I remember hearing about an artist, Nickolay Lamm, who was getting a lot of attention for bringing to light the discrepancies between Barbie dolls’ dimensions and those of normal (and healthy) young women. Today, I learned that his crowdfund mission was a success, and he’s created this awesome new doll, Lammily, whose proportions are those of an average 19 year old American girl.

Here’s a video highlighting the difference between Lammily and traditional Barbie dolls:

I think this is a really neat idea, and is something that seems so minor and simple but could make a big difference. He’s releasing the dolls, and included a sticker pack so you can give her acne, scars, cellulite – all things that real people experience but are glossed over. Lamm said that he’s going to release more dolls of different ethnicities and body shapes too.

Lamm also released this video of kids reacting to playing with her, and it’s pretty amazing. The kids noticed the difference between her and other dolls they usually play with, and so many commented that she looked like someone they knew.

OK so this came up in one of my classes today, and I wanted to post something about it on the blog because it relates to our discussion on intersectionality from Monday. Here’s a quick BuzzFeed video about it, too!

Basically, for some background, the US is the only industrialized nation which does not provide paid maternity leave. Under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993, companies with more than 50 employees are required to provide job security for employees who can take up to 12 weeks unpaid leave for things like the birth/adoption of a new child or care for a parent.

There are organizations which do provide paid maternity/paternity leave, which is great, but the underlying structure of our society is severely problematic. It affects anyone with any kind of relationship, though especially those who are members of multiple marginalized groups.

People who work at businesses with fewer than 50 people are already exempt from the federal law, and their employers are not required to give them paid or unpaid leave, nor are they required to guarantee that once they return from leave they will be in the same/similar position. Additionally, people who financially cannot afford to be without pay for 12 weeks are also essentially disqualified.  Women, especially women of color, are more likely to be poor or living near the poverty line, so they are effectively disqualified from being able to take advantage of this policy.

I think there are a lot of reasons that contribute to why the US is such an outlier on this issue. Maybe government-mandated paid paternal leave goes against our stereotypes about parenthood (wait, fathers can/should/want to stay home and care for baby?!), or maybe it’s too big-bad-government sounding (*gasp* I think that sounds like socialisim). I think a big part, however, is our culture’s tendency to be so individualistic – we have the mentality here that everyone should take care of themselves and everyone will be able to figure it out if they work hard enough. I think one of our country’s biggest flaws is our inability to see the ways in which different structures, and the interactions between them, are constantly in play and effecting the ways in which we live.

I found this article about a new game that these two teens created and — stay with me on this — I think it ties back to our recent class discussions.

I was thinking about some of the reactions to watching Filming Desire and Window Water Baby Moving, and the ways we’re socialized into what is “normal” or what makes us “uncomfortable.” Mostly, it seems like our society has a real issue when it comes to talking about female pleasure, just like it has a tendency to equate nudity with sex. Seeing naked women outside of the context of sexual intimacy was jarring for some people, and a lot of people were a little freaked out by the intensity of the child birth video, especially if this was their first time watching it (or maybe the second, if you count the time in the 5th grade when many public school systems tried to freak you out and scare you as much as possible about the consequences of sex).

This article kind of takes that idea and goes in a different direction; it’s about two teenagers who created a video game called Tampon Run, where, you guessed it, you run and throw tampons at people instead of shooting bullets at them. They made it to parody of sorts, to make a social statement about “idea that in society, we’re more comfortable with guns and violence than we are with teaching girls to be comfortable with their bodies.”

I’m reminded of that scene from Orange is the New Black that we were talking about in class on Monday where the women don’t even have a basic working knowledge about female anatomy. As an earlier post mentioned, in mainstream media, showing women wanting or experiencing sexual pleasure (or god forbid, giving birth — can you even imagine the rating that would get??) often automatically generates higher maturity ratings.

Really? What kind of message does that send, when we can show men’s faces during orgasm during a PG-13 or R rated film, but not women’s? Or when we can show countless bloody and gory and violently graphic scenes in television and media (shows like Hannibal or Game of Thrones, I’m looking at you), but the word “tampon” makes some people squeamish?

I love the idea behind the game, and it’s pretty simple and fun, so give it a shot! Realizing the kinds of images and topics that make us uncomfortable, and thinking about why they do, can hopefully help us become more critical consumers of the world around us.

I found this article just published today on mic.com, titled “Who Has the Right to Tell the Stories of Marginalized People?”

