Well, to unveil my official opinion about the Vogue cover that I know you’ve been waiting for with baited breathe is that I pretty much refuse to have an opinion about the Vogue cover. I’m not pretending that it doesn’t exist, I’m just thinking along the lines that if we, or I, feed into an idea like this that it just perpetuates a problem rather than finding any actual answers.
The issue of the cover raises a lot of questions though. And maybe they’re questions that need to be asked in a mainstream forum. Is it racist because we READ racism into it? Is that reading in and of itself inherently racist? Does it say more about us as people, as a conglomerate if we see there being this intertextuality between an image of a white woman and a black man to King Kong?
There has been a lot of focus on this cover, and a lot of it I can say is needless. But, when talking about representation in media, I thought about how when you flip through a Vogue, how many images of minorities do you see? I have a copy of the Vogue at my house and have looked through it, and there were some stunning photographs of Bundchen and James together. So why this cover? Why not this cover?
All in all, I don’t really have an answer, just a series of questions following questions. I think that a dialogue about representations of minorities in mainstream media definitely needs to be opened up and embraced, but I question the validity of this cover to be the catalyst for this. I fear that this is all going to be chalked up to a debate over what is politically correct; another means to gloss over the actual problem rather than facing issues head on. But we shall see.
2 comments:
I don't think racism is really the issue. As you hinted at in your previous post, it's James' body language and facial expression that's reminiscent of King Kong, not to mention the type of body he has. I suppose it helps that him and King Kong are the same colour, but that's just icing on the cake, isn't it? Point is, I think you'd make the same connection in your head if it was a big muscular white guy with the same stance and roaring, feral-like facial expression.
I'd say there's no doubt that this was the idea Vogue was going for - I mean, it's not like they just slap pictures on their covers all willy nilly. So the fact that we look at it and make racist/sexist connotations doesn't have any deep implications, because the image is so obviously trying to conjure up that association.
It's an eyebrow raiser for sure, and I'm not sure what Vogue was trying to say, if anything, aside from just generating buzz.
I think that the point made about reading into racism when observing such a text is one of importance. The connotation of racsim only exists in this case because the media permitted it to. Comparisons made to King Kong can be drawn, as a result of the media reading into the text and generating the idea. It just causes new controversy and reason to focus attention on those distributing the idea. In taking the time to examine the cover, one would notice that James' body language, facial expression and stance depicts a fierce competitor ready to hit the court. In reality, the same image of a white man would not cause such controversy.
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