malala day: give a kid a book already

Posted: July 14, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: art, education, feminisms, fiction, healing, issues, literature, music, protest, race/ethnicity, violence | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment
Malala Yousafzai, Claude TRUONG-NGOC

Malala Yousafzai, Claude TRUONG-NGOC

Today is Malala Day, the birthday celebration of Malala Yousafzai, the girl the Taliban shot in the head because she wanted to go to school. That was two years ago, and I am still moved by everything she does. It’s so easy to let life unravel in the face of horrible circumstances, and yet she kept going, keeps going. Her continued existence would have been enough to fight back. Going back to school would have been enough. But Malala skyrocketed, becoming an advocate for girls’ education and a role model for girls all over the world.

Her brave yet peaceful response to the Taliban, and to all who try to hold girls back, is a great lesson for our warmongering leaders, if they took the time to really listen to girls. She doesn’t fight violence with violence; she fights it with education and, more precisely, books. Check out this new video where she explains how books are stronger than bullets.

Malala just turned seventeen. My niece is going on fourteen, and the night before she came to visit us last week my partner and I watched The Punk Singer, the movie about Kathleen Hanna. It got me all fired up about making a mix CD for my niece. (Side note: since the 80s and 90s are back in, will kids start making mix tapes again? Pretty please?) My partner and I started talking about how so much of our values and world views came from the books we found at the library or borrowed from friends, the records we collected from thrift stores and out-of-the way shops, and the zines we traded when we were kids.

My feminist life, for instance, started when I cracked open The Bell Jar and discovered that someone had put my feelings into words. The Color Purple started me on the path to racial and economic justice. When I listened to “Rebel Girl,” Kathleen Hanna was the queen of my world. I devoured these books and records and then I learned about the women behind them, and I finally had an image of the kind of woman I wanted to be.

I wanted to create, to agitate, to express myself. Each book or record was like a window to what could be.

By the end of my niece’s visit, we walked out of a used bookstore, arms piled high with books and CDs. Malala had to face gunmen to get to books; we only had to stroll into a shop the size of a warehouse and take our pick.

Though we in the US are lucky to have access to free public schools, there are a lot of arguments about the state of education here today. Teachers have their hands tied by nonsensical standardized tests that leave children of color further and further behind. To make matters worse, attendance and performance here are affected by everything from street violence and school attacks to dating violence and bullying.

But there is one way we can help young people get at least a little of the education they need. For Malala Day, think about the things that helped you find your way when you were younger, that helped to define who you are today–a book, record, print, poem–and give a copy to a kid.

Books are #strongerthan bullets.

native americans aren’t your mascots

Posted: April 14, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: art, education, equality, fiction, film, issues, literature, performance art, poetry, race/ethnicity | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I was reading a rather yawn-inducing piece on Jezebel describing the concept of a “basic bitch” and my eyes wandered into the comment section, which is typically fine on that site because most readers are feminist, anti-racist, etc. But I saw something really bizarre happen. A commenter who introduced herself as a Native American woman said she was tired of all the anti-white articles and comments popping up all over the internet, and people responded by challenging her Nativeness, even going so far as to demand to know what tribe she belongs to, whose rolls she’s on, what rez she lives on.

They were doing this because they felt like she was complaining about reverse racism (which pretty much only happens at an individual level and not at a systemic level, so it’s not the same thing as actual racism, which is pervasive and affects every aspect of people’s lives), a reaction they thought was kind of racist in and of itself, so they responded with…their own racism.

Let’s just get this out of the way: it’s not really okay to question how Native someone is just because you don’t think they act or look like a Native person should. Because of the problem of blood quantum, people still think it’s perfectly acceptable to single out Native Americans as the one group that must prove their ethnicity. With blood.

Blood quantum is the measure of how much Native blood a person has. It’s like the one-drop rule, but instead of being used to classify as many people as possible as non-white so they could be segregated from white people and treated like second-class citizens, blood quantum was established by the US government (and back in the colonies) to actually limit the number of Native Americans. The smaller the tribe, the less the government had to offer in a treaty. Even now, government benefits to tribes are measly due to blood quantum. Lived all your life on the res, 100% Native, but descended from several different tribes? Too bad, you don’t have enough blood from this one tribe to be a full member, so the US government ignores you. Old tribal census rolls are incomplete because the US government forced your family off their land, sent their kids to boarding schools where their language was beaten out of them, and your grandfather was delivered in a shack with a dirt floor (by a drunk doctor who screwed up his birth certificate) to parents whose records don’t appear to exist? Sorry, friend, you’re out of luck.

Last week I saw this image of a white Cleveland baseball fan in red face haughtily explaining himself to a Native man. In the middle of the city. At a public event. In red face. Like it’s totally cool.

It’s an understatement to say that Native Americans are only visible in our society as mascots. And even then those mascot roles are often played by white people (see Johnny Depp as Tonto in The Lone Ranger and Rooney Mara’s recent casting as Tiger Lily in an upcoming Peter Pan movie). If you want to see Native people represented as real, multi-dimensional human beings, you have to dig around.

To help you get started, here are a few creative projects that challenge the stereotypes that even some “anti-racist” Jezebel readers perpetuate.

