Kickass Princesses, Part 1
Fairy tales! We all like fairy tales, right? They have both an air of comfort and adventure about them, and – as they’re something we first came into contact with as young children – there’s also an almost familial fondness for some of them. As they come from the oral tradition, folk/fairy tales have adapted slightly with each retelling to suit the world around them – but as Treasury Islands recently pointed out, the writing–down stage of most tales we know (i.e. when they became a little more set in stone) happened in deeply misogynistic times – and this carries through in even our most beloved fairy tales.
In the world of children’s books there’s a double-whammy of bad female role models and massive under-representation. There’s only one female character to every 1.6 male characters. One of the few regular traditional roles for girls in children’s literature is that of the princess, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the traditional princess trope doesn’t give girls many positive or useful goals to aim for: look pretty, be born into or marry into hereditary privilege and… uh… that’s it. Happily ever after. Forever. Are you bored yet? I am.
Yet plenty of little girls are still obsessed with princesses and being a princess. It might not appeal much to the grown-ups, but the trope remains strong – as does the lure of pretty things. (Personally, I still have to suppress a twinge of jealousy when I see a kid going by in a really good princess dress – with the layers of skirt and the faux-stays bodice and WHERE WERE THEY WHEN I WAS SMALL, HUH? – but it’s fine. I’m not jealous. I’m writing this wearing a £3 Claire’s Accessories tiara so it’s all OK.)
So, as it doesn’t look like we’ll escape the princess trope any time soon, it’s time to play with it instead. There’s no need to throw out the castles, dragons and bling along with the bathwater – there are plenty of good children’s books out there featuring kickass princesses who do more than just wear dresses. In this post, the first of a three parter, I’m going to give you the lowdown on some good princess role models for your sprogs/selves (delete as age-appropriate).
Disclaimer before we begin:
These books are primarily working from the Western European fairy tale trope, so whilst they may kick ass, some elements remain disappointingly similar throughout – namely that the princesses are often ‘conventionally beautiful’, often blonde, always Caucasian, and in this selection the tales all revolve around the marriage trope. I hope to uncover a wider variety of ass-kicking later, but in the meantime here are some nonetheless very good children’s books.
The Paper Bag Princess
- Written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Michael Martchenko, published in 1980 by Annick Press
The Paper Bag Princess is a short, snappy children’s book aimed at the 3-5 age group. (Click here to hear it read to you by a kindly librarian.)
The book begins with a typical princess called Elizabeth who “lived in a castle and wore expensive princess clothes”. She plans to marry Prince Ronald, but when a dragon steals away the prince and scorches all the kingdom (including all her pretty clothes) she doesn’t waste a moment: she dons the eponymous paper bag (the only unscorched thing she could wear) and goes off to rescue her man, defeating the dragon using her wits.
Munsch has explained that he wrote the book on his wife’s suggestion:
One day my wife, who also worked at the daycare centre, came to me and said “How come you always have the prince save the princess? Why can’t the princess save the prince?” I thought about that and changed around the ending of one of my dragon stories. That made the adults a lot happier, and the kids did not mind.
(Of course the kids didn’t mind – they don’t have such strong pre-conceived ideas of narrative yet!)
But as well as the princess doing the rescuing, there’s also a brilliant message about self-esteem and moving on. The Prince, once rescued, turns out to be an ungrateful asshat, telling Elizabeth off for looking a mess: “Come back when you look like a real princess.” Upon hearing this the princess doesn’t get upset or angry. She tells the prince, “Your clothes are really pretty and your hair is very neat. You look like a real prince but you are a bum.” (or a toad if you have the UK version). The final line – “they didn’t get married after all” – is illustrated with the Paper Bag Princess dancing off into the sunset.
This book is a brilliant, simple primer for just about everyone. It teaches people that being brave, smart and kind are more important than how you look – and that when someone is mean to you, you can be the bigger person walk away. That’s a double-helix of kickass for all genders, packed into a very short picture book.
