Reinventing the Wheel: The Hostess Trope in the Twenty-First Century

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Notes

1. Hadaly 1 and Hadaly 2 are robotic gynoids created by Ichiro Kato in the mid to late 1990s. See Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), 264.

2. André Breton and Paul Éluard described Bellmer's first Doll as ‘the first and only Surrealist object with a universal, provocative power’ (Tate Modern, ‘Hans Bellmer, The Doll 1936/1965’, August 2004), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bellmer-the-doll-t01157/text-display-caption (accessed August 11, 2015). Bellmer recreated the Doll in a variety of forms.

3. I am using the gendered term ‘hostess’ rather than the more up-to-date ‘co-host’ because ‘co-host’ is a euphemism that obscures the power dynamics operating when a woman is professionally engaged to ‘share’ hosting duties.

4. Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 380.

5. Ibid., 195.

6. See, for example, Barbara Bolt, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (London: IB Tauris, 2004).

7. Simon O'Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation’, Angelaki 6, no. 3 (December 2001): 125.

8. Rebecca Schneider, ‘Remembering Feminist Remimesis: A Riddle in Three Parts’, TDR: The Drama Review 58, no. 2 (2014): 23.

9. O'Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect’, 128–9.

10. Schneider, ‘Remembering Feminist Remimesis’ 23.

11. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C. Levin (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 175–6.

12. For a different investigation of Barbie's embodiment—also partially through Baudrillard—see Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (London: IB Tauris, 2007).

13. For a description of this ‘unnerving ensemble’ and its installation, see Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 128.

14. At the time of writing, the work is not on display at either Tate London or Tate Liverpool.

15. Hans Bellmer, ‘Notes au sujet de la jointure à boule’ (‘Notes on the Subject of the Ball Joint’), Les Jeux de la poupée (Games of the Doll) (Paris: Edition Premières, Heinz Berggruen, 1949).

16. Guy Bennett, ‘Hans Bellmer “Notes on the Ball Joint”’, US Theater, Opera, and Performance (March 20, 2011), http://ustheater.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/hans-bellmer-notes-on-ball-joint.html (accessed August 11, 2015). This quotation describes exactly how the animation in Reinventing the Wheel was constructed.

17. Taylor, Hans Bellmer, 99.

18. Bennett, ‘Hans Bellmer’, unpaginated.

19. Taylor, Hans Bellmer, 73, 76.

20. Bellmer in Taylor, Hans Bellmer, 143.

21. Livia Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire: Perversion in Hans Bellmer and Oshii Mamoru’, Mechademia 5 (2010): 289.

22. Livia Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part III: The Artificial Woman and the Perverse Structure of Modernity’, Mechademia 7 (2012): 289.

23. On Bellmer, see also Wood, Edison's Eve, 152.

24. Taylor argues that the Surrealists’ fascination with mannequins and automata derived from mannequins’ ability to (passively) incite confusion between the animate and the inanimate, and to passively embody ‘beauty’. Taylor, Hans Bellmer, 100.

25. Bellmer in Bennett, ‘Hans Bellmer’, unpaginated. Reinventing the Wheel also takes the form of a game of experimental poetry.

26. Bellmer also dabbled in miniature scenography, making two tiny shadow-box ‘museums’ for Personal Museum (1938–1970). See Taylor, Hans Bellmer, 201–7, 232. Reinventing the Wheel takes place inside a miniature panorama.

27. Bellmer in Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire’, 290.

28. Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire’, 290.

29. Hans Bellmer, The Doll (La Poupée), trans. Martin Green (London: Atlas Press, 2005 [1963]), 127.

30. Taylor, Hans Bellmer, 76.

31. Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part III’, 291.

32. Bellmer in Bennett, ‘Hans Bellmer’, unpaginated.

33. See, for example, Toshiya Ueno, ‘The Shock Projected onto the Other: Notes on Japanimation and Techno-orientalism’, in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, ed. Bruce Grenville (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery and Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001), 234.

34. See http://lull.tv/video/actroidseries1 (accessed August 11, 2015).

35. See, for example, Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

36. Beverly J. Stoeltje, ‘Gender Representations in Performance: The Cowgirl and the Hostess’, Journal of Folklore Research 25, no. 3 (1988): 221, my emphasis. See pp. 220–21 on the ‘winners’ of the titles Miss _______ and Queen of the ________.

37. Ibid., 238.

38. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 20. According to de Lauretis (pp. 25–6), the exception to this inability is the ‘blind spot’ of the video camera. See also Lucy Lippard in Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America, ed. Jayne Wark (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 181.

39. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 [1977]).

40. Sarah K. Donovan, ‘Luce Irigaray (1932–)’, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005), http://www.iep.utm.edu/irigaray/ (accessed August 11, 2015).

41. Geraldine Harris in Radical Gestures, 126.

42. Lucy A. Suchman, Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 224.

43. Cf. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language (Bruissement de la langue) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 [1968]), 141–8.

44. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 124.

45. See, for example, Allison De Fren, ‘The Exquisite Corpse: Disarticulations of the Artificial Female’ (PhD diss. (critical studies), University of Southern California, 2008), http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=allison_de_fren, 273–4 (accessed August 11, 2015); De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender; Mary Ann Doane, Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991).

46. Annette Michelson in Catherine Vasseleu, ‘A is for Animatics (Automata, Androids and Animats)’, in Living with Cyberspace: Technology and Society in the Twenty First Century, ed. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts (London: Continuum, 2002), 91.

47. For instance, Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Tania Modleski, The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988); Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993).

48. Examples and ‘role models’ from Wheel of Fortune international include: Vanna White (USA), 32 years, 1982–present; Adriana Xenides (AUS), 18 years, 1981–99; Maren Gilzer (Germany), 10 years, 1988–98; Annie Pujol (France), 7 years, 1987–94.

49. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]), 93.

50. According to the Wheel of Fortune history wiki, White has touched the wheel, i.e. the locus of destiny, five times in her 32-year tenure. http://wheeloffortunehistory.wikia.com/wiki/Vanna_White (accessed August 11, 2015).

51. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, Screen 23, no. 3–4 (1982): 74–88; Doane, Femme Fatales, 25–6; Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986 [1929]); Lee Rodney in Radical Gestures, 159.

52. See Cecilia Ridgeway, Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

53. James Fitchett, ‘The Fantasies, Orders and Roles of Sadistic Consumption: Game Shows and the Service Encounter’, Consumption, Markets and Culture 7, no. 4 (2004): 291–2.

54. Fitchett, ‘Fantasies, Orders and Roles’, 286.

55. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 9.

56. Amber Musser, ‘Masochism: A Queer Subjectivity?’, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 11–12 (2005), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/musser.html (accessed August, 11 2015).

57. Ibid.

58. Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9, no. 4 (1984): 267–82.

59. Jérémie Valentin, ‘Gilles Deleuze's Political Posture’, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Sarah Lamble, in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 199–200.

60. Livia Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part II: Bellmer's Dolls and Oshii's Gynoids’, Mechademia 6 (2011): 164.

61. Schneider, ‘Remembering Feminist Remimesis’, 15.

62. Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 123.

63. Ibid., 124.

64. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

65. Chela Sandoval, ‘New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed’, in Cybersexualities, ed. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh University Press, 1999 [1995]), 249–50.

66. Foucault, Technologies, 18.