A talk with the Penn Ph.D teaching that The Sociology of Miley Cyrus course you've heard about

Since a flyer emerged a couple days ago for a summer class at New York's Skidmore College titled "The Sociology of Miley Cyrus: Race, Class, Gender, and Media," the internet has been freaking out. There's something about the outraged and contemptuous auto-reactions to the class in the media have made for a nice symmetry with the outraged and contemptuous reactions to its subject. As the teacher, Dr. Carolyn Chernoff, was a Philly resident until very recently, we decided to call her up and see how she was doing.  

CP: You got your Ph.D at Penn pretty recently, right?

CC: I did! I’m most recently from Philly; Philly’s the place I consider home at this point.

 

CP: And when did you leave?

CC: This summer. I moved to Saratoga this August.

 

CP: Were you here in Philly when the Rolling Stone cover story in which Miley Cyrus said she had found herself on South Street came out?

CC: [Laughs.] I don’t remember that. I’d have to look that up.

 

CP: It must have been after you left [it was indeed in late September], because Philly, like, freaked out about it. Why do people get so weirdly incensed about Miley Cyrus?

CC: With all the very real problems we’re facing as a nation, right — violence against women and children in communities of color, the collapse of the public education system, ongoing poverty and wealth stratification — it’s a convenient distraction to say that a barely post-teen girl or woman is a moral apocalypse. So on one hand, it’s a convenient distraction.

On the other hand, I think that the things that get people so incensed about Miley are the same reasons that I’m trying to teach this course — to help people deconstruct and better understand media, systems of representation, and ideas of power and privilege in the contemporary U.S.

 

CP: I’ve read a few things that people have written since this got big a couple days ago — it seems like most of them don’t really understand what sociology and cultural criticism are.  Are there any reactions that you’ve found particularly silly?

CC: All the best, most inflammatory stuff — all of the pearl-clutching about “Oh, the liberal arts are a cesspool; oh the social sciences are a cesspool! Can you believe that someone would do something so silly!” — is more grist for the mill. It’s more data about why we need to rigorously study media and representation. If you look at the flyer for my class that got tweeted, and if you look at the content of that, this is, you know,  serious sociology. This is rigorous stuff, looking at understanding the world. So in some senses, all of the hubbub in the blogosphere sort of proves the need for a class like this.

I would say the best reaction that I’ve gotten was last night night on campus — a young woman very sweetly came up to me and said “You know that you’re exploding on the internet, right?” and I said “I have heard.” One of her friends had commented on the picture of me on my faculty page and sent it to this young woman saying “Oh my god, this looks like you,” so she wanted  to pose for pictures. She borrowed my glasses, she was very sweet.

I’m actually surprised — I’ve only gotten a couple of comments on my glasses and my looks. I expected that to be the go-to — How do we dismiss an academic? Well, we point out that she’s a woman, first of all, then we point out how she looks. So I’m pleased that even though a lot of the conversation on the internet is the usual pearl-clutching, popular-culture-is-a-cesspool, liberal-arts-colleges-are-cesspools —

 

CP: [Laughs.] Did people actually use the word cesspool?

CC: I’m not sure they know it. [Laughs.]

 

CP: Is this something that you’re getting a lot of attention for on campus?

CC: On campus, I’m getting nothing but support. My students think it’s hilarious, they think it’s interesting, some of them have said this is actually helping them explain to their family and friends why liberal arts are so important — for critical thinking, for understanding and unpacking the world we live in.

The great thing about being at a school like Skidmore that focuses on rigor and relevance and creative approaches to scholarly issues is that, yeah, my department understands that this is a class in race, class, gender and media. The school supports what I do, and that’s really great for me both as a scholar and as a teacher.

 

CP: In 2013, you were teaching a course called Youth Culture in and out of School at Skidmore —

CC: Yeah, that was in fall.

 

CP: And when Miley’s performance at the VMAs happened, you incorporated it into a lesson plan that ended up being the genesis of this upcoming course. What was it about that lesson that made you decide there was enough stuff to talk about there for an entire course?

CC: It was very convenient in terms of some of the things we were talking about in the class. Feminists of color were very clear that [the problem with the performance] was very much about race and class. But a lot of the mainstream media focused on That Bad Girl Miley rubbing her butt up against a married man. Instead of talking about the fact that Robin Thicke was an equal participant, and they were singing and dancing to a song that basically legitimizes rape. So there was already an interesting cultural moment — seeing what people were getting upset about vs. what I saw as the real issues.

So I showed the clip — we were talking about youth culture and subculture, right, this idea that we see youths as dangerous, as a threat, but without talking about the role of adults in youth culture.

The students broke [the video] down; they had really insightful things to say, and were able to apply the readings and concepts toward “What is the real social problem here? Is it Miley? Is Miley the devil? Is Miley the apocalypse? Or is this another way of sending coded messages about who women are, who they’re supposed to be, and what they get blamed for?”

 

CP: What do they get blamed for?

CC: Well, you tell me — Miley’s been blamed for the moral decline of the united states — on Saturday Night Live when she was on, they took that idea and ran with it, saying that 2013 at the VMAs is when a young woman ruined the world as we know it. (Tongue in cheek.)

 

CP: The photo on the flyer has a Miley face with her lips going side to side rather than the face she’s more known for with the tongue sticking out. Why’d you choose that photo?

CC: That’s a Terry Richardson photo — he’s also an interesting magnet for criticism. As a photographer, he does the American Apparel photos, he does a lot of Vice magazine photos — so, a lot of the stuff that tries to be hip and transgressive, but also reinforces the notion of women as sexual objects. 

There’s a lot going on in that photo; the way you can also read the lip twisted to the side and the bared teeth is not just aggression, there’s also whether it’s shame or self-consciousness. Paul Ekman has a great book, a field guide to facial expressions, called Unmasking the Face. You can read some of Miley’s facial expressions through that scholarly lens; there’s a lot going on.

 

CP: I read in some profile that she says she started sticking her tongue out in photos because it felt too weird awkward to smile at cameras.

CC: Well, I think the idea that there’s a real Miley Cyrus that the public will ever know is a fiction. We will never, ever know the real Miley Cyrus — if there is one. She’s grown up in public, she’s grown up in front of a camera. What she does and  why she says she does it are interesting, right — it’s interesting that she claims she’s a huge feminist and supports everybody’s right to do whatever they want, it’s an interesting comment on contemporary feminism. But yeah, you have a public face, and sometimes your public face gets reduces to sticking out your tongue.

I mean, it certain worked for her. But it’s a double-edged sword — it works, but it’s still within the confines of a fairly limiting system. I’m trying to get people to think more systematically, more structurally, as opposed to “Oh, those bad American girls who have no morals.” It’s not just about individual choices.

 

CP: Is all of this attention getting annoying yet?

CC: I mean, officially, anything that lets me remind people why sociology as a discipline is a rigorous and relevant, why this is useful, why what happens in a liberal arts school is helpful to society? That’s great. I can talk about that all the live-long day.