It was a great read, so here’s the link: http://mic.com/articles/101230/who-has-the-right-to-tell-the-stories-of-marginalized-americans

This was so appropriate for our class and multiple conversations we’ve been having in class the past few weeks. It touches on our discussion on the criticism surrounding The Help and what it did (or rather, did not) include and why or how that matters, to issues of responsible film making and the lengths to which we can or ought to go when producing a narrative. It gets at the ways in which Brandon Teena’s story was told and retold through different news stories about his “betrayal” versus the documentary several people posted about versus Peirce’s portrayal. Even what we were talking about today, the significance of casting actors in opposite gender roles in Orlando, and the inclusion of women with experience as mothers in leadership positions in the hopes of changing policy to enact social change (think Sheryl Sandberg’s parking space example).

I haven’t watched the Amazon series the article talks about, but I have seen some of the episodes of Orange is the New Black and have heard much of the celebration of Laverne Cox and the importance of her inclusion in the show and the ways in which the producers have authentically told her character’s story (like the article mentions, for example, using Laverne’s twin brother to play her character’s pre-transition self).

I would love to hear people’s thoughts about either series, if they’ve watched them, or just general thoughts about this topic!

This afternoon I was describing the screening of “Where Should the Birds Fly?” to my roommate, and when I was doing so I thought of Professor Sikand’s comment in class about considering the violence that Fida included in the film. .

As a viewer, I really appreciated the violence of the film. I think that in order to be true to the conflict and the realities of the conflict, which to me is what Fida truly tried to do, she needed to include the graphic violence of the attacks on Gaza. Additionally, going off our discussion in class about the images we often get from the mainstream media, I don’t think we are truly shown the horrors and the graphic nature of war. Scenes and images from the film were horrible and difficult to watch, but I’m glad she didn’t take the edge off when considering which scenes to cut and keep in editing the film. I’m glad we got to see the whole reality, even if it was immensely difficult to watch.

I’m thinking particularly of the scene with the teenage  boy in the hospital who had been hit with the white phosphorous bombs; I’ve never seen images or videos which depicted the real, raw, graphic wounds sustained by civilians during a war. I’m thankful for him for allowing himself and his pain to be documented and shown – I don’t think the effect would have been the same if Fida simply had an account of the injuries he sustained or described them for us. Instead, we saw a real boy writhing and crying in pain after sustaining injuries because of a conflict in which he plays no part. Similarly, the scenes with the wounded and dead Palestinians in the street, being carried or covered with sheets, were also powerful. And the shot of the man looking at the dead children, these were all horrible and horrifying but truthfully documented what it is to live in a war zone and to be a Palestinian civilian.

Finally, I appreciate the inclusion of Mona and her story through time within the film, like some people mentioned today in class. In representations of conflicts and war zones, I think that we see more often just quick snapshots of the destruction and damage. Fida included the scene with the father shouting for his son Mohammed (and in the Q&A remarked that this raw display of emotion in the moment was against the cultural prescriptions for men and thus important to share) – and this is more along the lines of what I have seen in news coverage/viral stories about the effects of war and violence on civilians, in Palestine and around the world.

While that particular scene was gut wrenching and highly emotional, I’m glad we also got to see Mona. How many times do we see coverage of a bombing or an attack or a raid, and then never consider it again? With Mona’s story, we got to see the long-term effects of being a Palestinian enmeshed in this violence. We were presented with this little girl whose life will never be the same, and returning to her multiple times really brought home that point for me. Our experience with the conflicts and violence in the Gaza strip could end when the movie stops – it will never end for Mona and for everyone else Fida included in her footage, and I definitely took that away from watching the film.

I just finished watching Boys Don’t Cry – it was so heavy and emotional I wanted to get it done today. I’m still kind of reeling about working through everything that happened in the film. I have to say, I don’t know if I’ve ever been more anxious for a character. This was probably the most anxiety-ridden film watching experience I’ve ever had.

You know the classic trope of horror movies, when the girl hears a noise coming from behind a door, and every gut instinct you have is screaming “GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR, RUN!” but she only goes closer? And you just keep thinking “Oh God, something horrible is about to happen” and your stomach wrenches? That feeling was my whole experience of watching this movie. I was 99.9% sure a rape was coming at some point (given the context clues of our recent class discussions/readings), which I was definitely anxious about and worried for Brandon’s safety. And let’s be clear, the rape scene/flashback was horrendous and violent and really difficult to watch. But more than that, at least for me in terms of a long-term sense, was the constant fear of Brandon getting outed. I kept getting nervous that they would finally “find him out.”

