Ad-Krac(auer) and Zero Gender

Alright, I wrote about the idea of Ad-Crack last time, the overpowering allure of beauty in advertisements, something we just can't seem to get enough of, but I forgot to tie it in with, yes, go ahead and pull a hair out, theory. I found myself distracted writing last week, what with the Virginia Tech tragedy (and the gendered nature of shooting rampages is, I hope to offend no one, of highly phallic imagery--an offshoot, no pun intended, of the mediations of "war porn" and, dare I say, "9/11 porn"--class, I'll just stop here and get on with it!) that I forgot to bring in Kracauer.
Siegfried Kracauer, German cultural theorist, had the idea of the "mass ornament'--a reference to the dancing Tiller Girls of the 20s and 30s, who, he claims "are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble female units whose movements are mathematical demonstrations"; the singular "ornament" consists of "thousands of bodies, sexless bodies." Bringing back the Ad-Crack, I keep thinking of images of beauty in ads as a current manifestation of Kracauer's "mass ornament," wherein a piece of a body on a billboard and another piece of a body spilling from a Panasonic flatscreen and another piece from a magazine Lancome full-page (shades of Mulvey's "one part of a fragmented body . . . gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon") add up to Madison Avenue's "mathematical demonstrations" of "indissoluble female units" (and what an appropriately monetary and anatomical term "unit" is here) for the sake of peddling beauty.
And "sexless bodies?" Well, they are Baudrillardian reproductions, copies of copies of copies--enough eye candy to make you want to start an underground fighting ring, what say you? When does a copied gender supersede original gender? When does sex disappear?
And this "ornament" is rapidly being pornographized. Bikinis on a near-subatomic level--seen the Niels Bohr Collection? Jeans low-slung enough to offset gravity.
Things've evolved--or devolved, depending. We're seeing a monument to pornography, a "mass pornament." I had to go there, y'know.
Can I seamlessly segue here into Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues?
Forget it.
I can't.
Anyway, the "Impressions of the Man" essay beat me to a lot of things I wanted to say. It didn't beat me to Fight Club analogies, though.
There's Fight Club and the analogy of factory jobs and "making" gender--"for Jess [materialization] is the product of labour" and "Jess does the 'work' of 'making' and 'remaking' identity" (108). Working in steel mills and paper mills and plastics factories and binderies, places of making things parallels Jess's attempts to "make" herself. (Ah, if only he-she'd worked in a soap-rendering plant, what a nice parallel to Fight Club, a story where gender is made--and, if not made, found, rediscovered, through the cleansing metaphor of soap. AHH!!--this might help my FINAL PAPER!)
Then there's Fight Club and Jess's typesetting job--"where Jess lived in a world where he/r identity existed outside of language and text, he/r work as a typesetter, setting type in relief and in the proper order for printing, provides for he/r entry into the symbolic order" and "s/he now works at night setting in relief the code that made printed language possible" and "Jess labours to manifest histories" (136). (Ah, remember Tyler Durden's ramshackle heart of the Paper Street Soap Company--a house on Paper Street--and consider the idea of Paper Street past the fact that a paper mill--perhaps not so different from the mill Jess Goldberg laboured--is found there--consider the name Paper Street--a region where genders, identities, can be written, rewritten, typeset, copied, circulated. Tabula rasa-rama! AHHH!!!--this, too, might help my FINAL PAPER!).
Zero Gender?
I'm halfway through Feinberg's book, just past where Jess has her breasts, her "absolute female signifiers," removed. S/he has a "flat chest," the 'visual signifier of maleness" in the "Impressions" essay (123). I don't know to what lengths s/he'll go to "pass," but if s/he doesn't add an "absolute male signifier" to the equation ("mathematical" Kracauer-ism?) by the book's finish, is Jess zero gender? If one absolute sign is removed without the opposing absolute sign there to resignify, where is s/he, as a gender. Zero gender? Post-gender?
Donna Haraway, where are you?
Zero gender--a repellent to Ad-Crack?
I don't know. Jess really likes her BVDs.