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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 4 years ago

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Fantasies, dreams and desires, ideas of normalcy and fears of difference. A slightly queer reading of 15x14

Mrs Butters is a delightful character who is built to parallel so many things in the show. She occupies perfectly the semantic sphere that the narrative has crafted around Dean’s desires; also, you know, cake.

We could talk for days about the significance of food and drink in Supernatural. One of the biggest themes that run through the entire show is hunger (or thirst) and food is very often a symbol for an emotional need of sorts. Supernatural draws a lot folklore, and human stories have always used symbologies that put together food, desire, love, sex, family, goodness and darkness and all those human experiences.

We have discussed the shit out of every instance of food in the show, analyzed parallels to other stories and fairytales, scrutinized queer-codings and subtexts, got called nasty names by impolite people accusing us of saying that a slice of baked good means Dean likes sitting on dicks. So, yeah, I’m not gonna start explaining everything from the beginning. Let’s jump to the parallels.

- The comfort food. Motherhood, hugs, and the past that can never return: the ideal of childhood and the 50s fantasy

We’ve already talked about how Mrs Butters functions as a parallel to Mary and a symbol of the ideal motherhood that both Mary and Dean struggled with. In Dark Side Of The Moon, we see a memory from Dean’s childhood, where we learn that Mary would cut off the crusts off his sandwiches. Mrs Butters also says that she cut the crusts off, establishing a direct parallel to Dean’s ideal of childhood and child-parent relationship. Or, we should say, as both Mary’s and Dean’s ideals of a child-parent relationship, because we know that Mary set up her life with John and the kids as an elaborate “scene” according to her idea-slash-fantasy of the perfect safe life.

She strugged with that, because her ideal life could never match with reality - she had loose ends from hunting to deal with, she at some level liked having those loose ends to deal with because as much as she hated the hunting life and craved for safety and “normalcy” that was still something she was in her element doing, probably more than the perfect housewife role. Of course when she came back she attempted to recreate the scene but quickly discovered that it was impossible and dropped all attempts to do so, embracing the opposite, or at least what she perceived as the opposite (having a pretty dualistic view of hunting life-domestic life where they cannot be reconciled).

Dean, on the other hand, started out with a similar dualistic view, figuring that he’d always belong to the hunting world and could never have the domestic, “normal” thing at all, embracing his “freakness” as opposed to the concept of normalcy represented by civilians, by the middle class, by the suburbs, by the apple pie, white fence life (insert heavy queer subtext here). And yet there was always an ambiguity with him (again, he’s never one-or-the-other, he’s always both), because, while on the surface he embraces this rebellious, devil-may-care persona, that’s not quite what he is as a full individual. He grew up essentially a housewife from a very early age, has a very caregiving personality, and thrives in taking care of others.

Dean is both Mrs Butters and Mary, where the difference between him and Mary is that Mary couldn’t (didn’t have the time, support, resources?) reconcile parts of her that Dean instead was able to (and in fact recently helped her with: before dying, she’d reached a pretty healthy balance of living her own life as a hunter and having a warm relationship with her sons, at least as healthy as it can get in that kind of circumstances).

Another important parallel to Dark Side Of The Moon, borrowed by Scoobynatural, is the nightgown that feels like being wrapped in hugs: we are reminded of Dean’s “I wuv hugz” from when he was a kid, a symbol for his early life of affection and safety that he lost with his mother. Childhood hugs, comfort food, loving gestures like cutting off the crusts are all symbols of a past that cannot return.

On a level, from a “coming-of-age story” perspective, childhood, with its innocence and perception that adults will always keep us safe, is obviously something that everyone needs to accept as something that belongs to the past and cannot return, to embrace instead the responsibilities and risks of adulthood in a healthy way. In a sense, Dean needs to go through all these steps - acknowledging that his mother was a flawed person, that in fact both of his parents were flawed people who made mistakes but he can forgive them for his own sake in order to be able to let go of trauma and carry on... - to become a healthy adult able to be a good parent to his own child.

(There’s also the cholesterol thing - Mrs Butters chastizes Dean for his diet, but we know that there’s a depth to Dean’s diet, not only his extreme appreciation of food due to experiencing food scarcity and insecurity as a child, but also the memory of his mother’s comfort food, such as the “Winchester surprise”, a monstrosity of meat and cheese. While the “meat man” persona would appear on the surface as a sterotypical masculinity thing, it has layers, in a typical Dean fashion... not coincidentally, in the latest episode he calls himself the meat man while wearing an apron that we’re told he’s very fond of, painting him, again, in a mixture of different meanings, masculinity and femininity, fatherhood and motherhood, devil-may-care attitude and caregiver attitude.)

On another level, a more political level, there’s the 50s fantasy element. We all know the significance of the idealization of the post-war period as the “good ol’ times” in American culture, and it’s an ideal that Mary definitely drew from when she built her perfect life with her family. Mrs Butters represents this in a very literal way, being literally from 1958 when she “froze” herself, and acts as a very stereotyped governess for a bunch of men that feel like they are above housework, what is considered women’s work. Dean initially comments “how progressive”, knowing exactly how bullshit these conversative ideals are, but then appreciates the comforts of the perfect caretaker.

In fact, Dean’s “giving in” to the comforts of a governess makes me think of that famous feminist manifesto “I want a wife” by Judy Syfers... because housework is very much Dean’s work in the bunker. It’s interesting that Mrs Butters immediately comments negatively on the cleanness of the bunker and their clothes: we know that Dean cleans and washes, and, while it’s likely that he cannot keep everything super perfect like a governess would because he’s busy doing many other things, it’s a way Mrs Butters uses to establish roles that she knows and is comfortable with. She is used to being the one who does “feminine” work while the Men of Letters have absolutely zero skills in that regard, and doesn’t really even stop to question if that’s the case with the men in front of her.

Anyway, let’s go back to the 50s fantasy. The show has repeatedly made commentaries on the vacuity of it. Peace Of Mind is the most obvious instance, but there’s plenty of subtext in the show that deals with that typically American aspect. Just like the childhood aspect, the narrative tells us that the “good ol’ times” are also an idealized thing that cannot return (if it ever existed, because Dean’s childhood was built on a fantasy, and the “good ol’ times” are also a fantasy, because the real 50s were horrible for anyone who didn’t swim in privilege). Mrs Butters cannot stay, the 50s fantasy-slash-childhood fantasy cannot last, and Dean embraces his role as an adult-slash-modern housemaker. Blah blah gender, blah blah cake. (Yeah, sorry, but you can fill in the blanks.)

- The contaminated drink. Poison and weakness from the forbidden sexual desire to the forbidden family domesticity

Aaaand now the second branch of parallels that Mrs Butters pinged on my radar, which sends us in an even more queer-subtext-heavy territory. We’re going to talk about the smoothies and the tomato juice. Yes, I know, the smoothies are given to Jack, not Dean, but symbolically Dean and Jack share the same semantic area; both are given a magically conjured drink, and both end up locked away waiting to be killed. For this analysis, they basically overlap.

Let’s start with the tomato juice. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Dean is given something that visually reminds of the blood the vampires drink. The tomato juice is a stand-in for blood, and blood in relation to vampirism has a long history of subtext in the show that connects to sexuality, sex, sexual fears and contamination. While vampires are not necessarily always invested of those meanings every single time they appear in the three-hundred-whatever episodes of the show, their main symbology is connected to sex and sexual fears, as vampires do in modern western literature, after all.

You’re probably going to think, wait, what? What has Mrs Butters got to do with sexual fears? Yeah, I know, it sounds weird, but hear me out.

The tomato juice - a stand-in for blood, with a vampire reference - parallels Mrs Butters (who represents trauma, remember) to 6x05 Live Free Or TwiHard. Sexual assault, blood, contamination via the poisoning liquid.

Next to the tomato juice there’s the smoothie. It’s a poison in disguise, a contaminated drink that makes Jack weak. We have, in fact, a pattern of Dean being given contaminated drinks that place him under another’s power. Not just the vampire’s blood, but also Jeremy from 3x10 Dream A Little Dream Of Me, who offers Dean a beer through which he connects him to his dreams. There’s Nick the siren from 4x14 Sex And Violence, who contaminates Dean through the flask. The venom in the siren’s saliva parallels straight to the gorgon Noah in 14x14 Ouroboros, and I don’t have to start explaining what all those things represent, right? (I have written posts about these things, it would be nice if tumblr didn’t suck and showed them to me when I go look for them.)

(Oh, there’s also Crowley’s human blood addiction, which is not, as one might expect, a parallel to Sam’s demon blood addition, but Dean’s First Blade/Mark Of Cain issue, and the First Blade/Mark Of Cain arc is all imbued by the queer subtext of the Dean-Crowley-Castiel triangle.)

Basically, Mrs Butters is inserted in a history of queer subtext, although it appears as obvious that Mrs Butters hardly represents homosexual desire, unless we go a pretty stretchy route of her occupying Cas’ space in the Dean-Sam-Cas-Jack family (I mean, that’s true, but it’s not simply that). It is also true that Mrs Butters represents Cuthbert Sinclair, and here the radar pings, because Cuthbert Sinclair is totally inside the pattern! He wanted to make Dean part of his collection just like the vampire in 6x05 wanted to make Dean part of his pack, with supernatural means of exorting control over Dean and heavy heavy rapey tones. (I know we don’t like to talk about this, but the show does play with incest subtext, John mirrors are often rapey.)

So, we have all this semantic area of poison, weakness and submission to external control painted in overtones of sexual assault and sexual fears especially in relation to homosexual desire. (I am NOT linking homosexual desire to sexual assult, nor the show is, it’s a wide and volatile semantic area where the common denominator is fear, fear of being hurt FOR being different sexually, it’s about vulnerability because of being different. It’s a horror narrative, guys, remember, queer fear is a recurrent theme in the genre. Dracula was about the horror of what happened to Oscar Wilde, we’re running in circles.)

Now, what kind of fear is explored in 15x14? Well, the episode is about the fear of losing family. The plot is about Dean’s feelings towards Jack after he killed Mary. Dean doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to lose Cas soon also because of Jack. Mary and Cas are both very noisy absences in the episode, and we know that Dean is going to suffer something horrific again that will shatter his family again. This goes past the fears regarding forbidden sexual desire: we’re in the territory of forbidden familial desire, so to speak, Dean’s craving for a domestic peace with his family.

Jack is both the culmination of Dean’s process of family-building, as the son figure of the family, and the element of destruction of that family-building. Not a coincidence Jack’s birthday was referenced, as Jack’s birth coincided with Cas’ death and Mary’s supposed death or at least separation. Now Jack has supposedly killed Mary (or is it a inter-universe separation again? @drsilverfish’s theory always pops up, and we keep getting reminded of other universes - the telescope is broken...) and we know that Cas’ ultimate death hangs above us.

We’re always running in a spiral, Dean’s relationship with Mary, Dean’s relationship with Cas, Dean’s relationship with motherhood and gender roles, Dean’s relationship with sexuality. There’s a big picture of mirrors in the semantic area of fantasies, idealizations, desires and dreams. I hope I managed to make this post make sense, but I’m always open to requests of clarification or elaboration. Thanks for reading!

#my spn thoughts #spn meta #spn 15x14 #queer subtext #dean and femininity #dean and masculinity #dean and food #dean and mary #dean and childhood #dean and sexuality #dean and family #spn

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butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker · 4 years ago

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There's something I'm trying to put into words,

about the discomfort of straight women who are very into slash and yaoi. It's been bothering me in a quiet way for a while, and then over the weekend it exploded, and I'm trying to pick my way through pain constructively.

There's a couple of things.

~*~

Point zero is that desire is good, actually, and so is fantasy. Keep this in mind, we'll come back to it.

~*~

The first thing is shame. People who are choosing to approach their own desire from the side, not willing to recognise their own bodies or vocalise their desire in their own voice, or think about sex in which their bodies participate. People who are too afraid to work on their own liberation, so take yours.

After all, feminist sexual writing is a whole genre and tradition. The only reason why queer men's liberation feels appealing to these women is that they have nothing at stake in it: it's fantasy, it's safe, it's nothing to do with or about them.

For actual queer men, the process of liberationary sex writing is - of course - mortifying; or there is a stage of mortification and pain one experiences in approaching it. It is not, and never will be, your safe space; that's why you're trying to transform it into one.

~*~

The second thing is privacy. I'd wake up and log on and there would be a full-flown gigglefest about sex in slash, and not being able to quite put my finger on how to say - this is making me feel bad and weird. And in retrospect, this picks up on point 1. Whose bodies are we sexualising in this space. I want to go back and start a conversation about how I prefer girl-on-top and how people who read missionary fic are gross, and hey when you read Barbie/Ken fic, do you see them mostly doing it doggy style?

Because I think that would make-it-real, for these women to feel their own bodies are at stake and being scrutinised in the conversation.

Making my morning coffee, I wonder what kinds of sexual relationships these women have, and if they know that "gay missionary" isn't this abstract concept that appears in fanfiction but a kind of sex they have all the right anatomy to experience for themselves. I suspect they would not like that, and that also the purpose of these conversations is specifically so that nobody envisages them having sex, or being sexual beings.

~*~

The third is experience.

A. thinks that it's a problem that teenagers watch gay porn. (A. wrote her dissertation on gay porn.) A has never had her rights removed on the basis that the world must be made "safe for children".