  • The Cherokee Word for Water: This recently released film about Wilma Mankiller, the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation, focuses on her big impact on a tribal community without water.
  • Reel Injun: Filmmaker Neil Diamond won a Peabody Award for his exploration of Hollywood’s portrayal of North American Natives.
  • Project 562: Matika Wilbur has been photographing people from every federally recognized tribe in the US for this Kickstarter-funded project. She includes this anecdote on her Kickstarter page: “I had this incredible experience at the bottom of The Grand Canyon. The elders appointed a teenage boy to help me carry my equipment to photo shoots (since there aren’t cars down there, and I’m clumsy on a horse). He was kind of quiet at first, standoffish even. But after the first interview and photoshoot, he was excited for the next one. He started suggesting ideas. I could see him listening as we spoke to his elders. That evening, he revealed that he had walked a despairing path, having struggled with depression and his own sense of Tribal identity. As I was leaving, he shyly pulled me aside, and told me that this project gave him a new sense of hope. He said that he believed in me. He said that I was the first lady that he’d ever met that had went on to ‘do something’. He thanked me for giving him hope. He said that his experience with Project 562 had meant more to him than he could articulate.”
  • The Artifact Piece: Clad in a loincloth, performance artist James Luna lies in a display case to underscore the problem of presenting Native people as artifacts of the past instead of living, evolving people of the present.
  • The Round House: Louise Erdrich’s latest novel of an Ojibwe family won the 2012 National Book Award.
  • Crazy Brave: Poet Joy Harjo’s new memoir chronicles her search for her voice and herself. What she’s learned about the debris of trauma: “You can use those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you.”

that moment when a book becomes everything

Posted: January 27, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: art, creative process, education, fiction, gaming, literature | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been nostalgic for the books I read in my youth. I don’t know why, but I can’t get them out of my mind. Are you ever jealous of someone who is reading one of your beloved novels for the very first time? They’re just stepping into the world of authors like Lorrie Moore or Jamaica Kincaid or characters like Thomas Cromwell or Harry Potter. Oh, to enter the wizarding world anew! If you’ve never had that feeling, my guess is you aren’t a serious reader. You probably didn’t find that book when you were younger, the book that sweeps you away and leaves you losing hours in the comforting hush of libraries, digging through musty used bookstores, piling up books in every nook and cranny of your house, sniffing a brand-new book like it’s a drug.

I think that may be what it’s about. I’m reminiscing about what it was like to discover the world of literature. It really is a world. It’s a whole other world you have no idea is out there until you find yourself in the midst of it. And then your brain’s soft explosion leaves you changed forever. There is always another place you can go to even when you are stuck in bed with a fever or frustrated with the way of the world or really just hating life. You realize that as long as you have these places in your mind, you are safe.

Do you have safe places in your mind? Sometimes when everything is crappy, I open one of my Harry Potter books for an hour or so, and then I feel much better. But often my recollection does just as well. And this translates to real-life experiences. When I’m flying and turbulence hits, I go to the number-one happy place in my head, which took place ten years ago. My family was in southern California for a wedding, and we spent a day at the beach. No one wanted to go into the water but my three-year-old niece and me. So I pulled her onto my back and we threw ourselves against the waves, laughing and laughing with each one, until we wore ourselves out. I think it’s years of serious reading that allow me to conjure up that memory so clearly, perhaps embellish it a bit to fit my present need, and forget (mostly) that the plane might plummet to the sea, leaving me the lone survivor floating on a piece of wreckage in a storm surrounded by sharks. In the middle of the ocean. (My imagination stoking unlikely, if not impossible, fears is, of course, the other side of the reading coin.)

Anyway, I’ve been so nostalgic lately that I actually listened to a Judy Blume audio book on my phone the other day while painting the bedroom. It was Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which stood up fairly well, better than I expected. And it made me feel like youth was better than I remembered it to be, like maybe middle school wasn’t such a horror after all. It just felt like that at the time, and now that I’m more than twenty years away from it, there are things I can appreciate about it and, dare I say…miss? Don’t you miss that thrill of discovery, of a whole world you’ve yet to traverse?

I think there’s another element in here: the book series. Sometimes a writer creates a world I don’t want to leave, so a series can be the ultimate delight. I miss them, and they are mostly to be found in genre fiction, of which I read little. Young adult fiction is rife with series, and I remember being so immersed in them that I felt like a character. Going on to read the second or third or twelfth book was very much about seeing what I would do next as Nancy Drew or Claudia Kishi or Ramona Quimby.

I’ve mentioned before that I read a lot of Nancy Drew* as a kid, so the first story I wrote was my own version of Nancy Drew. Then I wrote other stories based on books I’d read or movies I’d seen. It was an obvious way to keep those worlds going, and that very desire may have been what got me started as a writer. At some point, I moved away from that to create my own narratives, but they were still very influenced by what I’d read and seen. For instance, I created a fashion book (at age 10, I believe) full of childish designs with descriptions of how and where they were to be worn. In the lengthy acknowledgements, I thanked my boyfriend, Adam Curry, MTV VJ and host of Headbangers Ball, which I was not allowed to watch.

