Single and For Your Love creator Yvette Lee Bowser are working hard to make that happen. I wish them well—and in the meantime, I’m turning off the tube.

  I Kissed a Girl

  The Evolution of the Prime-Time Lesbian Clinch

  Diane Anderson-Minshall / WINTER 2004

  WHEN MADONNA AND BRITNEY SPEARS MADE OUT AT THE MTV Video Music Awards last September, some called it a brilliant marketing ploy (the pair duets on Spears’s current release, In the Zone). Others dismissed it as a fading hipster’s desperate homage to herself, Madonna anointing the next Madonna. Still more disdained it as a gratuitous display of vulgarity—for which c
onservatives immediately demanded, and in some situations received, an apology (from papers such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which printed a photo of the event on its front page). The obsessively documented kiss could have served as an irreverent pop-art critique of America’s concerns about same-sex unions; after all, anxiety about Supreme Court rulings and Canadian legislation had placed gay marriage in the headlines throughout the summer of 2003. The VMA routine had all the elements needed to make a statement: Christina Aguilera in hot pants, Missy Elliott as a butch groom, Madonna as a polygamous bride, and those ostentatious kisses.

  But it wasn’t a statement. Rather, the Madonna-Britney kiss was a choreographed moment of pure showmanship, the ultimate example of the lesbian kiss as sweeps ploy that prime-time producers have spent the last few years perfecting.