B thinks there's too much gross stuff in fanfic and it should be banned. B has never experienced fanfic archives removing LGBT material under the aegis of child-protection and removing what is "gross". B has never experienced a reasonable-sounding expansion of anti-kink laws being used in the vaccum where anti-gay laws once stood, the way they disproportionately target queer porn, or are used to harass sex workers, or arrest queer people.

C thinks that anyone who has a gross fantasy, is a hair-trigger away from actually hurting somebody. C is cisgender, and will never be arrested in a bathroom or have her body regarded as inherently a gross sexual fetish. C does not date women, and has never come to learn that a fist may be more easy to take than a kiss, when you are made to feel disgusting for desiring love. C is also asexual - the shame associated with having a sexual expression of any kind is not on her radar. C does not experience gender dysphoria, and had to wrestle with the downright odd things you brain does to manage a libido and an incoherent body all at once. C has never dated someone who survived the peak of AIDS, and has formed intimate connections between blood and sex and death, forged by decades of homophobic media and law. C. cannot tolerate the concept of erotic horror because she has never been made to experience her own body and desires as horrifying.

All these women spend all their free time making stories about imaginary gay and crossdressing men, talking about drag race, and sylvester.

This is not dissonant to them. As we have said, these women see queer man culture as a a place of safety - an escape from patriarchy and their own discomfort. They are unable to comprehend queer expression as a thing that is not safe.

They are very certain that they can tell the difference between a sexual expression that is gross and nongross; and hurting the gross is therefore OK, because punishing perverts will never be co-opted in their soft-focus world of tender coffeshop AUs and gentle longing and having the right kind of gay sex that is photogenic for women to consume.

~*~ A corollary: these things are not for you. What if we defined queer media - one of many possible definitions - as a thing that excludes. Their defining quality is a conversation between queer artist and queer listener, drawn from the conversations the artist had with their friends and lovers, or conversations with the world which anyone within the wall will find familiar.

I am suddenly, humbling-ly and viscerally aware of where the *don’t like white people who like ballroom culture* people are coming from

~*~

The fourth thing is that broader conversation about women with privilege (whiteness, class, straightness), being unable to consider that their behaviour could ever be dangerous or destructive.

Their own narrative of sexual victimhood and shame is central in their own hearts, and they are incapable of adopting an intersectional perspective which adds nuance to their experiences.

~*~

And the fifth is how much they hate you when you try and bring actual queer politics into their fragile world.

Simultaneously asking, on the one hand - could we make this space safe for work again, so it feels a little less like it does now? and being howled at, as if that's an outrageous restriction on their right to talk about pornography.

And on the other, if we are to be a porn conversation place, can we try and rethink the judgemental "anyone who likes weird sex is a threat" attitudes that come up over, and over, and over again.

Needless to say, the needle for "this man is a sexual predator" fired in under 30 seconds and, shortly after demanding I leave the community I established, nobody has spoken to me since.

~*~

There's a particular soreness, I think, of being around people who want to casually chat about drag and feel like Born This Way is theirs and want to PM you about their dissertation on gay porn studios of the 1970s and stan the Marquis de Sade

but cannot take the reality of being around queer people or their lives.

An ugliness, a grossness, a grossness that compounds the passively "being treated like a sexual object" into an active bar on having sexual subjectivity. A be seen but not heard of the bedroom: be seen, a Bowie-chiselled Velour-glamoured Cowley-sparkling Velvet Goldmine vision;

but not heard, as in, don't ever cross that line into talking about real sex in our fantasies (even when our fantasies are your real sex), and don't ever make us consider that our words have weight.

I'm spending time in a little world with women who like Interview with a Vampire, the Company of Wolves, David Lynch and the Marquis de fucking Sade, and who are so fragile around their own fears of desire that they cannot tolerate someone saying - it's fine to be into stuff, and not be ashamed.

This odd middle space, where on the one hand I am comfortable in spaces which are sexually silent - where the horror and challenge of my body and life never come up; and on the other, I am comfortable in spaces which are radically sexually open, in which no-one need feel afraid or judged.

These women, on the other hand, want something else: this desire to talk about sex billowing out of them, irrepressably, but also to use that freedom to box other sexualities down tight - to judge, to shame, to define themselves coyly by describing others as disgusting, to feel that urge spilling into view only to publically run away from it and demand others do the same.

Erotica, without wanking. Desiring men, without women. Thinking about the sex lives of your toy dolls, but not being into that weird stuff. Fantasies, with no bodies. Male sexuality, with no actual men in it.

~*~

I am the last of three queer people who has left that community; and still, I imagine, the "define our own sexuality in coded ways by judging things we are not as gross, and creating in the gaps around our own bodies and desires a world of gay men who are like I wish to be" conversations are going on; but unobserved by any actual queers who might break the fantasy.

And reader, I liked these people. I'm heartbroken.

#longreads #responses welcome but reblog with care #I have this lovely little note I was sent last week from one of them saying how much they appreciated the work I'd put in to making such a n #nice community #The bedroom politics tag #the feminism tag

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princesssarisa · 4 years ago

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“Beauty and the Beast”: Belle’s beautiful discontentment (warning: long)

In my Feminist Defense of the Animated Belle, I addressed most of the issues I’ve heard people complain about regarding Belle’s character. But there was one I didn’t touch on, because it has very little to do with gender roles: the common complaint that Belle is a “snob.” I’d like to discuss that topic now. I’d also like to use it as a springboard to discuss a valuable aspect of Belle’s character that sets her apart both from certain Disney princesses who came before her and from depictions of Beauty in other Beauty and the Beast retellings: her willingness to own her discontentment.

I do understand the “snob” accusations. After all, Belle’s neighbors are poor peasants working hard to eke out a living. It’s only natural that they have little time for books or dreams of adventure and think Belle’s passion for those things is impractical. It’s reasonable to sympathize with their perspective more than the movie seems to want us to. It’s fair to argue that the movie has a (probably unintentional) classist undertone by portraying the villagers as small-minded and bigoted and by having Belle only find a kindred spirit in a prince, albeit an enchanted outcast prince, and find her ultimate happiness by leaving the town in favor of a royal castle. I’m grateful that other BatB retellings exist (e.g. Megan Kearney’s webcomic, or Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter) that portray Beauty’s peasant world in a more positive light, depict the historic cruelty of royal court life in the Beast/Prince’s backstory, and have him leave the castle in the end to become a peasant rather than Beauty becoming a princess.

But none of the above is any reason to criticize Belle.

I don’t think she looks down on her neighbors. She most certainly doesn’t shun them, as some critics claim she does. Just look at her meeting with the baker during the opening song: she tries to have a friendly conversation with him and tell him about the wonderful story she’s read, only for him to rudely brush her aside with “That’s nice... Marie! The baguettes!” I don’t interpret her subsequent shrug and eye-roll as showing disdain for his “low-class” disinterest in books – just as “Oh well, as usual, no one shares my interest.”

Nor do I buy the claim that she shows disdain for the “I need six eggs!” woman (and by extension for all struggling mothers) when she rides past her. It’s true that she does seem to be smiling, which might imply amused contempt, but she might also just be enjoying her ride on the wagon while at the same time wistfully yearning for a new life, with her expression having nothing to do with the woman. I don’t know what the animators meant to convey. And even if that overwhelmed mother does represent the life Belle doesn’t want for herself, and if Belle sings “There must be more than this provincial life!” in response to seeing her, what’s wrong with that? I don’t think it’s an insult to women who choose to have big families. Even a woman who chooses to have five kids shouldn’t be expected to wrangle them all by herself while also doing her grocery shopping, with no help from her husband or from anyone else. That’s the kind of unpaid labor women have too often been forced into and it’s not “insulting other women” for Belle to yearn for something different.

Belle has the right to be bored by her small town life and want something more. She’s not some rich girl looking down on the poor peasants; she’s a poor peasant too. A person trapped in a dull, stifling lower-class existence has every right to long for a different life. Would we accuse Cinderella of being a “snob” and “ignoring the value of domestic work” because she dreams of escaping from her enslavement by her stepfamily? Of course Belle’s life in the village is more comfortable than that, but it’s still reasonable that she should want to break free from its limits.

“But Belle is clearly richer and more privileged than her neighbors!” some critics argue again and again. “Most peasants in those days were illiterate, so the fact that Belle can read shows she’s had a higher-class education, and in the stage musical, Maurice tells her she’s ‘class’ while their neighbors are ‘the common herd’!” I don’t buy that argument. I’ve never bought it. Not one bit. The movie’s setting isn’t the real late 18th/early 19th century France – it’s the Disney version of it. The village has a bookshop in the animated version and a church library and schoolhouse in the live-action remake. There’s no indication whatsoever that Belle's neighbors can’t read. (Gaston holding her book askance as he looks for pictures in it and Le Fou’s inability to spell Gaston’s name don’t count; the first is a “parental bonus” gag implying that Gaston is looking for a centerfold, while the second is a “Le Fou is stupid” gag. Gaston quotes Shakespeare in “The Mob Song,” so he’s clearly had some education.) Belle just stands out because she has a passion for books, instead of only reading now and then during breaks from “more important” things, and because she would rather read than engage in smalltalk about practical everyday matters. Belle is shown borrowing her books, not buying them, which I presume implies she can’t afford to buy them, and Maurice builds his invention out of ordinary household items (e.g. a wood stove, an axe, a teapot), so he presumably hasn’t spent much money on it either. Nor are they any better dressed than their neighbors, nor does their house look any fancier. They certainly don’t seem richer than Gaston, who apparently owns the village tavern and can afford to arrange a wedding party on short notice and bribe Monsieur d’Arque with a bag of gold to help him blackmail Belle. As for Maurice’s remarks in the stage version, they’re clearly about her personality, not about social class.

Belle also has the right to be an individualist and a misfit. That’s part of the whole point of her storyline. It seems to me that critics who complain that she “looks down on normalcy” are doing the same thing the villagers do, which is supposed to be wrong: saying “It’s a pity and a sin she doesn’t quite fit in.”

It’s no surprise that people should complain about Belle’s complaining, though. Traditional fairy-tale heroines aren’t supposed to complain. As much as we can joke about the cliché that the “I want more” heroine became during the Disney Renaissance, we shouldn’t forget how innovative that kind of heroine was in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Just think back to Snow White: at the beginning she’s dressed in rags and forced to work as a scullery maid by her stepmother, but we find her smiling and cheerfully humming as she scrubs the castle steps. Then there’s Cinderella: a bit more complex and openly discontented than Snow White, but in general she still goes cheerfully about her chores. The heroine who lives in unhappy circumstances but “bears it cheerfully and without complaint” is a mainstay of classic, old-fashioned fairy-tales (and other stories too). The early versions of Beauty and the Beast are no exception. After Beauty’s family falls into poverty, we’re told that her sisters constantly wail and cry over their lost wealth and status, but Beauty swallows her grief, resolves to be cheerful, patiently shoulders all the household chores, and devotes her days to consoling her father and siblings. For this she’s held up as a role model, in contrast to her complaining sisters, who despise her and insult her for it, but whom she always loves and forgives.

Of course there’s value in that kind of character. Resilience in the face of adversity and finding happiness where others find none is a strength in its own right. But it can be overdone. The more that women, poor people and outcasts are encouraged to be cheerful, patient and uncomplaining, the more they’re expected to “stay in their place.” Any righteous desire or demand for a better life or better treatment is labeled “rude,” whiny,” “petulant” and “selfish.” It doesn’t always cross that line, but it can.

Linda Woolverton, the head screenwriter of Disney’s BatB, knew that she wanted Belle to be different both from the traditional Beauty and from the likes of Snow White and Cinderella. So did lyricist Howard Ashman, whose experience as a gay man did much to influence the outcast heroes and heroines of the three Disney movies he wrote for. As noted in this Time Magazine article, they resolved to create a heroine for “the next century,” who wasn’t “based on being kind and taking the hits but smiling all the way through it.”

They definitely succeeded.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s wonderful that Belle owns her discontentment. It’s beautiful that she doesn’t try to fit in or put on a patient, cheerful mask, but unabashedly yearns to escape from her dull, small-minded village and find adventure in the great wide somewhere. It’s wonderful that she has no patience for Gaston’s rudeness and arrogance and that she loathes the thought of having to give up her reading and intellect in favor of a mundane marriage and raising a gaggle of children. It all leads beautifully into her friendship and romance arc with the Beast, where she refuses to tolerate his bullying, refuses to let him control her even though he’s the master of the castle, only forgives him when he earns her forgiveness, and inspires him to change for the better. The happy ending comes about precisely because Belle was willing to be discontented and shamelessly wanted more than she was given at first. This makes her almost the opposite of the original tale’s Beauty, whose story was written as an allegory for arranged marriage and whose purpose was in part to convince girls to submit to unwanted circumstances for their families’ sake. I love that instead, Belle refuses to submit to what she doesn’t want, and her refusal becomes the catalyst for all the positive growth and transformation in the story.

Let’s hear it for heroines who want more!

#beauty and the beast #disney #belle #meta

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thedreadvampy · 4 years ago

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So this was sent to me by @atiredpan weeks ago when the White Jon conversation was very live and I'm posting it (belatedly) with their blessing (they didn't want to put it up publicly and have it seem like an attack which I really very much appreciate but wouldn't have minded) and I percolated for a few days and then got very busy for a few weeks. Response follows.