Princess Smartypants
- Written and illustrated by Babette Cole, pub. Hamish Hamilton 1986
Babette Cole has done a lot of awesome for children’s literature. Her drawings are warm, funny and just more than a bit gorgeous, and she’s also subverted Cinderella in Prince Cinders (and done plenty more amazing children’s books, but I’ll focus on this one.)
(Once again, you can have this book read to you on YouTube.)
Princess Smartypants (Best. Name. Ever.) is content with her own life: “She enjoyed being a Ms. Because she was pretty and rich, all the princes wanted her to be their Mrs.” Ten points to Cole for slipping in the Miss/Ms/Mrs thing in a fairly small, light way. Minus ten for having a princess who is both pretty and blonde.
However, wanting to put an end to the constant stream of suitors once and for all, Princess Smartypants says she will marry whoever can accomplish all the tasks she sets. This is where it gets badass – her tasks show her interests: gardening (an extreme sport when you see the slugs); feeding her monster pets; roller disco; motorbike riding – you get the idea. Princess Smartypants is accomplished, independent, and happy getting up to the stuff she enjoys.
Eventually Prince Swashbuckle does manage all the tasks, so this is where Princess Smartypants uses her plothammer card and turns him into a toad. Grumpy toad prince drives away in his red sports car, and no princes bother her again. (My plot spill is nothing without the illustrations – for the love of God, READ THIS BOOK.)
As with The Paper Bag Princess, the final frame page of this book combines the news that the protagonist doesn’t get married with an illustration of her looking very happy – in this instance, on a sun lounger, toasting the audience with a glass of something, and surrounded by her monster pets.
The message from both of these books is that you can create your own happily ever after.
The Practical Princess
- From The Practical Princess And Other Liberating Fairy Tales by Jay Williams, Scholastic 1978
Princess Bedelia is given common sense as a baby by a visiting fairy (the other two fairies bestow the more expected gifts of beauty and grace), despite her father’s complaint of “What good is common sense to a princess? All she needs is charm.”
However, when a hungry dragon demands Bedelia to eat and a dragon slayer can’t be found soon enough, the King and his advisors decide they’ll have to give her over to be eaten. Our girl takes control of her own fate with a kind of weary resignation when she realises no one else is up to the task. She makes a dummy from straw and one of her finest gowns, and stuffs it with gunpowder. Bye bye dragon.
When a powerful but age-inappropriate and unwanted suitor turns up, Bedelia sets him near-impossible tasks using her extensive knowledge of the surrounding kingdoms – and uses her sense to catch him out when he cheats. When our girl winds up in a tower with a male Rapunzel/Sleeping Beauty-type prince, she uses her common sense to undo the spell he is under, and rescue them both.
This story isn’t my favourite of the lot – I found the heroine very slightly prissy, and the details and language didn’t really warm my cockles. However, the moral of the story is pretty much ‘don’t panic, keep thinking, you’ll find a solution’, and ain’t no arguing with that. Hip-hip hooray for brains!
The Wrestling Princesss
- From The Wrestling Princess and Other Stories, written by Judy Corbalis, illustrated by Helen Craig, 1986, pub. Andre Deutsch
The Wrestling Princess takes place in a world where some gender roles are set in stone, but some are very altered. Princess Ermyntrude is either wrestling the guards or covered in axle grease, working on her tractors and helicopters – but the King tells her she has to find a husband for the succession. The princess’s resistance and her father’s weary insistence make for a good introduction to the debate on succession. Also, Ermyntrude’s father naming the ‘feminine’ traits she needs sets them up to be deconstructed/dismissed:
“To get a husband you must be enchantingly beautiful, dainty and weak,” said the king.
“Well, I’m not,” said Ermyntrude cheerfully. “I’m nothing to look at, I’m six feet tall and I’m certainly not weak. Why, Father, did you hear, this morning I wrestled with sixteen guards at once and I defeated them all?”
“Ermyntrude!” said the king sternly, as he rethreaded his needle with No. 9 blue tapestry cotton. “Ermyntrude, we are not having any more wrestling and no more forklift trucks either. If you want a husband you will have to become delicate and frail.”
“I don’t want a husband,” said the princess and she stamped her foot hard.
