Blog Post #4: Happy "Ho"lloween!

I couldn’t help but feel these readings were particularly relevant this week as I received notification after notification on Facebook of my girl friends changing their profile pictures to images of themselves and friends decked out in their Halloween costumes. As best said in Mean Girls, Halloween is, after all,  “the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it” (note: of course, I recognize this as a loaded comment in itself, with the voiceover of a female referring to other women as “sluts,” a statement Amy Dobson would certainly draw attention to). And at least from my personal observations, Halloween is easily the most social media-driven holiday, with celebrities and “commoners” alike sharing their costumes for the world to see on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Watching these photos pop up on my newsfeed after reading Amy Dobson’s “The Grotesque Body in Young Women’s Self Presentation on MySpace,” I was definitely able to see first-hand some of the images she describes of the classical versus grotesque presentations of women on social media sites. As I briefly touched upon above, Dobson’s piece looks at how the MySpace profile pictures of Australian women aged 18-25 go against the “hetero-sexy” or “traditionally feminine” norm (Dobson, 5). Though some of the slang she took from the women’s profile pages was unfamiliar to me, I thought it was so interesting and a definite testament to the globalization powers of the Internet that this study of Australian women was just as relevant here in America despite the certain differences in culture.

While the hetero-sexy and traditionally feminine depictions of static, submissive women reflect back to a “classical” sensibility, today’s women on social media call more to a “grotesque” depiction of the female object (Dobson, 7). However, despite the negative connotation of “grotesque,” calling a woman’s image a “grotesque” representation is not necessarily insulting—for women to choose to represent themselves in “unfeminine” or even “laddish” ways shows a subversion of gender stereotypes and may actually be empowering to the woman (Dobson, 7).

Looking back at those Halloween pictures on my Facebook, I could see how the behavior performed by many of my friends may be deemed “laddish” in its open depiction of women partying or doing “goofy” poses with their mouths opens open and tongues out, or even closely hugging a platonic female friend, lips pressed to her cheek (Dobson, 6). What really struck me was not as much their body language in these photos but the juxtaposition of what the women were wearing in relation to how they were posing. Despite their “laddish” poses, many of the young women’s costumes still subscribed to the traditional notions of what is hetero-sexy and/or feminine. Costumes ranged from the hyper-feminine princesses and fairies to the other extreme of traditional femininity, the more “porn star” hyper-sexualized female depiction of “sexy” nurses, French maids, or fill-in-the-blank profession.

In fact, if you simply Google the phrase “popular female Halloween costumes” or “top Halloween costumes for women,” the first sets of results that come up are costume stores boasting “sexy adult” costumes. Interestingly enough, on many of these sites, the women modeling the costumes are posed in a manner similar to that of the women Dobson described from Facebook—they are in over exaggerated  poses of seduction, with their hips jutted out and lips pursed.

If I was to communicate with Dobson, I would be very interested to learn her view of women’s social media depictions of Halloween, as though the poses these women are making may subvert gender stereotypes, their attire certainly subscribes to be judged by hetero-sexy standards. I know it may be a once-a-year occurrence, but I think it is definitely an interesting phenomenon to study.