So I feel weird about how I'm responding to this stuff, I'm launching rapidly into taking about/explaining my own experience in a way I'm worried maybe comes across as a direct comparison. It kind of feels like I'm talking in a way that's like brushing off your experience and saying OK BUT HERE'S WHY I'M RIGHT and that's not what I'm trying to do, it's just that there's not much I can usefully add to what you've said - you know your experience better than I do, and I'm not gonna go around trying to read into it or reexplain it. So I'm going to talk about where I am/have been coming from, but not with the intention of countering your points, all of which I think really resonate.

First off, the post where I was like "Jon is white and if you disagree you're Wrong" was, unreservedly, just a shitty post and I'm not suprised it upset a lot of people. I'm really very sorry about that, it was thoughtlessly written and pretty stupidly posted.

I totally get that my whiteness has fed into how I hced Jon (and as I think I've said before I saw Jon a certain way well before I engaged with any fanworks, just as you did). There's a lot of reasons I imagined Jon as white from pretty early on, a non-negligible one of which was like...That's Jonny. This is a podcast by Jonny, about a character with the same name and mannerisms as Jonny, and Jonny is extremely white. It would have felt weird, when I was listening to TMA as a Friend Podcast, to stick a brown face onto what at least appeared at the time to basically be a self-insert character of my white friend. Now that's a really personal thing informed less by the story and more by the circumstances under which I've interacted with it, but it certainly laid a baseline. I didn't really have a clear mental picture of Jon (or most of the characters) for a looooooong time (for an artist I'm really not a very visual thinker) but I had a few sort of mental sketches (Jon is short white balding and awkward, Martin is tall biracial and scruffy Basira is fat and somali Melanie is my friend from work etc) which I developed a long time before I encountered fanworks.

I saw the alienation you mentioned and I connected it to class and gender, not race, because I’ve met a lot of cis men, white and otherwise, who interpolate trauma, class insecurity, insecurity about their own abilities, and so on into withdrawal, denial and snappiness. So for me I had an interpretation of that element of his personality which was pretty much race-neutral, and then I had these existing cues leading me to assuming he was white (largely that Jonny is white, but also wee stuff in the story that...it’s not like anything substantial enough to remember, let alone justify, but there were certainly interactions that pinged whiteness for me personally)

There are actually iirc a few throwaway references to Jon being promoted above more qualified candidates throughout (or at least I thought I knew that before s5), but the time I decided I thought White Jon was an obvious conclusion was of course the conversation where Sasha expresses frustration about it. and the context of that conclusion (at least as far as I can see) wasn't "people of colour can only exist in subservient positions/defined by oppression" but was informed by two things that were going on with my life around the time that episode aired

I had been having several conversations with friends of mine (and largely friends of Jonny's) who work in London in the museums/archiving sector and who are the only women of colour in whole departments or even whole museums, and who experience so little career mobility compared to their less-qualified white counterparts (we're talking about women graduating top of their class at Oxbridge with anthropology or library science masters and stellar original research, with a decade or more of impeccable work experience and acting up, being left in internship and low-grade positions, while white men who "fit the culture" but have 0 museums experience sail into upper management positions and then stay there until they retire). So I'd come almost directly from these conversations into what to me sounded like exactly the same gripe in TMA.

I'd been at that point working for about a year and a half on co-coordinating the anti-oppression committee in my workplace, which was a very Good Progressive Activist Charity with Good Lefty Principles, and over the course of experience sharing and discussions both with colleagues of colour and along lines of wealth, disability, class etc, I was very much confronted with the realisation of how much 'being adequately qualified' meant different things for middle-class good-university white men vs much more highly skilled and hardworking women of colour or people of different class and wealth backgrounds. Obviously I'd known that before in principle, but not really having been in Salaried Workplaces (as opposed to like. service and retail hourlies) I hadn’t got so up close and personal with it. So that was also very fresh in my mind, this like...big substantial experience of how Good, Well-Meaning, Caring, Thoughtful, Woke white men just........did not need to think about this. at all. and were startled and discomforted to face it. and that this was also true of most white middle-class women. and these conversations were really carved down the middle between white middle-class European women saying ‘this is such a surprise when we have such an equitable hiring policy and diverse staff, that there’s this gender gap’ and women of colour in the room wearily saying ‘yeah, there’s a gender gap, there’s always a gender gap and it is always a racialised gender gap’ so yeah I was definitely thinking about the intersection between being passed over at work because of gender and because of race.

The point about Tim is interesting because I think for me what’s getting lost is that I don’t think Jon is entitled as like...a Character Trait. He’s not like...Toxic Masculinity Man. He is very anxious about boundaries and about his own capacity to do harm. But it has to be pointed out to him where he’s doing harm. He doesn’t notice where he’s been unfairly advantaged, and that’s to me much more reflective of most people’s relationship to white or male entitlement.

As I say, that exchange with Tim and Sasha cemented the Jon Is White hc in my head specifically because it was so reflective of conversations I had had with women of colour working in similar workplaces, about white men, usually about white men they generally liked or at least didn’t have beef with beyond their unfair advantages.

It seems odd to me to frame ‘bitching about your boss on your friend’s behalf to make her feel better’ as more similar to white entitlement/white privilege than any of that tbh? That’s just...being friends with someone?

Anyway I recognise that it’s not white entitlement to accept a job. Obviously it’s not, it’s just sensible under the circumstances, you get lucky and you grab it. For me my sense of Jon as white-because-of-this is not “he took a job he shouldn’t have taken,” it’s more about his obliviousness to the impact he has on others, and also primarily how people react to him. The interaction between Sasha and Tim is saturated with the of course it would be him I mentioned above, but even before that he walks through the world not expecting to have to think about anything but his conscious decisions, and he’s caught aback when people see him as out of place or as having power above his station.

I think it’s impossible to extricate ‘this is where my head was at’ from that interpretation, and also like obviously my own whiteness is a big factor. And not just my own personal whiteness but the place I grew up (which was 98.3% white) and the world which reflects back whiteness. So this is in no way intended as a bolshy This Is The Correct Headcanon the way my Bad Post was bc examining it I’m like...yeah I mean this is about how I personally interpreted this based on where I was at at the time. But I do feel like there’s some communication gap in what it is about this unqualified promotion thing that pinged me - it’s not that All Bosses Must Be White And All Brown People Must Be Downtrod, it’s something quite specific about the tone and tenor of the interactions around the getting-a-job.

But also? Idk. Kind of unrelatedly, and people obviously should feel free to disagree with me on this, it feels kind of off to frame this as defaulting to a white Jon? I sort of think that my idea of Jon as white is very much not ‘white until proven otherwise’ - part of the reason for my original strident tone was that I felt that I was being expected to drop a headcanon I had for specific reasons and default to the fanon version of Jon without actually having any reason other than ‘this is how the community thinks he should look,’ and without really understanding anything about what that means, and while obviously defaulting to a non-white headcanon isn’t like...entrenched in the way that defaulting to a white headcanon is, it does seem to me like this is perhaps part of why white fans slap brown skin onto a character without thinking into what that means or why they’re doing it.

The thing I’m struggling with as regards my personal headcanon here is that I could decide to only ever draw Jon as Fanon Jon, but it wouldn’t be because I had strong reasons to see him that way, it wouldn’t be the same as why you see Jon as brown, or why I see like...Melanie as Indian, it would literally be Default To Standard in a way it isn’t for you. And I don’t feel that I have Defaulted To Whiteness, or where I have it is for reasons specifically to do with Jon (I visualised Jon as white because I visualised him as Jonny, who is white), not because I think every character is White Until Proven Otherwise. Like, my reasons for understanding Jon as white may be bad reasons, but they are reasons, not post-hoc excuses (I can’t like...prove that. but I know it to be true at least on a conscious level). I didn’t go Oh Jon Is White Because Everyone Is Unless I Have Reason To Think They Aren’t, Hooray, Here Is A Post-Hoc Justification For Why It Isn’t Racist To Think That. So while I am totally on board with the idea that it may be shitty, harmful or poorly thought through to hc Jon as white, I’m not sure I can fully see it in myself as being default. But I do understand that that isn’t necessarily what came across in my original short post.

Honestly, the reason I took issue with Fanon Jon and Fanon Martin in such a bolshy way in the first place was that I didn’t get why these characters were universally seen as Asian and white, respectively, and had such strong and consistent fanon images, when none of the other characters did, and when I was seeing people drawing people like Sasha and Melanie and Tim as white way more when in my mind there was no reason to assume they were white. On an emotional level I guess I think either there’s Fanon As Lore, or there’s no fanon (and I prefer the latter) and my discomfort came from the place that the one character I absolutely saw as coded as white in the core cast had this one really specific Ambiguously Brown Fanon Look (which from what I’d seen at the time didn’t seem to be like...backed with anything or coming from any personal interpretation for most of the white fans I was seeing on like Twitter and Tumblr) but white headcanons are everywhere for characters like Melanie or Sasha or Georgie, who seemed to me to be unambiguously people of colour, or characters like Tim or Martin (who could perfectly reasonably be people of colour and who I hc as Rroma and biracial respectively)? I don’t know, it’s difficult to express, but I find it frustrating.

#tma #White Jon #idk sorry to post this so separate from the rest of the conversation I have been Busy

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septiembrre · 4 years ago

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GG Headcannons

Tagged by @sothischickshe. Thanks, boo ;-)

Ship: Beth x Rio -- in honor of our lovebirds day for GGWEEK2020

38. What is/are their love language(s)?

Haha, this has already made its way into one of my ficlets. I am also writing love languages into my next chapter of Better Be Mine. I can’t let it go!! I don’t actually care about them as tool for my irl relationship but it’s so easily identifiable for Brio. So my headcanons here...

Rio’s love languages:

Rio prefers to receive love through Quality Time.

Rio shows love through Physical Touch.

Beth’s love languages:

Beth prefers to receive love through Words of Affirmation.

Beth shows love through Acts of Service

49. Do they have differing political opinions?

Lol, @sothischickshe I can’t believe you tagged me in this!!!! Stop reading into the underlying vibes of Beth/Rio conversations in my fics!

So the short version of my response is: yes.

Now the absurdly long response:

I think about Rio & Beth a lot. I think about them talking about politicized issues quite a bit and imagine them in conversation with each other, teasing their beliefs apart. I like picturing these conversations instigated by hard parenting moments, things in the news, and things that come up as they finally start saying more words to each other. I think Rio could also just directly ask Beth about her political beliefs (I can’t necessarily picture the reverse yet).

I think Beth is definitely more conservative than Rio -- and that’s an assumption I make because Rio’s a Latinx guy who probably came up with lack of access to wealth, and Beth as a white woman in the suburbs who formerly perceived herself/her family as wealthy.

Beth’s characterization is complicated -- sometimes it really leans into Karen stereotypes/white woman privilege (lol, I cannot believe they literally had her show up at Gil’s workplace. I CRINGE!) and other times her beliefs and actions positively surprise me. Personally, in my fic writing, I love leaning into an idea that Beth grew up more working class/experienced neglect from her parents. I don’t want to romanticize these experiences but trauma around financial insecurity & complicated family relationships personally resonates with me. Ugh, I love writing about it, and it’s something that I read in her childhood that I like to lean into. That flashback in Season 2 really humanized Beth for me and it really made me love her.

Okay, that was a major digression about class, but her life experience must lend itself to her political beliefs. She married into a wealthier family -- a family that owned it’s own business, was financially stable and just... a family perpetuating all the harmful effects of white heterosexuality and problematic gendered labor. And she conformed to it! Beth diminished herself to make herself fit there, to find safety and stability, to feel worth. So, I think her politics as an adult are also “safe” and probably echo the popular moderate trends in normative, toxic parent groups. Honestly, irl as a queer WOC who is anti-capitalist and been forced to be political for my own self-preservation and preservation of folks I love, I would not seek out PTA Beth’s friendship for multiple reasons, but I still have such a soft spot for Beth as a character?

That being said, Beth in the context of Annie & Ruby is obviously a different Beth. She loosens up in these spaces, she speaks her mind much more freely and in these scenes she comes as a normal, relatable human and she’s funny and prim and awkward. I think she comes across as somewhat liberal but not particularly educated on the issues/progressive (as is the way most characters are characterized on network TV). In this vein, she throws around a lot of white privilege and because some of it has gone un-interrogated in the context of the show... I’m not sure how intentional these vibes are or if it’s just par the course of it being white-owned network TV. Obviously characters are allowed to make mistakes and do shitty things, but I wish there was more on-screen acknowledgement of race in the show, and more intentional naming of things. In regards to Ruby + Beth in particular, I feel like an American white woman can’t have a life-long/multi-decade friendship with a Black woman and not be intentional about acknowledging racism/the specific misogynoir that Black women face. But the show hasn’t really acknowledged this aspect of Ruby + Beth’s friendship...

*stares at the camera like I’m on The Office*

It would be such a rich opportunity to discuss the challenges of interracial friendship if done well. Also, what an opportunity to delve into what it’s like to maintain friendships across the years (um, it’s hard!!! Even with people you love so much! Tell us more about Beth & Ruby’s ups and downs!). Beth and Ruby care about each other so much. When they and Annie get friendship beats -- I cry! Just make it make more sense! If the show filled in these blanks, it would be so great. Beth is obviously awakening~ definitely so in regards to her gender and her power and it could shift her political opinions? The show definitely poked a little fun at her crime “wokeness” by having her push back on cultural appropriation with those other PTA parents. Just by the exposure of her own relationships, Beth has experience with the lack of American safety net, our terrible, impoverishing health-care system, and inaccessibility of higher education.

