dear katy perry...

I'm trying to write a dissertation, so please show some consideration and stop annoying me.

When you came up with this, I was mildly amused.

This was a bit worse, and I don't really understand why you're naked and rolling in candy either, but whatever.

But this? Really? 'You're so gay and you don't even like boys'? 'I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf while jacking off listening to Mozart'? 'You bitch and moan about LA wishing you were in the rain reading Hemingway'? 'I can't believe I fell in love with someone that wears more makeup than...'? So you use 'gay' as a derogatory term. You think anyone who would rather read a book than jump around naked on a beach (or a candy cloud) must have serious issues. You're offended if anyone finds classical music more inspiring than your video for 'I kissed a girl'. And men who would have been described as 'metrosexual' in the early noughties seem to make you uncomfortable. That cracks me up. You realise you're engaged to Russel Brand, yes?

Who AREN'T you bashing? You're silly and unnecessarily offensive. Please shut up.

Bechdel testing and intersectionality

The Bechdel Test (or more accurately, the Bechdel-Wallace Test, but it's sometimes also called the Mo Movie Measure) is usually said to trace its popularity back to the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel, who credits Liz Wallace for the rule itself. The original strip can be found at Alison Bechdel's blog, and I'm not sure of the copyright issues, so alas I cannot reprint it here. But you should definitely take a peak at the strip in question.

The Bechdel Test in its original comic strip form is:

The film must have:

1. At least two women in it,


2. who talk to each other,


3. about something other than a man.

There can be strengthened versions of the Bechdel Test too , so one can ammend (1) to require two women protagonists, and amend (3) to include a provision that the women must talk to each other about something other than a man or normatively feminine activities (eg housekeeping, childcare, etc). For example Juno passes the unstrengthened Test, but not a strengthened Test, because all the women in the film apart from Juno herself talk about babies, babycare, and motherhood when they are not talking about men.

The Test does not infallibly demarcate the sexist films from the non-sexist ones, but it is a useful tool to highlight the invisibility of women as protagonists who are not appendages to men, and trigger discussion of the roles women have in the general media, and within particular storylines. It's worth noting that only a tiny minority of mainstream films and TV programs pass the Test or strengthened versions of the Test, and children's films are known to fare particularly badly. Books tend to do rather better, but still not nearly as well as we might hope.

One might also want to have a Bechdel Test for demographic groups other than those that are gender-marked: one could have a Bechdel Test for race, queerness, disability, age, fatness, class, etc. It has been much remarked on in social justice circles that portrayals of members of these demographic groups tend to follow the same tired old tropes, many of which are downright harmful.

For example, a few weeks ago, I blogged over at my place about the problematic discourses of queerness that are presented in film and fiction books. In mainstream narratives, the death and hopelessness of queer people is still part of mainstream discourses about queerness, as is extreme gender dichotomisation. In mainstream novels and films about queer people, how many of them do not involve the death, often brutal, of a queer person, attributed to queerness itself? Consider Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don’t Cry, and even Queer As Folk (UK version). Angels in America is a rare exception: the death of queer characters is caused by silence and closetedness, not by queerness; and the ending is...more life.

There are similarly problematic narratives about disability, something that the team at FWD/Forward have been doing a stellar job of blogging. Disabled people in films are almost invariably presented as bitter and manipulative (House, Patty in the most recent series of Shameless), downright evil (Doctor Who's Davros), or just people whose lives are not worthwhile, as in the Grey's Anatomy case that is discussed at FWD/Forward, which involves narratives about both disability and size.

Racialicious and The Angry Black Woman have also discussed the difficulties of formulating a Bechdel Test for race. In much mainstream film/fiction, non-White people are either the Bad Guys, or their roles are restricted to stereotyped roles, or they are simply not present at all.

As feminists with a vested interest in addressing intersectionality, where does that leave us? I think the discussions that emerge from attempts to formulate Bechdel Tests for gender, race, disability, etc are useful discussions to have, because they highlight the problems with the roles that are currently allocated to people in those groups, and what less oppressive portrayals would look like.

But I wonder if part of the problem isn't that fact that we're trying to formulate these Test versions independently. That isn't a criticism of the Test, or of any of its versions. Nor is it a criticism of films/books that pass the Test(s). But few films/books pass more than one kind of Test, and if they do, it's certainly rare for them to pass more than two (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Grey's Anatomy, for example, both pass a gender and race version, but no more). This means that no mainstream film or book I can think of is genuinely representative of human diversity, and I'm particularly hard pressed to think good portrayals of people who experience multiple kinds of oppression.

Thoughts?

--IP

sex sells... books.