There were other series I loved and that still stick with me. One was The Baby-sitter’s Club. I wanted it to be my life, and I so adored it that I actually watched the movie when it came out in 1995 even though I was eighteen. I have to confess that I’d watch it now. In fact, I’m tempted to find one of the books at the library and see if it stands the test of time. I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed, however, and the Stoneybrook that still lives in my imagination will be silly and dull.

When I think of all those beloved books I read as a kid, I can smell the old library where I met many of them for the first time. My sister and I spent every other weekend at our dad’s, and he would take us to his library branch, which was in a strip mall, but no less special for its sad location. Rather, it stands out to me as a magical place. Next to the TJ Maxx was a room full of books and every book could be mine for a couple of weeks. There was no way I could get through them all. There were always more good books waiting to be taken home and devoured.

I think of that place, gray and plain as it may have been, and the many books I cherished. I look at kids of that age today, and I think, wait until you read this one or that one; your whole world will change. I realize they will also discover fabulous books that didn’t exist when I was young. And I feel good about life and the future.

*Did you know there are Nancy Drew games?

katniss and beyond

Posted: December 16, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: creative process, empathy, equality, feminisms, fiction, film, gender roles, literature, race/ethnicity | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I was busy working on an international campaign to end gender-based violence when Catching Fire came out. My colleagues and I were in a rush to meet deadlines–chatting and emailing from Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa, Lebanon, and the US–and suddenly all we could talk about was Katniss.

Jennifer Lawrence, at only 23 years old, dominated the box office. Finally, studios are starting to understand that a woman can lead an action film and that audiences want female superheroes with their own stories. Catching Fire, like the rest of The Hunger Games trilogy, is all about Katniss. There are no subplots that are not part of her overall narrative, and she is a strong, independent, and dynamic protagonist. She is proving to the studio system that men and boys can care about the stories of women and girls. At the theatre I visited, the crowd was actually split pretty evenly.

I’m sure it’s been said many times that Katniss is the antidote to Bella, Twilight‘s insecure, moony lead whose vampire boyfriend won’t sleep with her because he’s afraid he’ll kill her. There may be a love triangle of sorts, but Katniss is no one’s girlfriend. In fact, as NPR pointed out recently, Peeta, played by Josh Hutcherson, takes on the role of movie girlfriend.

I was thrilled that my colleagues around the world felt as inspired by Katniss as I did, so I appreciated Black Girl Dangerous‘s post about disidentification and how “character subtleties can be reinterpreted and radicalized” by readers and audiences. She describes her identification with Katniss and JK Rowling’s Hermione, especially as Hermione’s hair struggles are shared by many girls of color.

That girls of color have found ways to make iconic characters their own really speaks to how pervasive the straight white male narrative remains in our society. Women and girls are used to reading themselves into male narratives, to finding something in any story to identify with, because that’s always been the expectation. But women and girls of color are further out in the margins, forced to also read themselves into white narratives. Have you seen these “10 life-changing books” lists going around Facebook lately? Yeah, Nabokov’s prose was stunning, but, white friends, can you start reading books by people who aren’t white men? There’s a whole world out there.

I love Katniss. LOVE. And I love Hermione. But we still need to make heroes of black girls and brown girls. If they zero in on Katniss’s olive skin in the books and decide she looks kind of like them, that’s great. But they could use someone who really does look like them. They deserve to see themselves on the big screen.

Geena Davis came up with a simple solution to gender inequality in film.

Step 1: Go through the projects you’re already working on and change a bunch of the characters’ first names to women’s names. With one stroke you’ve created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they’ve had a gender switch. What if the plumber or pilot or construction foreman is a woman? What if the taxi driver or the scheming politician is a woman? What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it’s not a big deal?

Step 2: When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” That may seem weird, but I promise you, somehow or other on the set that day the crowd will turn out to be 17 percent female otherwise. Maybe first ADs think women don’t gather, I don’t know.

And there you have it. You have just quickly and easily boosted the female presence in your project without changing a line of dialogue.

The same could be done to include more people of color. It’s really that easy. If we start to see more women and girls of color onscreen, even in crowds, it will be seem natural when the next big trilogy premieres with a black girl as the hero. Studios just need to take some simple steps in that direction.

Men and boys should be expected to appreciate the narratives of women and girls, and they’ve proven they can by supporting movies like Catching Fire, The Heat, and Bridesmaids. But we also need to encourage white folks to support narratives of people of color. If we can all identify more with each other’s stories, more gender, racial, and economic equality will follow.

And that reminds me: I’ve been waiting for Dear White People to come out, and it’s on its way!

 

tv women: olivia pope, mindy lahiri, and emily thorne

Posted: November 18, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: education, empathy, fiction, for further exploration, protest, the body | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Do you watch television? I’m sure many of you don’t, and I get that. We don’t have cable because we’re not interested in being sucked into TV all the time, but we do watch some. We catch the big cable shows later on Netflix or DVD, and I watch a few network shows in addition to PBS. I often like to follow a good story and compelling characters while I’m knitting a scarf or folding my laundry or painting shutters (which we have too many of), so I don’t care so much about whether the medium is film or TV. Plus, television is a great place for women these days, far better than film.

