In an interview with The Sopranos' creator David Chase in early March of this year, Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air asked if any scene in the series had been particularly misinterpreted by the public. His mind went immediately to "University" (episode 32) about the murder of a young exotic dancer named Tracee. This answer does not surprise me, as the episode about Tracee lingers in my own mind—along with Dr. Melfi's rape and Janice's erotic play with dominant and submissive roles—as an engaging and embattled representation of contemporary womanhood. The series' creator and writers are clearly aware of ongoing debates in feminism over sexuality and power; in fact the show seems to make a knowing reference to the history of the "feminist sex wars" when Carmela warns Janice that her fiancé, Richie Aprile, will soon enough take a mistress. Janice responds that she doubts any mistress will let Richie hold a gun to her head while they have sex. Carmela gasps, "I thought you were a feminist!" Janice clarifies, "He usually takes the clip out." Tracee, like Janice, is a site of contestation over the ambiguous imprint of feminism on filmic representations of the female body, especially in contrast to network television's one-dimensional representation of strippers (think Friends: Stripper stole the ring!) or simple-minded blockbuster events like the films Striptease and Showgirls. (Regina Barreca, in "Why I Like the Women in The Sopranos Even Though I'm Not Supposed To"—exclaims "even the whores are not your ordinary whores—they too have complicated inner lives" [36]).

David Chase posits the episode about Tracee as heavily misunderstood to be a simple exercise in misogyny. His background suggests that a certain countercultural energy informs his approach to this series. He regularly criticizes network television for selling a false reassurance to the audience that Americans are good people, that authority figures have our best interests at heart, that the family is a safe haven from a harsh world, and that consumer capitalism is an appropriate mode of bonding, recharging, and finding joy (Chase). He reminds us, "America has really big serious problems that are continually papered over with boosterism and escapism and money" (Kelly). His comments on "University" redirect attention from the topic of violence against women to the larger fields of cultural violence—capitalism and family values—that encompass and entail this particular gendered violence; by revealing these economic structures as inherently violent, Chase makes a materialist feminist critique of patriarchy worthy of bell hooks.[1] And by invoking hooks, I mean to acknowledge the politically committed work of reading against the grain of progressive filmmakers (Spike Lee, Quentin Tarentino, Oliver Stone), while avoiding hooks's stock answer ("it's not enough") and the "socialist-feminist realism" that has been rightly criticized for lending itself more "to moralistic denunciation than to building knowledge of complicated genres" (King and McCaughey 15).

This episode will make you wince with the brutality of Tracee's death, and its use of the pernicious visual cliché of the murdered prostitute or punished fallen woman lends itself to easy feminist denigrations, but any knee-jerk dismissal of the show as somehow going too far (by murdering a woman) or not going far enough (by failing to adopt a sex-positive image of the stripper as liberated lady) should be categorized as what Judith Halberstam calls "a crisis of spectatorship." She argues, "We simply do not know how to read imagined violences: all too often representations of the pernicious effects of homophobia, racism, and sexism are collapsed by the viewer into homophobia, racism, and sexism themselves" (253). A film about sexism is, in other words, often misread as a sexist film. This illiteracy may be behind readings of Tracee's death as misogynist rather than as a critical comment on the misogynist representations of violence against sexual women.

Throughout this episode, two stories are carefully interwoven. One narrative strand follows Tracee, a dancer at the Bada Bing! club, as she attempts to create a traditional family dynamic in her life. In the opening scene she approaches Tony with a gift of homemade date-nut bread, and later she entertains hyperreal fantasies of a future home life with Ralphie, the volatile gladiator-wannabe whose baby she is carrying. Her fantasies measure the extreme distortions produced by immersion in the ideology of family values, as she imagines their life as suburban, normal, loving, tidily poised at the end curve of a New Jersey cul-de-sac. Her actual experiences of the nuclear family as a violent space (her mother burned her hand on the stove when she was a child, and she repeats the act by burning her infant son with cigarettes) are erased by this media-driven nostalgia for home. The second narrative strand follows Meadow, Tony's daughter, as she negotiates her first year at college. Meadow is sorting through romantic mythologies and imperfect relationship realities as she pursues sexual pleasure while trying to gauge her boyfriend's commitment and trustworthiness. Her loss of virginity works as a counterplot to Tracee's quest for domesticity. The "good" daughter becomes sexualized, as the "bad" stripper seeks the legitimacy of love, marriage, and baby carriage.