If after watching Brandon grapple with his secret and navigate the world for the better part of two hours I was this emotionally distraught, what does that say about the experience of actual people who are transsexual? I think that this was entirely intentional through the set up of the movie, and was done really to highlight this constant fear, the constant displays/proving of gender, and the realities of the lives of transsexual people. The never-ending fear of being outed, the betrayals of their bodies (i.e., getting your period when you identify and are trying to pass as a male), the difficult process (practically and financially) of undergoing a sex-change operation, the stigma of mental illness or the disgust as other people react to them. I appreciate this film’s attempt to show the hardships of a transsexual individual.

I think this movie, because it involves transgender behavior and the main character is a transsexual, really complicates the notions of gender, rape, and representations in film. I’m excited to talk about the movie on Monday and hear what everyone thought!

I know tomorrow will be a bit hectic trying to work through our discussion of the 3 articles in addition to reactions to The Help, so I wanted to post my summary notes of Kaplan here on the blog. Kaplan’s piece serves a two-fold purpose; to educate us about the representations of mothers in Hollywood, and to address the attitude toward and full discussion (or lack thereof) of motherhood by feminist film critics.

The piece discusses how Hollywood films tend to relegate the Mother to the periphery of the film. They are not shown as complex characters who have conflicting needs and roles.

Kaplan outlines four paradigms of the Mother:

• 1. Good Mother: She is all-nurturing, and lives only through her family
• 2. Bad Mother/Witch: She demands her own life, takes control of the narrative & is therefore punished for her violation
• 3. Heroic Mother: She suffers/endures for the sake of the family; is slightly more central to the narrative than the Good Mother
• 4. Silly/Weak/Vain Mother: She is the center of comedies and is ridiculed by the members of her family

Additionally, Kaplan notes that the Mother is rarely single, and traditionally rarely combines motherhood & work. She argues that the narratives which do focus on the Mother do so only because she is resisting her “proper” place; the heart of the film is to work to re-inscribe the Mother back into her appropriate role as defined by patriarchy. In this way, films aim to teach us about the life that we should want (Kaplan gives examples of Stella Dallas to show how this function of film serves to indoctrinate us to desire a particular set up of social roles within a capitalist context).

Another important aspect of this piece was the recognition that traditionally, feminist film critics have focused on the Mother from a daughter point-of-view. She mentions the tension and conflict that feminist film critics have, angry at their mothers for reinforcing and working within the patriarchal structure. However, Kaplan concedes that this is a repetition of patriarchy’s omission of the Mother.

At present, Kaplan says that there is a split between representing Mothers as the Old, traditional mother and the Career mother. The Career Mother, in her dedication to her career, loses the very qualities that are needed to be cast as a good mother. However, more recently fathers have been portrayed as nurturing, and are now allowed permitted to acquire feminine attributes.

Questions to consider:

1. Can you think of examples of each of the 4 types of Mother images?

2. Why is it problematic that until recently the perspective of the mother was left unexamined?

3. Can you think of examples that contrast old & new representations of mothers/fathers that show either a combination of motherhood & career (for mothers) or a nurturing fatherhood (for fathers)?

Today I was thinking more about our discussion of whether or not noir films or their themes are feminist. I think it’s a really complicated issue and argument, because on the one hand, some of our authors (Gledhill, Place) have pointed out that in this genre/movement, female characters are not confined in ways they usually are in other genres. Their sexual excess, and thus their deception/destructive possibility grants them more power and agency in the roles they occupy.

In the two movies we’ve watched so far, both of the women are able to provide for themselves or their family because of their ability to capitalize on their sexuality, which seems to be their only marketable skill and avenue for success. Then again, the endings of both of the films, while ambiguous, both seem to negate their previous status and actions and bring them back under the definition of an “acceptable” woman figure.

In Klute, Bree seemed to have been taking care of herself before Klute came around. She mentions in one scene that a year ago she was living a life of luxury when she was in “the business” full-time. She was able to provide materially for herself, even if it was achieved by performing sex work. Still, we see the evidence that she’s trying to escape that world and support herself through attempting to enter into the modeling and acting world.

At the same time, this still reinforces the idea that women are defined in what they represent for men. A career as a sex worker, a model, or an actress is still ultimately objectifying and relying on the body as a source of consumption. For instance, even though she was living alone and supporting herself, Bree was still being financed by men; that is, by her johns and clients, who were the consumers of her sex work.

Additionally, Bree is cast somewhat as a damsel in distress who depends on Klute to save her during times of danger (like the scene where he goes to find the person on the roof of her building, and the confrontation scene with Peter where he saves Bree’s life).