The ensuing prince/groom casting-call both plays to some gender norms (it’s a rule that the prince must be taller than her) and some non-norms (the prince must be able to match her in a face-pulling contest).
This princess does eventually get married, but to a short prince who has a shared love of mechanics and loves her for who she is, and vice versa.
“You’re too short,” said the king.
“He’s not,” said the princess.
“No, I’m not, I’m exactly right and so is she,” said Prince Florizel. “Then when I saw her pulling faces and shouting insults and throwing princes to the ground I knew she was the one person I could fall in love with.”
“Really?” asked the princess.
“Truly,” said Prince Florizel. “Now, come and see my mechanical digger.”
In this book, unlike the previous two, marriage doesn’t turn out to be a thing to be avoided – provided it’s with the right person. This story is about deconstructing the existing framework of helpless princesses and dashing princes – and it also becomes about two quirky, likeable people meeting and falling in love. And falling in love is totally punk rock.
Honourable mention: The Practical Princess
- Written by Rebecca Lisle, illustrated by Joëlle Dreidemy, pub. Andersen 2008
I actually picked this one up by accident when friends were singing the praises of the other Practical Princess book (see above) – but I thought it would be worth comparing and contrasting these different practical princesses.
This book is far more recent than most on this list (the others all being from the 1980s), and it is not particularly feminist, but it does play with the trope a little.
Having read it, I’m not quite sure why this one has the name: Molly, our protagonist, is only a bit practical and she’s not actually a princess. Molly is an ordinary (read: extraordinarily beautiful, but non-royal) girl who wants to be a princess, so she enters a casting-call to find Prince Percival a bride. Her farmer parents help her by making and buying pretty clothes and shoes at great expense, and her lovely boyfriend Stan makes her a crown.
That’s right, she has a boy back home who loves her already, and – though he doesn’t want her to go – he helps her because she has her heart set on becoming a princess. He even drives her to the competition. POOR LOVELY STAN.
I don’t want to go overboard in my criticisms/analysis of children’s books here (not like the Freudian interpretation of The Cat in the Hat – no, that would be silly) but ignoring her current relationship is massively problematic for me. As is the remarkably unsisterly attitude Molly displays towards the other (real) princesses in the competition. They’re all painted as vacuous fashion victims, but I find this attitude in the writing to be uncharitable and a little lazy – as if the other competitors’ one-dimensionality will add more depth to the protagonist by default.
That said, to give her her due, our girl does realize over the course of the book that there isn’t much to recommend becoming royalty and that Stan back home is kinder and cuter than Prince Percival. When the glass slippers moment happens, Molly sticks her toes out so the shoe doesn’t fit, and defenestrates herself to escape back to her old life and lovely, long-suffering Stan.
The plus points for this book are it has a trajectory which begins in the same place as a lot of the readers (‘I’m not a princess but I want to be one’), and the conclusion – that riches and status are hollow compared to people who really care about you – is pretty universal and good. I just wish there’d been less mention of tiny waists throughout the book (no girl ever needs more indoctrination on that shit) – and our protagonist doesn’t really ‘kick ass’ so much as ‘avoids falling into the same traps as the other women.’
Also: poor Stan! You’re not good enough for him, Molly. I’ll take him off your hands.
- There will be more kickass and subversive princesses from children’s books in future articles. Hannah has a few on the list, but if there are any you think she should know about/make sure she doesn’t miss then let us know in the comments section!
[Gamer Diary] Mass Effect 3: Presenting a fairer image?
As is no secret, the final instalment in the Mass Effect trilogy was released on 9th March after months of buildup and anticipation. People weren’t just excited to see what would happen – Bioware & EA also caused a bit of a stir with their marketing this time around. Here I’m going to look at trailers and the game’s packaging to see whether the good-fuss about their efforts to make a more gender-balanced campaign is well-deserved.
The Trailers
You may remember that when I first burst onto the pages of BadRep I was talking about RPG advertising and the distinct lack of women in these trailers, despite the games’ built-in capability for you to play as a female protagonist. I mentioned Mass Effect advertisements, and no sooner had I criticised them than they announced they’d make a ‘FemShep’ trailer and let the fans vote on what she’d look like. So I thought it’d only be right to address the marketing of ME3 before I tell you all about the game itself.
