The Dish

by Dish Staff

Reviewing the new documentary, Regarding Susan Sontag, J. Bryan Lowder argues that it demonstrates how much of her swagger was a “carefully (and wisely, for a woman in a man’s trade) crafted façade, behind which lived and wrote a person who, despite the kind of career most writers can only dream about, felt as inadequate as the rest of us”:

That Sontag harbored such self-doubt can almost feel offensive—such as when a confidant reveals to the director that, after publishing the remarkable book On Photography, Sontag could only worry that it wasn’t as good as Walter Benjamin’s work.

But if you can get past that initial bristling response, Kates’ documentary offers fascinating and crucial insight into the psychology and motivations of one of the previous century’s greatest, and most mercurial, thinkers. Indeed, the film is so attentive to Sontag’s personal life, so committed to pushing past her decades-long PR campaign, that at moments it felt like a violation. But then, there’s something important about placing the kind of person who is more-than-willing to pronounce upon everyone and everything else under a similar scrutiny, something irresistible in regarding the critic, the figure whose job description is to regard the rest of the world.

And what does Kates see when she looks at Sontag? For one thing, she discovers a woman whose sexuality clearly informed her orientation to culture and who yet declined to directly come out as queer (some oblique textual gestures aside). Though the film is not exactly angry about this omission, it refuses to respect it, dedicating a considerable portion of the run-time to interviews with Sontag’s many female partners and lovers.

The Economist‘s Y.F. has more on Sontag’s sexuality:

While on a fellowship at Oxford in her early 20s, Sontag made her first trip to Paris, where in the 1950s so much of America’s avant garde seemed to find a natural home. Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, the writer’s first lover, accompanied her to France and recounts that the day before they were due to host an expat party she punched Sontag in a jealous rage. At the party, noticing Sontag’s bruise, Allen Ginsberg asked Zwerling, “Why’d you hit her, she’s younger and prettier than you.” Zwerling replied, “That’s why.” Sontag possessed a magnetism that even in their moments of greatest candour the film and the people in it—some of them deeply hurt by her—seem unable to withstand.

While much has been made of Sontag’s desire to remain private about her sexuality, she also wrote about it often and gave it an enshrined place in her life and intellectual development. Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer, wryly sums the situation in the film: “Does the author of ‘Notes on Camp’ have to come out?” The film takes us through her experiences as a very young undergraduate in Berkeley and San Francisco in the late 1940s, discovering the area’s underground queer culture and her own place within it. “Everything begins from now…I am reborn,” she writes, “I have been given permission to live…” Of its connection to her writing she observed, “My desire to write is connected to my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon to match the weapon that society has against me. I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer.”

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Freddie recently complained about his Facebook friends sharing a jokey item that conflated “think[ing] Olive Garden is fancy” with being a racist. Freddie’s post title, and seemingly straightforward request, is, “keep your classism out of my antiracism.”

I share his sentiment, but am pessimistic about the prospects of separating classism from not just antiracism, but social justice advocacy more generally. It’s not that sometimes, well-meaning progressive sorts slip up and accidentally insult one group while helping another. Rather, it’s that a certain kind of chic progressivism (or pseudo-progressivism) has fused with class snobbery. The chance to engage in a bit of class signaling is a feature, not a bug.

We see this in so many arenas, the most obvious being a certain kind of anti-commercialism that seems to be about defending those who can’t afford flashy-fancy items, but is in fact about those who prefer discreetly high-end items (or better yet, experiences) looking down on those whose tastes aren’t so impressive. See: Black Friday. See also: the “basic bitch,” and Noreen Malone’s spot-on explanation. The thing these days is to sneer at the schmancy in a way that seems at first to be about supporting the underdog, but that’s in fact the opposite. “Gourmet” is no longer indicative of high-end, nor are designer logos. So you’re not actually taking the pro-underdog position of you prefer Bushwick farm-to-table to special-occasion restaurants (that may well cost less). A gigantic engagement ring, a McMansion, an SUV, these are the things one can evoke as examples of how “we” i.e. Americans over-consume, but the person ostensibly including himself in this first-person-plural actually has plenty of money, status, and whichever stuff does interest him. It’s simply not done to insult the actual poor. So all the classist energies have gone towards insulting this nebulous (and unless otherwise specified, white) middle class, all the while claiming to be concerned about the environment, labor, etc. Yet those remain, for others, true concerns. The difficulty is sorting out which is which.

We also see this play out in social-media issues-of-the-day discussions. Specifically, the “privilege” conversation, which is often, as we have seen, a way for those with the right manners and terminology to exclude everyone else. Class signaling and social-justice advocacy have, on Twitter and most especially on Facebook, started to look, at times, almost indistinguishable.