While in some of the voiceovers and scenes with the psychologist we hear that being a sex worker actually allows Bree to have a sense of agency and control (she mentions feeling powerful and taking charge while her clients are awkward and shy), the most exciting scenes are the ones in which Klute swoops in to rescue Bree and is cast as the hero. Additionally, one could argue that Bree is rescued from her life as a sex worker as she leaves with Klute at the conclusion of the film (although the ending is ambiguous as to what her future holds, like we discussed in class).

In this way, even though she was originally portrayed as a strong female character who was finding her own way in the world and relying upon herself, at the close of the film she’s seemed to stop working in the sex industry (which can be read as both a bad and good development) and has relied on Klute for protection and stability. Her sexuality has faded and she seems to be headed for the life she earlier mentioned she wanted no part of (to paraphrase, ironing socks in Cabbageville).

Blonde Venus also has these contradictory feminist and traditional elements. Helen returns to work as the primary breadwinner for her family, albeit after her husband was too sick to work, and after he has protested her entering the workforce. Much like Bree, her career as a performer emphasizes her identity as a sexual being who puts on a show for the men around her.

Helen’s relationship with Nick, while of course not the best message (at least in the beginning it is clear it’s nothing more than prostitution), she seems to hold most of the control in the relationship. When her husband returns, she leaves Nick, who wants to marry her, after having used him to finance Ned’s recovery and her and Johnny’s life in the interim. Later, once she is famous in Paris, we hear that she’s been using men to climb the ladders and attain success. Helen has used her sexuality not only to market herself as a performer, but to enhance her career; almost reversing the convention that men are the users, women are the used. Considering the time period of the production of Blonde Venus, I think this is definitely progressive.

Still, at the end of the film, Helen is returned to domesticity and her role as a housewife. While it is unclear if she will work again, or if she even loves Ned, her deviation from the convention of the loving mother and wife is over. Though she attempted to survive as a single working mother, and was always one step ahead of the detectives and policemen after her, it was not a feasible long term situation. Helen is re-established as a dutiful woman, and though the last scene is her wearing her sexy and dramatic evening gown, engaging in the tasks like giving Johnny a bath and putting him to bed remove all hints of sexuality from her actions.

I think both of these films definitely have subversive and feminist elements, and some of them are not what we would expect. Both main characters use their bodies and their sexuality, which seem to be their only option, but they do so successfully and in ways in which they hold onto some power and agency. However, the ends of both films seem to take these characters who have deviated from prescribed social and gender roles and configures them back into the appropriate norms.

I had some final thoughts about The Blonde Venus that we didn’t mention in class. I’ve never taken a film class, and honestly don’t know much about the technical/historical aspects of the film industry (well, at least now I know about the Hayes Code, which is something) so my notes and interpretations of the film were based in the thematic and narrative elements that touch on my background in WGS classes.

I think something incredibly interesting about the film that we didn’t talk about is the historical significance of the title and Helen’s stage name, “Blonde Venus.” In the early 1800s, a South African woman named Sara Baartman was put on display in Europe in freakshows as an oddity — and was nicknamed the “Hottentot Venus” (I’ve linked a quick overview of Sara’s life for those of you who have never heard about her here). This was an offensive stage name and a racial slur aimed the Khoikhoi people of South Africa.

Sara’s naked body was ogled and gawked at by the white Europeans who were both intrigued and disgusted at her different body shape. She was viewed as grossly sexual at a time where sexuality was becoming linked with ideas of morality by Victorian Europeans. We saw the remnants of this pairing during Helen’s “Hot Voodoo” routine in the film, where sexuality was characterized with something taboo and sinful, and was associated with notions of primitiveness, animalistic instincts, and of course, Africa.

I think it is important that the name of the film is “Blonde Venus” because of the ways it relates to the history and ideas about the “Hottentot Venus.” During the movie, Helen’s emergence as a sexual being, starting that first night with her Hot Voodoo routine (where she even wears a blonde afro wig), is juxtaposed and put at odds with her identity as a wife and mother. As a performer, Helen’s body is being consumed just like Sara’s once was, and her performances still have an air of immorality and sinfulness. At that time (and arguably, still today) the idea of a woman who is at once both sexual and a good mother was incompatible, as seen when she is condemned as a bad mother and judged not fit to have custody of Johnny. I personally think that the moments we saw shared between Helen and Johnny showed she was a good mother, who did whatever was necessary to help protect him and sheltered him from the reality of their situation.

Our reading didn’t touch upon this aspect of the film, but it’s hard for me to think that the naming of the film was totally unrelated to Sara Baartman. Even if it was, I think the connection sets the stage for an interesting reading of the film.