The first glimpses we saw of Mass Effect 3 didn’t show a female Shepard; actually, they barely showed a male Shepard either (but he was still there) – we were simply teased with the knowledge that the war was coming to Earth. Notably, the voiceover doesn’t say “if he doesn’t bring help” but just says “Shepard” to avoid any issue of gender. But then you see male Shepard… so, er, kinda redundant there.
When they first showed everyone FemShep, to me, the trailer didn’t have the same production quality that it could have had, but they made this up with later offerings, such as those below.
Next we have the Take Earth Back pair of trailers; one male and one female. These two did good. They’re the same, just with a different version of Shepard in each. There’s no making one look cooler, or more badass, than the other, and that’s great. The pity is, though, that TV channels didn’t really seem to pick up FemShep’s version – I only ever saw the male version being broadcast.
Then we get to launch day and they start pushing the ‘Launch Trailer’, and as far as I can discover, there’s only one version: Male Shepard (or BroShep)’s version. This might not be too bad; there’s a lot of female characters shown – Ashley, Liara, Jack, Miranda etc – and that’s more than a lot of games can say at the moment. The thing that ruins it, though, is the (totally unnecessary) sex snapshot of Shepard bedding Ashley, who is the woman fighting beside you in the T.E.B. trailers I linked above.
Of course, it could be argued that having that in the trailer shows how you can romance your team-mates if you so desire and that it’s an all-inclusive RPG experience. But it really isn’t necessary and is completely discordant with the rest of the trailer.
The Packaging
Here I can only talk about my box when it arrived, so there may have been people receiving differently presented games. When my game arrived the sleeve insert (that paper thing that slips under the plastic on the box) was displaying a proud BroShep on the front and back. I was a bit disappointed as I’ve never really thought much about Template BroShep’s appearance as part of my gaming experience.
It wasn’t until I had to insert Disc 2 while loading the game that I discovered FemShep hiding underneath the disc! The cover is reversible, so you can have FemShep on the front and on the back (though the screenshot inserts are still BroShep) if you take the insert out and flip it around. Obviously, I did this immediately so I didn’t have to look at his smug face anymore. The reversibility is great, but you have to realise it’s available and then you have to do it yourself.
Have they done well, then?
I think they have, but there’s a bit of improving yet to do – not for Mass Effect, as the trilogy is now complete, but for other titles following in its footsteps.
The male interpretation of an either/or, binary choice, RPG protagonist is still the default in marketing, it seems. There may well be more male gamers buying these titles, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to see all a game can offer.
I’m really very pleased that the marketing strategy has improved – at least for this game – and I’m hoping it’ll continue to do so for other releases this year and in the future. It is a real treat to see FemShep kicking some bottoms in that Take Earth Back trailer, and I hope we’ll see lots more awesome female protagonists to come.
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As a side note: for those of you waiting to see a review, it’s coming – I’m just being extra thorough. And yes, I will talk about that ending and the ensuing furore.
A Hunger Games Guest Roundtable
Less than a day to go to the UK release of the Hunger Games movie, and frankly it’s difficult for some of us at BadRep Towers to go more than five minutes without starting a very excitable conversation about it. After spamming my personal Twitter feed so heavily even I began to feel slightly awkward, I dragged two interested parties – writer and Den of Geek founder Sarah Dobbs and comics writer (and Starburst journo) PM Buchan – into a corner for an email-chat.
A few points before we go any further:
- This is us revisiting Suzanne Collins’s books, mainly, and looking at the characters we like, and how the books – for us – jigsaw with other franchises out there. Back in the mists of time, Team BadRep’s Jenni also talked about the books on here in a more spoiler-free, introductory way.
- SPOILER WARNINGS are all over this. Do not read this post if you want to read the books unspoilered.
- Sarah’s been interviewing the cast of the movie over on Den of Geek, and you can read those posts here, here, and here.
- As Bucky and I haven’t seen the press screenings, we’ll maybe be back to talk about the movie later.
