Let me start off by saying that I had a very happy childhood and for  all intents and purposes I never really wanted for anything.

However given our discussion of Slaughter’s piece today I feel it necessary to bring up that my mother is a politician. In addition to a Politician she is an engineer.  for some background information my mother graduated from Lafayette in 1981,  as one of the first female metallurgical engineers, she worked after college at Alcoa in upstate new york overseeing aluminum recycling. For a time she made more money than my Father when that changed she stopped working at Alcoa. Fast forward a few years and some of my first memories are of my mother working as a realtor.

Once again fast forward a few years and my Mother became involved in politics first on the Bernards township environmental commission, then on the planning board, the Township committee and finally she was appointed Mayor in 2013.  Given the discussion today of Women, particularly in the political sector giving up either their families or their jobs I feel this anecdote is particularly relevant. I have never once heard my mother complain about how she was treated in any of her jobs simply because she was a women, she did mention of course that she was always in a minority but she never once expressed that she felt in any way oppressed or disadvantaged because of her gender or her choice to have a family.

 

http://www.bernards.org/township_committee/tc_gaziano.aspx

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!

Janet Wolff

Can there even be feminine writing?

…Questioning, due to the patriarchal culture and the marginalization of women’s experience, if it is even possible for women to articulate their suppression by using new aesthetic strategies

The idea of “Womens sentence”:

-Literary forms can be changed to accomadte and express womens experience

-This has been establishished in some areas of feminist criticism

As an example of this development of rediscovered work, she talks about Julia Kristeva, and her analysis called, the revolution in poetic language”:

Her analysis talks about certain texts from the late 19^th century that potentially subvert the patriarchal order by writing from the semiotic chora ( which is the earliest stage in your psychosexual development (0-6 months) where you are dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs. Kristeva tries to examine the origins of a type of writing that gets away from the boundaries of the predominating male-controlled culture

-She then talks about feminine writing and how it has been extended to the visual arts.. “the idea that women can write, paint and produce culture”

In order to know what exactly women’s art is, We need to know about ideas of womens knowledge

-She then discusses the recent work on (women and science) and women and philosophy to full understand the idea of womens knowledge

-she talks about how a male dominated culture caused it to be fifteen or more years of feminist work in literary and art criticism for womens voice to be raised in culture because of these three ways:

 

1) the institutions and ideologies of production and reception

-Why the history of art is mostly a history of mens work

2) representation

-The way women have been depicted in literature in painting by stereotypes, or how the “woman” is constructed in representation such as the impossibility of a feminist heroine, a subversive plot, or a female body without the connotations and meaning of a male dominated system of representation and viewing

3) formal and textual characteristics

-The immasculation of the reader and the need for women to take on the point of view of men

She paraphrases Elaine Showalter, a literary critic, who said that the primary mission for feminist criticism is the identification of the key characteristics of women’s writing, she called this gynocritics.

Showalter uses the concept of the “wild zone” which talks about the experiences of men and women overlap but the dominant culture describes them. The wild zone is all of the experiences that women had that are excluded from articulating or sharing this information

-The issue with the wild zone is that there is no way that women can talk about their oppression and women’s writing is the embodiment of social, cultural and literary heritage of the silenced women and the dominant men

-The assumption that women are excluded from culture

-culture and knowledge are male

Institutional Organization of knowledge

-Mirrors and produces the gender biases and inequalities

-Women have always been secondary or marginal to the public sphere, they are secondary in knowledge

She concludes by saying that development of disciplines, growth of professions and the separation of work and home, and linguistics (such as the tag questions of “isn’t it? Or didn’t they? Which shows an apprehension less common in males. Men are said to speak more and interrupt more often) had produced partial and male knowledge`

1)From the movies we watched in class, can you think of an example where you saw partial and male knowledge being produced linguistically?

2) If the wild zone was represented in a movie how do you think it would look?

3) Based on the three ideas of institutions of production and reception, representation , and formal and textual characteristics, what do you think Wolffs position would be on Orlando’s opinion of other women?

Anne-Marie Slaughter has job in DC, son and husband live in Princeton

Decided to return home to family and leave gov’t job—still has full time job as professor at Princeton

2 reactions from other women: disappointed and condescending

Women from her generation have held on to the feminist beliefs raised with b/c are determined not to drop the ball for the next generation—different reaction than younger generation

Believes women can still “have it all” but just not today with America’s economy and society

Crazy long days in DC working for Clinton, equivalent of one vacation day a month

Having it all meant what kind of job she had

Other females high in gov’t over past years have also stepped down to be with family

In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired

“Although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men” (5)

Best hope and closing that “new gender gap” is to close leadership gap: elect a woman president and 50 women senators—ensure women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders

Cliches:

it’s possible if you are just committed enough

very few women in leadership positions—pool of female candidates for any top job is small, and will only grown smaller

every male supreme court justice has a family; 2 of 3 female justices are single with no children, Ruth Bader Ginsburg began career as judge when child was almost grown

It’s possible if you marry the right person

men seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family and women vice versa

It’s possible if you sequence it right

People tend to marry later now—but if have children earlier may be more difficult to get graduate degree, good first job, and opportunities for advancement in crucial early years of your career

Also less income while raising children and then can’t hire help

Being able to work from home can be the key to carrying full load vs letting a team down at crucial moments (11)

“According to the Women’s Business Center, 61% of women business owners use technology to ‘integrate the responsibilities of work and home’” (11)

Comparison to marathon runner—discipline, organization, and endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with young children at home is comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a week but rarely how employers see things

Comparison to Orthodox Jew taking off Friday afternoon and Saturday

Redefining the arc of a successful career

Makes sense for women to peak in late 50s and early 60s

Female role model: Michelle Obama

“When the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company

the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge

“If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal” (20)

May need to put a woman in the White House before we’re able to change the conditions of women working at Wal Mart

Possible Questions:

Do you think the only solution is electing a woman as President?

