http://www.bustle.com/articles/49097-taylor-swifts-time-businessweek-cover-photos-are-powerful-assertive-different-from-the-rest

This article takes a new look one of the world’s most prolific pop stars. It discusses how Swift is photographed straight on, eyes watching the reader in two magazine cover, Time and Bloomberg Businessweek.  There are two magazine that are well known for discussing individual’s power, career, and economic strength.

This article discusses how pop stars are usually shot showing off their bodies in fashionable clothing or photoshopped.  Instead Swift forces the reader to consider her as a serious forced to be reckoned with in these photos.  She is not sexualized and instead framed as most men are on these important magazines.

After thinking about what Sinead O’Connor said about the “pedization” about the Spice Girls, I believe I understand what she was trying to say.  By acting young and carefree, not only does this girl group related to younger girls (probably their main objective) they also appear young and immature themselves.  By combining their 20-something sexuality and their teenage appearance, they make it acceptable to sexualize younger girls.  Another repercussion of this is that society may now believe that it is acceptable to assume that all 20-something women wish to be treated and seen like the Spice Girls. Thus they are not taken seriously and display what I call “pre-packaged feminism”.  The Spice Girls are definitely making a feminist statement, but it is already one that has been covered.  As I believe some of the other musicians in “The Righteous Babes” feminism is about pushing the boundaries and making people feel uncomfortable with the state of things.  The Spice Girls have put out their statement, but with their look and act being fetishized their statement is not taken seriously.  It’s almost as if society has allowed them to state their opinion, but will not actually take it into consideration. Their feminism is part of their image, but that is all it appears to be.

I believe a similar thing has happened with many recent pop stars.  Female empowerment is part of their image, but that is all it is publicized as.  Being a feminist singer may be a precursor to being labeled “rebellious” which is something that can be fetishized and can be sold as part of that performer’s personality.  It is as if society only permits feminism as  a look and not as something to be taken seriously.  Performers are allowed to show a certain amount of rebellion, but anything past that may be pushing the boundaries.

Although, there look may be toned down and controlled by publicists and other production staff, a performer’s song can at least be interpreted many ways.  Songs with rebellious or feminist lyrics can affect people in ways that personality and image cannot.  Songs are still left to be interpreted and may be a great place for encouraging young feminists.

After watching “Shooting Women” and reading “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” I now realize that although women are often told they can do whatever a man can do by parents, teachers, and mentors when it gets to doing the job there are obstacles that the trusted adults in our lives had never warned about.  In “Shooting Women” several of the women said that they had been sexually harassed while on set.  They felt like men were bothering them because they felt that the film industry was still a man’s domain and they didn’t want women around to screw it up.

In “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”, Slaughter says that no matter how high up a woman gets in her career she will still be expected to be the primary care giver to her children and if she failed to do so that might her career even more.  Slaughter has now begun to telling ambitious, young women that they can have it all, but not all at the same time.  It is possible to have a successful career and a happy family life, but they can’t exist at the same time as they do in a man’s life.  She says that telling women that you can have it all only sets them up for disappointment in the future.

My question is: What should we be telling the girls of today and the women of tomorrow? Should we tell them that they can have any job they want and risk that they may be harassed or abused at that job? Or do we warn them that harassment may happen and allow them to choose a career with that in mind? Both options have both negative and positive outcomes, but being honest about the potential problems down the road, as Slaughter does, may discourage women from following their dream job.  However, hiding the fact that harassment is a possibility may lead women in to danger.  Neither option is good, but one must be chosen until women are seen as equally capable of every job that a man has held in the past.

I think we got our answer after watching “Filming Desire” in class.  Several of the filmmakers that were interviewed discussed the difficulty of shooting a woman’s sexuality without exploiting it for the male character’s pleasure.  One of the filmmakers stated that all female film directors had to reinvent how to make a film because all of the usual film tropes have been created by men and many objectify and insult women.  They said creating a feminist love scene was one of the most difficult parts of making the film, more difficult then any scenes with action sequences or large groups of people.  These filmmakers said they wanted to do their best to not objectify their female characters, given that many women on screen are objectified before they even begin speaking.

Nonetheless, it does appear that a feminist sex scene is possible.  It is possible to show the woman getting just as much respect and pleasure from the sexual act as the man.  Many filmmakers choose to do this by not explicitly showing the sexual act.  They will never show the naked body of a woman and the sex is implied or talked about in a voice over.  If a naked body is shown it is shown in its entirety, never cut up into segments.  This is a way around the inherent objectification that exists in many viewers that cannot be prevented by the filmmaker.  This is a reason shooting lesbian sex scenes or even romantic scenes between two women is difficult.  As the filmmakers in the documentary and as Kaplan writes about in “The Avant Gardes in Europe and the US” any relationship between two women is seen as pornographic and can be objectified even more than when it is a man and a woman together.  Thus although the feminist sex scene is possible, it is only possible when considering and working around the inherent opinions of the viewer.

When Virginia Woolf first penned Orlando: A Biography she did not think to consider who might be chosen to play Orlando in a film adaptation and if it would be the same person to play him/her as both a man and a woman.  It is very interesting that Sally Potter chose to you one actress to portray Orlando in both sexes.  Tilda Swinton did an astounding job of playing both genders, convincing me that she was a man for the first half of the film so much so that I was almost surprised when she revealed her female body.

I think this casting choice only added to the film because it really drove home the point of how easy it is sometimes to overlook gendered differences and then how obvious it is when you’re confronted with it like when male Orlando tells Sasha that she has to stay with him because he loves her and then female Orlando is propositioned the same offer and finds it repulsive.

