criticizing other women's pleasures

Beyond the valley of the doilies: Salon’s Joy Press did an interview with Jessica Helfand, a design critic/graphic designer who teaches at Yale, about her book on scrapbooking. In the interview, Helfand says a lot of interesting things about gender, pleasure, and creativity, three things that are rarely recognized as being bound together. Helfand is a firm believer in a certain kind of elite standard—“It's at once horrifying and fascinating to witness the degree to which design is being discussed online by people whose concept of innovation is measured by novel ways to tie bows,” she wrote—but she also found herself more sympathetic to scrapbookers than she expected.

The interviewer describes scrapbooks as often “cheesy and sentimental and generic,” but also “hands-on design as practiced by regular people rather than artists -- an attempt to represent everyday experience through visual culture.” Why are professional writers always so shocked to find out that many, many people want to recognize the creative potentials in their own lives? Of course most of the results are bad; that’s just Sturgeon’s law. But we sing to our kids even though we’re not good at it (I know I’m not); being good isn’t the point.

Anyway, Helfand calls scrapbooks “the original open-source technology, a unique form of self-expression that celebrated visual sampling, culture mixing, and the appropriation and redistribution of existing media.” Apparently the Gutenberg parenthesis had some parenthetical interventions of its own.

I’m interested in scrapbooks because of the way they employ copying, or physical appropriation, in the service of self-production: scrapbookers define themselves by what they take from the rest of the world. As, in the end, we all do, but the scrapbook foregrounds the materiality and creativity of the project of self-construction from found objects.

Helfand discussed the pleasure that people—mainly women—find in scrapbooking, and her discomfort with the $2.6 billion industry that, she argues, talks down to them: “Why are women targeted in this treat-them-like-13-year-olds way? I went to one of these scrapbooking retreats, and it's all these women in their pajamas with snacks -- Hostess Twinkies everywhere! There's something about junk food being part of this. It's like, no husbands, I'm going to let myself go and look at pictures of my family and eat Twinkies.” She references a study called “Making Me Time,” “about the creative crisis of the stay-at-home mom who needs to feel she's doing something with her day. The physicality of putting pen to paper and grease pencil to word fetti is making them feel they're doing something.” I’m reminded of Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: one thing a romance-reading hobby does is give a busy woman an excuse to turn away from her family and spend some time on self-care. Should the fact that Harlequin profits from this disturb us? Or are some kinds of profit more acceptable than others?

The answer, at least for scrapbooking, might lie in how much the premade materials enable creativity and how much they constrain it. Helfand likes messy scrapbooks, not stereotyped ones. Though I should admit that this too is a design preference with a particular cultural and class background: she points out in the interview that many scrapbookers like premade stickers because they don’t trust their own handwriting and spelling; maybe the ultimate solution is to convince them that their writing is worthwhile anyway, but that’s going to be a hard sell—it really will make the scrapbooks harder to show other people. It’s hard to condemn someone who wants her scrapbook to be a better version of herself.

At the same time, there’s something of value lost in that we now seem to be performing ourselves even in the most intimate aspects of our lives. As Helfand says, “I have a theory that contemporary scrapbooking is a little bit of a reflection of reality TV. … People want to gussy themselves up. … So you take this scrapbooker, and she's thinking, I'm overweight and I don't want a picture of myself in the scrapbook, but I do want to show off my cute kids and pretty pink ribbons. It's this externalizing idea of, I want this to look good for everyone else so if I ever get famous my scrapbooks will show that I'm perfect. But the whole purpose [of scrapbooks originally] was to celebrate the everyday.” Being famous to fifteen people, as opposed to being friends with fifteen people, changes our relationships to them and to ourselves. Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination gets into this (as does Veronica Mars, in a different way).