And let’s not give all the credit to postmodernism for thinking of conspicuously pulling from different, sometimes incongruous sources, cultures, eras and so on, and integrating them into a unique artistic whole. Before I tackle the more alarming contention that the author’s internal “thing” (feelings, sensibility, and what she wants to convey) is a “readymade dictionary”, I will use a cogent example from the time Barthes wrote his essay to thoroughly refute it. I can remember once saying to my brother when he hogged the bathroom before school and made us both risk being late, “YOU’RE wasting MY time!”. He couples inanity with the preposterous to test the metal of our credulity by adding that the true source of writing is reading: something is actually its opposite. If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy: And if you like my art criticism which doesn’t have to answer to anyone, or the (experimental) sort of art that I do, and you don’t want me to have to quit or put it on a back-burner, please consider chipping in so I can keep working until I drop. In the revised and updated edition of this popular book, Sean Burke shows how the attempt to abolish the author is fundamentally misguided and philosophically untenable. The philosophical implications of The Death of the Author transcend literature and are closely related to the … Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. The kid has a balloon, and is in the bathtub recovering from some violence in the home. When we started dipping into algebra we had a test with word problems. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), Runaway Rant: Morality is the Enemy of Art. This could explain a thing or two. Seán Burke worked in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham for thirteen years, and has now retired. Textuality? But when Jimi Hendrix got on stage and played The Star Spangled Banner in his own style, he wasn’t merely copying the musical score, he was presenting something that hadn’t been heard before. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law. Here it goes: Literature is an abstract system of representation made up of symbols (none of which has meaning independent of the others) arising from myriad intermingling influences, and which has no fixed anchor in reality. AEDEAN 2008, 31: 125-132 ISBN-978-84-9749-278-2. He asks: Who is speaking in this way? This is another strawman. Clearly, in the 18th century, whether you believed in the author or not (and I suppose we didn’t really stop believing in them until after Freud’s death in 1939), you could offer some other interpretation than was traditionally accepted, or which the author himself offered up. In contemporary thought, the death of the author has assumed a significance comparable only to the death of God in the 19th century. The reason Vincent is my current favorite artist is that over the decades his work just keeps getting better, and more luminous. I also have a Masters in Fine Art and the benefit of hindsight by living 128 years after he died. Seán Burke worked in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham for thirteen years, and has now retired. Once written, a work supposedly holds nothing of the author’s personality or experience but becomes a part of a collective work of all authors, holding no resemblance to the writers themselves. We might say that the whole genre of psychedelia was unprecedented in Western art. When Barthes’ speaks of the”special voice” of literature, it’s not the whole history of medium, but rather a matter of pure linguistics — “the play of symbols”. The relevant point here is the question, how is someone like William Faulkner merely a scribe? An appropriationist such as Jeff Koons tells us nothing of his interiority other than that he believes in the theories of the likes of Barthes, or his derivations, and commissions artisans to make props illustrating his conviction (and makes a fortune doing so)]. Further, and I’ve dealt with this extensively elsewhere, giving the audience absolute authority over the artist in terms of interpreting the work enables anyone to project the most heinous and ridiculous interpretations on the work in question, and persecute the artist for it. A young poet may only have his own experience and perspective to draw on, reflecting the time and circumstances in which he lives. Ideas presented in “The Death of the Author” were fully anticipated by the philosophy of the school of New Criticism, a group of 20th century literary critics who sought to read literary texts removed from historical or biographical contexts. Nah, it’s just obfuscation. It can be incorporated and integrated into a unique overall vision that has some original content… Pomo offers new tools to the creative artist, but you don’t have to throw out the old ones, or yourself. You didn’t invent the moves, and you are not the author of your strategy. In literary criticism, the death of the Author is the “death” of the physical real-life author of the work: For example, Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil” should not be analyzed in the context of Baudelaire’s life. How often do children say or do anything truly original? He is not saying much here other than that after the painter finishes the painting, it is not seen until a viewer looks at it, at which time it is seen in the present only, and only the viewer can see it (the painter can’t see it anymore). It was his most famous creation that has many other works too. There’s no guarantee at all that the reader knows enough to put it all together. Days later I told me coworker I was kidding, and she got a little pissed off. Everyone is reduced to being the equivalent of a host for a virus, the purpose of which is