On Those Triangular Twilight Comparisons
Miranda: I made a blog post the other week elsewhere on the internets about how the movie franchise is being merched, as far as I can tell, in a way which visually dovetails with a lot of Twilight merch, and the disappointment I feel around that. Nonetheless, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling trilogy is, I think, using the love triangle motif in an effective, nuanced way. So while the Twilight comparisons might be short-sighted, they’re not unreasonable. But what do my friends think?
Bucky: OK, so here’s my big confession: I sort of love Twilight. It’s the reading equivalent of eating popcorn, plus I’m a sucker for romance, which should be apparent in the fact that even the most depressing things I write are always thinly-veiled love stories. My beef with Twilight was the general mormon-propaganda shittiness. I could totally have gone for a general horror-lite romance WITHOUT the abominable gender politics and chastity stuff.
Throughout the first book, it was apparent that this wasn’t just going to be a vapid romance, which was fine and the nature of pitting them against each other sort of insisted that the romance be downplayed, but across the three books I was disappointed by the things that didn’t happen – when the action/adventure/1984 stuff took over the romantic hook was still what kept me reading!
Sarah: I think comparisons to Twilight are kind of irrelevant here, because they’re completely different stories in completely different genres. Twilight is a romance, and The Hunger Games is… well, anything but that. It’s an action/thriller/horror with strong anti-war sentiments, and I think reading The Hunger Games for the romance is doing it a massive disservice.
In particular, getting overly invested in the love triangle element is missing the point, because Gale and Peeta aren’t really individuals, they’re metaphors.
Bucky: OK, I’ll give you that it’s an unfair comparison, but there’s no escaping the Love Triangle parallels, Collins just uses it as a device to much greater effect, rather than pinning an entire series of books on it.
On the Boys
Sarah: Like I say, I think the boys are, in part, metaphors – Gale in particular, which is why the idea that anyone would declare themselves “Team Gale” utterly baffles me. Because what does Gale stand for? Anger. Revenge. He’s a hunter; he’s kind of Old Testament-y. He’s very black and white, and not very interested in forgiveness. He’s initially presented as having the most in common with Katniss: they have the same background, they live in the same area, they look like each other, they’re very close friends and their lives seem very similar. But even right at the beginning, she’s restraining him. He’s shouting about rebellion in the woods while she tries to calm him down and keep him safe. He just gets more violent as the books go on, and it’s his bombs that kill a bunch of innocent children. Gale is basically a terrorist, and his is no way to build a future.
Bucky: I do like what you’re saying about Gale. I think all the main characters are realised brilliantly, because they’re people, compromised and damaged people with their own agendas, not pin-ups like they would be in Twilight. But I don’t feel like Collins had such a good handle on Gale’s character in the first book – I think his anger was hinted at but I don’t think she’d made the leap towards thinking that he’d become Anger, Vengeance etc – early on he still has the potential to be a romantic lead and not a product of his society. Peeta is pretty great, in retrospect. He’s a well created character.
Sarah: Yeah, Peeta is great. Peeta is so great. It’s not Gale that Katniss seeks out when she wants to feel safe, it’s Peeta. It’s easy to forget how strong he is, because he’s so warm and protective. But Collins makes sure – over and over again, especially in Mockingjay – that he needs to be protected, too. I don’t think I can quite forgive Gale for that line where he says Katniss will choose whichever of them she can’t survive without, because he’s wrong – she’ll pick whoever can’t survive without her, which is clearly Peeta. Peeta is preternaturally calm, loving, and forgiving (until the Capitol breaks him). I think it’s super important for them to be together at the end, because they’re the only ones who understand one another – and they make one another better. They’re different, but their differences make them better equipped to work towards a world that’s better than either the world they grew up in, or the one that Gale and President Coin want.
I think maybe the way Peeta gets broken in Mockingjay is the first time we really appreciate him for who he is. I dunno. I’m still thinking about this.
Miranda: What d’you reckon about this piece over on Bitch, about masculinity in the trilogy? I’m digging it.