I wish I could browse this enticing retailer's shelves. It's one of these things that would never have come to my mind before I saw them. Is it really as bad as it looks? Is it worse? Do they sell porn in the left store and gardening manuals on the right? Is the women's section actually pretty much the same as the men's section, plus a few hundred insufferable romance novels with pastel coloured cover designs and a couple of first ladies' biographies? Do both sides sell standard works on military history and the financial crisis? Do both sell A brief history of time and Anne Frank's diary?

Even for the people whose world view this mirrors - would it be so bad to shop side by side with the mysterious other? It reminds me of unnecessarily genderspecific toilets and annoying books that just won't go away (think: Men are from mars...). I wish I could write an eloquent post about capitalism, stereotypes, stupid dichotomies, education and public spaces of consumption. But I'm tired, so I'll just share the picture with you and see what you think.

Picture courtesy of Anika (a friend who suffered many a boring lecture by my side in undergrad and, on good days, eloquently formed her despair into poetry that still adorns the walls of my old room). Taken in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.

P.S.: If you saw a shop front like this, which side would you check out first? Would you browse both or only one? Would you have a good laugh and go buy your books somewhere else altogether? Do you think they have different criteria for employing staff in the two sections? How does Nashville feel about genderqueer people?

Capitalism and gender: would you pay £30,000 for the sex of your baby?

In the Guardian last weekend, there was an article on selecting the sex of your prospective baby. It's illegal in Britain, and according to the article people are spending £25,000-£30,000 on going to abroad for the treatment - that's a fair bit more than the average yearly wage in Britain. What on earth is going on?

These parents are “desperate” to have children of a particular sex. They talk about getting “sick of walking past Baby Gap and seeing these little girl outfits and just getting this pang.” It's interesting that gender is couched mostly in terms of consumption – later in the article there's a description of the bedroom of twin girls born due to sex selection (unsurprisingly, it's pink and frilly). The emphasis on consumption (rather than other gender markers such as, say, the sort of activities one might traditionally do with a child, or behavioural traits) is presumably down to the kind of people who can afford to do this – that is, the very rich – and points to some interesting avenues of analysis around gender and capitalism. What does it mean if gender is a kind of consumption? How might that link into the way that the “pink pound” has redefined sexuality?

The rich parents used as examples are, basically, bosses, and their attitude is not just down to consumption, but also to the way that has made them relate to the world: “Susan says, 'I used to be a CEO of a company... So you can imagine coming from that mindset and having a baby in your body, and your baby holding a secret and you don't know? In the nicest possible way, I needed to know.'” As an illuminating contrast, another (very different) prospective mother, who chose not to find out the sex of her child, says “If I knew, I would have projected a whole future for him or her. I'm excited about that lack of control.” This is getting closer to the heart of the matter: these parents are setting themselves up to define their children. The article rightly points out that sex selection is very much for the parents' benefit. What it doesn't go into is how that relates to capitalism, consumption, and (neo)liberal ideas about choice.

Although the article describes the extreme genderedness that ends up being forced on the children, it doesn't elaborate on what this might mean other than this attitude of trying to control the child, “chipping away at their uniqueness”. It mentions several reasons why people object to sex selection, some of which are salient (the missing girl babies of China and India) and some, um, less so (“the intrinsically virtuous course of nature” and “divine will”). But what is motivating this urge to control? And what is it, specifically, that they are trying to control? Obviously, it's not simply a case of control-freakery in choosing one or the other gender, but a reinforcement of the gender binary itself. Well, it seems glaringly obvious to me, but remarkably they manage to avoid any kind of critique of gender essentialism. The idea that any child should have all possibilities open to them, regardless of gender, is skirted round in a more general discussion of the parent/child relationship, and it's frustrating that they get so close to that sort of much-needed critique and still manage to un-gender it. There is no discussion of the possibility that people should be able to mix together gender traits, to switch around as they like, which is worrying given the heightened reinforcement of gender – in a gender essentialist society, that's tricky already, but if parents have spend £30,000 making you a girl, what are they going to say if you want to climb trees and refuse to wear dresses? What on earth are they going to say if you turn out to be trans? Making the sex of a child so important that it's worth £30,000 puts incredibly restraining limits on possibilites. It's frustrating that despite all the potential, an article like this can just... miss out the fact that capitalism and sexism (in the broadest sense of the term) cut out whole swathes of possible ways to be.

(picture courtesy of Sharon. I still like climbing trees!)

just a box of tissues...

but you can still do something odd with it. I was amazed when i walked through a supermarket and found this. First thought that popped up in my mind: wtf?
Seriously - i have seen many many things, but i did not expect to be tongue-tied just because of a box of tissues.
What is it telling us anyway? I would be glad if you share your opinions with me.