The Miley Cyrus Affair (Issues 2013)

Perhaps I can continue a run of blogs with a brief series on the issues that captivated me most in 2013, beginning with one that everyone probably feels they have already heard way too much about: The Miley Cyrus Affair.

During the controversy following the infamous Video Music Awards performance, many kept pointing out “There’s a war on in Syria!” Indeed, there were more apparently weighty stories in 2013, but I found this one to be among the most fascinating.

I first caught the performance in a series of GIFs I can't find right now. Soon after, the prudes attacked it as raunchy on a par with porn, feminists attacked it for the way it succumbs to the music industry's aesthetic of selling female flesh, other feminists defended it by attacking the first feminists for slut-shaming, then a series of professional bloggers attacked it as racist.

Say what you will, the performance initiated one hell of a dogfight in the culture wars, and this makes it worth some consideration.

I think it helps to think of the performance as a text--and therefore somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation. I’m no expert, but as I understand the basic premises of post-structuralism, the meaning of a text, as a work of language, gains meaning from factors outside the author’s intentions, from an infinite web of cultural connotations, infinitely involuted or expanding, however you want to think of it. In this case, the text is a live performance composed of images and gestures as well as lyrics, delivered by performers and technicians, but taking up meaning within the context of America today, including its historical heritage. Like an onion, you may peel away one layer to see another, but you never reach a core that is the meaning of the text. You may turn it like a diamond to see some facets instead of others, but you never see the one angle that counts.

Many of the attacks on the performance come from writers who appear to be well-versed in this kind of critique. They are eager to begin stripping away those layers, to reveal the hidden significance, usually connected to civil rights, behind every sign however innocuous at first glance--every turn of phrase, every gesture, every giant teddy bear, every extended tongue. Miley Cyrus was treated to a big helping of this, with some writers tying her to the history of slavery (recounted at great length) and calling her performance a "minstrel show" (Vulture).

Watching the performance, I myself noticed that the designers of the performance had clearly chosen black women to be the background dancers, so I don’t mean to say that these writers have no point, only that beyond the obvious fact of the race of the dancers, the rest isn’t immediately clear. And if it takes that much intellectual labor to show how bigoted something is, then one thing it isn’t is blatant. It appears to me that in the application of their interpretive techniques these authors are fueled from the start by their favorite moralizing on civil rights issues and have no inclination to apply the brakes on corners as the uncertainty of textual interpretation should encourage. It's all adamant outrage, with each writer seeming to try to find worse terms of condemnation than the last. 

 

Perhaps then, this blog is a post-structuralist critique of post-structuralist critiques.

Having said that, it is too lenient to suggest that Miley Cyrus and/or whoever designed the performance, bears no responsibility for whatever sexist or racist effluvium culture and history have deposited, through them, as knowing or unknowing actors, into their performance. In the post-modern world, most of us are aware that words and images speak more than they appear to at first glance, and this is doubly true for anyone marketing to the masses. Backup dancers are not just backup dancers--how they dance, how they are treated, how they are dressed, their race, their physique, and so on all speak an infinity of meanings, as the performance's critics point out knowledgeably if also somewhat overwroughtly. When I saw the performance, I thought, “Someone should have known better.”

However, they frequently don’t.

In short, while I wish that the teams of people designing the performance had been more color blind, I also wish the professional bloggers who took up the fight against its latent and manifest racial stereotyping had rejected the urge to jump to hyperbole and had instead made the same strokes with more restraint and fidelity to the philosophical foundations of their trade.