Sarah: I like it too. I’m not keen on the view that Katniss isn’t a feminist heroine because she “ends up weak” at the end of the trilogy. YEAH ALRIGHT LET’S SEE YOU GO THROUGH WHAT SHE DOES AND SEE HOW BLOODY XENA-LIKE YOU ARE – I might love Katniss a bit too much. Hmm.
Miranda: I thought it was interesting that they picked up on the “does she need to end up alone? How do feminists find romance in books now?” thing.
Sarah: Yeah – I mean, surely we’re not gonna claim that women can’t be in relationships with men and still be feminist? I think the happy ending, with all of its caveats, was necessary.
The leading lady we've been waiting for? Katniss Everdeen takes aim
“Like Joan of Arc”
Sarah: Katniss’s attitude to sex is worth thinking about, too. She’s almost completely sexless (unless we read between the lines a bit with all the many nights she spends sleeping in Peeta’s arms?) and just not really that interested in romance… but she explains that quite early on, I think, because it’s not a safe enough world that she’s ever really thinking beyond her next meal. I bloody love her, in exactly the same way I love Buffy and Starbuck and all those other tough-because-they-have-to-be women out there in sci-fi/fantasy.
Bucky: I think it’s pretty awesome. I know I wanted romance, but it’s still cool that she just doesn’t have time in her life to care about “petty” stuff like that.
Miranda: This whole area fascinates me. I think Katniss’s story engages with the issue of ‘sexless action heroines’ really well. A lot of my early engagement with feminism came from a place where, sick of all the sexualising/objectifying/insert buzzword here, you know what I’m talking about – I constructed a sort of mental checklist for movies. It involved asking questions like “is the heroine SENSIBLY DRESSED?!” and “is she defined by her romantic attachments (usually to men)?” It was like Bechdel Plus.
I think these remain pertinent questions to ask, and I still ask them. But I also think I spent years mistrusting any heroine who dared to fall in love or wear a V-neck, just in case she was being somehow undermined from somewhere. It’s only recently I’ve begun to engage with heroines like Emma Frost, and also to confront the fact that ‘sexless heroines’ can also feel quite limited in their own way, depending on how they’re written. Often I think we cite a heroine’s lack of sexual desires as evidence for her liberated awesomeness, but this can feel for me like a bit of a red herring, and one that’s still being driven, in a sense, by the same set of patriarchal restrictions. The question about how to write “feminist romance” is therefore an interesting one.
Katniss directly faces off with these questions. The novels show her wrestling a load of societal pressure to live out a romantic narrative and define herself against one – her survival may depend on it. Uunderneath all that, she does struggle with genuine desires for Peeta and Gale, played out against a hugely traumatic backdrop.
I thought it was fascinating – she does find love, but it’s a struggle to get there in fair, real terms. I think Katniss – though Jennifer Lawrence describes her as a Joan of Arc figure in your interview – goes a lot further than many heroines in TVTropes’s Jeanne D’Archetype section because we get to see that struggle played out, with all the paranoia over who’s controlling the narrative that that entails. She moves through a sexless phase, in the process taking on an entire system of oppression in order to discover how she really wants to express her desires, and how to be able to do that safely rather than it being a capitulation of any kind. These are books about struggle, personal and political.
Illustration from the initial range of UK print covers for the books - by Jason Chan
Revolution!
Bucky: I almost like the books more now that you’ve both pointed out the media and propaganda themes that I took for granted – they are, in hindsight, pretty strong ideas to sell to a teenage audience. I like to think that I’m quite media-savvy, but I guess that if I encountered this at a time in my life when I wasn’t then it might have raised some interesting questions.
Sarah: I do super-love that tension Miranda pointed out in her blog post, re: merchandising this franchise when it’s all about the evils of capitalism and in particular the way we exploit people in other countries. I think they should’ve gone with more Mockingjay “symbol of the rebellion” stuff, but in a way Capitol-themed makeup ranges are perfectly apposite.
Bucky: Yeah, the merchandising is insane, especially because propaganda is insanely merchandisable (by its very definition) so to ignore that angle and create “straight” merchandise like a Katniss barbie instead of “in-character” merchandise is just batshit.
