Kristi “The Body” Noem

Kristi Noem, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, has had so much plastic surgery and wears such heavy makeup that she no longer even looks like the same person as the Kristi Noem who first entered the House of Representatives fifteen years ago. She gets a lot of attacks and mockery for this, especially from the political left. I think there is a distinctly misogynistic tone to a lot of these attacks and a lot of this mockery, as is the case with other women in Trump’s orbit like Melania Trump and Karoline Leavitt. Yet the kind of hyperfemininity that people are reacting to when they launch sexist broadsides against the women of Trumpworld is off-putting for legitimate reasons. There is something Dorian Grayish about “Mar-a-Lago face,” in the sense that it is an active decision to physically, visually represent the outward condition of the soul, only unlike Dorian Gray these people have to wear the portrait over and within their actual faces at all times.

In general I think our culture is ripe for a serious accounting of “the body” and how it relates to what’s being done to women in the cultural reactionary lurch that’s underway. I’m not the right person to talk about most of those subjects (or sub-subjects), for a lot of reasons, but an interest in having that out is something that I’ve noticed recently. I’m going to say a few words about it because I wish I was qualified to, as readers familiar with my past writing about what conventionally gets called “gender identity” will know.

I have noticed this sudden, highly gendered preoccupation with “the body” with Noem et al and also in much recent art that’s spoken to me. Florence and the Machine’s recent Everybody Scream album, the book and movie Hamnet, and the movie The Testament of Ann Lee can all be understood as a kind of “child death art” (or miscarriage art, in Everybody Scream’s case) that most of us have not seen as much of until recent months. This is a subject matter that inevitably has to look at the body within the family, and generational transmission within the body, in a way that has been shied away from by most.

I absolutely loved Everybody Scream and The Testament of Ann Lee, and Hamnet moved me as well when I went to see it. Hamnet strikes me, anecdotally, as more deeply moving (or shaking) to people who are mothers, though; it resonated with my own mother on a more profound and intimate level than it did with me. I found the relationships between the children in the movie more touching, and more difficult to watch, than anything in the predominant focus on their parents. Too, Ann Lee, even more than Hamnet, is clearly not for everyone. There’s a lot to dislike about the Shakers even if one likes weird artsy musicals and stories about women screaming in the woods. I have a good friend who avowedly has very little sympathy for them and doesn’t even find them a particularly interesting historical subject because of the intense anti-sex sentiment. Indeed, the case study on Hancock Shaker Village in Interpreting Religion at Museums and Historic Sites presents their celibacy as a much more significant barrier to many people’s understanding of them than is the case with, say, Catholic or Buddhist nuns. Pretty clearly this has to do with the fact that, as a Restorationist Protestant movement, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (which does still exist) does not have a “vocational” model of celibacy and instead insists on it as a model of life for everyone. Yet there are many other people whom this doesn’t seem to bother very much, even though Ann Lee probably would have loudly judged and excoriated these people’s own lifestyles and behaviors. I’m not sure how to account for this.

(Personally, as an Ann Lee superfan, I think the movie is at its weakest when it challenges the audience’s presumed worldview too little rather than too much; each time it addresses the political and historical situation surrounding the early Shakers, it tells the viewer how to feel about it. Worse, it tells the viewer to feel a frankly conventional “patriotic-ish but anti-Trump white liberal from the Northeast” way, which won’t make most people going to see this movie feel at all convicted or challenged. The intermittent attempts to address race relations are one case of this, but not the only one. The historical figure most sanitized by the movie’s version of events isn’t any of the Shakers but the early Methodist luminary George Whitefield.)

So Hamnet is capable of underwhelming people and The Testament of Ann Lee is capable of revolting them. This is probably a good thing given that these are movies that attempt such serious engagement with subjects that are so visceral for so many. What about Everybody Scream? I don’t know anyone who dislikes the album, but presumably they’re out there somewhere across the fruited plain or in the wild blue yonder of Al Gore’s internet. The main reasons that I can think of not to like Florence Welch in general have to do, directly or indirectly, with the ways in which she engages or doesn’t engage politically. Everybody Scream makes a number of powerful internal statements that I think are clearly feminist in nature, but there is little externalization beyond the fact that she expects (correctly) that other people will enjoy and feel “seen by” her music. She went to some art-and-money gathering with some kind of venture capital ghoul; she released a (presumably unintentionally but still quite obviously) racist music video during the Ceremonials album cycle early in her career. She isn’t yelling at everyone in a two-mile radius that all sex is morally irrecuperable, but she’s doing some things, and failing to say some things, that it’s reasonable to take issue with.

None of these works is for everyone and “child death art” probably is not for everyone either, but I’m glad it exists. Kristi Noem might be glad it existed too if she ever went to see or sat down and listened to any of it, which she probably never will. She’s inhabited and created and presented a version of herself meant almost entirely to appeal visually to the straight men with the worst taste in America (which is to say, some of the people with the worst taste anywhere in the world). That isn’t a version of oneself that cares much about what other women are going through, or what other people in general are going through, for that matter. Not in good faith, anyway.