Maybe She's Born With It...

Dissatisfaction. Nobody doesn't have it (everybody has it). Whether a person is dissatisfied with their job, their adequacy in their child's education- but we are Americans so more likely that dissatisfaction will be in looks. Nose not "white" enough? Rhinoplasty! Hair not Caucasian enough? A mix of peroxide and a hair straightener will fix that. Skin not pale enough? Bleach it. Everything a person needs to become more beautiful (i.e. Caucasian-like) to satiate that physical dissatisfaction is available and it is no coincidence that all of it a in a profitable market.

Loreal's new make up that makes you beautiful (and several shades lighter it seems)

Susan Bordo takes on the issue of women who do plastic surgery, wear color contacts, dye, straighten and sleek their hair in the name of just wanting to feel beautiful, but not because media dictates what is beautiful. Or so they think.
In "'Material Girl': The Effacements of Postmodern Culture," Bordo has several quotes from women who are defending colored contacts and an ad that suggests that "Brown eyes [get] a second look," because brown eyes are ugly. Okay, so it doesn't say that brown eyes are ugly, but they assuredly imply it. Why be satisfied with dull brown eyes (which is the prevalent color in ALL minorities) when you can have blue eyes (like white people) and green eyes (like white people). Essentially white is right, but that is definitely unfair to Caucasians for the simple fact that white women are just as unsatisfied with their looks as any other woman. Bordo says, "if we are never happy with ourselves, it is implied, that is due to our female nature, not to be taken too seriously or made into a 'political question.'" So if all women are dissatisfied with how they look, but all of them are flocking to look a certain way, who is dictating what beautiful is? Who better to tell a woman how she looks but... a man.

Eugene Schueller, founder of L'Oreal. This guy looks like someone who knows beauty in women.

Of course a man would be behind the pressures of being a certain kind of beautiful. Even Oprah Winfrey cannot escape the perception of what "beautiful" is. "Oprah Winfrey admitted on her show that all her life she has desperately longed to have 'hair that swings from side to side' when she shakes her head." Bordo said it was Oprah "[revealing] the power of racial, as well a gender normalization, normalization not only to 'femininity,' but to the Caucasian standards of beauty that still dominate on television, in movies, [and] in popular magazines." So when one of the wealthiest women of the world admits that all the money in the world could buy her hair happiness, does everyday Jane have to worry? (As a small tidbit, the richest woman in world is Liliane Bettencourt, daughter of Eugene Schueller).
So how are men controlling fashion and beauty statements for men? Is it outright that men are perpetuating what you should look like? Don't women have sort of freedom or say on the matter? According to a girl in class, she stated that growing up she always wanted "blonde hair," and eye lashes like "hers (pointing to another girl in class who had curvy lashes)." Well companies are giving you freedom. For example Maybelline:

Maybe you were lucky to be born with features that we made up, but in case you weren't, we have a solution.

Maybelline doesn't hide that they are instilling a beauty that you don't have. They are downright telling you, thus giving you freedom and power. A power that ads and television give you, but as cultural critic John Fiske said, "the subordinate may be disempowered, but they are not powerless. There is a power in resisting power, there is a power in maintaining one's social identity in opposition to that proposed by the prominent ideology." So according to Fiske we have power to say "no, straight and sleek is just as good as wavy and curly." But what if even in magazines that are meant to support your unique look if you are black, or Latina you are reading articles that illustrates beauty as a white, thin, blonde hair, blue eyed woman. "This invitation to cognitive dissonance reveals what Essence must grapple with in every issue, as it tries to keep its message clear and dominant, while submitting to economic necessities on which it survival depends.
So as I mentioned before, who are the powers to be that make a specific beauty so? As professor Wexler mentioned, maybe all the people in charge are white, blonde hair, blued-eyed men who want to keep them as a societal norm. Of course that too is changing as the Latino population is growing. Maybe soon the market will find it more profitable to have this on covers:

Yes, that is a Latina without lighting her skin, hair or eyes

Of course, ads are for making money, and just a couple of seconds of make-up will not make you beautiful. That takes an entire team and perfect lighting. Maybe she's born with it... maybe not.

I Thought Love Knew No Bounds

First comes love. Then comes marriage. Not quite. In our modern society, as Michel Foucault put it, “our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities,” and thus, our form of entertainment has progressed along to include more sexual heterogeneous situations.
So we come to “Clerks II,” which I am not too quick to call romantic comedy, but ultimately, its saturated ending makes it so. As Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s book, “Romantic Comedy,” says, “a romantic comedy is a film which has as its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearts way and almost always to a successful conclusion.” Yes, there is a successful conclusion in the plot, but it is how it got there that makes it a not-too-generic, borderline radical romance film. Therefore, I am apprehensive to fully categorize it just as a romantic comedy, but not quick to say it is a complete radical romance on the levels of “The Graduate” or a sex comedy like “10.”
In Clerks II, our protagonist, Dante Hicks, is a fry cook at a fast food restaurant, on his last day of work, who is engaged to Emma, a controlling woman who "probably wouldn't have given [Dante] the time of day back in high school."