So, on one hand the show tries to do a thing where they equalize and don’t name race in the context of the three leads, “they’re three women”, but then they play on racial tropes with Beth and Rio’s relationship... I would like for their interracial relationship to be more overtly discussed/acknowledged outside of Rio’s somewhat performative call outs of Beth’s white lady fragility.

So anyway -- Rio’s politics. We don’t know a ton about Rio so we don’t have too much textual evidence to go off of. But, we do know that Rio picks at Beth’s facade of white women fragility all the time -- sometimes with more hostility and other times simply teasing. When I write him, I give him my own experiences of having to become well-versed discussing politicized issues by the default of growing up experiencing racism and xenophobia. Rio, like any Mexican-reading man, has probably been told to “go back to his country” throughout his life -- and I can’t imagine it not politicizing him... Though, conservative Latinx exist and constantly shock me with their assimilationist audacity. *stares at the camera like I’m on the office again* But, idk, it’s something about their characterization of him of being so worldly~~ I imagine him being informed and up-to-date on the American news. I want him throwing around his power and $$$ by donating to local, progressive candidates of color. But, this is all projection~ :-)

Ha, I feel like this was too critical of my forever otp (and on ship day to boot)!! And of Beth. The show has a habit of putting Beth through the physical and psychological wringer, and what I want instead is for our baby to be out of harm’s way, financially stable, divorced and independent, and also forced to interrogate the more harmful ways she deploys her whiteness. Lol, no one would watch my show. I know.

I love Beth & Rio. They thrill me. And like many others in the fandom, I often want to remove them from the GG canon and make them have harder/real/necessary conversations -- and generally converse about anything/everything because they barely do that on screen. I love the drama of their scenes, but my happy place is skipping a year ahead and building headcanons about what they could look like in actual relationship with each other... and one of these daydreams is Rio pushing Beth on her politics. I’m in an interracial relationship with a white woman myself -- and one of the things I love is endlessly discussing political issues and processing and growing together, and I like transplanting that to Brio in my fic perhaps too much, and it makes them OOC in my writing at times.

Okay!!! This got long again. Thanks for tangling with this if you’ve gotten this far. There were a lot of assertions up there and I’m happy to unpack something further (but, thats at your own risk y’know. Clearly I don’t know when to stop when it comes to writing these ridiculously long posts).

#beth x rio #my bbs #rants #ask memes

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theroguefeminist · 5 years ago

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I think a big thing stopping people accepting nuance in regards to the gendered socialization one picks up, is because so much of our theories about CIS gender dynamics can become very thorny and not as immediately satisfying if that happens. A very unambiguous socialization model seems super super baked into everything third wave feminism has to say.

The existence of trans ppl definitely throws a wrench into a lot of simpler frameworks for gender in society. That’s one reason terfs, who are 2nd wave feminists and even more behind, can’t stand trans ppl bc terfs can’t really reconcile their narrative about how being “female” can only be understood as an oppressed class you’re put into based on genitalia at birth and then imprisoned in due to socialization–and how abolishing these classes would solve patriarchy. Now suddenly you have ppl saying they identify as women despite being “socialized as male” and ppl saying they identify as men despite being “socialized as female”? That flies in the face of the framework. It starts to become clear that gender is more than a hierarchical class system rooted in power and oppression, but also has a component of identity and self-expression.

Fortunately, most of us have moved on from 2nd wave feminism. We have come to realize that gender is more than that. Most women and men don’t want to cease being women and men, and that desire isn’t necessarily incompatible with dismantling patriarchy or challenging gender norms.

Later strands of feminism take the identity and self-expression aspects of gender into account but tend to use clumsy attempts to reconcile the problems trans people bring up, i.e. disconnect between identifying as one gender but being treated as another, spending a large portion of your life living as one gender and another portion of your life living as another, being treated as one gender in some instances and another gender in different instances, opting to live as one gender despite years of being “raised” as another, being unable to identify or tell everyone’s gender by their behavior and appearance, identifying as /neither/ male or female, etc.

The fact that gender involves coercive socialization is not something any of us trans people would deny: we are the first to point out how we are all forcibly assigned a gender at birth and raised according to the strictures of that gender. In fact, our experience is even more painfully at odds with that gender assignment than the average cisgender person. Which is why most (non-feminist) cis people’s first objections to trans people are that we’re trying to say gender isn’t biological or innate but socially constructed and we’re all being pushed to play narrowly defined roles. The average person has to reconcile a completely uncritical understanding of gender as innate when presented with exceptions that prove the rule. Most cis people balk at this and just try to deny our existence in response.

Feminists on the other hand ALREADY KNOW gender is socially constructed. I think this is why SOME cis feminists are more readily able to absorb trans people into their worldview. After all: gender is socially constructed, it’s forced on all of us, and being gender nonconforming can be seen as a form of rebellion. HOWEVER, even the most well-meaning, trans-positive cis feminism will find points of conflict with trans existence. Like you say, that the explanations reliably model CIS gender dynamics and experience but not trans ones. Unfortunately, a lot of feminist critique of male power/privilege and female oppression rely on the very gender binary system that, in mainstream patriarchal society, situates male and female at opposite, mutually exclusive poles.

We know to critique the gender binary of course. We know it’s “bad” or at the very least incomplete, but beyond an elucidation into restrictive gender norms that keep women down or further men’s toxic behavior, no feminist framework truly escapes the binary. We still talk in terms of men versus women, male and female socialization, etc. I’m not saying this is wrong per se when you consider that, in many circumstances this framework actually is correct. You can probably compare most mainstream current feminist thought to Newtonian physics: it’s a perfectly accurate model in the limited scope it was used to model phenomena. In fact, to do away with it would be a mistake.

And I guess that’s what I mean about trying to reconcile anything being next to impossible because I would say the trans model, like the Einsteinian model, is looking at things with a different lens. Using a lens that includes the phenomena of trans experience we see gender differently–and dynamics do not follow the predictions we would make with the cis feminist model. But I would say that like the Einsteinian model, the trans lens does reveal things the cis feminist model left out and see the original phenomena we measured in a different light. If someone accepts that gender is an identity, and not just a mode of oppression or power, that may change how someone approaches feminism and liberation, particularly in terms of how their actions and words might impact trans people.

One problem is we do not deal very honestly or thoroughly with this issue. We sidestep the conflicts that arise–the ways in which trans existence challenges cis feminism–for a variety of reasons, I think partially in the name of solidarity, partially because we fear minimizing/enabling/obfuscating the very real system of patriarchal power or, on the other hand, excluding or hurting trans people from the conversation by acknowledging the conflict. I think our constant quest for solidarity and intersectionality–for a wholeness of theory–has forced us to collapse the complexity of this issue. But the feminist lens and trans lens are different lenses, and that needs to be acknowledged sooner rather than later.

#feminism #transgender #trans #gender #zablorg #gender socialization

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thesmithadventure · 7 years ago

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ENG 277: Postcolonial Women Writers with Prof. Hai

My favourite class by far this semester was my Literature class, Postcolonial Women Writers. Although I have been sure about majoring in English since before I started Smith, I’m still pretty unclear about what type of literature interests me most - am I a Victorian novel type of girl, or more of a contemporary poetry person? This class was a way for me to step out of my academic comfort zone a little, and so I thought I’d tell you about why that was so and why it was so, so worthwhile.

WHY I PICKED THE CLASS

I was drawn to this class for a number of reasons. Most importantly, the English department requires majors to take a class with a “focus on the global/racial as a central category of analysis,” and postcolonial literature is definitely situated in this category. However, it appealed to me more than the other classes with this focus because it was a completely new field to me. Knowing more about the history and effects of colonialism has become a priority for me with regards to what classes I take: having grown up and completed my secondary education in the UK, I previously knew very little about how imperialism shapes the modern world. And since I had heard great things about the professor, I decided to try the class out during the add/drop period.

THE WORKLOAD

The class was split into 5 novels and a couple of short stories, meaning that we spent a little over a week on each author. The books varied in setting, length, and themes, but all connected to postcolonialism and gender in unique and super interesting ways. Here’s the reading list in full:

The Joys of Motherhood - Buchi Emecheta Sunlight on a Broken Column - Attia Hosain Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (easily my favourite read of the semester! Such a heartbreakingly beautiful book) The Space Between Us - Thrity Umrigar White Teeth - Zadie Smith

We had a paper due after finishing every 2 books, and the prompt allowed us to either choose between 2 authors or compare both (for example, the first assignment was a paper on either Emecheta or Hossain or a comparison of their themes/characters/etc). Each paper was 6-7 pages and could be on any aspect of the novel we found interesting, as long as it related to postcolonialism. Although writing papers can sometimes feel like pulling teeth for me, I wrote a really cool essay about the role metafiction played in empowering characters with different oppressed or privileged identities, which was a really great opportunity for me to explore a theme we didn’t get to discuss fully in class.

We also had to write a Moodle post (a short, informal piece of writing posted on a class forum) on something we found interesting about each story. These posts allowed the class to see what everyone else was thinking about, and therefore allowed the discussion to continue outside of class as we learned from each others’ perspectives.

WHAT I LOVED

This class changed my worldview in so many ways. As someone interested in both literature and the social sciences, I appreciated a new perspective on how social structures manifest and intersect - to paraphrase my professor, turns out everything leads back to patriarchy and capitalism in often complicated and unexpected ways. In addition, I loved how discussion-based this class was, especially given that it was made up of both majors and non majors; everyone was able to bring their own experiences and ideas, which made for interesting and enlightening conversations about the books, their authors, and the context in which they were written.

My favourite thing about the English department is that there is so much opportunity to explore different types of literature. When I started working towards the English major, I expected to spend a lot of time reading the ‘big names’: Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and countless other dead white dudes. However, Smith does a great job of highlighting the importance of authors who have traditionally been excluded from the literary canon such as women and writers of colour.

In short: this class allowed me to read a bunch of really fun novels while learning more about literary analysis, history, and oppressive social structures. My writing has improved, I am more confident participating in class discussions, and I have a much deeper understanding of how the world works. I’d recommend this class to anyone, regardless of major.

#smith college #smithbysmithies #english major #postcolonial literature #international student #academics

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pedagrouchy · 4 years ago

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Week Four: Canonicity

Othello, William Shakespeare, 1604

1. Canonicity: Why do you think this text is considered to be part of the canon? Who benefits or gets marginalized from an inclusion of this text in the curriculum?

Well, it’s Shakespeare, for the obvious thing. I guess pragmatically speaking that’s not a sure factor -- you don’t see Troilus and Cressida on too many high school reading lists -- but as authors go, he’s about as canonical as it gets. More importantly, maybe, is that it’s one of the four “major” tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello), which kind of puts it in a second, nested canon within the first one. Not being a student of Shakespeare historiography, I can’t tell you exactly how either of those canons came to be. I’m enough of a sell-out to the old guard to say that it probably has something to do with Shakespeare in general, and those plays in particular, being really, really good. But excellence doesn’t guarantee immortality, and I recognize that historical forces have been at work on the perception of Shakespeare for four long centuries.

As for who benefits or gets marginalized... that’s a tough question. And it seems like it depends how it’s taught, right? If you held it up as some abstractly, metaphysically great work of WESTERN LITERATURE, then surely the Harold Blooms of the world benefit from the lasting cultural capital. In that case, it seems likely that anyone who didn’t like it, or didn’t understand it, would feel marginalized. But if you taught it in its own context, as a created thing with particular flaws and virtues, subject to the same individual judgments as any work of art, then I’d like to think most people would either take something valuable from it or feel accepted in their decision not to.

2. Contexts: What version of a given historical period does this text tell? How would the narrative differ if someone from a different race, gender identity, ethnicity, or class wrote it?

Well, again, not being an expert on Elizabethan England, there’s not too much I can say about the relationship between the play and the reality it portrays. It certainly suggests interesting things, like that Black men could serve as generals in the Venetian army, but I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions without better historical footing.

The second question seems just as hard: we certainly can’t claim knowledge of Shakespeare’s gender identity, and his class seems like a (somewhat) open question. As for what it would look like had it been written by someone of another race, while it’s a rich problem, it seems like a hard one to solve solidly regarding an era that a) predates so many of our more familiar racial constructions and b) offers so few English examples of non-White writing that we might hold up in comparison.

3. Literary Elements: What cultural knowledge would someone have to have in order to understand the literary elements (symbols, theme, characterization, etc.) of this text? If the text includes minority characters, are these characters complex or stereotypical?

Someone would certainly need some knowledge of Elizabethan culture and idiom (the stained bed-sheets come to mind, as do all the references to horns), but I feel like that’s knowledge that has to be built from the ground up for anybody, these days. Maybe students from wealthier or more classically-educated backgrounds would have more of that building done by the time they came to class, but it would still be a matter of who’s spent the most time studying the material. Nobody gets a leg up because they come from a family that speaks Elizabethan English at home. I hope.