I’m not going to pretend that these shows are ideal. Or that even their feminism is ideal. But I appreciate the changes I’ve noticed in television the past couple of years, especially the increased focus on narratives of women of color. It’s not just women actors who are benefitting from these changes. I’m also noticing more women writers and directors. Yes, women directed some of your favorite episodes of Breaking Bad and Mad Men. One of my favorites is Agnieszka Holland, who directed episodes of The Wire, Treme, and The Killing. Then there’s Deadwood, the filthy, brilliant western, with an unusually high number of shows written by women. Even if the popular cable epics aren’t strong on complex women characters–where’s our female Walter White, Don Draper, or Tony Soprano?–women are increasingly making decisions behind the scenes.

Here are a few of the shows I’m watching because they feature fantastic women characters, especially women of color, and they’re entertaining.

SCANDAL

If you watch TV, how have you not become one of Olivia’s gladiators? It’s such a relief to see a strong black woman as the center of a show. Olivia Pope is a game changer for women in TV, a sharp, sophisticated political genius who fixes every problem Washington, D.C. throws at her. Her team will do anything for her, and men keep risking their careers to be with her. I tire of Olivia’s star-crossed love with Fitz (aka, Mr. President) because it occasionally turns her into a wobbly pool of jello, but all the other scenes make up for it. Plus, Olivia Pope, the fixer, is based on a real black woman, Judy Smith, America’s #1 Crisis Management Expert.

Have I told you how much I love Kerry Washington? She proudly identifies as a feminist and womanist, actively engages in politics, and talks wisely about important issues in interviews. And this season’s addition of Lisa Kudrow as Fitz’s opponent in the upcoming election is divine. As Congressperson Josie Marcus, Kudrow recently got to deliver a whopping, off-the-cuff feminist speech that shames the sexism of her opponents and the media so deliciously that it must be right out of Hillary Clinton’s fantasy world. It doesn’t hurt that the show was created by Shonda Rhimes, herself a black woman who happens to be one of the most successful show runners in the business.

THE MINDY PROJECT

Mindy Kaling didn’t just play Kelly Kapoor on The Office; she was also one of the writers and directors. Then she published Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). And then she created The Mindy Project: she produces, directs, writes, and stars in this sitcom about Mindy Lahiri, a successful OB/GYN trying to figure it all out in New York. She’s the very first South Asian-American woman to have her own show. Her character is confident about her work, loves her body, and says what she thinks. And she’s Hindu. And she’s sex-positive.

Kaling and the show have had to deal with some backlash, and there have been some weird moments. But I’m holding on because there are many more smart moments and her character is really new and fresh. The show’s heavy on the cameos, but some of the best episodes involve Anders Holm, of Workaholics, as Mindy’s boyfriend. The two have great chemistry, and their tent scene in “Take Me With You” of Season 1 had me giggling for days. The Mindy Project also rescued Adam Pally, whom I’d been missing since Happy Endings was canceled.

Additionally, I love how Kaling has been calling out the sexist, racist, and image-obsessed media lately. She’s tired of being asked about her weight and her ethnicity instead of her work. If you need more of a reason to like her, check out Lena Dunham’s interview with Kaling for Tavi Gevinson‘s Yearbook 2.

REVENGE

This show is a total guilty pleasure. My sister and I text each other in the midst of it: “Did she really do that?” “But how is he alive?” “Noooooooo!” Like Scandal‘s over-the-top plot lines, Revenge is designed to be somewhat absurd. That’s what makes it fun, especially when Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) comes face to face with her nemesis, Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe, who is active in women’s rights, by the way).

Emily is secretly destroying virtually every evil rich person in the Hamptons, and I love it when the girl next door kicks ass (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Now, I don’t normally like revenge stories because I think revenge is a useless concept, but this is basically an evening soap opera. And we frequently see the downside of vengeance with deaths and broken friendships. Emily comes complete with ninja skills, a mentor who trained her at a revenge school(!) in Japan, a British revenge companion, and an endless supply of complicated emotions.

One of the best parts of this show, however, is Nolan, Amanda’s closest friend, confidante, and partner in crime, played by Gabriel Mann. A tech genius and hacker, Nolan is equally sweet and sly, and he’s bisexual. Those around him treat his sexuality as completely normal, not batting an eye when he goes from pining over Padma to falling hard for Patrick. Yes, television, you can have characters with diverse sexualities and not make their stories all about said sexualities.

So what would you add to this list? Or remove?

malala yousafzai: seeing girls differently

Posted: October 14, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: education, equality, fiction, literature, race/ethnicity, violence | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

I was momentarily disappointed that the Nobel Committee did not award Malala Yousafzai with the Peace Prize. Then I realized that she’s bigger than that prize and certainly bigger than the Nobel Committee’s narrow view of peace work. In fact, I’m glad they didn’t choose her because that would imply that she needs to be chosen by a select group of aging white politicians, that her work is not valuable unless deemed so by an institution. So congratulations, Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, for, you know, doing your job like the rest of us!

