Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Week 7--Post 4: I'll never look at another bikini the same...or will I?
That's just it--the brilliance of it--as a heterosexual male, I cannot help but look at a woman in a bikini without having pretty much the exact same reaction every time. So the marginalization continues... Teresia K. Teaiwa's essay forces us to consider our very paradigm in the West, and I hate to admit it, for the bikini's sake, but she's spot on. It does not cease to amaze me how much the Two World Wars of the early 20th century have come to influence how we live 60 plus years later--right down to the bathing suits we see/wear on the beach! I recommend watching President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation on YouTube where he talks about the so-called Military Industrial Complex. I never thought I should be including the bikini in that complex. Teaiwa's piece blew my mind!
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Sam -
ReplyDeleteGood connections to Eisenhower's admonitions about the military-industrial complex - and I agree, the bikini seems an all too clever guise to mask the violence that the Bikinians and their homeland were forced to, and still are, enduring. The masking of this past is reminiscent of Webber's portrait of the Tahitian Princess Poedua, which depicted a smiling, alluring woman in a natural setting, when in fact she was held captive aboard Cook's ship when Webber made the portrait. Both the portrait and the bikini serve as masking agents, ensuring the consuming public of the valor of their respective missions, both performed under the guise of scientific study, but both ultimately bent on furthering the hegemony of Western power.
- Trey