And minority characters -- ay, there’s the rub. Because traditionally, and in the view of the canon itself, Othello is a prototypically complex hero -- all the tragic ones are. I certainly agree that it’s hard to read (let alone see) the play without getting a sense of his deep and troubled personhood, but I’m not sure that’s a complete answer to the question. What I’d want to ask, more than anything, is whether a character can at the same time contain human complexities and racial simplicities -- whether he can be real as a man, or as a person, but stereotypical as a Black man, or a Black person. Yet even here, it seems like so much cultural context is required. Othello might fit some of our standards of racist stereotype (most notably in his passion-killing of the White, “pure” Desdemona), but we still have to ask how those standards have changed since 1604, and, for that matter, how those standards operate and are commented on in the play as a whole. I can’t answer those questions, but I would sure pose them to a class.

4. Teacher/Reader: How does your own identity, ability, sexual orientation, age, religion, socioeconomic status, race, etc. shape your reading of this text? In other words, how does your own positionality/privilege affect your perception of this text's value?

Tricky question. As a White man, and a White man in an English major, I’m probably propped up in my love of Shakespeare by all sorts of unstated and vaguely sinister forces. If there is such a thing, I’m definitely the type of person who’s “supposed” to like Shakespeare. Most of the people walking around rambling about his genius look like me, and talk like me, and maybe more importantly look and talk like my dad, and my dad’s friends. Shakespeare is an accepted part of a world that I’m also, more or less, an accepted part of. And so that will taint any statement I might ever make about how just obviously good and fun and moving his work is.

But then, I feel like this question is made a lot more interesting by how old Shakespeare is. He’s had time to get claimed, in a pretty deep way, by cultures and cliques he could never have anticipated, and that possibly he wouldn’t have belonged to. I think there’s value in the approach of taking Shakespeare as this monolithic, culturally-created figure to be pushed back against and deconstructed. But I also think there’s a kind of rebellious value in trying to strip away those accreted layers of critical snobbery, and to find beneath them the great, imperfect work of a funny, thoughtful guy writing plays for the common people. Probably, hopefully, a teacher can do both.

5. Assessments: Would a summative assessment on this text allow students to think about ways to enact social change beyond the classroom? Would it allow them to move past the four corners of the text and even a personal connection with the text to understand how this text has greater significance to current issues and events?

This is a little bit of a tangent, but I was thinking about this yesterday, and I had the idea that what I resent about that CCSS standard is less the suggestion that students “stay” in the text than the suggestion that any text has only four corners. In my ideal world, any text worth studying is worth studying because it’s expansive enough to contain our world, in the same way that our world contains it. So rather than treat it as a static object, to spend some time in and then compare to the dynamic world around it, my hope is that students could treat any text -- Othello especially -- as a thing that already is about the world around them.

And if I can get that point across, it seems like options abound. Because Othello already is about justice, and race, and White perceptions of Black feeling, and violent structures, and jealousy about the body, and domestic violence, and hyper-masculine blindness, and on and on. I’ve only ever gotten to see one professionally-produced Shakespeare play, and it was this one, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2019. Iago was cast and dressed as the spitting image of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and I don’t think a single person left that theater imagining Othello as anything less than searingly contemporary. I hope that a good teaching of this play, and a good summative assessment, would do the same thing -- and make any conversation about its “greater significance to current issues and events” sound understated.

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p-j-edagogy · 4 years ago

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Week 4: Critical Literacy and the Canon

I am once again here to talk about The Great Gatsby ... which should not be too much of a surprise to anyone who has heard me bring it up on several occasions during the last two quarters.

The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in 1925.

1. Canonicity: Why do you think this text is considered to be part of the canon? Who benefits or gets marginalized from an inclusion of this text in the curriculum?

I think that this text remains a key part of the canon because I would be lying if I failed to admit that it does a really careful job of weaving together a variety of key messages about greed, wealth, obsession, and (of course) the American Dream. It starts conversations about themes that were relevant during publication and have remained important throughout the last almost 100 years, at least for white people in the US. The core characters are all white, fairly wealthy and living the luxurious lives that we are told is the goal.

2. Contexts: What version of a given historical period does this text tell? How would the narrative differ if someone from a different race, gender identity, ethnicity, or class wrote it?

This is the Roaring 20s novel. It paints the picture of a life of luxury, parting, reckless spending, and yearning after people that we can’t have, I mean, that was the life that people wanted to be living and that is the story that we are fed about the time period. We’re going to completely ignore issues of segregation (did you know that lynching wasn’t yet illegal in 1925?), (white) women having only gained the right to vote in 1920, the completely silencing of the LGBTQ+ community, and the forgotten voices of anyone who wasn’t white, male, wealthy, and educated. The Great Gatsby would not be The Great Gatsby if it hadn’t been written by Fitzgerald because just about anyone else would have perhaps paid the slightest bit more attention to the social issues that plagued the nation in the 20s.

There is a lot of color symbolism within the text that requires a Western understanding of colors and things that they tend to represent. The main one that comes to mind is the use of white as a symbol for purity and innocence, especially when paired with the women in the text. That aside, much of the understanding of the story and the themes within it require and understanding of American ideals and the narrative of the American Dream which are both things that a reader who is not American may not fully understand without being provided those extra pieces of information. In terms of the second question, I can’t think of a single character who isn’t white ... not that I remember at least.

As a skinny blonde girl, I can only dream of having as much power over a man as Daisy has over Gatsby. That being said, I definitely enjoy the novel more because I am able to see the flaws in the characters in the same way that I would see them in myself. This is a strange luxury, but not a luxury afforded by people whose identities differ from my own. As an angry little socialist, I am able to see the critique of hoarding wealth and having your life driven by the pursuit of money. Once again, a luxury not afforded by those who don’t have knowledge of these sorts of system of power. Instead of feeling excluded by the text on the very basis of its parts, I am excluded from the text for the reasons that it wants me to feel excluded. I’m not sure if that makes sense exactly, but it works in my head.

I think that a lot of the modern theories about this text are what make it so wonderful for a critical approach. It might be because I spent a year doing just that and exploring why everyone hates Daisy and explaining how we definitely shouldn’t hate her for the reasons that we do. But there are rich theories regarding Nick and Gatsby’s relationship and the homoerotic subtext that exists surrounding them. I’ve also recently discovered a world of theories about Gatsby’s race/ethnicity and reading the text through the lens of him hiding his ethnicity and being white-passing. I’m not entirely sure how much I buy into all of the theories, but there is scholarship out there that explores these ideas.

Having student choose a specific critical approach (feminist, Marxist, etc.) and exploring a key scene or character through that lens could lead to rich thought about how both people and literature can exist in ways that we may not understand on out first glance. I don’t think that the characters within the novel need to have their actions justified, most of them suck and I hate them, but having students approach a text that they have likely already been exposed to through a lens that they may not expect can lead to rich critical thinking and discussion that gives them tools to explore the world around them.

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bennettmarko · 4 years ago

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Fiction and Identity Politics

I hate to disappoint you folks, but unless we stretch the topic to breaking point this address will not be about “community and belonging.” In fact, you have to hand it to this festival’s organisers: inviting a renowned iconoclast to speak about “community and belonging” is like expecting a great white shark to balance a beach ball on its nose. The topic I had submitted instead was “fiction and identity politics,” which may sound on its face equally dreary.

But I’m afraid the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around “identity politics” has got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are “allowed” to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.

Let’s start with a tempest-in-a-teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which—the horror— numerous partygoers wore. When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.”

The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with “all the students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and demanded that administrators “create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.” The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that “creates an environment where students of colour, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” In sum, the party-favour hats constituted – wait for it – “cultural appropriation.”

Curiously, across my country Mexican restaurants, often owned and run by Mexicans, are festooned with sombreros – if perhaps not for long. At the UK’s University of East Anglia, the student union has banned a Mexican restaurant from giving out sombreros, deemed once more an act of “cultural appropriation” that was also racist.

Now, I am a little at a loss to explain what’s so insulting about a sombrero – a practical piece of headgear for a hot climate that keeps out the sun with a wide brim. My parents went to Mexico when I was small, and brought a sombrero back from their travels, the better for my brothers and I to unashamedly appropriate the souvenir to play dress-up. For my part, as a German-American on both sides, I’m more than happy for anyone who doesn’t share my genetic pedigree to don a Tyrolean hat, pull on some leiderhosen, pour themselves a weisbier, and belt out the Hoffbrauhaus Song.

But what does this have to do with writing fiction? The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.

In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things, that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: look-but-don’t-touch. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.

Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesn’t belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. We wouldn’t have most of Graham Greene’s novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.

In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginal’s voice – though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.

We wouldn’t have Maria McCann’s erotic masterpiece, As Meat Loves Salt – in which a straight woman writes about gay men in the English Civil War. Though the book is nonfiction, it’s worth noting that we also wouldn’t have 1961’s Black Like Me, for which John Howard Griffin committed the now unpardonable sin of “blackface.” Having his skin darkened – Michael Jackson in reverse – Griffin found out what it was like to live as a black man in the segregated American South. He’d be excoriated today, yet that book made a powerful social impact at the time.

The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

What strikes me about that definition is that “without permission” bit. However are we fiction writers to seek “permission” to use a character from another race or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we don’t belong? Do we set up a stand on the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter Twelve, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot? I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.

But this latest and little absurd no-no is part of a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.

So far, the majority of these farcical cases of “appropriation” have concentrated on fashion, dance, and music: At the American Music Awards 2013, Katy Perry got it in the neck for dressing like a geisha. According to the Arab-American writer Randa Jarrar, for someone like me to practice belly dancing is “white appropriation of Eastern dance,” while according to the Daily Beast Iggy Azalea committed “cultural crimes” by imitating African rap and speaking in a “blaccent.”

The felony of cultural sticky fingers even extends to exercise: at the University of Ottawa in Canada, a yoga teacher was shamed into suspending her class, “because yoga originally comes from India.” She offered to re-title the course, “Mindful Stretching.” And get this: the purism has also reached the world of food. Supported by no less than Lena Dunham, students at Oberlin College in Ohio have protested “culturally appropriated food” like sushi in their dining hall (lucky cusses— in my day, we never had sushi in our dining hall), whose inauthenticity is “insensitive” to the Japanese.

Seriously, we have people questioning whether it’s appropriate for white people to eat pad Thai. Turnabout, then: I guess that means that as a native of North Carolina, I can ban the Thais from eating barbecue. (I bet they’d swap.) This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you. Because who is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? Who is a professional kidnapper? Who swipes every sight, smell, sensation, or overheard conversation like a kid in a candy store, and sometimes take notes the better to purloin whole worlds? Who is the premier pickpocket of the arts? The fiction writer, that’s who.

This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best. When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.

As for the culture police’s obsession with “authenticity,” fiction is inherently inauthentic. It’s fake. It’s self-confessedly fake; that is the nature of the form, which is about people who don’t exist and events that didn’t happen. The name of the game is not whether your novel honours reality; it’s all about what you can get away with.

In his 2009 novel Little Bee, Chris Cleave, who as it happens is participating in this festival, dared to write from the point of view of a 14-year-old Nigerian girl, though he is male, white, and British. I’ll remain neutral on whether he “got away with it” in literary terms, because I haven’t read the book yet.

But in principle, I admire his courage – if only because he invited this kind of ethical forensics in a review out of San Francisco: “When a white male author writes as a young Nigerian girl, is it an act of empathy, or identity theft?” the reviewer asked. “When an author pretends to be someone he is not, he does it to tell a story outside of his own experiential range. But he has to in turn be careful that he is representing his characters, not using them for his plot.” Hold it. OK, he’s necessarily “representing” his characters, by portraying them on the page. But of course he’s using them for his plot! How could he not? They are his characters, to be manipulated at his whim, to fulfill whatever purpose he cares to put them to.

This same reviewer recapitulated Cleave’s obligation “to show that he’s representing [the girl], rather than exploiting her.” Again, a false dichotomy. Of course he’s exploiting her. It’s his book, and he made her up. The character is his creature, to be exploited up a storm. Yet the reviewer chides that “special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell” and worries that “Cleave pushes his own boundaries maybe further than they were meant to go.”

What stories are “implicitly ours to tell,” and what boundaries around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? I would argue that any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.

I’m hoping that crime writers, for example, don’t all have personal experience of committing murder. Me, I’ve depicted a high school killing spree, and I hate to break it to you: I’ve never shot fatal arrows through seven kids, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker, either. We make things up, we chance our arms, sometimes we do a little research, but in the end it’s still about what we can get away with – what we can put over on our readers.

Because the ultimate endpoint of keeping out mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction. Someone like me only permits herself to write from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with bad knees, skint for years but finally able to buy the odd new shirt. All that’s left is memoir.

And here’s the bugbear, here’s where we really can’t win. At the same time that we’re to write about only the few toys that landed in our playpen, we’re also upbraided for failing to portray in our fiction a population that is sufficiently various.

My most recent novel The Mandibles was taken to task by one reviewer for addressing an America that is “straight and white”. It happens that this is a multigenerational family saga – about a white family. I wasn’t instinctively inclined to insert a transvestite or bisexual, with issues that might distract from my central subject matter of apocalyptic economics. Yet the implication of this criticism is that we novelists need to plug in representatives of a variety of groups in our cast of characters, as if filling out the entering class of freshmen at a university with strict diversity requirements.