Only fifteen women have won the Peace Prize since it began in 1901, compared to 85 men and 25 organizations. Still, that’s significantly better than the scientific awards, where women aren’t even close to double digits:

  • Chemistry: 2%
  • Physiology or Medicine: 5%
  • Physics: 1%
  • Economics: 1%

Women fare the same in Literature as they do with the Peace Prize, a very modest 12%. Alice Munro is the finest short-story writer around, so I’m always happy to see her work lauded. It’s important that we recognize Munro’s stories of the inner lives of women in quiet towns as worthy of attention, but her Nobel Prize in Literature does not make these numbers go down more easily. The Nobel Committee’s gender problem reveals a long history of ignoring women’s work and devaluing women’s stories.

Take Malala. What more inspiring story could you possibly find? But she’s just a girl. How could they give such an important award to a little girl?

She’s just starting out and has her whole life to win such a prize!

Malala has already done more than any one person could ever be asked to do. When I was sixteen, I was pretty much a self-absorbed twit who thought she knew everything. How many pundits, commentators, and editorial writers have decried the so-called apathy of today’s young people? How many have said, in my day we marched for civil rights, we marched against Vietnam? How many have criticized digital activism as comparatively lazy and wished kids would get up off their butts and do something?

Then comes Malala, who risks her life  to write about education for the BBC. She gets shot in the head, recovers, and holds no grudges. She keeps working to support education. She talks like the Dalai Lama. She wows Jon Stewart with her dedication to peace at all costs, saying about the Taliban’s death threats:

I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, ‘If he comes, what would you do Malala?’ then I would reply to myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.’  But then I said, ‘If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.’ Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that ‘I even want education for your children as well.’ And I will tell him, ‘That’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.’

She starts a foundation. She gives a speech to the United Nations Youth Assembly. She writes a book. This girl is unstoppable.

Meh, she’s just a girl.

There’s always been negativity around the world girl. It’s often used to insult or belittle. It’s associated with disempowerment. But maybe being a girl can finally be an amazing thing.

Malala works to ensure that girls all over the world have access to education. Experts now agree that the most important thing organizations and governments can do to promote peace and improve life in low-income populations around the world is to educate girls. Malala’s work gets to the root of why we don’t have peace. And, of course, why so few women have won Nobel Prizes.

At 36, I find myself wanting to be one-tenth as amazing as that sixteen-year-old girl. The Nobel Committee doesn’t deserve her. We don’t deserve her. But she keeps working for us anyway.

This brave Pakistani girl. Let’s appreciate her while we can. Let’s remember that all Pakistani girls–all girls–are potential Malalas. Let’s follow her lead and give them all a chance.

celebrating transgender art

Posted: September 30, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: comedy, education, empathy, equality, fiction, film, gender roles, literature, music, performance art, sexuality, the body, theatre, Uncategorized, violence, visual art | Leave a comment

It seems like stories of transgender folks are appearing in the news more and more. Recently, students at Marina High School in Huntington Beach, California, crowned Cassidy Lynn Campbell as their first transgender homecoming queen, which was great news that was inevitably followed by bullying and criticism.

Before that, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning bravely became Chelsea Manning. Many journalists and media outlets respectfully followed AP style guidelines by using Manning’s new name and female pronouns, which made for a good lesson for the general public, but Fox News, to no one’s surprise, refused to make the change and even ridiculed Manning’s gender identity.

In the past few months, Jamaican trans teenager Dwayne Jones was beaten, stabbed, and shot to death by a mob in Montego Bay; 21-year-old Islan Nettles was out with other trans folks in Harlem, New York, when a group of men beat her to death; a trans woman was stripped naked and thrown off a bridge in Mexico City; and Diamond Williams, a transgender woman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was killed and dismembered, her body parts left in a field.

I understand that a lot of people have lived their entire lives thinking of gender as a fixed fact of life instead of a fluid social construct. That doesn’t excuse violence, but it explains some of the ignorance we keep seeing. The presence of out gays and lesbians in pop culture has helped to normalize homosexuality and strengthen equality efforts such as legalized gay marriage, so I’m crossing my fingers that as transgender folks become more visible–through everything from reality shows to Pulitzer Prize-winning novels–the rest of the world will continue to loosen their heternormative restraints.

Even for those who happily identify as their assigned sex, the performance of it can be exhausting. Haven’t you ever wanted, even for a moment, to break free from the confines of your manhood or womanhood?

I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s post to highlighting transgender artists and gender-bending art. If you want to understand why people struggle with their assigned sex and work to create their own gender identities, this list is an excellent start.

Artists

Musicians

Filmmakers and Theatre Artists

  • Iizuka Kashou: writer/director of Our Future, a Japanese coming-of-age film centered on an 18-year-old girl who explores her masculinity after her parents separate
  • Andrea James and Calpernia Addams of Deep Stealth Productions:  produced comedic shorts Transproofed and Casting Pearls as well as the first all-transgender Vagina Monologues, prepped Felicity Huffman for her role in Transamerica
  • D’Lo: analyzes South Asian and immigrant experiences of non-traditional gender identity and sexuality through comedy, leads community workshops, recent work: D’FunQT (one-person show)

Films

  • Ma Vie En Rose (Belgium, 1997): Seven-year-old Ludovic prefers dresses, which his family initially finds endearing until they discover there’s more to it than fashion and others don’t respond as kindly in this comedy drama.
  • Beautiful Boxer (Thailand, 2003): This drama tells the true story of Nong Thoom, a successful Muay Thai fighter and trans woman.
  • Tomboy (France, 2011): A little girl is mistakenly identified as a boy, and she goes along with it, feeling perhaps that it’s not a mistake after all.
  • Breakfast on Pluto (Ireland, 2005): Based on the novel by Patrick McCabe, this film follows a trans woman’s youth in 1940s Ireland, right next to the border of Northern Ireland and the busy and violent IRA.

