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Diana and Beyond
White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture
By Raka Shome UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09668-6
CHAPTER 1
White Femininity in the Nation, the Nation in White Femininity
All around the world a strange thing happened. It got bigger everyday. It stretched beyond the wildest imaginings of even the most devoted followers of celebrities. Diana who was flesh and blood, the English woman who died in the tunnel in Paris had already become a myth and more than that, a symbol of things that are good.
—Keith Morrison, Dateline NBC, September 14, 1997
[A] decade after her death, Diana remains an inescapable presence in British life: mostly but not always benign: a restless and seductive ghost. It's time to peer into the many corners she still haunts.
—Time Magazine, "How Diana Transformed Britain" (August 16, 2007)
In 1997 when Princess Diana died I, like the rest of the world, was fascinated by what was happening. I was struck, in particular, by the emotions and sense of familiarity being expressed by the people—British and non-British—toward a white upper-class heterosexual British woman they did not know. I was intrigued by how a media narrative of a white heterosexual upper-class British woman was able to secure so many affective attachments of love and desire from people—white and not white, Western and not Western. I thought to myself then, here was a thoroughly British (and particularly English) woman who, through multiple mediations, was being hypernationalized and transnationalized, and with no seeming contradictions rupturing this double movement. What script of white femininity was being so successfully spun and mediated such that this highly British woman became a simultaneous signifier of a national popular and a global popular? What ideologies of white femininity did this script tap into and stabilize such that this woman soon became an idealized signifier of a modern woman of the millennium? Why would a similar idealization not have occurred of a nonwhite woman, an immigrant woman, or a non-Western woman? Even though 15 years and more have passed since the death of Diana, that moment of her death, which unleashed a media phenomenon unprecedented in history, was an important cultural and political moment. It was a moment in which we saw the hypermediated construction of a national myth organized around the body of a white upper-class heterosexual woman whose every aspect was being linked to "the people," both in the United Kingdom and beyond, and who came to signify a new (white) postcolonial British identity—at once cosmopolitan and national. Thus, when Diana died and a frenzied mediation followed, I excitedly waited for some for some academic book to emerge that would zero in on this aspect: the mediated relationship between white femininity and nation that the Diana phenomenon made visible. As academics started producing essays and edited collections about the Diana phenomenon, what struck me is that the whiteness of the phenomenon and, specifically, the white femininity angle was hardly being theorized or analyzed. Yet, it was so visible, so in our face (at least if you were nonwhite).
Available research on Diana has focused attention on her death as a performance of various aspects of the public sphere (Ang et al, 1997; Kear & Steinberg, 1999; Merck, 1998; McGuigan, 2001; Richards, Wilson, & Woodhead, 1999; Taylor, 2000; T. Walter, 1999). Scholars have addressed the Diana phenomenon from various perspectives—as a ritual of mourning, as a sign of an emerging feminine public sphere, as a site for the production of an emotional national sphere, as an example of a global "structure of feeling," as a location through which race was negotiated, and as a narrative of humanitarianism through which a neoliberal regime of governmentality was staged (Rajagopal, 1999). All of these are indeed important lenses through which to comprehend the Diana phenomenon. While these works have provided significant insights into this cultural phenomenon—and some have specifically also focused on its gender politics (for example, Campbell, 1999; Braidiotti, 1997)—there is very little work to date that has discussed explicitly how this entire national spectacle, which continues to be revisited even today, was enabled by a spectacularization of white femininity. Although Richard Dyer (1997), prior to Diana's death, had discussed her image—in a section of his influential book White—as an example of idealized whiteness, his work—given its emphasis—was not focused on issues of nation and national identity. Overall, work linking white femininity to national identity in a comprehensive manner is still limited. This book hopes to offer a contextually situated analysis of the numerous facets of white femininity that the Diana phenomenon mobilized and stabilized in the production of a (new) national narrative of Britishness in the 1990s and beyond. Additionally, this book links the representations of Diana's white femininity to images of several other privileged white women in popular culture at the turn of the millennium in order to call attention to a larger neoliberal formation of citizenship in North Atlantic nations (especially the United Kingdom and the United States) that was being expressed through particular images of privileged white women. Thus, while Diana's image remains my point of entry into, and exit out of, such discussions, throughout this book, I touch on a constellation of images of privileged white women in order to illustrate a larger formation of white femininity through which many neoliberal logics of national identity and citizenly belonging were being rewritten in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. My hope is that this project will offer useful insights for comprehending larger neoliberal logics of "selfhood" in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that were not only gendered, but also enacted through bodies of numerous privileged (and primarily heterosexually identified, upper-/middle-class, and able bodied) white women in North Atlantic nations.