You do indeed see just this brand of tokenism in television. There was a point in the latter 1990s at which suddenly every sitcom and drama in sight had to have a gay or lesbian character or couple. That was good news as a voucher of the success of the gay rights movement, but it still grew a bit tiresome: look at us, our show is so hip, one of the characters is homosexual!

We’re now going through the same fashionable exercise in relation to the transgender characters in series like Transparent and Orange is the New Black. Fine. But I still would like to reserve the right as a novelist to use only the characters that pertain to my story.

Besides: which is it to be? We have to tend our own gardens, and only write about ourselves or people just like us because we mustn’t pilfer others’ experience, or we have to people our cast like an I’d like to teach the world to sing Coca-Cola advert?

For it can be dangerous these days to go the diversity route. Especially since there seems to be a consensus on the notion that San Francisco reviewer put forward that “special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell.”

In The Mandibles, I have one secondary character, Luella, who’s black. She’s married to a more central character, Douglas, the Mandible family’s 97-year-old patriarch. I reasoned that Douglas, a liberal New Yorker, would credibly have left his wife for a beautiful, stately African American because arm candy of color would reflect well on him in his circle, and keep his progressive kids’ objections to a minimum. But in the end the joke is on Douglas, because Luella suffers from early onset dementia, while his ex-wife, staunchly of sound mind, ends up running a charity for dementia research. As the novel reaches its climax and the family is reduced to the street, they’re obliged to put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash, to keep her from wandering off.

Behold, the reviewer in the Washington Post, who groundlessly accused this book of being “racist” because it doesn’t toe a strict Democratic Party line in its political outlook, described the scene thus: “The Mandibles are white. Luella, the single African American in the family, arrives in Brooklyn incontinent and demented. She needs to be physically restrained. As their fortunes become ever more dire and the family assembles for a perilous trek through the streets of lawless New York, she’s held at the end of a leash. If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.”

Your author, by implication, yearns to bring back slavery.

Thus in the world of identity politics, fiction writers better be careful. If we do choose to import representatives of protected groups, special rules apply. If a character happens to be black, they have to be treated with kid gloves, and never be placed in scenes that, taken out of context, might seem disrespectful. But that’s no way to write. The burden is too great, the self-examination paralysing. The natural result of that kind of criticism in the Post is that next time I don’t use any black characters, lest they do or say anything that is short of perfectly admirable and lovely.

In fact, I’m reminded of a letter I received in relation to my seventh novel from an Armenian-American who objected – why did I have to make the narrator of We Need to Talk About Kevin Armenian? He didn’t like my narrator, and felt that her ethnicity disparaged his community. I took pains to explain that I knew something about Armenian heritage, because my best friend in the States was Armenian, and I also thought there was something dark and aggrieved in the culture of the Armenian diaspora that was atmospherically germane to that book. Besides, I despaired, everyone in the US has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something!

Especially for writers from traditionally privileged demographics, the message seems to be that it’s a whole lot safer just to make all your characters from that same demographic, so you can be as hard on them as you care to be, and do with them what you like. Availing yourself of a diverse cast, you are not free; you have inadvertently invited a host of regulations upon your head, as if just having joined the EU. Use different races, ethnicities, and minority gender identities, and you are being watched.

I confess that this climate of scrutiny has got under my skin. When I was first starting out as a novelist, I didn’t hesitate to write black characters, for example, or to avail myself of black dialects, for which, having grown up in the American South, I had a pretty good ear. I am now much more anxious about depicting characters of different races, and accents make me nervous.

In describing a second-generation Mexican American who’s married to one of my main characters in The Mandibles, I took care to write his dialogue in standard American English, to specify that he spoke without an accent, and to explain that he only dropped Spanish expressions tongue-in-cheek. I would certainly think twice – more than twice – about ever writing a whole novel, or even a goodly chunk of one, from the perspective of a character whose race is different from my own – because I may sell myself as an iconoclast, but I’m as anxious as the next person about attracting vitriol. But I think that’s a loss. I think that indicates a contraction of my fictional universe that is not good for the books, and not good for my soul.

Writing under the pseudonym Edward Schlosser on Vox, the author of the essay “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Scare Me” describes higher education’s “current climate of fear” and its “heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity” – and I am concerned that this touchy ethos, in which offendedness is used as a weapon, has spread far beyond academia, in part thanks to social media.

Why, it’s largely in order to keep from losing my fictional mojo that I stay off Facebook and Twitter, which could surely install an instinctive self-censorship out of fear of attack. Ten years ago, I gave the opening address of this same festival, in which I maintained that fiction writers have a vested interest in protecting everyone’s right to offend others – because if hurting someone else’s feelings even inadvertently is sufficient justification for muzzling, there will always be someone out there who is miffed by what you say, and freedom of speech is dead. With the rise of identity politics, which privileges a subjective sense of injury as actionable basis for prosecution, that is a battle that in the decade since I last spoke in Brisbane we’ve been losing.

Worse: the left’s embrace of gotcha hypersensitivity inevitably invites backlash. Donald Trump appeals to people who have had it up to their eyeballs with being told what they can and cannot say. Pushing back against a mainstream culture of speak-no-evil suppression, they lash out in defiance, and then what they say is pretty appalling.

Regarding identity politics, what’s especially saddened me in my recent career is a trend toward rejecting the advocacy of anyone who does not belong to the group. In 2013, I published Big Brother, a novel that grew out of my loss of my own older brother, who in 2009 died from the complications of morbid obesity. I was moved to write the book not only from grief, but also sympathy: in the years before his death, as my brother grew heavier, I saw how dreadfully other people treated him – how he would be seated off in a corner of a restaurant, how the staff would roll their eyes at each other after he’d ordered, though he hadn’t requested more food than anyone else.

I was wildly impatient with the way we assess people’s characters these days in accordance with their weight, and tried to get on the page my dismay at how much energy people waste on this matter, sometimes anguishing for years over a few excess pounds. Both author and book were on the side of the angels, or so you would think.

But in my events to promote Big Brother, I started to notice a pattern. Most of the people buying the book in the signing queue were thin. Especially in the US, fat is now one of those issues where you either have to be one of us, or you’re the enemy. I verified this when I had a long email correspondence with a “Healthy at Any Size” activist, who was incensed by the novel, which she hadn’t even read. Which she refused to read. No amount of explaining that the novel was on her side, that it was a book that was terribly pained by the way heavy people are treated and how unfairly they are judged, could overcome the scrawny author’s photo on the flap.

She and her colleagues in the fat rights movement did not want my advocacy. I could not weigh in on this material because I did not belong to the club. I found this an artistic, political, and even commercial disappointment – because in the US and the UK, if only skinny-minnies will buy your book, you’ve evaporated the pool of prospective consumers to a puddle.

I worry that the clamorous world of identity politics is also undermining the very causes its activists claim to back. As a fiction writer, yeah, I do sometimes deem my narrator an Armenian. But that’s only by way of a start. Merely being Armenian is not to have a character as I understand the word.

Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived. I reviewed a novel recently that I had regretfully to give a thumbs-down, though it was terribly well intended; its heart was in the right place. But in relating the Chinese immigrant experience in America, the author put forward characters that were mostly Chinese. That is, that’s sort of all they were: Chinese. Which isn’t enough.

I made this same point in relation to gender in Melbourne last week: both as writers and as people, we should be seeking to push beyond the constraining categories into which we have been arbitrarily dropped by birth. If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.

The reading and writing of fiction is obviously driven in part by a desire to look inward, to be self-examining, reflective. But the form is also born of a desperation to break free of the claustrophobia of our own experience. The spirit of good fiction is one of exploration, generosity, curiosity, audacity, and compassion. Writing during the day and reading when I go to bed at night, I find it an enormous relief to escape the confines of my own head. Even if novels and short stories only do so by creating an illusion, fiction helps to fell the exasperating barriers between us, and for a short while allows us to behold the astonishing reality of other people.

The last thing we fiction writers need is restrictions on what belongs to us. In a recent interview, our colleague Chris Cleave conceded, “Do I as an Englishman have any right to write a story of a Nigerian woman? … I completely sympathise with the people who say I have no right to do this. My only excuse is that I do it well.”

Which brings us to my final point. We do not all do it well. So it’s more than possible that we write from the perspective of a one-legged lesbian from Afghanistan and fall flat on our arses. We don’t get the dialogue right, and for insertions of expressions in Pashto we depend on Google Translate. Halfway through the novel, suddenly the protagonist has lost the right leg instead of the left one. Our idea of lesbian sex is drawn from wooden internet porn. Efforts to persuasively enter the lives of others very different from us may fail: that’s a given. But maybe rather than having our heads taken off, we should get a few points for trying. After all, most fiction sucks. Most writing sucks. Most things that people make of any sort suck. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make anything.

The answer is that modern cliché: to keep trying to fail better. Anything but be obliged to designate my every character an ageing five-foot-two smartass, and having to set every novel in North Carolina.

We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats – including sombreros.

This is the full transcript of the keynote speech, Fiction and Identity Politics, Lionel Shriver gave at the Brisbane Writers Festival on 8 September.

#censorship #free speech

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kashif1550 · 5 years ago

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Post 3 - Multicultural America

1.What is the subject of your film, program, or internet/social media selection? Provide a brief summary, describing your selection and how it relates to our course topics, readings, and screenings.

For the site I picked, I used the root dot com because I wanted to find a way to discuss white-passing and also how it’s changing. Initially, I was going to do that by introducing the 1950s movie, Imitation of Life, for my post about films. Both the remake and original, though, give off a white person’s narration of what it’s like to be a white-passing individual, similar to how Gone with the wind is a white supremacist view of how slavery in the south was like.

(The way the slaves were depicted is far from reality, making it uncomfortable to watch at times when they portray the mammy character.)

In short, it sugar-coats the trauma, glossing over the true pains that black people faced when navigating their world—and for that reason, I avoided it.

Before I dive into the article about white passing, let us review what “passing” is first. Passing can be used in more ways than just race. For someone to pass, it means to be perceived as something they aren’t. When it comes to the topic of race, white passing is when someone passes as white, but in actuality have a mixed-race background. Throughout US history, African Americans have passed as white as a means of survival, understanding that there life would be at risk if the truth was told about their parent’s racial background. Society was closed off for non-whites; the best schools, best towns, best jobs were in the segregated white side of town.

For someone of mixed-race heritage to venture into those areas safely, they would have to embrace only one side and play into the image of what they wanted others to see when they looked at them. Because, at the end of the day, the system of how race operates is based on perception.

Still, to this day, people have to put up an inaccurate front, maybe even lie about their real name, to secure a job. Race-based implicate bias in workplaces has led to research being brought to the public’s attention due to how serious the issue has gotten throughout the years.

Looking at a study conducted by Princeton professors, Paul von Zielbauer, of New York Times, discusses how race plays a big factor—despite having problems with law enforcement. White men with a criminal conviction get just as much, if not more, job offers than an African-American man with nothing on his record.

“White men with prison records receive far more offers for entry-level jobs in New York City than black men with identical records, and are offered jobs just as often—if not more so—than black men who have never been arrested, according to a new study by two Princeton professors.” (Zielbauer, 2005)

Decades past The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by MLK Jr., African American men are still hindered at entry-level jobs. People tend to push the blame on minorities, stating that the problem lies that, however, that can’t be the case when the entire system of race was built on injustice. The system cannot be deemed broke if it is doing what it was meant to do, discourage darker skinned people from providing for themselves and achieving upward mobility.

And that, sadly, leads us to why white-passing was so prevalent after slavery and into the 20th century. It was not because these individuals wanted to, but because they had to. Connecting this back to the reading, I think back to Peggy Mclntosh’s piece on white privilege.

She says, “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cash in each day, but about what I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes tools, and blank checks. Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable.” (Mclntosh, 1989)

As Mclntosh stated, white privilege is ‘unearned assets’ given to you on the bases of your skin, not your skills. Continuously, we see people try and paint minorities as the ones that caused this curse of bad fortune, dismissing the existence of white privilege entirely in the process. Even more childish than that, people demand the end of affirmative actions as though the playing field has been set leveled for everyone. It isn’t, and to say it has is a clear slap to the face of every disadvantaged black and brown person who lives in this country.

2. Referring to related and appropriate readings and screenings from the course, describe how your selection represents racial and ethnic identities (and if applicable, intersectionality). In what ways does your selection for each of the journal entries generate a conversation regarding race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity?

The way my selection has represented racial identity is through the lens of the one-drop rule. Through Henry Louis Gates Jr. article titled “How Many ‘White’ People Are Passing?’ he discusses how the roles are beginning to show what was the aftermath of the one-drop rule.

When talking about the fallout of such a law, it iscreated a precedence of people ignoring the existence of their white parent in order to box that person in to a ‘colored only’ section. For the piece I picked, it creates a conversation by questioning about how often that rule wasn’t used and how it created an unneeded divided.

“‘Bryc found that about 4 percent of whites have at least 1 percent or more of African ancestry […] “the percentage indicates that an individual with at least 1 percent African ancestry had an African ancestor within the last six generations, or in the last 200 years. This data also suggests that individuals with mixed parentage at some point were absorbed into the white population,’ which is a very polite way of saying that they ‘passed.’” (Gates, 2011)

However, when you compare that to African Americans, the percentage is far more staggering, showing that people who looked “white enough” wasn’t always the case for mixed-race people. Shockingly enough, it is stated that: “research shows that the average African American has a whopping 24 percent of European ancestry.” (Gates, 2011)

24?! That’s means, unlike with white people, African American’s bloodline had someone fully white not as far back. Many people of mixed-race background submerged themselves in to the African American community, as well as the obvious underlining effects of sexual assault of enslaved black women. The article gets even more interesting when they dive into where the hidden ancestry might show up more, showing that whites living in the south had a higher chance of having unknown African DNA.

