Miley Cyrus received a lot of press for
her now oft-termed "transgressive" performance at the 2013 Video Music
Awards. In the set, she danced suggestively, showed off her twerking “skills”,
mimed burying her face in a voluptuous black woman’s rear end, ground her rear
end into Robin Thicke’s crotch, and simulated sex with a foam finger. Quite the
spectacle. The public and private responses varied from feminists calling for
an end to "slut-shaming" they argued is employed by the conservatives
determined to police the sexuality of young women, to activists of color asking
folks to question Miley's appropriation of black culture in her recent shift as
public performer (I would say artist...but that seems to be a stretch). It
is the latter that I currently find of interest for this blog post, as it
relates to Chad Heap’s discussion on the seemingly antiquated excursion of
slumming. Rather than assume slumming no longer exists, perhaps an argument
needs to be made that one must no longer travel anywhere in order to use the
Other to justify the construction of your oppositional identity.
In his description of the appeal of the Negro Vogue craze phase of
urban slumming, Heap states, “For these [white] men and women, a slumming excursion
to Harlem or Bronzeville was ‘like taking a trip from their white world into
another mysterious dark world,’ a trip that offered numerous occasions to take
advantage of the supposed freedoms of black nightlife while simultaneously
reinforcing a sense of white superiority,” going on to assert, and this is of special
interest in relation to Miley Cyrus’ seeming wanton appropriation of urban
black cultural markers, “slumming created a space where middle-class whites
could normalize their own increasingly public sexual behavior by contrasting it
with the spectacle of cross-racial and black sexuality presented in local black
and tans.” (Heap 2009:191)
Rather than join in the chorus of responding to Miley’s VMA
performance, I chose to watch, for the first time, the video of the song “We Don’t
Stop” which was performed at the awards show. I was, to be honest, horrified.
The video begins with Miley symbolically cutting off an ankle monitor (linking
her to the perceived delinquency of blacks? I am not sure of most of the
choices made in the filming of this video…), shifting quickly into an image of
her placing a highly stylized gold “grill” into her mouth and “mean mugging”
for the camera. Really? Oh honey, just stop. From there it just goes downhill
as Miley and her seemingly diverse group of friends (although predominantly
white), party in a variety of settings. Multiple times Miley engages in various
forms of appropriating black culture, most notably twerking in a circle of all
black women while giving sung shout: “To my home girls here with the big butt/Shaking it like we at a strip club”.
In addition to these images of a white
female body acting in seemingly “black” ways, we also see Miley writhing,
dressed in all white, on an all white bed, in a varying assortment of sexually
explicit poses. Legs open, crotch exposed, back arched, aggressive/assertive
sexuality shamelessly on display. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing…but
reconsider the quote from Heap and how slumming enables elite whites to express
their blossoming sexuality as normative in contrast to the primitive,
threatening and perverted sexuality of black citizens and suddenly the bad
taste in my mouth makes sense. “We Can’t Stop” is a celebration of black
cultural appropriation and may even be read as a contemporary version of
slumming which no longer requires actually going to a specified geographic
location. This makes her final chorus oddly fitting: “And we can't stop/And we
won't stop/We run things, things don't run we/Don't take nothing from nobody.”
Well then Miss Miley, I’ll take this to mean you’re not interested
in having a conversation about your revival of slumming ideologies.... sigh.
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