In Conclusion…
Bucky: The more I talk to you guys, the more I feel like it’s cool I enjoyed these books and all, but I’m not the person whose life this might make a difference to. I don’t need any more role models, but younger readers might benefit from Katniss and will almost certainly benefit from the way that she isn’t sexualised or defined by her relationships. So that’s pretty cool.
Sarah: I’ve just got back from a press screening of the film. I think Gary Ross really really gets the political aspects of the book, and he’s really explicit about it, and there were at least two new bits he’d put in that made my jaw drop. My review’s over here.
Miranda: ONE DAY TO GO!
Fairytale Princes Discover the Cinderella Life
I was very excited to hear of the five hundred ‘new’ German fairytales from the 1800s which had been found in an archive in Regensburg. Team BadRep love this stuff – we’ve previously had a Fairy Tale Fest series of posts on how awesome folk tales can be through a feminist lens.
New sources are always interesting, because they show just how different some of the versions were back then. This article in the New Yorker gives some examples:
Schönwerth’s Cinderella is a woodcutter’s daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun. His miller’s daughter wields an ax and uses it to disenchant a prince by chopping off the tail of a gigantic black cat.
Even better, that linked article suggests the collection might go farther than just focussing on princesses:
Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful – Schönwerth uses the German term “schön,” or beautiful, for both male and female protagonists.
We commented previously on how fairy tales were often warnings to young women that they should be passive and dutiful. In a society where girls had the power to cause chaos if they ever stepped outside the extreme social restrictions, families wanted children to see these dangers on a mythic level. We still do it – even in Star Wars, those who seek personal power are bad and will fall to evil. (It has also been pointed out that Governments, the Church and other authorities all promoted this mindset throughout history, and that it’s an incredibly good form of population control. The idea that niceness and power are incompatible has been socially useful, but remains untrue at least on a small scale.) Star Wars champions those rebels who seek agency for themselves against a dark Authority, but many of its other messages would fit right in with the warnings in folk tales.
While the GOOD = PHYSICALLY BEAUTIFUL trope is still ironclad across most tales, it looks as though this latest find of stories will show the rules about behaviour and the tales of young people needing rescue being applied to men just as much as women, which could be VERY badass.
One hundred of the new stories were published in German in 2010, but there’s no news on when any will be translated into English. We’ll keep an eye on this, and keep the good readers of BadRep updated! (If there’s a version where a princess kills a dragon with a sword, radio stations scanning the outer galaxy will be confused by how loud my cheering must have been to have reached them).
And if you think that we’re hoping for too much, that the tales might not be that different from the sanitised Victorian versions, read that first quote again. Cinderella – in so many versions a figure so passive that she doesn’t announce herself even when the Prince enters her house, right up to when he puts the slipper on her foot – is here the heroine who uses magic items and travels impossibly far, taking action to rescue her beloved.
Imagine if Disney had sold us that version in 1950.
The Women’s Library: Fairness and Resistance
As a special treat for Women’s History Month, the London Metropolitan University Board of Governors has decided to “seek new homes” for their world-class trade union and women’s history collections.
Kicking ass since 1926
The Women’s Library collection was created in 1926 and has been housed in its purpose-built home in Aldgate for a decade. It’s in constant use as a research facility and in recent years it has also branched out to become a vibrant force in the local community and beyond.
Their exhibitions, events and collaborations with artists are accessible, relevant and often hard-hitting. Their 2007 exhibition about prostitution was one of the most thought-provoking, balanced and insightful I’ve ever been to (and I spend a *lot* of time in museums) and was firmly rooted in partnership with local charities working with women on East End streets.
Another example is their immensely popular ‘Alternative Jack the Ripper Walk’ and (In) Memoriam installation, which included putting up memorial plaques to each of the Ripper’s victims. The work presented an articulate challenge to the misogynist undertones of much of the murder tourism which brings visitors to their neighbourhood in Whitechapel while raising awareness of the violence against women that never seems to go out of fashion.
Missing statues
Group of Afghan women, 1927. Not many of images of Middle Eastern flappers about, are there?