Novels

  • Sacred Country: Rose Tremain’s prize-winning novel is set in rural England, where we find Mary Ward, the child of poor farmers, who discovers at six that she doesn’t want to be a girl.
  • Middlesex: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows the struggles of Cal, an intersex child raised as a girl in a fairly traditional Greek American family, who finally manages to define his own identity as an adult.
  • Cereus Blooms at Night: Shani Mootoo’s acclaimed debut explores gender identity in a fictional Carribean country through Tyler, a nurse who cares for Mala, an older woman suspected of killing her father.
  • Annabel: Kathleen Winter’s debut novel reminds us of the limitations of gender through an intersex child raised as Wayne, who loves hunting in the desolate Labrador countryside with his father but has a shadow self he calls “Annabel.”

reanimating diana: young woman as mythic hero

Posted: September 16, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: art, fiction, film, gender roles, literature, protest, television, violence | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

artemisI’ve spent the last week in bed with this miserable end-of-summer illness that’s going around, but the upshot is that I watched loads of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Years ago, when Buffy was already in its fifth season, I happened to catch an episode and was immediately hooked. I’d forgotten how much I once craved a female superhero. Coincidentally, this was also when Alias started, and though Sydney Bristow boasted no actual super powers, I still loved to watch her kick ass, especially in that bright red wig.

As a late 70s tot, I was a big fan of Linda Carter’s incarnation of Wonder Woman, Diana Prince, though I was far too young to understand much about the story. There’s a picture of me, about three years old, standing in the living room in my Wonder Woman Underoos, and I can barely contain my excitement.

As I got older, I searched for similar themes in books–not warriors necessarily but girls and women who took control, solved problems, made decisions, and changed the world in some way if only in their little communities. Therefore, I read a lot of Nancy Drew, and I was really drawn to the notion of a regular girl fighting crime because it made me feel like I could do that sort of thing.

And that’s what I liked about Buffy Summers and Sidney Bristow. One was a blond, outgoing high-school student and secret chosen one, while the other was a graduate student in English (just like me!) and world-class spy. While these shows had their flaws, I liked how Buffy addressed the good girl/bad girl binary: Buffy couldn’t be just one or the other; ultimately, she had to be both. She had to accept that her dark side was an essential part of her and was not such a terrible thing to embrace. A girl or woman could be multi-dimensional, have conflicting feelings, be tough and firm if she wanted to, and drive the story. She didn’t need to be anyone’s sidekick. She didn’t need saving. And she didn’t need to please everyone.

Has there been another good female superhero since then? I suppose Katniss is one, though she doesn’t have super powers and there’s that tiresome love triangle that guides much of her story. But who else? I admit that I’m not very knowledgeable about comics, but there’s a reason for that. The few women characters always seemed to be impossibly busty and done up in just a strip of leather. To the rescue: artist Alex Law’s Little Girls Are Better at Drawing Superheroes Than You displays little girls’ re-interpretations of superheroes, and they are uplifting and exciting. Little girl Hulk in a tutu might be the best thing ever.

There’s been an influx of superhero movies lately, but they’re mostly the same old stories of straight white dudes. Supposedly, Marvel is a pinch interested in making a female superhero movie because they see a hole they can fill, but they aren’t ready to move. Furthermore, this world is in dire need of more superheroes that aren’t white. Can we get a black Batman or Arab Harry Potter?

Enter Qahera, who breaks the mold and then some. Egyptian artist Deena’s veiled female Muslim superhero fights both misogyny and Islamophobia. Qahera deals with current, real-life scenarios such as sexual harassment and the sexist response of Egypt’s police to said harassment.

It’s fun to imagine having super powers and using them to kick a little ass, especially when faced with a corrupt police force or tyrannical regime, but Ciudad Juárez has its own superhero right now, minus actual super powers, one assumes. A woman calling herself Diana the Huntress (excellent name choice, though I prefer her Greek form, Artemis) has been shooting bus drivers in response to women’s frequent sexual abuse at the hands of the drivers. Authorities say she’s getting revenge, but considering the utter lack of police and government response to rampant femicide in Juarez, you might call it justice.

The thing is I don’t think violence really is a part of justice. I don’t actually want to respond to violence with violence. I think the value in a good superhero tale is not in graphic violence but in the symbolism. Buffy didn’t kill humans, only monsters, and those monsters were the physical manifestation of angsty teen emotions. One of the things I loved about Buffy was that it wasn’t just good vs. evil. Buffy was about accepting that there’s no such thing as perfectly packaged categories of good and evil. There are subversive feelings and ideas lurking beneath cheerleader smiles.