This parallel is deliberately crafted through twinned scenes and rhetorically pointed segues in which Meadow's body fades into Tracee's. In one scene Meadow and her mother, Carmela, have a conversation about Meadow's biracial boyfriend. Carmela asks her daughter if she is in love with Noah. Meadow responds, "At this point I'd better be." Carmela asks, "At what point?" Meadow demurs, "We are so not having that conversation." In a previous scene we see Meadow under Noah as he unwraps a condom. Meadow is clearly referring to the birds-and-bees conversation that makes for such predictable humor in family television. In her most sardonic teenage knowingness, Meadow is not "going there" with Carmela, resisting the possibility of warm bonding, Gilmore Girls style. In the next scene, we see Tracee talking with Tony, reproducing the daughter/parent dyad of Meadow and Carmela, but instead of taking place in the cozy bedroom of the family home, this conversation happens outside the strip club, in the alienated space of a gravel parking lot. Where the Meadow/Carmela scene subverts our expectations for closeness, the Tony/Tracee scene parodies them in grotesque form. Tracee tells Tony she is pregnant, and that it is Ralphie's baby. She is positioned in relation to Tony in this scene as a daughter figure, seeking advice and support, but as an unwed mother and a sex worker, she takes on the hybrid role of deviant daughter, doubling Meadow's newly deflowered status.

These blurred boundaries between stereotypes enact the poststructuralist dictum that each pole is haunted and inflected by its supposed opposite. Tracee and Meadow hold within their separate social roles traces of the other, calling the good girl / bad girl binary of traditional Western thought directly into question. This move aligns the episode with the concerns of sex worker feminism. Jill Nagle, in Whores and Other Feminists, reminds her readers of a commonly noted point in sex radical feminism, that the whore stigma affects all women, shaping how we perceive and present ourselves. We must "not only be virtuous, but also . . . appear virtuous, to . . . demonstrate our affiliation with the privileged half of the good girl / bad girl binary" (5). The parallel between Tracee and Meadow dismantles this tenacious binary, constructing portraits of young women in the space between categories and asking, to borrow Nagle's language, "what purposes are served by using any sexual categories to describe women" (4). Tracee's status as whore seems to make her vulnerable to attack (Ralphie mentions it several times to excuse himself for killing her), but Tony recognizes Tracee and Meadow as the same, not as opposites. In the following episode Tony looks at Meadow and sees Tracee, suggesting that there is no "particular class of woman" (to paraphrase playwright Janet Feindel) who is suited to stripping or who is less deserving of safety and sexual freedom [2].

In a gesture of solidarity with sex workers, the episode encourages the audience to sympathize with Tracee, as we see her humiliated and hurt in a thousand small ways before the scene of her death. She tries to show Tony her braces and is reprimanded by Silvio for fraternizing. She offers a kiss to Ralphie and he turns away, making rude remarks about what she's been doing with her mouth. She says "hi" to Tony with a huge smile, but he waves her away and goes into another room with another stripper. Standing there in her too-tight tomato-red dress, hair swept up in an approximation of classiness and elegance, she has that look of gangly girls in six-inch heels for the first time. With this shot, the stripper is transformed into wallflower. The usual catty attitude among women toward exotic dancers (based on distorted fantasies of the stripper as blonde bombshell, a jealousy that implicitly condones violence against sex workers who are regarded as getting what they deserve) is undermined as the camera lingers on Tracee's disappointed face and awkward retreat. She becomes someone we recognize, someone we can identify with, someone we have perhaps been.

She becomes a fool.

Dale Bauer uses such an image in "Gender in Bakhtin's Carnival" to explicate the behavior of certain characters in novels by Hawthorne, James, Wharton, and Chopin, and this appropriation of Bakhtin can be extended to my own analysis of Tracee in The Sopranos. The function of the fool is that she does not understand social conventions, and in the absence of her understanding, she prompts "a dialogue about those very interpretive norms." In this way, the fool acts "as a resisting reader within the text" and "provid[es] the means of unmasking dominant codes." "Stupidity," writes Bauer, "forces the unspoken repressions into the open, thus making them vulnerable to interpretation, contradiction, and dialogue" (715). "The role of the reader" when confronted with the fool "is to question and restructure the 'cultural and intertextual frames' in which the character operates and is made foolish" (715). In several scenes, Tracee forces other characters to explain the social conventions that structure their relationships. Tony turns down the date-nut bread because he already has a family, spelling out the difference between that gift-giving dynamic and the more limited employer-employee relationship he expects her to maintain with him. He is pushed to articulate a cultural belief he does not necessarily understand himself. "Bread," he muses as she walks away. This frame of family-versus-work or private-versus-public that separates Meadow and Tracee into different kinds of girls appears to Tony as foolish in the face of Tracee's death. Tracee doesn't understand that she is not wife material, or even mistress material, and she forces the conventions into the open for discussion by acting as if there are no such boundaries. In being rebuffed, dismissed, and finally killed, she dramatizes the impact of these conventions on particular female bodies.

