Table Of Content“It’s never been easier to consume popular culture or trickier to thoughtfully engage it without messing up: you have to like (or
condemn) all the right things and for all the right reasons. But those arguments around Beyoncé or the Oscars get so heated
because pop culture is where we affirm and, yes, perform, our public values. Anderson illustrates precisely why those political
stakes require us to envision a post-‘callout’ world where we can stay critically engaged in the discourse on movies and sports
and music—perhaps especially when it comes to the stuff we’re not supposed to like.”
—Gene Demby, host of NPR’s Code Switch
“Problematic is a necessary contribution to a crucial current debate—a sustained, thoughtful argument for engaging with the
compromised, the difficult, and, yes, the problematic in contemporary popular culture.”
—Angus Johnston, historian, professor at City University of New York, and advocate for student rights
“In a time when everyone is swinging sledgehammers, Dianna Anderson comes at our feminist discourse with a scalpel, taking
on some of the most bitterly polarized and polarizing figures of our time with nuance and care. Even if you think you physically
can’t bear to read another essay about Iggy Azalea or Girls, you need to read hers.”
—Sady Doyle, author of Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, Fear . . . and Why, and founder of Tiger
Beatdown
“In Problematic Dianna Anderson takes the reader back to feminist theory 101, walking the long-dedicated and newly recruited
among us alike through the often risky process of consuming popular culture with a critical eye. Along the way she teaches us
to hold on to the joy of those things that can, at times, fall short of perfection.”
—Katie Klabusich, writer, reproductive justice advocate, and host of Netroots Radio’s The Katie Speak Show
“This work is necessary right now, especially in this particular moment (a Trump presidency and in a #MeToo world). It is hard
to read Problematic and not come away concerned that a feminist critique of pop culture is both required in today’s society and
struggling under the weight of its own righteousness. Anderson doesn’t want feminists to stop being critical of the world around
them; she’s just asking that they be more thoughtful about how they do it. Problematic can serve as an example of how to do
exactly that.”
—Jessica Luther, author of Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape
Problematic
Problematic
How Toxic Callout Culture Is Destroying Feminism
Dianna E. Anderson
Potomac Books
An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
© 2018 by Dianna E. Anderson.
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © iStock/IntergalacticDesignStudio.
All rights reserved. Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Anderson, Dianna E., author.
Title: Problematic: how toxic callout culture is destroying feminism / Dianna E. Anderson.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017050551
ISBN 9781612349619 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 9781640120914 (epub)
ISBN 9781640120921 (mobi)
ISBN 9781640120938 (web)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-perception in women. | Image (Philosophy) | Feminism. | Popular culture.
Classification: LCC BF697.5.S43 A524 2018 | DDC 305.42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050551
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their
content.
To True and Veebs: the best kids I know. May you never stop learning and listening.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Lena Dunham Is Not a Pedophile: False Narratives and Scarlet Letters
2. Harry Styles Is (Probably) Not a Creep: What Makes You Beautiful and the Male Gaze
3. On My Money and Bitches Who Better Have It: How Modern Anticapitalists Fail to
Account for Racial Politics of Black Artists
4. Why Does This White Australian Sound like She’s from Atlanta?: On Cultural
Appropriation, White Supremacy, and Black Sexuality
5. Mother Monster and Q.U.E.E.N.: Context Challenging and Changing the Problematic
6. Friendly Fire: Why Our Perfectionist Lens Makes Us Harsher on Feminist Media
7. Actually, It’s about Ethics in Feminist Criticism: Where White Feminism and #GamerGate
Converge
8. Do You Even Lift, Bro? Toxic Masculinity, Sports Culture, and Feminist Ignorance of the
Problems
9. Dinos, Disasters, and Dives: A Feminist Defense of That High-Heeled Chase Scene in
Jurassic World
10. Selfie Game Strong: Kim Kardashian and de Beauvoir’s Thoughts on Beauty
11. Pinterest Perfect: How Our Home Lives Reflect an Unhealthy Obsession
12. “I Am Big Enough to Admit I Am Often Inspired by Myself”: Leslie Knope as the Paragon
of Feminist Joy
13. Teen Girls Are the Future and That Is a Good Thing: Our Perfectionism Actively Harms
Women
14. Never Say Never: Setting Your Own Borders and Understanding Your Boundaries
Last Notes
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without encouragement and support from a multitude
of people. To those who have stood by me, who have challenged me, who have changed me, I
offer my thanks.
To Tom, Natalie, and the team at UNL: you have made such a good home for this book, and
this South Dakotan couldn’t be prouder.
To Dan, Emily, Rina, Radhika, and Brad: hashtag squad. This book was birthed from many
of those late-night arguments as we walked home at 2:00 a.m. and the stories told on Saturday
morning brunches over English breakfast. Thank you.
To Dad: I know you don’t quite get a lot of what your feminist, liberal, Democrat daughter
does, but you’ve gladly supported me in more ways than I can count. Here’s to great homemade
salsa and many more years of me teaching you how to Google whether or not something on
Facebook is fake.
To my feminist friends and colleagues: here’s to being imperfectly great.