Are there any movies that have a strong female lead in a position of power where she is not seen as the antagonist?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/do-male-feminists-get-free-drinks#217b9jl

Found this article earlier today on Buzzfeed, as satirical as it is I found it interesting just to go along with the many conversations we’ve had about feminism this semester and was wondering what people in our class, especially the boys, thought about it.  Also the “are you a feminist” quiz link at the end is funny and definitely work checking out.

 

Bit of a rant but so be it. i just got around to watching the new version of Carrie, for those who aren’t aware its a remake of a 70’s film based on a Stephen King short story about a girl who gets bullied and then develops psychic powers and kills everyone (a very, very sparse summary). My main problem with the remake is the casting choices around the main character. I simply found the new one to be utterly unbelievable.  Carrie is supposed to be an awkward bullied girl who quite frankly isn’t very attractive.  And in the 70’s version this was believable and the casting choice was on point.

However in the new version the actress playing Carrie is quite good looking and the poster itself is extremely sexualized. Somehow making being drenched in pigs blood sexy. In this case however the sexualization of a character takes away from the film and makes the characters less believable. If the film is about an awkward girl who gets bullied cast someone who is even slightly  believable in that role.

In summation Carrie and its remake are a perfect example of the increasing sexualization of hollywood and the increasing desire to use women as marketing ploys through sexuality and forced gender norms around both male and female sexuality.

 

 

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?

• Cooper articulates in her essay that the film is an investigation of heteronormativity through a narrative that privileges female masculinity in four ways:

1. by dismantling the myth of “America’s heartland”- Brandon going against the norm of America’s heartland
2. problemizing heteromasculinity- John and Tom portray masculinity but the film shows that in a twisted way, making it seem bad
3. by centering female masculinity- Brandon idolizes John and Tom in the beginning of the film but once he becomes infatuated by Lana, he realized he can put his own spin on masculinity
4. by blurring the boundaries of female masculinity-Lana refuses to acknowledge that Brandon is biologically female but identifies as a female, which is where the boundaries got blurred

• Cooper said the director of the film, Kimberley Peirce didn’t want to just re-tell the “sensationalized” murder story of Brandon Teena.  She wanted to reclaim why a girl would want to identify as a boy in the first place
• The media coverage on Brandon’s death focused almost exclusively on the fact that he was a girl passing as a boy
• New York Times film critic, Janet Masin, said “tabloid-ready tale attracted the kind of omnivorous media attention that distorts the truth beyond recognition and milks reality dry”
• Heteronormativity is constantly reinforced by the media, which depicts characters who transgress from heterosexuality as “comic, weak or evil” linking those characteristics with “criminality”
• Varied forms of female masculinity, including trans-sexuality have been seen in an unfair way
• Even scholars have shown no interest in masculinity
• The media illustrated Brandon as a threat to traditional family values, to innocent women, but most aggressively portraying him as a threat to America as a whole
• Perice captures Falls City, not as a town with hard working, simple, religious folk but rather as a dismal place with dysfunctional families, dead-end jobs, and abundant alcohol and drug use to pass the time hoping one day to escape.
• Characters surrounding Brandon in the film are alcoholic, depressed, violent and promiscuous, showing Brandons normalcy and good nature
• The film suggests Brandon as the one who isn’t “sick”

 

Questions:

Does Brandon being transsexual change the way we view rape?

Do you think it would’ve added to the story if we got a chance to see what Brandon was like when he was a girl? How might it have changed the film?

I noticed how much the film stayed aware of the two genders throughout the story. Assumptions about the male and female genders were made often and very directly (i.e. things were not being slyly implied to viewers, but rather directly stated). For example, when Orlando says “There are three words I could use to describe the female sex, but all three are not worth expressing.” Similarly, when Orlando looks in the mirror at his new, female body and says “Same person, different sex,” statements like these leave little room for interpretation.

I wanted to point out one of the many androgynous moments in the film. It is at the beginning of the film before the Queen dies, and she tells Orlando: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” In the Queen’s advice for Orlando, sex is irrelevant. She does not say, “Be the best man you can be,” but rather gives a life lesson that could be taken by either a man or a woman.

I think the film also emphasizes how if a person could experience what life is like from the perspective of both sexes, they would become a much more sympathetic (or rather empathetic) person.

This is the article I was talking about the other day in class!

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/distracting-yoga-pants-banned-officials-north-dakota-high-school-article-1.1962380
After re-reading this article and watching the video, I did a little bit of research. I discovered that this is a major issue amongst many high schools around the country. I feel its ridiculous that adults are blaming men for “not being able to control themselves”, and women for “dressing provocatively.” I know this is on a much smaller scale, but stories like this are still a reason for rape culture today. Instead of understanding the victim, and simply stating that rape is not ok, we spend our time analyzing the situation in order to find a reason why it may have been the woman’s fault. What else would you expect when you are starting this belief from such a young age?