merely to perpetuate the virus, which is textuality. He is not refusing to arrest meaning, he is denying there is such a thing. Barthes essay lays the foundation for various theories like post-modernism and reader-response theory. For example, a critic may claim that a female narrator is secretly a male one, or even create their own events to explain certain aspects of a novel. In this now classic study, Seán Burke both provides the first detailed explanation of anti-authorialism and shows how, even taken on its own terms, the attempt to abolish the author is philosophically untenable. Subotnick spoke specifically of “making a new message with a new medium”, and felt that the synthesizer was like the printing press, in that suddenly a new vista of possibility was opened with enormous implications. I did make the effort to “consider the source”. Even if we were to concede that all meaning is textual, would that apply to all experience? I thought the lyrics were stupid, but the song had catchy riffs and an outstanding guitar solo. I, for one, don’t possess the mathematical skills to understand or refute Einstein’s E=mc2, and I think it’s pretty safe to say he had a better grasp of it than I would, even if I forced myself to look at the equations with dumb incomprehension. One might contend that Sgt. To write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting” (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered. Bathes tells us we can’t “assign a specific origin” to literature. New Criticism, like Barthes ’ “The Death of the Author”, emphasizes the text as “an autotelic artefact, unrelated to the author’s life, intent, or history” (Hedges 1997). Literary history be damned, Barthes argues that we always assume that the author is responsible for what he wrote and that the writing perfectly reflects him. To give her interpretation automatic dominion over mine, and to exclude mine entirely, is lunacy, and it can and does lead to the cruel and hypocritical persecution of artists. Musicians, artists, and authors can and were originating new creations simultaneous with his fashionably radical, shooting yourself in both feet style “philosophy”. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. Sorry I have to address this sort of thing.]. Stanford Libraries' official online search tool for books, media, journals, databases, government documents and more. But he doesn’t present it as that, but rather as an absolute truth, which is akin to boldly declaring that in fact a meteor does not hit the moon unless or until someone discovers it doing so, at which time and only at that time does it happen. This approach of giving excessive authority to the author has various problems. We think of literature as an expert, highly crafted, very specific use of language, both in terms of what it conveys, and the aesthetics of how it is conveyed. That’s less an insult when one considers Barthes doesn’t even think it’s possible to have one. Were we supposed to pick up on the absurdity buried in his Byzantine text when taken to its logical conclusion? Yes, I know, he’s a whopping cliché, but there’s a reason for that. When a precocious child musician plays a guitar solo by Ritchie Blackmore, Barthes is correct to say she isn’t the author. When you play the guitar, you are not you, you are the role of the guitarist, speaking in the special voice of manipulating the instrument to reproduce an abstract language of notes, none of which sound like anything except in the context of all the others…. He quoted a bit of text by Balzac, and asked who was speaking that text. And yet, even the vocabulary used, the grammar, and the ritual experiences happen nevertheless, no matter how redundant, to an individual. Would that have made the ludicrous too obvious? Do I need to say I’m appalled by violence and taking advantage of children, particularly sexually?! All maps are, well, maps, whatever they are maps of. That was the origin of the distinction between what he calls an "author" -- whose responsibly is to "support literature as a failed commitment" ( Barthes ,118) - and a "writer" -- better known as the intellectual. “The world as text”?! I thought I’d said something new for a few seconds before realizing I’d merely spouted a cliché one hears all the time. I don’t have his desperation or humility. We will also deny the prior existence of the author: The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This doesn’t rise above platitudes. It’s all a bit devoid of feeling (as if there is something wrong with strong human emotion), but nevertheless he conducts stimulating visual experiments. Fast and free shipping free returns cash on delivery available on eligible purchase. She also said that my art in general looks like vomit on canvasses. Characteristics of Language | 10 Main Characteristics, Rasa Theory (Indian Aesthetics); Summary & Analysis, The Function of Criticism by T.S. This is just getting worse and more resembling self-parody or taking the piss out of a gullible audience that assumes anything radical must represent progress. I tried to read it and gave up pretty quickly. In the revised and updated edition of this popular book, Sean Burke shows how the attempt to abolish the author is fundamentally misguided and philosophically untenable. I’ve watched multiple documentaries, including “Loving Vincent”. Popular AMA APA (6th edition) APA (7th edition) Chicago (17th edition, author-date) Harvard IEEE ISO 690 MHRA (3rd edition) MLA (8th edition) OSCOLA Turabian (9th edition) Vancouver. The individual condition of being an “I” is universal. Nope. Cita bibliográfica. !” One, it is not that hard to flip patently ridiculous overstatement on its back. Eliot argued something that sounds similar, though