Although there are works on the Diana phenomenon that have focused on the issue of race, these works have not moved this focus to the level of theorizing what the phenomenon revealed about the intersections between white femininity and the nation. For instance, Paul Gilroy (1997), Mica Nava (1999), Yasmin Brown (2001), and Emily Lomax (1999) offer useful and interesting discussions of the problematics of race that surfaced in the Diana event in 1997. Gilroy harshly, and in my view correctly, remained skeptical of linking the Diana phenomenon to the promise of a more ethnic Britain. Nava and Brown, on the other hand, saw the multicultural face of Britain represented through Diana's death as a positive sign of a changing England. Lomax remained more critical and saw the representation of multiculturalism occurring through the Diana phenomenon as a ploy of what she called "ethnic marketing" (1999, p. 74). And Nava, more recently, in her book Visceral Cosmopolitanism (2007), has addressed the representational politics of the Diana and Dodi romance in order to argue that it indicated a healthy cosmopolitanism that offered possibilities for reimagining Britain through multicultural logics. I respectfully disagree with this argument (but address this disagreement in a later chapter). Overall, in focusing solely on how national and global ethnicity were represented through the Diana media phenomenon, these works do not explicitly analyze or theorize the complex functioning of white femininity in this national performance.
With the Diana phenomenon, the relative absence of a focus on white femininity is especially to be commented upon. The sheer range and volume of images available about this white woman (including the many tropes of white femininity through which she has been represented) supersedes media representations of most other white women in history. While the full complexity of this unprecedented event cannot be captured in one book, it is the case that there are numerous complexities regarding the operations of white femininity expressed in this phenomenon that are of value to cultural theorists interested in understanding how the white female body remains a site for the performance of a national (re)vision. Given all this, I felt that the Diana phenomenon needed to be revisited as a case study in order to better understand the relationship between nation and white femininity. Such an examination, while certainly contextual—given that whiteness functions in different ways in different times—nonetheless would provide larger glimpses into the circuits of power through which white femininity and national identity articulate each other in contemporary culture (something that has not been theorized as much even today and especially when contrasted with the numerous studies done on white masculinity and the nation).
Indeed, the Diana case offers an example par excellance through which to comprehend how representations of iconic white women signify shifts in a national common sense. Few white women in history have had such an archive of images organized around them through which shifts in a nation's modernity has been imagined. And very few white women in history have risen to a level where they symbolized not just a national popular but also a global popular. And furthermore, very few white women in our mediated times have simultaneously signified so many universalized narratives of white femininity: angel, good mother, global savior, icon of beauty, and a goddess. Diana Taylor (2003) notes that Diana's physical existence was "redundant"; she existed always as an image, a representation that was more real than her corporeality and "that continues to defy the limits of space and time" (p. 154). Indeed, Diana's image simply refuses to disappear. In the first few months of 2011, we saw it vehemently assert itself with the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Following that, we have seen almost every act and every fashion style of Kate Middleton being compared to those of Diana. And, more recently, the birth of Kate and William's baby, William and Kate's "hands on" no-fuss parenting style, the new 2013 biopic of Diana where she is played by Naomi Watts, and the 2013 resurrection of the investigation of Diana's death following new claims of conspiracy continue to prove to us that Diana does not perish.
Diana's fashion designer Victor Edelstein once commented on the universal quality that the image of Diana has acquired.