“In South Carolina at least 13 percent of self-identified whites have 1 percent or more African ancestry, while in Louisiana the number is a little more than 12 percent. In Georgia and Alabama the number is about 9 percent. The differences perhaps point to different social and cultural histories within the south.” (Gates, 2011)

It begs to ask the question how many people are unaware of their own identity due to the fear of the past, having grandparents who lied about their linage in order to get a better life for their offspring.

3.How does your selection relate to the course readings, screenings and discussions? Reflect upon the representation and circulation of racial and ethnic identities in popular visual culture. Your reflections should be attentive to the intersectionalities of race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, socioeconomic class and gender.

When it comes to the popular visual culture and “white passing” the stories are definitely there. At the turn of the century, literature had a bit of an obsession of the concept of “passing” as white. The novel like “Passing”, “Imitation of Life” and other tales followed ambiguous African-Americans. The novel “Invisible Man” was less about running between the lines of white and black, but rather a social commentary about a fictional scenario of an ambiguous African American man who drifts between two worlds, unnoticed as an onlooker, and discussing economical and political tensions that are rising.

Overall, when we thinking of “passing” individuals in the media, we notice that many sided with their white side to secure roles. For Broadway star, Carol Channing, she did not even claim her black ancestry until 2002 - at the age of 80. Before that point, she only identified as of European descent. Having been shielded from her own identity till the age of 16, it wasn’t a surprise that Channing had a lot of unsettling ignorance resided about her own heritage, making cringeworthy comments.

When she was told that her father was partly black from her grandfather, she said: “I know it's true the moment I sing and dance. I'm proud as can be of [my black ancestry]. It's one of the great strains in show business. I'm so grateful. My father was a very dignified man and as white as I am. My [paternal] grandparents were Nordic German, so apparently I [too] took after them [in appearance]” (Chicago Tribune, 2003)

I feel uncomfortable now even looking at her say that being black was “one of the great strains in show business.” Her comments were distasteful, dismissing how slaves were forced to perform in front of their masters and how that led into subcultures of new music like blues and country. She chalked up all of her talent to her black grandfather and her white looks to her white ancestors. If only she knew that wasn’t how genetics work. Perhaps, if the divide placed on mixed-race people wasn’t so strenuous, we wouldn’t have cases of ignorance like this.

For the most part, the media has mainly shown the stories of mixed raced women, not showing the struggle of mixed-race men who have to choose if they’d “pass” as only one race. As I stated before, “Invisible man” isn’t really about passing because his own race wasn’t up for debate, but rather what he saw due to his ambiguousness.

There’s many reasons as to why women were the main focus when talking about “passing.” However, it becomes obviously clear in the film Imitation of Life, writing the mixed-race girl off as a trickster for being something she wasn’t. In a sense, Hollywoods take on “passing” women was that they were deceptive, completely disregarding the essential need of passing as white. Sadly, in Imitation of Life, the mixed-race girl is beaten to a pulp after her white date finds out she’s mixed with black.

Sources:

Zielbauer, Paul von 2005

“Race a Factor in Job Offers for Ex-Convicts”

New York Times, July, 17, 2005

Mclntosh, Peggy 1989

“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”

Gates, Louis Henry

“How Many ‘White’ People Are Passing?”

https://www.theroot.com/how-many-white-people-are-passing-1790874972

Rusoff, Jane

“At 82, Channing still in step” Chicago Tribune

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brigdh · 7 years ago

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A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzie Lee. A YA novel starring Monty, eldest son of an Earl in mid-1700s England, his childhood neighbor/best friend Percy, and his sister Felicity. The three of them are just about to begin a Grand Tour of Europe, their last summer of freedom and fun before Monty has to buckle down and behave like a noble heir, Percy starts law school, and Felicity is shipped off to a finishing school. Unfortunately none of them are particularly looking forward to their futures. Monty is very cheerfully bisexual, and has engaged in romps, gambling, drinking, and drugs to the point of being kicked out of Eton. Percy is mixed-race (the son of a plantation owner, though raised by his aunt and uncle, minor gentry) and though he's tolerated, his existence isn't always well-regarded in their circles. Felicity is pissed off about being doomed to learn embroidery and manners instead of going to medical school to become a doctor. Oh, and Monty is desperately in love with Percy, but is afraid to tell him and lose his friendship. This is just the beginning – as the book gets going, there are also revelations about epilepsy, child abuse, insane asylums, and more. It's not all serious, though. In fact, most of the book is light-hearted fun: there are encounters with highwaymen, battles with pirates, parties at Versailles, Carnevale in Venice, villas on Greek islands, operas, fortune tellers, hostage exchanges, escaping thieves, and basically every adventure one could imagine in 18th century Europe. There's even a plot about alchemists and an elixir of immortality which, to tell the truth, felt a bit out of place in the otherwise historically-based book. And, of course, there is lots and lots of pining as Monty and Percy engage in the most excellent sort of romantic-comedy suspense, yearning and avoiding telling the truth about their feelings. A++, that bit. My main complaint with the book is that Lee tries very earnestly to handle appropriately the issues of social justice she includes (racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia), but every one of the ensuing conversations feels very 2017-approved, with every term the correct vocabulary, every checkbox checked, every privilege painstakingly unpacked. Not that such views couldn't – didn't! – exist in the past, but the way Lee portrays them doesn't seem to relate to the characters or setting at all. They don't arise out of the environment of the book, but are dropped in wholesale from an outside perspective that wants to be sure we know the right way to think. And then there's the moment where one character tells another about how the Japanese mend broken pottery with gold seams, see, so that the broken places end up more beautiful than the whole, and it's meant to be a profound moment but it's just so embarrassingly like this person in the 1700s is reading off a tumblr post. But nonetheless it's a funny, sweet book, if not quite as good as I expected when I heard "Gay Roadtrip through 18th Century Europe". What it reminds me most of all is reading an AU from a fandom you don't know. Maybe the characterization and setting isn't always that great but you don't care because it's not your fandom. It has the tropes you love and you can't wait to see the couple get together at the end, so you stay up late reading it on your phone. A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is that experience in original fiction. Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. The sequel to Too Like the Lightning which I absolutely LOVED. However I really should not have waited seven months to read this one, because I'd forgotten some of the characters and plots and this is a series jam-packed with multitudes of characters and plots, and you better have every miniscule bit of such details ready at your fingertips to have a chance of following the action. To briefly summarize the plot (a task that's probably impossible, but I'll try to hit the main points) in the 25th century the world has more or less become a Utopia. Nations have been abolished, religion banished to the private sphere, and gendered distinctions made it illegal; to all outward appearances, it is a world with no reason to go to war. Unfortunately it turns out that all of this has been made possible through carefully targeted assassinations, picking off key individuals to guide the world away from war, riots, major economic downturns, etc. Not many – about nine a year, on average, for the last two hundred years. This information sets off a flurry of activity as the characters take sides, variously trying to figure out the conspiracy behind it, hide the perpetrators, uncover proof, keep the public from finding out, and broadcast the secret to as many people as possible. When several world leaders turn out to be involved, chaos breaks out worldwide. It's not just drama, though; behind the action scenes is the frequently repeated question of if it was such a bad plan after all. Is it worth losing a few lives to prevent the millions of deaths that would happen in war? Seven Surrenders is all about the philosophical dilemma. In addition to the one above, we get multiple debates over the riddle, 'would you destroy this world to save a better one?', and 'If God has revealed proof of His existence, why did He chose you above every human who's ever prayed to believe? And, more importantly, why now?' There is speculation about the power of gender, of sexual attraction, of the effect of raising children as experiments, of the role of Providence in life, of what it would mean for two Gods to meet, of how one conducts a war when there are no living veterans to teach the next generation. But there's plenty of action too – the book includes revelations of secret parentage, long-lost loves, a revenge story worthy of the Count of Monte Cristo, bombs, murders, resurrections, suicide attempts, cute kids, so many disguises, sword fights, gun battles, horse chases, and more. Ultimately I didn't like it as much as Too Like the Lightning. It just didn't feel as deep or as grand, possibly because so much stuff was happening that none of it got enough exploration. One of the most best character arcs (Bridger's) happened mostly offstage, and many of the other characters were too busy reacting to the constantly changing political winds to have a real arc. I still recommend it, because it's just so different from everything else and I have to support an author who mashes up transportation science with Diderot's philosophy. But if you read it, definitely don't wait months between books. The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry. A murder mystery, the first in a series set in Victorian London. Charlotte is the middle daughter of a middle-class family, believed by all to be firmly unmarriageable but happy enough with her staid life. The book opens with the murder of a young well-off woman, then Charlotte's maid is also murdered, as are several others. There is no apparent connection between the victims except that they're all young woman, all live nearby, and all were strangled. Inspector Thomas Pitt is assigned the case, and he begins to spend a great deal of time talking to Charlotte – first just to interview her regarding the murders, but then for her own sake. But will Charlotte's family allow her to marry a... policeman??? There are several interesting things about the book. Set very specifically in 1881 (which is to say, before Jack the Ripper) the very idea of a serial killer – as opposed to a thief who murders for money – is new and shocking to most of the characters. So is the concept that such a criminal could appear "normal", that rather than being a dirty, lower-class raving lunatic, it could be a respected neighbor or even a member of their own family. These are such self-evident ideas to modern people (and most characters in mystery books) that seeing Charlotte and the others wrestle with them, discuss their ramifications, and feel guilty for suspecting their husbands and fathers was pretty fascinating. I also liked that the family was so solidly middle-class. Historical fiction has a habit of gravitating toward extremes: everyone is either upper aristocracy or enduring the most grueling poverty. A family of boring bank clerks actually made for a refreshing change. Unfortunately those are the only good things I have to say about the book. The middle 2/3rds of the story drags along interminably, as nothing happens except for characters having the same few discussions over and over again. Charlotte suspects her father! First she must have a conversation about it with her mother. Then her younger sister. Then her older sister. Then her mother and the older sister talk. Then the older sister talks about it to her husband. Then... Well, you get the idea. And it's not as though each new character was bringing a fresh perspective and insight to the issue! No, we just get the same few protests and agreements recycled over and over in slightly different wordings. It's such an awful slog that I nearly abandoned the book. However, I stuck it out to the end, only to be rewarded with the reveal of the killer (warning for spoilers, I guess): a lesbian who has been driven mad by repressing her sexuality! You know, I don't think I've ever actually encountered this awful cliche in the wild before. It would almost be exciting, if it wasn't so offensive. Though there's not a lot of time to be offended, because the reveal, motivation, attack on Charlotte, rescue, and arrest all happen in the last two pages (literally) so none of it is exactly dwelt on. It's probably all for the best that I disliked this book. It's the first in a 32-book series, and now I don't feel any desire to read the rest.

(DW link for easier commenting)(Also goddamn, I am so far behind on putting up my book reviews, you guys. So prepare for a lot of that.)

#book reviews #anne perry #ada palmer #mackenzie lee #books

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la-liga-zine · 7 years ago

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Memory and Film: A Conversation with DIY Filmmaker Caitlin Diaz

At 28, Caitlin Diaz has had the privilege of working with world-renowned clients as a colorist, archivist, and filmmaker, amassing an impressive body of work that shows her nuance and passion for working behind the camera. She currently lives in Los Angeles, working freelance on various projects from her home studio, but her heart is and has always been rooted in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas. As her "source of inspiration and security," Caitlin recently undertook her most arduous and personal project yet: an independently produced and financed feature film based in RGV about women and transformation. In our interview below, we trace Caitlin's deep connection to her hometown, her experience as a woman of color in the film industry, and the power of DIY culture.

Mia Rodriguez: You’ve said that your work “explores the state that is commonly and absurdly called existence.” What does it mean to you to exist in the modern world as a Latinx?

Caitlin Diaz: Existing in this world is very layered and I try to retain as many experiences as possible, good and bad. Being a Mexican-American woman from South Texas plays a huge role in my life and how I perceive the world around me. Living authentically is always my goal--being resilient, sincere and compassionate all at the same time. It’s a difficult balance, especially as a woman of color, but (in my opinion) necessary to strive towards.

MR: As a colorist and archivist, a lot of your work is intrinsically nostalgic. What are your earliest memories of film, color, and capturing memories? Was it a hobby that developed into something more?

CD: Nostalgia definitely is the spark when conceptualizing a new project. All of my films pull from the past to help me understand the person I am at the current moment. We’re constantly in flux. Memories help bind the chaotic nature of my evolution as something constant, something I can always go back to. I’ve always been interested in knowing more about my family history, cherishing the stories that my grandparents, parents, tías and tíos share with me. So I hoard old family photos, record the stories and digitize any and all home movies. I’m obsessed with the past: the idea of what was once there and now isn’t, how things (and people) have changed. It continues to fascinate me.