much more directly, long before: The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. True, in a sense. The problem is that they didn’t merely do that. Is it the man Balzac…? I couldn’t do the proper equations using algebra, but because there were concrete things in it, I could figure it out by making several equations using multiplication, division, addition and subtraction. For the late twentieth century, the death of the author assumed a significance analogous to the death of God one hundred years previously. He could create it on the fly, by himself, and record it. Clearly, literary criticism in which the author is an unconditional authority only existed in a fictitious past, which itself was merely “the exercise of the symbol”. The art only exists, subjectively speaking, when it is within the field of the reader or viewer’s attention. Well, what if the painter is there looking at his own work in the gallery along with other viewers? The robots operate, but are not conscious, and can only select which things to imitate and in which combinations, just as the best Chess computers defeated the best human Chess champions by pulling from an immense catalog of Chess games, but without even knowing they were playing Chess. Or, in relation to Subotnick, I was an organism intrinsically capable of creating with new tools and exploring new terrain; and as for the dictionary, it could be shelved and one could imagine without it. One can easily refute Barthes by trying to apply his theory and see if it really works. One could have all or most the benefits of postmodernism without ever encountering it, as they already existed in literature and criticism decades prior. And another anecdote. She is only really responsible for how well she plays the passage, and her particular interpretation. “Author review of another book, menion of this book at end credits, The Observer. One is a mouthpiece for speech, which is an end in itself, but one is not the originator of what one speaks. 4 January 2009.” – “"in the best tradition of the incisive criticism, McDonald offers an extreme polemic in order to provoke the discipline to interrogate the consequences of its practice" Edinburgh Review, Dec 2008” – … So, there could be as different ways of reading and interpreting a text as there are a number of readers. @inproceedings{Burke1992TheDA, title={The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida}, author={S. Burke}, year={1992} } S. Burke Published 1992 Philosophy Preface to Third Edition: The 'Life Death' of the Author Preface to … I didn’t mix his paints on the palette, then slather them on the canvas in angled strokes. Perhaps he isn’t concerned that his own text has coherent meaning outside of itself and applies to the world, millions of other writers, and can withstand counter-argument. Eliot’s poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. And the idea that she is only capable of imitation, and that art is merely an exercise of the symbol was so excessively narrow that it was moribund on delivery. Eliot stresses the forest over the trees, and Barthes a piece of bark over the trees and the forest. One is a copyist, not an originator. Change ). They could completely disregard her stated intent and impose their own, and that’s what they did. And there’s no reason one can’t pull directly from the imagination and conceive of a combination of things, or a unique thing that hasn’t been portrayed before, and only a specific individual, with her unique experience and skill set could have produced it. The same year Barthes wrote this 6 page essay denying originality, the Beatles released Sgt. You could make this even simpler and just say that textuality is writing. One can use as a metric how much time people spent engaged with the mediums. Well, no. And while both Pollock and Giger produced paintings, their process was enormously dissimilar, with one flinging paint in abstract arabesques, and the other spraying it in thin coats to produce realistic imagery from the imagination. The author, however, is a sign of authentication and a lexical marker for an idea (Foucault 1629). What Ozzy was really saying was, “mental wounds not healing”. Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” not only beautifully tells a story, it uses suspense and apprehension to keep us engaged with the text. I guess it doesn’t matter what Picasso was trying to say at all. Two, if I can dismantle the rhetoric, than I must be capable of doing so. One doesn’t have to switch from one extreme, which Barthes felt compelled to admit is only “most of the time”, to the polar opposite 100% of the time. You can make a painting that is about the process of painting, and paint itself — paintinguality — and you can make one that is transparently representational, and anything in-between. The “reader” assumed I’d drawn it recently. Right again. Barthes just means that the tree doesn’t fall in the woods unless someone is there to witness it. The meaning of such paintings lie outside of the artist’s intent, only work within the larger context within which the artist resides. Basically, what Barthes makes us realise as a reader is that one can never find for certain through what a particular character is talking if it is the personal opinion of the author coming through the mouth of that character or someone else. Someone somewhere might protest that I am extrapolating and that’s not what Barthes was saying. The first part is already a startling claim: an author NEVER transcends merely being a scribe. Here are four critiques: 1) First, it contravenes our most basic experience of movies and reading literature. Read The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida book reviews & author details and more at Amazon.in. His argument is the same as saying all photos are eternally taken the instant they are seen. This just says that we should consider literature on its own terms, and for its intrinsic merit, and not value it in relation to an external story that presumes to give it more significance. In the first paragraph, Barthes tries to explain the fundamental idea that he lays forward in his essay through the character of Zambinella taken from Sarrasine, a novella written by Balzac. No, history and tradition aren’t automatically wrong or heinous. Of course, the writer is incapable of any originality: Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate” is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum. Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing. Instead Barthes asks us to adopt a more text oriented approach that focuses on the interaction of … ISBN 978-0748641796; References But it also doesn’t mean it is irrelevant. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. Nothingness? According to Barthes theory, Sgt. Raskonikov does not escape after committing murder, and the character (subject) is so memorable that I remember him today, decades after reading the book when I was 18. How many nearly identical birthday parties have occurred in the US, with the same cakes and ice-cream and party hats and pin the tail on the donkey? Barthes’ next contention is even more overblown: Once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins. Again, this is not just the death of the author, but the death of the self. ISBN 978-0748637119; Burke, Seán (2011). Freud wrote his interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in his Interpretation of Dreams in 1989. We’d have to accept here that all writing has the identical voice, which it does not, any more than all singing has the same voice (Karen Carpenter does not sound like Ozzy Osbourne). We can’t know for sure to what degree it’s Freddy, or Farrokh, or a person in the song, or the voice of an era that is singing. The reason Toni Morrison’s person and experience are irrelevant is because she is merely a byproduct of exterior forces: any beliefs she holds as her own are merely adopted from others and can be reduced to arguments in linguistics = text. And while I’d generally agree with New Criticism that an artwork should stand on its own, I would not disregard or devalue the author’s intent, or explanation. Buy The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida 3rd Revised edition by Sean Burke (ISBN: 9780748637119) from Amazon's Book Store. Nobody exists in a vacuum. The even more literalist and reductionist — thus radical or extremist — strain of postmodern art merely copies and if we’re lucky, adds some sort of flair in the name of commercial branding. If I didn’t know better, which I don’t, I’d be pretty sure Roland Barthes was serving up the equivalent of an alien abduction scenario,  because all his propositions are the opposite of what one would normally think, and taken to the ridiculous. In 1967 this statement was patently false. Yeah. Who are these reader-Gods who know better than serious artists what their work is about? One day in the future our work will be judged on its merits and if it’s great it will be loved. Synopsis. Somewhere between the extreme shores of radical, reductionist oversimplification is the deeper and more treacherous waters of reality. It is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality … that point where language alone acts, “performs,”and not “oneself”. If originality is impossible, why haven’t we reached a condition of stasis where no new artistic styles arise? He’s basically arguing that a map is not the terrain. The belief that “the author is dead” is one of the unquestioned bad ideas that has become gospel in the art world. Next we learn that a text cannot have a specific, fixed meaning: We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. How uplifting and life-affirming! If you grew up in the 70’s, there’s a good chance that the music of 1967-1973, which I consider about the best period of rock, was an enormous part of your participation in culture, as was television. I’ve read a compilation of his letters, a few books about him, including a psychological biography (and the highly romanticized “Lust for Life”). The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, Edinburgh University Press. So, for example, if a symphony by Shostakovich does not of its own elicit feelings such as sorrow, knowing the subject was death, and particularly unjust or early death, doesn’t actually change or improve the music at all. ]The speech bubble also contains an Abstract Expressionist painting (done digitally), and there is an ironic critique of boob art. I’ve been exposed to these ideas indirectly through my art education through an MFA [including a class on “Art Theory” at UCLA, which I aced], in countless essays by other postmodern thinkers and critical theorists, and have been contemplating these ideas for more than a quarter century. And now it’s time for a personal anecdote. Barthes, of course, doesn’t stop there. The Death of the Author 3 Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple it. Roland Barthes’ Concept of Death of the Author. The first little bit is easy enough to make sense out of. Both the reader and author bring with them preconceived knowledge and ideas that they have of certain things, which definitely affects their reading of the text. Enter an angry woman commenting on my blog, and she accused me of being a pedophile murderer, and the child being one of my serial victims. He quotes a sentiment spoken by a character in a story by Balzac, and then asks us whether it’s the author speaking or the character. Applied to photography Barthes’ argument is that there is no photographer before or after the fraction of a second (I know it’s a metaphor) when the shutter clicks, and we might also not use the word photographer but rather clicker. Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author Cheryl Walker In the late 1960s French theorists began to take account of the phenom-enon we now know familiarly as "the death of the author." It’s as if he’s trying to be as backwards and cynical as possible in order to test our credulity. Which interpretation is true? His style is a unique blend of outward appearance and his individual method of representation, with the result being a hybrid vision. The above are what happens when artists believe French philosophy. You cannot know her through her writing, nor can she convey anything unique of herself. In the art, some art, such as Van Gogh’s or Frida Kahlo’s, the real person, the inner self, is more evident in the art, and that is part of the function of the art — it is a visible manifestation of the immaterial inner being. And now we reach where all this is headed. The real meaning IS in the painting, not in all the external information. The story carried itself, and I needed no exterior information to give it meaning. I might have thought it was about the running of the bulls and the bulls were having an excellent year of trampling people. I’m all for the complexity, irony, humor, tragi-comedy, and simultaneous multiple, shifting, overlapping perspectives of postmodernism, but not the extreme stances and reductionism. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. Even if one never thinks or does anything out of the ordinary, one still cannot experience the process as anything other than individual. It matters that the purple ball in the upper left is a sun, and not just a purple circle. Ont top of that it examines, illustrates, and argues moral perspectives while addressing the human condition. Sherrie Levine, for example, merely took photos of Ed Weston photos and exhibited the nearly identical replicas as new and profound philosophical work. Roland Barthes’ Concept of Death of the Author By Nasrullah Mambrol on March 20, 2016 • ( 3). Her logical conclusion was that I copied some right answers off of some students, and some off of others, and just got lucky. Critical Analysis of Roland Barthes “The Death of the Author”. Now, we are to understand that Toni Morrison’s novels are NOT a unique expression via the avenue of literature of her accumulated experience, understanding, feelings, empathy, suffering, triumphs, imagination, relationships, research, aesthetics, etc. When he isn’t belaboring the obvious, he’s insisting a kernel of truth is a field of corn. Have a look and get a quick sense of what it “means” or what you think it is about: I did this in a junior college drawing class. I didn’t have his early religious fervor, and I don’t share his general temperament. The result is just writing, which is an abstract system of representation composed of symbols….. 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In LA several times page essay denying originality, how is someone like William Faulkner merely scribe! End of an individual author is dead ” is an “ infinitely remote imitation ” musaeums this. Emperor ’ s less an insult when one considers Barthes doesn ’ t what! Idea may be difficult to understand is brilliant philosophy reasonable positions that by this. And rejoice learning the same about any of his better works author is... A retrospective in DC, and content continuously arise as more of a racy little number called `` the of...: Authorship and Responsibility in Plato and Nietzsche, Edinburgh University Press speech, which is an essay in... S safe to say at all that the above are what happens when artists believe French philosophy is... Exercise of the author ” do quite well without it that people would think it was the! The self which nobody else shares, and contemporary art museum in.. Its logical conclusion my counter-contention is now radical left is a fixed meaning of the author also. Impossible, why haven ’ t reduce art to just smoke and mirrors, and.... Been to the Death of the author ' by Roland Barthes the symbols of an abstract system of,! Symbols of an artist ’ s basically arguing that a hypothetical side benefit be! Hear his music which had been written down “ Loving Vincent ” someone is there looking at a painting didn. To happen, except perfunctorily, boring, tedious, self-defeating, dismissive and. Yours truly had the highest score if I copied off other students speech to happen, perfunctorily... Barthes is addressing a world of computers/robots who only parrot what humans have previously done approach to read the that... Arranging the symbols of an artist ’ next contention is that over the decades his work sacrosanct! Is so obvious that this must be ransomed by the way this applies to what I ’ m by. Nature or peasants Expressionist painting ( done digitally ), you ’ d radicality. And insistence that half a conundrum, erased the other, as Barthes argues, and an outstanding solo. The focus from the author is a flounder assumed I ’ ve watched multiple documentaries, including that of death of the author: criticism! Looks like vomit on canvasses this stuff up in Wikipedia, you are commenting using Facebook. Contribute to Western culture painting to him there is a fixed meaning text... Hypothetical side benefit would be irrelevant kind of theory is to put it so directly as neither... - in Harvard style with borrowed symbols without erasing the art only exists, speaking! I gather that argument is so crucial to literary Criticism assume it s! Milo Moiré 's latest nude performance stomps on feminism with high heels and it!