#CiC – adverts and taxonomies

One of the most exciting events taking place at Cradled in Caricature is a workshop entitled 'Create Your Own 1920s Advert'. This is to be led be two postgraduates from the School of History – Michael Kliegl and Rebecca Farmer – and will explore aesthetic, psychology and advertising in order to understand how and why advertisements are so wedded to stereotypes of character. After dividing into groups participants will be asked to make their own advertisements, and (here is the really fun bit) will be offered big pens, jumbo stick notes and boards in order to make them.

Despite there being a clear intellectual rationale behind this workshop focusing on cigarette advertising in the 1920s (see abstract here), we felt that spreading posters containing the Marlboro man around campus may have attracted some negative attention from the powers that be at the University of Kent. We therefore had to find an alternative advertising campaign that was both well known internationally and clearly associated the product in question with making people a 'better' man/woman. After some thought, the only campaign we could think of was what you see below. As Terry Norton says on Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge “people will always want to look at lovely ladies”...

Cradled in Caricature will take place on Monday 20 June, at Woolf College, University of Kent, Canterbury.
The full programme can be found here.
For inquiries or further information please contact me at cradledincaricature@gmail.com or twitter.com/cincaricature.

#CiC - heroes and villains

A panel called 'Heroes and Villains' promises to offer a vibrant exploration of the topics central to the symposium. Jacob Bradsher will investigate what makes a science-fiction villain, whilst Caleb Turner will ask "how do we magnify bodily attributes through caricature and why as viewers do we need this exaggeration to better realise a sense of meaning or truth, i.e. superheroes?".

Their abstracts (below) inspired the above poster which now can be found dotted across UKC.

Jacob Bradsher
Villainous caricature in Science-fiction literature, film, and art is rooted firmly in the portrayal of villains in Victorian literature.  The limitations of the human mind to conceive of truly unique villainous characteristics is obvious when these comparisons are made.  Despite the radical design of some twentieth century visions of space-villains and alien overlords, the similarities between them and the likes of Dickensian illustrations are striking.    
    I would like to investigate what makes a ‘villain.’  That is, I am going to explore the facial features, actions, modes of speech, and overall physical appearance of what has been considered villainous in Victorian literature (such as the illustrations of Phiz and Cruikshank) and how that has carried over into genres like science fiction and the portrayal of its antagonists (Star Wars, Titan A.E. etc.).
    It’s mostly a compare/contrast project, but I don’t want to simply show the similarities and differences in illustrations and character designs.  Roughly, I would be using Dickensian canon as a starting point, then I would move to the golden age of American comic books, then onto modern movies and science fiction literature to explicate the relationship between the genres and periods. 
    Basically, I would like to explore the relationship between what stereotypical villainous characteristics are immediately available to us a humans and those that we project onto perceived villains of the future.  The caricatures of Dickensian villains are easily identifiable compared to some of those featured in Sci-Fi productions, but there are also striking similarities.

Caleb Turner
    How do we view bodily depictions through caricature? The cartoonist Lenn Redman has described caricature as: “An exaggerated likeness of a person made by emphasising all of the features that make the person different from everyone else. It is not the exaggeration of one’s worst features. This is a carry over from the days, 100 years and more ago, when humour was almost always based on cruelty and when the caricaturist’s intent was to insult his subject… Many people think that a caricature is necessarily a graphic distortion of a face. Not true! The essence of a caricature is exaggeration – not distortion. Exaggeration is the overemphasis of truth. Distortion is a complete denial of the truth.
    In this light, caricature should no longer be (traditionally) viewed as simply a form of mockery through grotesquery, but more so as magnifying the truth through over-emphasising the defining physical boundaries – constituting an individual body – to their absolute limits. One type of body in particular that utilises this process to great effect is the superhero figure, being an intensely graphically illustrated physicality.
    To exaggerate a super-body is to take one’s most distinguishing features, (i.e. pointed ears, thick eyebrows, thin chin, warped smile and sharp teeth for the face of ‘The Green Goblin’; huge, thick fists attached to tree-trunk muscular arms for the hands of ‘The Incredible Hulk’) and streamline them to depict just how ‘different from everyone else’ they are. To caricaturise these individuals is to then ‘magnify’ the limits of truth associated with them even further (i.e. a display of ‘invulnerability’ in the sheer size of Superman’s solid chest, or ‘intelligence’ with Brainiac’s brain bulging outwards from the top of his head).
    What does this overemphasis of truth (rather than distortion) achieve in conveying meaning to us through the process of caricature? The superhero body is itself an expression of deliberately exaggerated characteristics, intended to evoke from only a marginal threshold of interpretation, consequently having a specific series of connotations attached to it. These constructed figures portray specific ideas, but they are designed to be among the most recognisable depictions of these ideas: they are presented as being an absolute epitome or incarnation of such concepts.
    How, then, is this ‘magnification’ of super-bodily attributes useful as a process for understanding and why as viewers do we need it to better realise a sense of meaning or truth?

Cradled in Caricature will take place on Monday 20 June, at Woolf College, University of Kent, Canterbury.
The full programme can be found here.
For inquiries or further information please contact me at cradledincaricature@gmail.com or twitter.com/cincaricature.

#CiC - what makes masculinity?

With Cradled in Caricature less than a month away, the drip feed of promotion is now beginning.
Next week postgraduate students at the University of Kent will find in their email inbox a copy of our programme. The team are very proud of the contributions we've managed to collect together, coming as they do from across the postgraduate community at UKC. We hope the community will respond with the same enthusiasm we have.
Part two of the promotion drive will see a collection of posters appear around campus highlighting the themes we intend to explore during the day. These are designed to be big, bold and provocative, but also to make serious points whilst provided discursive links with the contributions of specific speakers.

This poster plays on the themes Stelios Christodoulou, a PhD candidate in Film Studies at UKC, will explore in his paper '“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man: no time to talk”: 70s Masculinities in Saturday Night Fever (1977)'. His abstract reads thus:

If there is single image that encapsulates the 70s model of masculinity in popular culture, this is arguably John Travolta on the disco floor, in his white three-piece suit and black body shirt, right hand pointing upwards. Travolta’s performance as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977) elevated him to immediate stardom and now stands for all polyester fakery and excess tastelessness that allegedly was the 70s. What popular memory has obscured, however, is that Tony Manero’s masculinity is by no means an accurate reflection of the 70s, but a construct, an amalgam of often contradictory masculine styles and behaviours.
This paper explores the construction of Tony Manero’s masculinity, aiming to explain its cultural function and popularity, rather than to expose stereotypes. It also uses Saturday Night Fever as a historical case study of masculine identities in the late 70s. Underpinning the film are a number of historically specific discourses, including the association between disco and homosexuality, the male liberation movement, the style of the gay clone, Travolta’s star persona, and the revival of white ethnicity.
These discourses manifest in the film’s memorable grooming scene, which serves as the paper’s main textual example. The paper considers existing interpretations of this scene and attempts new interpretations based on literature on the representation of masculinity, including Richard Dyer’s discussion of the male pin-up. The scene, however, proves resistant to a theoretically consistent ‘reading’. Rather, it reveals that Tony Manero’s masculinity collapses together disparate signifiers of 70s liberated and homosexual masculinities with a nostalgic understanding of a unitary model of aggressively heterosexual machismo. The paper ends with the proposal that Tony’s identity as an Italian-American working class man renders his implausible masculine identity both appealing and believable.

Cradled in Caricature will take place on Monday 20 June, at Woolf College, University of Kent, Canterbury. For inquiries or further information please contact me at cradledincaricature@gmail.com or twitter.com/cincaricature.