In this foolishness-as-resistance, she grasps a degree of female narrative authority for herself, "controlling the distribution of hidden knowledge" (Akass and McCabe 151) by wielding the open secret of Ralph's troubled masculinity. She resists Ralphie's emotional withholding, responding not with tears but with emasculating comments.

Ralphie: "That's how you treat a man?"
Tracee: "What man?"

Her words remind us and Ralphie that, as bell hooks has argued, not all men are rewarded equally under patriarchy. [3]

Much of this episode focuses on Ralphie's performances of masculinity, linking them with his failed efforts to achieve a higher level of status among the other men. At this point in the season he has asked to be promoted to captain and has been denied. He goes around quoting Russell Crowe's lines in Gladiator, from the bravado ("I have come to reclaim Rome for my country") to the despair ("We are all dead men; all we can do is choose how we die"). His ability to "earn" for the guys above him in the mafia hierarchy, which he mentions frequently, positions him as a figure of the contemporary American blue-collar worker. Without denying the inequality between Ralph and Tracee, we can still note their similarly disenfranchised positions (the lack of class access to institutions of higher education and upwardly mobile socialization). In the same way that Tracee's class status makes stripping not the least lucrative or liberating job choice, Ralphie too faced a limited range of career options, with his 11th-grade-level education. Becoming a member of the mafia in this sense is not unlike joining the military; rather than an exercise of power it is a reflection of economic necessity and an initiation into a violent, Darwinian, hypermasculine system in which many men are made to feel quite vulnerable and feminized. Ralph turns on Tracee and brutalizes her because she undermines his masculinity in front of his peers; his vulnerable class status makes it feel imperative to him to protect his masculinity. His violence against her is a manifestation of this class anxiety, at least as much as it is an exercise of patriarchal power. And for those who perceive capitalism as a system of prostitution, the struggle between Ralph and Tracee is not merely between man and woman but between different kinds of sex workers, as Ralphie peddles his aggressive masculinity to improve his social position. (Having received a "Pasta-tute award" for selling out his Italian heritage, David Chase might also be included in this loose cluster of sex workers [Lloyd].)

This idea that we are all whores under capitalism takes me back to the topic of noteworthy segues. Early in the episode, Silvio slaps Tracee and slams her down on the hood of his car after she misses three days of work. Ralphie watches from the window of his house where they had been dining together on Fresca and Pop Tarts; his laughter melds seamlessly into laughter at the family dinner table with his official girlfriend, Rosalie Aprile, and their guests. The dinner party conversation is structured by the much-ballyhooed "war between the sexes," as the couples trade cliché complaints about empty milk cartons in the fridge and "the football trance" (men cannot seem to hear their wives when sports are on TV). They have, as Rosalie says, "the attention span of children." This lame rehearsal of the popular men-are-from-Mars discourse signals a lethargic antagonism beneath the surface of everyday domesticity. Ralphie's laughter (vindictive and face-saving in the scene with Tracee, giving the lie to the warmth and hospitality in the scene with Rosalie) marks the facade of "family values" often used to demonize strip clubs and the women who work there. John D'Emilio's essay, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," offers a useful context for this diversion: While capitalism itself is structurally responsible for the dispersal of the nuclear family, feminism and the sexual revolution are routinely blamed for it.[4] Tracee's disposability is dramatized as a sacrifice to the social-ladder-climbing of the middle-class family (a back alley abortion of sorts). Thus the stripper as resisting reader goes hand in hand with the stripper as scapegoat. Through strategic editing, the episode "University" repeatedly collapses the violence of strip club spaces against the performed bonding of home life, underscoring the continuities between stigmatized and socially sanctioned arenas to assert that they are not as separate or opposite as our symbolic register suggests.[5]

In the final scene, a new dancer is being trained, and the message of the stripper as automaton—all surface and labor, a series of interchangeable female bodies—lingers as Tracee's trademark song plays ("Living On a Thin Line" by the Kinks). Three strippers walk by, talking about her. One says she heard she went outside with Ralph and never came back. Another cautions, "Keep what you hear to yourself." In her role as resisting reader within the text, Tracee reminds us that the stripper body has often been a site of struggle over what can be said or not said, and under what circumstances, a struggle over what is "obvious"—an ideological struggle—from the question of misogyny on The Sopranos (is the show obviously sexist or not?) to the problem of objectification in feminism (is stripping obviously oppressive or not?) to the element of commerce in all heterosexual relationships (is money merely a less obvious exchange in marriage than in lap dances?). The stripper body is, in its most euphoric formulation, a guileless, honest revelation of unspoken social conventions. But as Akass and McCabe write (about another character on the show), "This powerful narrative position—to say what should not be said—is, however, a precarious one" (154). Tracee finds out just how precarious as her resistance is shut down by the thirteen lethal blows she takes from Ralphie, yet the gruesome text of her lifeless body remains before our eyes, confronting Tony and the audience with the foolishness of the frame, a haunting critique of whore stigma.