Rather tellingly, Juarez officials have put far more effort into catching this single woman who has killed two men (and wears a blond wig, by the way) than into finding the perpetrators of the mass rape and murder of the city’s female citizens. Clearly, serious cultural change–not violence–is what’s needed to end gender-based violence in Mexico, Egypt, or anywhere else. Transforming traditional narratives, especially superhero stories which are part of our collective consciousness (i.e., the mythic hero’s journey), are an important part of this necessary cultural change. Though that may be why Diana the Huntress chose an archetypal hero as her nom de guerre.

What I responded to most in superhero stories from Wonder Woman to Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the image of a curious, bold, strong, and smart girl or woman who could lead people and effect change. That’s why Nancy Drew was a kind of superhero to me. She saw problems in her world and found a way to solve them on her own. Like Nancy, Diana, and Buffy, I was never interested in being a damsel in distress (or fragile princess, a mythologized Diana of another kind), in letting life just happen to me. I wanted to make life happen, and I wanted to solve problems. That’s what the best superheroes do. If our superheroes reflected more diversity, we might be more inclined to see these strengths in people no matter their gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it feels like Athena is about to bust out of my skull, so I must get back to fighting the good fight against the simple cold.

running trails and tales: my creative process

Posted: August 19, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: creative process, empathy, fiction, literature, the body, violence | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

Last week I wrote about violence against women in crime fiction and detective shows, and I mentioned that these kinds of stories often lead us to believe that there is always some kind of monster lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike. While most women are attacked by someone they know, we also live with fear of stranger rape as a fact of life. Maybe “fear” isn’t quite the right word. Awareness? We are always aware of potential threats to our bodies–partly because frequent verbal harassment reminds us that violence is not far behind–and so go about the world knowing that horrible things sometimes lie just under the surface of a seemingly pleasant moment: a night out with friends, a quick trip to the store, a walk in a park.

I said last week that even though these threats are out there, I try not to spend a lot of time thinking about them despite what these stories and the media would have me think. Two days after I wrote that, I was lacing up my running shoes and glancing at the local news online. I discovered that a woman had been sexually assaulted the day before at the park where I run several days a week. She was walking a trail with her two-year-old daughter in the middle of the afternoon.

A great deal of cussing ensued in my living room.

Needless to say, many in the community and employees of the park are angry, feeling like an important part of all our lives–where we seek peace, fellowship, and pleasure–has been attacked. I run for release, for serenity. But I also work out a lot of creative ideas while I’m running. I like to run at this particular park because it has miles and miles of trails to choose from–with dreamy sunflower fields, old marble quarries, and lush, tree-covered tunnels that make everything magical.

For me, a good run or long walk is magical. My feet can barely keep up with my imagination as it takes off in different directions, conjuring up ideas, crafting narratives, developing characters. I spend a lot of time just letting ideas percolate before I ever write a word. It’s my favorite part of writing, the wandering mind. There’s something about communing with nature that sets my mind free; I can become anyone or anything in that moment. It’s like lucid dreaming. As long as I’m moving forward, the scene in my head is as vibrant as jewelweed along a stream.

I don’t know what I would do without this part of the process. Granted, it hasn’t always been part of my creative process. I used to write poetry strictly, and all I needed was a pen and paper to make something happen. It might not always be good, but there would be something salvageable to be put to work the next day. When I began writing fiction, however, I realized I needed a different approach. I couldn’t just sit down and write and expect there to be a full narrative, so running and long walks have become a critical part of my life. There’s something about a physical challenge that engages my mind in a way I never would have expected. It also helps me deal with stress, anxiety, or other frustrations.

I’m always aware of what can happen when I’m out there. There’s that word again. One has to be aware. Some of the trails become quite isolated, and I pay attention to my surroundings and sometimes look back to make sure that men who pass me don’t double back. Balancing daydreaming with defensiveness is a complicated act, but I’m sure it’s one that many women are used to.

Every time I’ve gone out since this attack, my imagination has taken me in a very different direction. All the stories and characters are the same: I fight this guy. I win. I stop him. I become like a superhero, a warrior, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Jennifer Garner in Alias. I imagine possessing Buffy’s super strength.

And then I’ve spent an hour dedicated to committing violence. I don’t like it. I’ve run out some of my anger, but my muscles are tighter than usual. So much for release.

My heart goes out to this woman and her family. It could have been any of us, but she’s the one who has to live with it, who has to find a way to make sure it doesn’t haunt her child. The police have released a sketch of the attacker, and I hope someone turns him in.

In the meantime, I will keep running wherever I want. And I will find a way to go back to the kinds of stories I want to create. I won’t let him change my life. Though I may have some tricks up my sleeve if you meet me on the trail.

dead women sell: detective stories from page to screen

Posted: August 12, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: fiction, film, gender roles, literature, television, violence | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I tried to watch a historical fiction miniseries on Netflix the other day, but I had to give up. Two episodes in, I’d seen at least five sexual assaults: one rape, three attempted rapes, and two different scenarios wherein unctuous men fondled women’s breasts against their will. Granted, the story took place in the fourteenth century when ideas about women and violence were somewhat different than they are now, but I’d had more than enough. Instead, I turned to Emma, letting Jeremy Northam‘s Mr. Knightley and the clueless but wonderful Miss Bates (“Pork!”) cleanse my brain.

