Sixties male texts commodified women yet produced proto-feminist representations

Evidence

Wolfe understands that the greatest damage done by the thoroughly pervasive commodification Las Vegas represents is the commodification of women. The women in this essay are commodified either as sex—the ”gold-lame odalisques” owned by powerful older men—or as ”old babes at the slot machines,” mechanistically reliable producers of Mob profit (they ”crank away the whole time”). The former recur in the essay as ludicrously commodified show girls, as deeply damaged prostitutes, and, most troublingly, as ”little high-school buds … wearing buttocks decolletage step-ins” (11), ogled, surveilled, and lusted after by the Wolfean narrator himself as sexual predator. … Despite Wolfe’s avid narrative participation in most of this sexual commodification and (as we will see) pathologization of women, he manages to produce a set of gender representations that have very little distance to go to become feminist arguments. These gender representations are similar, in their extreme alienation from, and reification of, the feminine, to those in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where women are at once objects of prey and sexual commodification and also De Kooningesque monsters of violent, devouring sexuality. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 276

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is ‘very little distance to go to become feminist arguments’ actually sustainable, or does participation in commodification foreclose it?
• XREF: connects to: Vegas-era machismo defeated the androgynous gender-utopian sixties male ideal — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 341; A narrative intended as masculine can be overtaken by its female characters — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 687; Black Power rhetoric in the 60s rejected chivalry and idolized brutality toward women (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• A narrative intended as masculine can be overtaken by its female characters #qualifies (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 687
• Black Power rhetoric in the 60s rejected chivalry and idolized brutality toward women #exemplifies (0.80)
• Men’s perspective passes as neutral truth while women’s is read as gendered #corroborates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 53
• Postmodern theory inherited sixties process aesthetics stripped of their revolutionary grit #corroborates (0.78) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 646
• The matriarchy myth built white-male and Black-male solidarity on shared sexism #exemplifies (0.75) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 231