MR: Your work ethic and aesthetic eye have allowed you to work with big clients such as The Estate of Ana Mendieta, Calvin Klein, Swarovski and artists like Nick Jonas, Enrique Iglesias and Beyoncé. What was it like the first time you saw your work shared with the world in such a big way? What did working with these brands and artists teach you?

CD: My work ethic is a direct correlation to me being a woman of color (morena) in an industry dominated by white males. I’ve always felt that I had to prove I belonged, that I was capable. I'm not afraid to ask for help if I need it. I think it's important to know and accept your limits. Many times I've been thrown into a project with no prior knowledge, so I must ask questions in order to do my job properly. I love learning and hate when things get too routine.

When I began working in LA, I was exposed to a lot of new workflows and machinery. I learned so much from my colleagues and developed really great relationships and valuable skills. My favorite job quickly became film restorations—every step in the process requires an incredible amount of attention to detail. It’s a match made in heaven because I’ve always been attracted to methodical processes. The most rewarding aspect of working on a digital restoration like the Estate of Ana Mendieta or Belladonna of Sadness is knowing that you’re a part of something larger: preserving the material for future generations to enjoy.

All these projects have taught me to approach my work with a more exacting eye. Currently, I work out of my home studio as a freelance film colorist and editor, so organization is always my top priority. I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned from working on big projects is to not allow stress or frustration to take over. Sometimes when things go awry (hard drives failing) or you’re up against a tight deadline, it’s easy to get caught up the chaos. But when you step back and take a look at the issue from afar, you realize the pettiness of worrying and you’re usually able to find a way to solve the problem.

vimeo

MR: Recently, you’ve entered into the post production stage of your first feature film, Puras Ilusiones, which takes place in a fictional town in South Texas, part of the Rio Grande Valley where you grew up. A favorite critical theorist of mine is Nancy Duncan who co-wrote a book called “Landscapes of Privilege,” in which she describes the connection between identity and place, landscape and memory. She says that “landscapes are integral to our identities,” describes them as “emblems of our individual and collective memories,” and that “threats to the landscape are often interpreted as threats to identity.” What are your thoughts on the landscape of the Rio Grande Valley? What does it represent to you? What memories of yours and your family dwell there?

CD: The RGV will represent my core being para siempre. The geographical and social landscape of the area is what drives me to explore this connection. I love the history of the area, the people who inhabit it, the culture and its close proximity to/relationship with Mexico. At the moment, 45’s border wall and industrialization of the untouched coastline (LNG export terminals) are two major concerns residents of the area have. The Valley is constantly referred to as one of the poorest regions of the US and, being so close to the Mexico border, one of the most dangerous areas of the country. There is more to the Valley than the negativities the press focus on. Memories from my childhood are pleasant: riding bikes on unpaved streets, day trips to Camargo or Migel Aleman with the family, pumpkin empanadas, raspas and breakfast tacos, thrifting at the Ropa Usada (10 cents a pound!), palm trees, mesquite trees and chachalacas…I can go on forever. It’s a beautiful area that is constantly overlooked and under-represented in the media. The Rio Grande Valley holds a lot of weight in the conversation about race, immigration, gender inequality, income inequality, reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues and countless others. It’s important we share these experiences and stories with the rest of the world.

MR: Following that train of thought, how much of Puras Ilusiones is based on your own experience growing up there? What makes you want to revisit and immortalize RGV now as an adult?

CD: Ironically, it was after I moved away from Texas when my interest in the RGV began to influence my work. I wrote Puras Ilusiones on and off for about 5 years. I pulled inspiration from memories I had and stories I invented based off old family photos. Both my grandmothers have wonderful stories from their lives. Nostalgia is always fun to explore. The land became a character and I kept daydreaming of desert ranches. I knew that whenever I decided to make the film, it would be shot on my family’s ranch in the RGV. So memories and historical events became the constant musings during the writing process. Last year in the midst of #NoDAPL, I read an article about a similar situation happening in the RGV. At the same time, it was the 50th anniversary of the 1966 Melon Strike—an event that sparked the United Farmworkers movement in Texas. The film evolved into a type of research project and a way for me to capture the beauty of the area.

MR: The plot of Puras Ilusiones is about female self-discovery, but it also tells the story of the grassroots campaigns, history of the land, and social justice activism you've mentioned is happening in the RGV region. Art and activism continue to be at the forefront of a lot of social change we see and have been seeing for decades. Personally, how do you see art and activism influencing each other, working together, to fight for justice? Do you believe art can be activism?

CD: Art and activism most definitely go hand in hand. The night of the 2016 election, I was extremely emotional, scared for what the future held and saddened by the possibility that I would never be able to make this film. The next day [my friend] Lauren texted me, ‘Girl, we HAVE to make your movie now.’ And that’s what lit a fire under my ass to get this production rolling. I realized this was my way of resisting the new administration, of addressing issues regarding gender, race and class through cinema, of disproving stereotypes. It gave me purpose and helped me harness pent-up energy. Sometimes we can feel overwhelmed by the news and social media, feeling like we always must have an opinion on every issue. A big part of activism is listening to others. Making this film was my way of meeting other people in the RGV who were resisting and hearing their stories. It was a way for me to give back to the community that shaped me into who I am today. The film became a tangible way for me to fight back.

MR: As your first personal, narrative film project, what has it been like directing and guiding your cast? Did you work organically off of their energy and chemistry or was there a set script and storyline? What have you learned from working with veterans and newcomers alike?

CD: I’m used to making films in a pretty isolated way. My previous work is all paint on film, so my process was working alone in my studio painting, splicing, editing, coloring. I love documenting objects/places in life and cutting them together to express a feeling or memory. Puras Ilusiones was a huge departure from how I had previously made films, so I approached it as a large-scale collaboration. I worked with trained actors and non-actors resulting in a range of experiences. Individual activists and organizations such as Save RGV From LNG and La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) also joined the cast and crew, which allowed us to showcase the work they are currently doing in the Valley. Resistance in the area is strong and it deserves to be talked about.

My crew and cast were completely invested in the project and it really showed. It was a wonderful experience to work with people who share a passion for what they're doing. There isn’t much dialogue in the script, so I encouraged my actors to improvise and inject a lot of their own experiences into the characters. There were only 10 of us on crew and we had a ton of gear to lug around. It was a grassroots, DIY production which meant we were constantly problem-solving. But it made the feeling of accomplishment stronger at the end of each day. We were also shooting all 16mm, which was a first for a lot of my crew. Our budget was extremely tight so we had to wait until we wrapped production to send all the film to be processed and transferred. My DP Lauren Pruitt and I were on edge for weeks until the footage arrived in LA. It looked so beautiful, I think we both cried a little out of relief. The biggest takeaway from production was the importance of enthusiasm on set. It was important to me that anyone involved was having a good time and never bored. It was wonderful to have such a lively crew and cast, especially since we had to work in the harsh Texas heat during many outdoor shoots. It also reaffirmed my belief in DIY filmmaking--not needing permission from anyone to make a film, not letting it become an elite art form. It can be done, but it’s a huge undertaking to see it through.

We've seen in recent years a huge resurgence of DIY ethics in film, print, art, and online media; people really going back to their roots and creating things locally as self-taught artists. You're a huge believer of DIY culture and your volume and quality of work are proof that sometimes, you really do have to do it yourself. Can you tell us more about how DIY culture drives or inspires you? As an artist of color, have you found freedom through DIY?

DIY culture became a very important part of my life in my formative years. Throughout high school, my friends and I would put on shows, mostly bands we had formed, in various places around the Valley like the local VFW or after-hours in the parking lot of a hardware store. Similarly, my sister and I would spend our weekends thrifting across the Valley, bring our haul home, cut it up and sew it into something new. We created the clothes we wanted to wear, the music we wanted to hear, the art we wanted to experience. There was a lot of that happening in the Valley while I was growing up; it came as a very natural way for us to express ourselves on our own terms.

The passion to create without hesitation stayed with me as a moved further and further away from the Valley. It’s pushed me to experiment with film. DIY culture forces you to stop making excuses. And in filmmaking, there can be hundreds of reasons why you feel you can’t make a film. DIY allows you to have control of what you are creating and to realize that there is never a wrong way to execute your ideas. Punk is the essence of DIY—complete, unapologetic self-expression. DIY filmmaking gives you the freedom to share your point of view because you don’t have to answer to anyone else.

MR: When can we expect to see the finished work and where would you like to premiere it?

CD: Puras Ilusiones is currently in post, which is probably my favorite part of the process. I’m editing whenever I have downtime between freelance work. My goal is to have it completed by late Summer/Fall 2018. I’d like to do a traveling screening throughout the RGV, specifically in the towns we filmed. I’m excited to share the film with the people who helped me make it and with the community that inspired it. Eventually, I'd love to have a 35mm film print made and screen the film on a larger scale so others can experience the beauty of the Rio Grande Valley.

MR: What does the future hold for you? Are there any other projects you’re currently working on or plan to start once Puras Ilusiones is released?

CD: My current goal is working with more female & female-identifying filmmakers, especially those who are trying to make their own stories come to life. It’s necessary to surround myself with others who are creating. I’m enjoying the editing process and taking my time with it because I hate rushing or forcing creativity. When I have ideas, I write them down. It’s hard to commit to a new project with the current one being in such a crucial state. But I definitely look forward to finishing the film and starting work on the next one.

Puras Ilusiones is a self-funded, independent film. Caitlin is editing & coloring the film herself but will be working with others on music, sound design, visual effects, subtitling and additional film transfers. If you'd like to help with the costs of post, please donate to the film's PayPal here

To see more of Caitlin's work, visit her website

#Interview #Caitlin Diaz #Mia Rodriguez #film

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pebl-design · 6 years ago

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STORIES STAY, LESSONS GO: DESIGN FUTURES 2019.

Earlier this month, a colleague and I had the privilege of attending the Design Futures Student Leadership Forum in Salt Lake City. Design Futures, a five-day interdisciplinary forum centered on Public Interest Design, brings student leaders together with some of the most important practitioners in community-driven and engaged design from across the country. Building leadership skills in the future leaders of the design world, the Design Futures forum is a tool for understanding and beginning the conversation about social equity and positive change in underserved communities. Discussing issues ranging from racism, privilege, intersectionality, and equity, I collaborated with fellow students from universities across the U.S. as we learned from experts in the field of Public Interest Design. Coming from a place of privilege in which topics centered on race, equity and diversity are often misunderstood, I began to appreciate the following concepts as crucial tools for engaging in meaningful discussions about equity in design.

Language Setting1

Equity– Equity revolves around systemic outcomes and exists when outcomes are no longer predicted by any aspect of an individual’s identity.2

Equality– Equality is the basic trait of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities.3

I was introduced to the distinction between equity and equality during an introductory workshop on power and oppression. Put simply, equality can be described as “sameness” or equal access to resources, while equity strives to produce equal outcomes. Understanding this difference is important to more successfully equitable design approaches.

Intersectionality– “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”4 The term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 and is closely related to the concept of “simultaneity” — the simultaneous influences of race, class, gender, and sexuality on individual identity.

Each of us was asked to “map” our intersectional identities in a small group setting. For me this exercise was a helpful tool for reflecting on and understanding my own privilege.

Diversity– A variety of identifiers and characteristics that reflects our individuality.5

Diversity is widely recognized as a desirable outcome in design. Working with professionals from the Creative Reaction Lab we discussed how “definitions of diversity are often limited and largely confined to visible aspects such as race, age, or gender rather than less visible aspects such as ability status, nationality, or mental well-being."6 Equity-centered community design, a more inclusive way to discuss diversity in design, aims to accommodate and include diverse backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences in the conversation.

Privilege– Special unearned rights and advantages given to a person or group.7

Workshop leaders and faculty asked us to think of privilege as a tool for advancing equity in design, rather than an instrument of shame or guilt. In the past, my privilege has felt like a barrier that prevented me from engaging in these important conversations. Learning to accept my privilege as a tool for promoting positive change helped me feel more comfortable approaching and participating in honest discussion.

Positionality– “The social and political context that creates your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status.”8 Positionality is closely tied to the issue of privilege in that it describes how your personal background or identity influences your understanding of the world. Learning how to leverage your privilege and positionality is a key skill to develop in order to advance equity in community design.

Learning to design for equity and the public interest is a life-long process where success is defined by and founded on meaningful relationships formed over time within diverse communities. For me, the Design Futures forum was the first step in this learning process. Opening my eyes to my own privilege and positionality, the forum helped me understand how I can move forward in my career to help advance equity in design with humility, empathy and understanding.

We gathered on the first morning of the forum for introductions and a program overview. Little did we know that by the end of the week we would have forged lifelong connections with this amazing group!

The students and faculty leaders of Design Futures 2019 commemorated the occasion with a group photo.

An example of a workshop brainstorming activity, these notes represent the various factors we saw influencing mattering and marginality.

After sharing some of our most memorable and emotional moments of the week, we joined in a group hug!

1 Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide, Creative Reaction Lab. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55737465e4b048703924b9b5/t/5a9eaec053450a4352677984/1520348865673/ECCD+FIELD+GUIDE+FINAL+-+2018+DOWNLOAD.pdf

2 Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide

3 Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide

4 Standard and widely-adopted definition from the Oxford English Dictionary.

5 Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide

6 Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide

7 Kiara Nagel, Oppression 101 Workshop, Design Futures 2019.

8 Online definition cited by workshop leaders.

#designfuturesforum publicinterestdesign

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