Years ago I read Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, in which Inga Muscio urged readers to stop watching movies that depict rape. I did that for a while, and then I gave up. For one thing, I didn’t always know a rape scene was coming. For another, there were some really good movies and TV shows that sometimes addressed rape, and I hated missing them even if I didn’t want to watch the rape scene. Though I suspect Muscio is probably right that we should just completely reject rape scenes.

I watched The Sopranos, well after it aired, and nearly tapped out in season three when the violence, especially against women, reached its peak. I’m glad I stuck with it because The Sopranos was a phenomenal series, but I wonder what it does to me to witness staged violence so regularly and what it does to the actors who portray it. And I wonder about anyone who can sit through a rape scene and not feel a crushing weight. Moreover, through TV and cinema, we typically see women as victims and men as aggressors, both tiresome and harmful gender stereotypes.

Admittedly, I am a big fan of British (and European) detective shows. From Miss Marple and Pouirot to Inspector Lynley, Lewis and Hathaway, and now (or then) Endeavor Morse, I devour Masterpiece Mystery. Who knew Oxford dons could be so murderous? Rather obsessively, I raced through all seven seasons of Prime Suspect, in love with the indomitable Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison. I followed Kenneth Branaugh’s gloomy Kurt Wallander around the Swedish countryside and Mireille Enos’s intense Sarah Linden as she followed clues through drizzly Seattle in The Killing, though I have yet to watch the Scandinavian originals of both. I loved Idris Elba as Luther and Malin Crépin as Annika Bengtzon.

But I am tired of women being beaten, tied up, raped, strangled, stabbed, and wrapped in plastic. I should also point out that these women, like the detectives who work on their cases, tend to be white, as though we couldn’t possibly care about people of color being attacked.

And I’m tired of worrying about deranged men who plan to sneak up on me while I’m unlocking my car door or break into my house while I’m sweetly slumbering. (I don’t actually worry about these things that much, but, to some extent, that’s the message some of these shows send.)

Off screen, most women do become victims of violence at some point in their lives, but their lives are about so much more than victimhood. On screen, women are often reduced to victims or defined by the physical attacks they endure. Furthermore, by impressing upon us the idea that attacks by strangers are so common, these shows (by these shows, I mean all  shows  that center on violence against women, especially US detective shows that have spawned iterations in multiple cities; Masterpiece Mystery is the least offender) undermine the seriousness of the violence most women face: intimate partner violence and “date rape,” which I put in quotes because the common terminology also implies a less serious form of violence than “rape.”

A new British show popped up on Netflix recently. In The Fall, Gillian Welch plays Stella Gibson, a bad-ass detective superintendent called to Northern Ireland to review a murder case. Stella is the next-generation Jane Tennison: sharp, focused, purposeful, demanding, and fully in control of her own life. She ends up tracking a serial killer, who, by day, is just a normal family guy working as a bereavement counselor! No one in his life has any clue that he’s a devious killer! I loved Stella so much that I finished the first season despite my utter disinterest in serial killers, my disgust with the focus on the killer’s detailed methods and trophy-stroking, and my absolute disbelief that no one has noticed that this man lives two completely different lives. I’m pretty sure there would be some red flags.

I appreciate a female detective–or a group of women code breakers, as in The Bletchley Circle. I appreciate a show that follows one case for the entire season instead of showing us a new murdered woman each week, a show that has plenty of male victims like a regular detective’s job, and a show that doesn’t shove every graphic detail in your face. But outside of most Masterpiece shows, which are tame enough for a PBS audience, this isn’t enough. And on US networks, there is little in this genre that I appreciate.

I still close my eyes or sometimes leave the room when a woman is being beaten (unless she’s a ninja or spy or boxer or superhero) or raped. My stomach contracts, and I hold my breath, willing the moment to end. But loads of people continue chomping on their popcorn and staring at the screen.

So here’s my question:

Can film and television address the issue of violence against women without normalizing, sexualizing, glamorizing, or unintentionally promoting it; punishing women for making choices; reifying the idea of woman as victim; and playing into traditional ideas of femininity and masculinity?

Is that too much to ask for?

Most of the shows I listed by name were originally books. I’ve never read them. Is that weird? I always like to read a good book before seeing the movie or TV version, but when it comes to detective stories, I’ve just never bothered. I did read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo after watching the Swedish movie to see how the book dealt with violence against women. It was easier to take in written form but still quite rough.

It turns out that killing women sells a lot of books. In fact, they have their own genre: fem-jep, as in female jeopardy. It’s a subject that has generated some controversy over the last few years. There are interesting discussions among feminist crime fiction writers and readers about women victims, book critics who can’t take another bloody breast, and writers who speak out against “gratuitous literary rape.”

I don’t think violence on the page has the same effect as violence on the screen simply because watching violence will always be more visceral, but it’s still problematic. In literature, the representation of violence against women can still contribute to rape culture by normalizing violence, playing on a passive/aggressive binary determined by gender, and encouraging us to connect woman with victim. Therefore, I ask the same question of literature as I do of film and television.

I welcome your ideas. In the meantime, here are some excellent considerations for writing about violence.

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