Works Cited

Akass, Kim and Janet McCabe. "Beyond the Bada Bing!: Negotiating Female Narrative Authority in The Sopranos." In Lavery, This Thing of Ours, 146–61.

Bauer, Dale. "Gender in Bakhtin's Carnival." In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 708–20. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1997.

Barreca, Regina. "Why I Like the Women in The Sopranos Even Though I'm Not Supposed To." In A Sitdown with the Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV's Most Talked-About Series, edited by Barreca, 27–46. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Bell, Shannon. Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Chase, David. "The Real Boss of The Sopranos." Interview by Virginia Heffernan. New York Times, February 29, 2004, late edition (East coast), p. 2.1.

———. Interview by Terry Gross. Fresh Air, NPR, March 2, 2004.

D'Emilio, John. "Capitalism and Gay Identity." In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 467–76. London: Routledge, 1993.

Donatelli, Cindy and Sharon Alward. "'I Dread You"?: Married to the Mob in The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos. In Lavery, This Thing of Ours , 60–71.

Halberstam, Judith. "Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representations of Rage and Resistance." In King and McCaughey, Reel Knockouts, 244–66.

hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Kelly, Audrey. "Made Man: Hit After Hit, David Chase Ushers The Sopranos into Big Time." Interview with David Chase. Fade In 6, no. 3. Excerpt available online, http://www.fadeinonline.com/chase/interview/chase.html.

King, Neal and Martha McCaughey. "What's a Mean Woman Like You Doing in a Movie Like This?" In Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies. By King and McCaughey, 1–24. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Lavery, David, ed. This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Lloyd, Robert. "Mob Rules: David Chase on The Sopranos, the Small Screen, and Rock and Roll." Interview with David Chase. LA Weekly, March 16–22, 2001, http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=23162.

Modleski, Tania. Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Nagle, Jill, ed. Whores and Other Feminists. New York: Routledge, 1997.

The Sopranos. Created by David Chase. HBO. 1999–.

Endnotes

1. His language echoes that of another rigorous media critic, Douglas Kellner, as well. In Media Culture, Kellner argues that "the political functions of media culture . . . include providing compensations for irredeemable loss while offering reassurances that all is well in the American body politic" (69). Compare this statement with David Chase's criticisms of network television: "The function of an hour drama is to reassure the American people that it's O.K. to go out and buy stuff" (Chase). [Return to text]

2. Janet Feindel's A Particular Class of Women, is published by Canada Playwrights Press in the anthology Singular Voices, distributed in the States by Theatre Communications Group. It was originally published on its own by Lazara Publishers, Vancouver, B. C. It has been produced in various theatres in the U.S. and Canada and most recently in Rome, Italy in English at the Teatro Inglese then in Italian at the Teatro Colesseo. There is also an article about the development of the play in Canadian Theatre Review. [Return to text]

3. hooks makes this point in her analysis of the Central Park Jogger rape: ". . . by combining a feminist analysis of race and masculinity, one sees that since male power within patriarchy is relative, men from poorer groups and men of color are not able to reap the material and social rewards for their participation in patriarchy. In fact they often suffer from blindly and passively acting out a myth of masculinity that is life-threatening. Sexist thinking blinds them to this reality. They become victims of the patriarchy" (quoted in Bordo 286). Susan Bordo praises this analysis as exemplary postmodern feminist cultural criticism. [Return to text]

4. "Ideologically, capitalism drives people into heterosexual families: each generation comes of age having internalized a heterosexist model of intimacy and personal relationships. Materially, capitalism weakens the bonds that once kept families together so that their members experience a growing instability in the place they have come to expect happiness and emotional security. Thus, while capitalism has knocked the material foundation away from family life, lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual feminists have become the scapegoats for the social instability of the system" (D'Emilio 473). [Return to text]

5. Donatelli and Alward write that David Chase's "genius is to make violence as domestic as going for a tennis lesson or taking Meadow for a tour of colleges. . . . [V]iolence is . . . almost always bracketed with homely domestic scenes" (64). Creeber likewise examines this "cross-cutting . . . 'between scenes of extreme violence and domestic warmth'" (130). [Return to text]