Emma and Dante.

As can be seen, Emma is extremely excited to be getting married to the underachiever, Dante, albeit, after she has "already played the field for a decade." In the film we find out that Dante had been working in a convenience store for a decade before it burned down, and is now working at a fast food restaurant at the age of 33. His marriage to Emma is ensuring that he leave the state of New Jersey to work at a car wash (owned by Emma's father), to live in a house (bought by Emma's parents). None of it is in the name of love.
Dante's boss, Becky, all the while, is pregnant with Dante's child, choosing not to tell him this because she simply chooses not to be open with him about it, not wanting to jeopardize his engagement to Emma.

Despite what it says, Becky is not ALWAYS Open

Becoming pregnant after a one-night fling with Dante, Becky remains tight lipped about her pregnancy throughout the day (the entire film takes place in one day). If not for this fact, Becky would ultimately be an independent woman who is aware of both her sexuality and freedom as a woman. In fact, I would suggest that both Emma and Becky are "postfeminists." As Chris Barker's book, "Cultural Studies," describes it, postfeminists "are not necessarily oppressed by dint of being women. Not all men are oppressors and it is unhelpful to understand gender relations in terms of 'men vs. women.'" To articulate, both Emma and Becky are in high standings in a socio-economic status, "the recognition of male loss and vulnerability" (Dante finding out he's fathering a child and Emma kicking his ass for finding out he's fathering a child that isn't hers), and finally "the understanding that women can wield sexual power."
Although it may seem like Becky has become what Simone de Beauvoir calls "just a womb," Becky's character is not debilitated by becoming pregnant with a man who is about to get married to another woman. Also, in opposition of de Beauvoir's statement, "[woman] cannot think of herself without a man." Becky does not tell Dante that she is pregnant until Dante confesses his love for her. This flips the tables again for what Barker has in his book which states "men are less inclined to verbalize emotions." Here, it is Dante who is confessing his love to Becky, while Becky never gave any inclination about her feelings, she describes her part in the affair as someone who just "fucks ugly, indecisive losers in the kitchen," but with a smile, of course.
Another subject the film takes into matter is that of sex and marriage. In the first thirty minutes of the film, Becky and Dante have a conversation about marriage that is more incline to the quote of Foucault. "I think marriage goes against our primal nature," "To be loved?", "[No], To fuck as much as possible." While Dante takes the role of 19th century conservatives who thought that sex and marriage "constitute[d] a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative," (despite not being too conservative himself), Becky's part in this dialogue goes from a "fact" Foucault had when he said, "this power [over marriageless sex] had neither the form of law, nor the effects of the taboo. On the contrary; it acted by multiplication of singular sexuality. It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration." From this radical look at romance, the movie slips back into the more conventional by the end ensuring the romantic comedy ending.
As the plot comes to a climax, Emma discovers the affair between Dante and Becky during a sex donkey show at the fast food restaurant where they work, which was a gift to Dante by his best friend Randall.

A Donkey show for a going away party. Why not?

Emma accuses Becky of being a whore, kicks Dante in the balls and slams a cake she had baked for him in his face (maybe as a symbol that she won't bake like an idealized woman... and she won't get cheated on and stand for it either).
What leads this movie into the conventional is that ultimately, Becky decides to keep the baby and Dante, in the most unromantic of ways, proposes to her through the drive thru window, making it a radical proposal to a less radical trope.
With my arguments for and against "radical romance" and conventional romantic comedies, I cannot help to think that this movie would have been considered a radical romance had it ended as part one did with both women leaving Dante. McDonald wrote that a radical romance is "[self-reflexive] as a modern and more realistic form of romantic comedy in contrast to earlier [film] texts," which it Clerks II certainly is, but with all it's unorthodox plot points and characterizations, it just ends falling for a happy ending–which truthfully isn't always a bad choice.

Work Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage Publication,
2008.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1870.
McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London:
Wallflower, 2007. Pg. 9; 67

What I Contributed to Sula?

“Sula” really leant itself to coming up with many discussion topics. Finding how to have eight people work together, bounce off ideas, and get everyone in class to participate was a difficult, but not impossible. At the end, the group worked well together because we all contributed.
As to what I contributed to the group was topics at hand when we had no idea where our direction of discussion was headed. In the brain-storming process, I gave ideas (that were and were not ultimately used). Some ideas that were not used were the ideas of xenophobia, especially with the Sula and Shadrack characters whom the town distanced themselves from for varying reasons. I also made sure we steered the course with keeping with “Radical Romance,” which the novel made simple with its topics, themes and issues.
Ultimately, we chose binaries. I suggested “The Bottom/Valley” binary and the one that I researched, which was “Traditional/Non-traditional Gender roles” in the book. I picked out four passages from the book and did the questions for the gender portion of our discussion as well.
In one of our get-togethers I also brought up potential theories we could use, such as Derrida’s differance, and DeBouvoir’s quote “a woman is a womb,” which I did not discuss in class. Another theory I mentioned was Saussure’s “Sign,” but it became too convoluted to use.