Introduction
In my senior year of college, I discovered Andrew Hudgins’s 1987 poem “Piss Christ.” I was
a theology and philosophy major and was obsessed with the idea of Jesus as a man. I wrote my
final paper for my theology coursework on whether or not “sin” was part of human nature and
what that meant for a Jesus who was at once fully human and fully God, according to Christian
theology. The meaning and power of God-become-flesh—and what it meant to be flesh—
entranced me.
Hudgins’s “Piss Christ” was inspired by artist Andres Serrano’s controversial art piece of
the same name. The photograph is of a plastic crucifix, complete with martyred Christ, floating
in an orangey-red fluid made of cow’s blood and Serrano’s own urine. Serrano approached the
piece as a Christian interested in the utter humanness of the Crucifixion. Christ bled, but he
also “shat and peed himself to death.”1 Hudgins’s poem reflected on this humanity, commenting
that “we have grown used to beauty without horror.”2
The piece was controversial in its day, and it was still such when I insisted to my theology
classmates that we worshipped a Jesus who pooped. It became a refrain of the year, whenever
I wanted to knock down someone I saw as being too high and mighty about their friendship
with Jesus: “Jesus pooped, too, y’all.” I delighted in the “Ugh, but we don’t have to talk about
it” response that I got. I convinced myself that I was doing better at this whole theology thing
because I had discovered an art piece from the 1980s.
Then again, it was pretty clear that my role at the college was pushing boundaries. When the
college was considering cutting its study abroad program, I rabble-roused and organized a
series of petitions and letters, mailing them directly to board members (whose names and
addresses we students were not supposed to have). I screened R-rated movies in the dorm
lounges, which was explicitly forbidden by our dorm rules. I was also the person who, when
the college decided to institute a new swearing rule, said quite loudly, “Well that’s bullshit.”
What I learned during that time was a Christianized version of knowing that art always has
something important to say to us as its audience, whether that art is a movie or a poem or a
photograph.
It’s no surprise, then, that I would bring this same attitude of paying careful attention,
challenging the norms, and refusing to be censored into a feminist activist career. Ever since
coming into my own in feminism, I have felt incredibly comfortable challenging and changing
the ways in which feminist discourse has parsed the meaning of “feminist art.” Just as I had
been in awe of Andres Serrano’s controversial and sacrilegious Piss Christ, I was determined
to understand and challenge the rubric for determining feminism now.
It took me some while before I became comfortable enough in feminism to trust my own
instincts about what was determined to be feminist. I allowed myself to be a student for a time,
learning the lingo, and following the drama. Most of all, I learned how to use the word
problematic in the same way I’d instructed people that Jesus shat in a hole in the ground: with
all the condescension I could muster. I’d swung from challenging theology and my native
Christianity to challenging feminism through righteous condemnation of anything that was not
perfectly feminist.
And I was embraced for it. The more Twitter threads I could do condemning the latest
“feminist” beauty campaign or the newly marketed “feminist” TV show, the more audience and
platform I gained. The more I could accuse my fellow feminists of failing in their jobs, the
better I felt about my own feminism.
But just as shouting about “Piss Christ” didn’t actually increase my theological credentials,
calling things problematic was lazy thinking that allowed me to focus on a single tree in the
midst of a conflagration.
Feminists everywhere have learned how to engage with popular culture on a critical level,
but a new cycle has developed that has made it very hard to engage in good faith. Some new
piece of art, movie, or fashion trend will come out and everyone will love it for a few days,
until that definitive piece of criticism makes us look at it in a different way. Suddenly it’s not
okay, it’s not right, and we can no longer enjoy that thing. And we secret away our defenses
and our ideas about things for fear of a feminist backlash, for fear of being the one who causes
controversy or, worse, is accused of being complicit in the homophobia, racism, sexism, or
ableism displayed by the original piece of work. Our affections, our predilections toward the
problematic things, our enjoyment of something in spite of our feminist politics often causes us
to behave in secretive ways around those things we enjoy and, on the other hand, to view both
ourselves and others as pariahs, as toppled from this inhuman pedestal of perfect feminism
once we screw up. The problematic must be acknowledged, must be atoned for, must be issued
in a cautionary genuflection lest we be seen as imperfect feminists.
We have made the perfect the enemy of the good.
But this is the pressure feminists are under every day—we can’t cover everything, but we
feel like we have to in order to understand and be part of the discourse. Admitting when we
don’t know enough or that we genuinely don’t want to participate is often interpreted as a
failure of feminism—what are we doing if we are not contributing in some meaningful way to
ongoing discussion? We must show ourselves as engaged and useful and interested in every
feminist topic and act as guides for other feminists in our engagement with the culture. We’re
constantly looking around us for signals
We’re signaling our feminist virtue with every tweet while binging on Criminal Minds and
Girls. We’re accepting of our own secret failures while acting out a life as a perfect feminist
by telling fans of “problematic thing x” that they’re wrong for liking something. We don’t pause
to examine why someone may be drawn to like that thing. We’re expecting the performance of
feminist values while forgetting our humanity in the process. We call out, clap back, pile on,
and win our battles, but we don’t pause to think about the wounds we’re inflicting or the ways
in which we’re contributing to a toxic culture of perfectionism.
This book aims to remedy this recent turn in feminist criticism. By applying and connecting
modern criticism to existing feminist theory, I hope to navigate you, the reader, through the
fraught world of cultural criticism. From One Direction to Nicki Minaj to Jessica Jones to
