Harryette Mullen
As a child “raised” in the nineties, I was able to witness, first-hand, the changes that reverberated into the Twenty-first Century. Here are some of the decade’s highlights and possible connections to Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge.
Arts & Culture
Posters from Disney Renaissance movie period (1989 – 1999)
As students of the arts, most of us mark points in our lives as they correspond to the release of books and movies. Because I was not a well-read child, most books made little impression on me, except the ones where horses were involved. So, when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released, I was only mildly interested. The Nineties were a time for the Disney Renaissance (beginning with The Little Mermaid, peaking at The Lion King, and ending with Tarzan) and the blockbusters such as Titanic, Schindler’s List, and Braveheart. (Most of the newer “classics” were generated during this time…of course, arguable.)
I was ten years old when my mother got Internet for the house. Before the Internet and the creation of user-friendly web browsers were made available for the American public, communication was simple…or nonexistent. This was also the decade of additional mass media such as email, pagers and cell phones. As I mentioned previously, the box office, independent film and major film companies were massively successful during this decade, due to the huge digital advances. Examples of these advances in specific effects can be seen in Jurassic Park.
the World Wide Web network
Social Change
Most of Mullen’s book criticizes the roles that women were placed and held in. She plays with the language of advertising and fashion and uses it against itself. However, it was not only men that held women in domesticity. While the nineties gave birth to the third-wave of feminine liberation, women employed many ways in which they kept themselves as sexual objects.
90s Fitness
Most notable, for me because fitness is my life, was the women’s fitness craze that developed. During the 80s, the aerobics wave hit the United States, but with the introduction of step aerobics and cycling, women were finding healthier ways to get in shape and look like Jane Fonda, who “breaks wet thigh high stepper” (106). Additionally, Mullen explores the difference between the health conscious and obsessed: “How anorexics treat themselves…over-counters prescribe themselves slighter…work[ing] off guilt” (89). Due to pressures placed on them by society and themselves, many women were developing eating disorders, severe body issues, addiction to appetite suppressing and energy enhancing drugs, such as cocaine and ephedra.
Not only was Mullen dissatisfied with the positions women were held in (whether as a result of society or individual pressures), but she was also confounded by the clear gap in which women of color were disregarded. Looking back on advertisements and other marketing and propaganda for this period, one may easily notice the lack of consideration for colored women.
War, Politics & Nature
During the nineties, the United States was involved in the Gulf (in the Persian Gulf) and Bosnian Wars as peacekeepers dispatched by the United Nations. My knowledge of the other reasons for which the US was deployed across the Atlantic is limited, but our government has been criticized heavily for adding justification to act upon our need for resources such as oil. Mullen cleverly notes, “Aren’t you glad you use petroleum? Don’t wait to be told you explode. You’re not fully here until you’re over there?” (69). Clearly, Mullen disguises her distrust in American international policy under a cloak to help distribute resources to the peoples who do not have the unlimited amount of resources Americans do.
George Bush, Sr. quote transformed into propaganda
AWESOME chronos post! I like how you make these connections back to Mullen–well done!