The film would have been drastically different if a man had been cast to play Orlando in both sexes.  A male actor portraying a woman would not have been very convincing to viewers and probably would have been laughed at and not taken very seriously.  Swinton’s androgynous look accounts for how easily she could play a convincing man and woman.

Although casting choices are usually not something that add much to the context of the film, Orlando would have been a much different movie if two actors had split the role.

How do you think the film would have been different if Orlando was played by a man throughout the film? Or even a less androgynous appearing woman?

Upon first seeing the phrase blaxploitation used in connection to “Foxy Brown” I was a little confused as to how black people were being exploited in the film.  Although Foxy, a black woman, endures a lot of hardships throughout the film and makes some questionable decisions, her storyline is ultimately triumphant.  She is wronged by an amoral group of drug dealers and pimps and overcomes rape and torture to avenge her boyfriend’s death and her own misfortunes.  After watching “Baad Asssss Cinema” in class I soon understood that black people were not necessarily being exploited in the plot of the film, but rather as a film device.

As we learned in the documentary, there was a sudden jolt in the 1970’s of movies that starred black people in the heroic roles.  This was a move by the movie studios to get more black people buying tickets to see their films.  After they succeeded in getting more black people to see their movies, the studios discovered that black people had also begun watching more of their regular, white-centered films and stopped making films centered around black people because it was no longer necessary.

Why do you think the studios were so quick to drop black character-centered films?  After the brief stint of blaxploitation mostly in the early to mid-70’s films reverted to being dominated by black characters.  Although I understand that the movie studios saw that they could get black audiences to see their films whether or not they had black heroes I do not understand why the black character-centered films were dropped so quickly by studios.  The actors of these films discuss in the documentary that they saw the movement towards black hero-centered films as a result of the civil rights movement of the previous decades can it really be called a success because of how quickly they stopped making these films?  I believe that althoug this blaxploitation movement came right after the “end” of the civil rights movement, the fact that these films were dropped so quickly by the studios shows that black actors and audience members were just continually used by the movie studios to make a profit.

On Monday we discussed the role of the femme fatale in film noir.  The femme fatale is often mysterious, dangerous, and after money or wealth.  More often than not she is more concerned with her own agency and power and has little concern for family or other domestic things that women of her era were expected to take interest in.  This character represented a subversion of feminine expectations and an empowerment of sexual liberation and personal freedom.  Although many femme fatales are not typically nice or good people they are capable of the same autonomy and power that typically only male characters are allowed.  That being said, most femme fatales meet their demise by the end of the film.  Most of the are either killed or punished with jail time or something worse.

What does this punishment say about strong female characters?  Is it enough that the character was seen on screen even though they didn’t live to see the end of the film?  I believe that although it is important for female characters to be portrayed powerfully they must also make it through the movie.  By killing them off, it gives viewers the ability to say because she was a powerful woman she had to be punished.  Some may argue that all bad, power-hungry characters should be punished in the end, but what makes femme fatales stand out from this statement is that their power is based in their femininity.  By punishing them, you are punishing them for being feminine.  In conclusion, although it is important for strong female characters to be displayed in any matter, the fact that they usually by the end of the film is sending the message that strong women should not be allowed to be successful.

Gledhill marks Klute as an interesting film as it combines the two very different genres of realism and noir, which typically showcase very different characteristics in their characters, especially female characters.  Film noir usually exaggerates female characters so that they are either the killer femme fatale or the domestic housewife, while humanist, realist films attempt to show women as real people with real problems.

• Gledhill also suggests that there are two ways to read Klute for meaning.  The first is the humanist literary method in which the film and every detail of it can be read for metaphorical meaning.  The second way of reading this film is through Marxist aesthetics.  This theory essentially states that you cannot decipher the absolute meaning of the film, but you can analyze how the meaning is produced.  It also states that this film is a product of all feminist film to come before it and it’s meaning is a result of history that has come before it.

The author identifies five main features of noir film and how they generally tarnish the appearance of the female character.

1) Investigative Narrative

• the hero is usually trying to figure something about a woman
• the woman is either the femme fatale or the domestic house wife
• if she is a working woman it is usually in a degrading job
• she can never both a family and a career, only one

2) Flashback/ Voice Over

• It is usually a man telling the story and dictating which details are shared about the woman.

3) Point of View

• The story is usually told from the man’s perspective and results in a fragmented incomplete portrayal of the female characters

4) Characterization of the Heroine

• The female character always seems to be switching between moral and immoral unlike the straightforward moral trajectory of the man

5) Visual Style

• The way the film is shot emphasizes the sexuality of the woman as it relates to men.
• Her body is usually shown in fragments.

In conclusion, the noir film and realist film (which are shown through the fact that Bree is a working girl, seeking psychotherapy, and taking control of her life) should not be able to coexist in the same film.  How do you think they hold up together?

Claire Johnston writes, “…it is not enough to discuss the oppression of women within the text of the film; the language of the cinema/ the depiction of reality must also be interrogated…” By this Johnston says that it is not enough to have a strong female character in the film the other characters must treat her appropriately.  It is common practice in films with strong female leads for the other characters to try justifying why the lead is female.  In a film with a male lead there is no need to mention why he is the main player, but with a female lead, many films strive to point out how much of an anomaly it is.  By pointing out that a female lead is strange it conveys to the audience the idea that a strong female lead should not be expected.  This says that the average woman does not have it in her to command as much power as the average male lead does, and that it is only occasionally that a woman can do so.  If a woman is to be the lead in a film, then the dialogue of the film should treat the woman as it would for a man.  If the dialogue and the actions of the film do not match, then it creates confusion in the viewer who may be unsure of the film’s actual position on the female lead.