There are certain women in the world who have that [universal appeal].... it's hard to put your finger on it ... its beauty, its kindness, its vulnerability ... I think in a way there's a very human need to have one's goddesses since the beginning of time, people have needed that.... Humanity needs it somehow. Doesn't happen with men. They are not gods in the same way. It's always women.
Edelstein's explanation is inadequate. When he states that "certain" women have "that," what is unremarked is that in world history, it is only white women who have risen to the level of a mythology, and it is only white women around whom narratives of universal love and desire tend to be scripted. The question is: Why? What enables that? What genealogies, stories, myths, and desires have already been solidified and given meaning in Western (and due to imperialism even in non-Western) cultures through the body of the white woman that they enable white womanhood to acquire a status of universal goodness, beauty, caring, and desire? As a national signifier of white femininity, Diana is also one of the few white women in contemporary times whose body has simultaneously traveled from the national to the global (and not always in this order or through a neat linearity)—although now the likes of Angelina Jolie are also signifying such movements (which I discuss in later chapters). Although I am using the terms national and global separately here, I do not suggest that they exist in a binary relation to each other. Rather, they constitute a network of interconnections in that the relations of the global are always shored up by, and situated in, competing national logics just as national logics are simultaneously informed by larger global relations. The global and the national are thus not neat separate objects or domains. They constantly inform each other through shifting transnational circuits of power that may inform what a national landscape might look like at a particular moment just as shifting transnational relations of power that may inform the nation (or national identity) at a particular time also impact the kinds of global logics that may confront us in that time (and beyond).
The signification of Diana in the 1990s was one in which we saw the British nation simultaneously assert itself as highly national yet also global. One of the foci of this project is to invite a rethinking of contemporary white national femininity through a lens of the geopolitical and global. How do representations, articulations, and actions of privileged white women of the Global North impact, inform, and intersect with larger geopolitics? How does the body of the privileged white woman—symbolically and materially—circulate through transnational relations of power and in the process maintain and reify (and sometimes unsettle) the hegemonic logics of those relations? One of the claims of this project is that white (national) femininity is always imbricated in larger global relations and logics. And some of the different ways in which white femininity remains situated in, and is productive (as well as also being an outcome) of, larger geopolitical and global currents is one important emphasis of this book. A gap in existing research on Diana (as well as on contemporary white women in general) is precisely a focus on the global relations of white (national) femininity. In this book, the global articulations of white national femininity and the ways in which transnational linkages constitute national identity formations through the body and image of the white woman (in Anglo-dominant contexts) will be dealt with extensively.
And Beyond
"And beyond" in the book's title is important. Beyond, along with Diana, frames this investigation of the relation between white femininity and national identity. Although Diana (the representation) is my central focus, I address numerous other white female icons of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—many of whom have not only articulated themselves through references to Diana (for example, Angelina Jolie, the Spice Girls) but who, along with the Diana, signal a larger millennial (and even postmillennial) neoliberal formation of white femininity in North Atlantic nations that need to be analyzed. For instance, in almost every chapter, while localizing the Diana phenomenon in the Blairite times of New Britain, I have broadened my discussion to address other white female celebrities who have been visible during these millennial times. Indeed, while the Diana phenomenon is contextually based, many of its logics about (white) national femininity provide a lens through which to read many other white women at the turn of the century. Thus, on the one hand, the book is about the Diana phenomenon. On the other, it calls attention to a broader reinvention of white womanhood in North Atlantic nations such as the United Kingdom and United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries through which we have been witnessing a complex neoliberal management of the (gendered) self and a containment of any Other that might threaten that self. Cherie Blair, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Christy Turlington, Sandra Bullock, Mia Farrow, Jemima Khan, Goldie Hawn, Donna Karan, Camilla Parker Bowles, the Spice Girls, Sarah Ferguson, Naomi Campbell, Oprah, Julia Roberts, Cindy McCain, and many others have small roles in this book. The black female icons in this list are included because, as will be discussed later, neoliberal logics of race today often articulate privileged black women through scripts of privileged white femininity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Diana and Beyond by Raka Shome. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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