A conversation with Rebecca Wanzo about pop culture, comics, race and gender, the arc of narrative, reading for pleasure, social activism, etc.
Q: You teach classes on literature, popular culture, feminist theory and social activism. You have a Ph.D. in English and certificates in Women’s Studies and African American Studies. You are weaving together many strands. Scholar, teacher, and activist are some of the titles that emerge. How would you describe your interests?
I do have a number of interests, but in terms of activist work, I haven’t been able to do as much pre-tenure as I would have wanted to do. I was much more active in relationship to anti-sexual violence and anti-domestic violence work prior to taking a job. I did everything from going to the hospital to lend support in the typical rape crisis case, to being a house mother in the DV [domestic violence] shelter, to teaching community education classes. Almost anything that needed to be done in a place, I had a job doing it at some point. I don’t know if my work can speak to some people’s activist interests or not, or if my teaching can in fact help my students think about the work that they do, but I would like to think that that occurs.
Q: Would you talk about your appetite for popular culture, your reading and viewing habits, what forms of popular entertainment you enjoy most and find most useful for your research?
I have an inexhaustible appetite for narrative. So, there are lots of things that I enjoy, but I don’t necessarily write about them, and I’m not particularly interested in writing about them. A lot of narratives that I write about are narratives that make me very unhappy, that make me angry. So that’s not what I do for pleasure. I think there is certainly a distinction between different kinds of reading pleasures. Sometimes when people go to graduate school, they lose the appetite for reading for pleasure. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ll come across, for example, a romance reader on a blog writing about the book that won the Pulitzer or the National Book Award; the blogger will say, “I love romance it’s so much more entertaining. That’s the sort of thing that should be winning awards.” I’m very sympathetic to that desire for respect for one’s pleasures, but sometimes people don’t recognize that different genres fill different desires and different needs.
There’s a kind of either/or way of thinking around a variety of issues that we have in this country that we see seeping into issues of consumption, where people feel like they have to rationalize and hold things up as the best as opposed to something that just gives them pleasure—they don’t have to feel guilty for feeling pleasure about something or taking time for themselves.
That’s a long way of saying that there are lots of things that I enjoy and it depends on many things—what I’m in the mood for largely—and there are many things that are interesting and useful to my research right now. Comics are important to my research but only specific kinds of comics. So, it really varies.
Q: You’re saying you don’t have guilty pleasure over your reading choices, you’ll read whatever you feel like?
I don’t believe in that phrase. At the heart of saying that something is a guilty pleasure is saying that you’re reading something or watching something that is bad for you. A lot of guilty pleasures have been attached to women. Soap operas, romance novels, fashion magazines... you can make very clear arguments about fashion magazines making women feel bad about themselves from what they’re looking at. Because I study popular culture, I’m a deep believer in the kinds of ideological work done by popular culture, and I think we need to address it. People can be taught how to read things and to take what they want from some things and discard the rest. But that’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t some subconscious things that are going on all the time.
What’s so interesting about popular culture is how there are varied acts of transformation that reflect how readers change, how producers change; you see that in genres like the soap opera. I just read an article discussing a character on One Life to Live who was marrying her female campaign manager to help swing the gay vote, and only in soap operas would they imagine that this is something that would win an election. I was amused by that; it made me want to tune in and see what they were doing on this show.
I’m intrigued by how texts change in relationship to time, and popular culture is where you see that immediately. Texts address desires in various ways and are often not very transparent, and that’s why it’s really interesting to look at them and try and figure out what they’re doing.
Q: What are the overall aims or emphases of your research?
I’m interested in theories of affect. Affect is a bit of a moving target in scholarship. Many people say they are working on affect, but they mean many different things. When you see a book in cultural studies where someone is working on affect, as opposed to say, philosophy and psychology, which have really traditional definitions, you’re looking at people who are interested in a relationship between emotion and politics. And I am interested in a relationship between emotion and politics, particularly in relationship to race and gender. All of my work is interested in how people tell stories about their emotions or other people’s emotions, in relationship to race and gender, or identity in general, and what that has to do with what it means to be U.S. citizens, too.
Q: Was there a moment in your youth or educational training when you knew the direction you wanted to take? Or was it a gradual kind of discovery?
I went into college as an elementary education major. My first semester I was talking to my English professor, and I said, “You know, you seem to have a really good job, and I want your job.” He was very sweet about it—David Mann at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. And he said, “Well, we should just really make sure that you get my job.” His field is in no way related to mine, but when he retired, he sent me a very sweet letter and said he tried to hold on until I finished with graduate school. He was really a lovely person and one of the extraordinary mentors I had as an undergrad, which was really what allowed me to proceed in this career. Because I don’t think I had a sense of what it meant to train to be a college professor.
My mom had been to college but didn’t quite finish her bachelor’s—she’s finishing it right now—so going to grad school hadn’t really occurred to me, growing up in public schools and going to a good public school for college. When I finally went to grad school I was just surrounded by people who had entirely different intellectual trajectories, and I was frantic about what I was going to do to catch up. But once I realized that you could spend a lot of time sitting around researching and talking about ideas and reading books, that seemed like the dream life to me. When I first started college, I quickly said, “That’s the job that I want.” Now it took me a while to figure out how to get there. I knew I was going to get an English Ph.D., but I kept adding majors. The field was not always clear; I was always an interdisciplinary person. I had a quadruple major as an undergraduate—English, history, black world studies, and American studies, and I had a minor in French.
Q: What are the origins of your interest in comic books—and the superhero?
Well, I’m like most people who do work in comics; I did not grow up reading them. I read lots of other things, lots of genre fiction. I didn’t start reading comics until graduate school. I hit a point when I just needed to do a different kind of reading, and I did not have much time for novels.
I started by reading Neil Gaimen’s Sandman, which was a really popular comic of the nineties. And unlike real comic readers, I’m one of those people who actually tends to read them when they’ve been completed, in trade paperback, because I like to see the narrative complete. I like arcs. Then there’s one I had read about a lot, Truth: Red, White & Black, a miniseries about a black Captain America, and I collected that as it was coming out and gradually started doing research and reading more about comics. So my interest is not just in superhero comics, I’m interested in comic studies as a field more broadly.
My new project is not really about superhero comics but about comic art specifically featuring African Americans in the United States—editorial cartoons as well as superhero comics, the graphic novel, and funnies. I’m interested how citizenship is depicted in all these kinds of texts.
Q: In some of your writing, you explore the salvation myth in popular culture. I wondered if you studied theology at all, or whether or not you grew up in a Christian church.
I didn’t. I had a more religious moment as an undergrad when I thought about going to divinity school. I’m interested in religion. It’s hard to be a student of U.S. culture and not be interested in religion and how it functions in this country. It’s incredibly important culturally. My undergraduate thesis was actually on womanist theology, an articulation that largely came out of black liberation theology. They use a lot of African American women’s literature to talk about how black women have this different sort of hermeneutic when they read the Bible.
That was compelling to me; so I’ve continued to be interested in religion. I didn’t grow up in a very religious household although members of my family, not my immediate family, but my mother’s brother and some other relatives are fundamentalist Christians, so I’m familiar with the tradition. And that’s given me a sense of respect for why people have fundamentalist religious positions; I’m more of a failed Buddhist myself. I’m not a particularly good Buddhist, but if I lean toward any sort of spiritual tradition any more that would be it.
Q: Could you talk a little about your newly published book—The Suffering Will Not Be Televised—and how you came to write it?
I looked at sentimentality in various African American women’s texts. I wanted to think about African American women as producers of sentimentality and not only actors of it. In literature, sentimentality in the nineteenth century in the United States was always circulated quite widely. It was certainly used for political tracts and in public spaces in all sorts of ways. I wanted to think about sentimental discourse in contemporary culture and certain kinds of conventions that you have to use to tell stories about pain to make people hear them, and how you can be left out of public acknowledgment or erased or ignored if you don’t obey the rules, or for whatever reason your identity doesn’t really match what is validated. African American women are a case study of the book. The book is not just about saying, Well, black women have it bad; people ignore their suffering—that is not my point. I’m really interested in when black women’s stories are paid attention to. There are conventions that you can see with a variety of kinds of groups that try to make claims about their suffering, which can include conservatives, to children or advocates for children, to the disabled. People often have to make use of one or more of these conventions if they want various institutions to hear them.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about the meaning of the word sentimentality in relation to your work?
I spent a lot of time actually just trying to trace the history of it. There’s a popular definition of sentimentality. Justice Potter said of obscenity, “You sort of know it when you see it.” And people say, “That’s sentimental,” or, “This escapes the sentimental.” You generally understand what it means even though people don’t articulate it. And generally, it means an excess of emotion. Unearned emotion is often a phrase that’s used. It’s attached to unreal emotion, emotion that’s designed just to provoke tears without some substance behind them. In literary studies there’s a more rigorous definition, but it’s not that far from popular articulations of it. It still has many of those aspects. But there’s also an idea that in the United States sentimentality as a tradition is concerned with suffering of the oppressed, and it’s an attempt to tell stories about suffering that can move people to feel differently about the oppressed group.
In terms of the longer history, it comes with its relationship to sensibility, and enlightenment philosophy, as a kind of ethos that’s important in relationship to compassion. What’s important to understand about sentimentality is that it’s a particular kind of intellectual tradition, but it also has a popular meaning that’s often not unpacked. Part of what I try to do in that book is trace the history early on and unpack the differences or similarities between the popular and the scholarly understandings of the term.
—Alice Evans interviewed Rebecca Wanzo in October 2009.