As you can probably sense, when I heard that London Met Uni is giving this vital centre the boot I was pretty angry. But I wasn’t shocked. With educational institutions’ budgets dribbling away and competition for research funding becoming ever more cut-throat, naturally specialist social history collections are in the firing line.
Social history is already viewed by some as fluffy girly history to the hard, throbbing Real Man’s history of wars, leaders and money. And the social history of marginalised groups? The fluffiest, wimpiest, most irrelevant history of all! Fetch me a beer and a tiger to wrestle.
I’ve written before about why discovering and recognising the history of marginalised groups is vital. It’s not just about fairness, it’s about resistance. It’s having the weapons to fight back when you’re told ‘oh that’s just the way things are’, or ‘but it’s tradition’. It’s about stopping people telling whatever story they want about your life.
It’s also a way of keeping yourself going, whether by looking back and seeing how far we’ve come, or by drawing inspiration from the people who came before you. That’s why it matters whether or not we build all those missing statues. Or it should matter to anyone who’s ever been on the sharp end of cultural hegemony.
Look back, look forward
According to For Books’ Sake there will be a campaign against the decision to move the Women’s Library and the TUC Library. For more information your best bet is probably to follow the Women’s Library on Twitter or Facebook and watch out for updates.
There are other archives of women’s history which are available to the public in buildings and online, I’ve listed some below (please add more in the comments!) But that doesn’t mean we can be complacent. Please visit them, use them, value them.
And while fully recognising the subtle, changeable and intricate nature of identity I’d say whoever you are, learn your history, whatever that means to you. And as an act of solidarity educate yourself about the people who’ve been written out of the textbooks.
- Glasgow Women’s Library
- Feminist Library
- Feminist Archive North
- Grassroots Feminism
- Women’s Art Library
- Music of Women’s Liberation
- The Real Rosie the Riveter Project
- BFI Mediatheque: The Gentle Sex
- BFI Mediatheque: Funny Girls
- Bishopsgate Institute Feminist Pamphlet Collection
18th March: Mother’s Day Post
It’s Mother’s Day today, and although there have been lots of influences in our lives which might have turned us towards feminism, we’ve found that lots of feminists ‘blame’ their mothers for starting them thinking about things like gender and equality. I asked some of the BadRep team about their mothers…
Hannah
“I would say I was raised very feminist. The family has a double-barreled surname because my folks hyphenated their names to negotiate the whole names and marriage thing. (Pro tip: don’t hyphenate – people will assume you’re really posh, and if both names are unusual you’ll spend the rest of your life spelling it out to people.)
“I always identified with feminism and was never scared of the word. I was brought up to believe I could do anything I wanted and my mom made a point of giving me and my brother equal access to all types of toys – like having boy dolls as well as girl dolls. She also always named sexism where she saw it. This was a real gift because growing up I saw sexism as a bad thing and a lazy assumption, rather than just the status quo.
“As I’ve grown up I’ve realised retrospectively just how rad my mom was – she went to Greenham Common, she bought Spare Rib magazine, she had rainbow shoelaces (which I’ve stolen) – but also I’m profoundly grateful that she never ever let me become fucked up about food and body image, or to correlate body-image with self-worth. I really feel like I’ve dodged a massive bullet with that one and am a lot better off than many women because of it.
Love you, Mom (now quit pestering me about grandkids).”
Rai
“My Mum didn’t really raise me in a ‘feminist way’, but the cumulative actions of my parents together has helped to shape my views on the world and, more specifically the concept of equality. As I understand it, my Mum took time off work to look after me when I was very little and after my brother was born too, but when he was old enough, Mum and Dad essentially swapped. Mum went back to working in the City and Dad became a househusband right up until I was 12 years old. Having a mother who worked full time in London and a stay-at-home dad is bound to have an effect (insert some philosophical/psychological insight into strong independent female figures and role models), but that wasn’t the only thing.
“My parents told me once that before they had me (their first child) they sat down and made the time to discuss and agree that there would be no greater importance placed on one parent or the other based on their gender. So if Mum was looking after us and we did something naughty, there would be no ‘just you wait until your Father gets home!’ threat of punishment… you just got punished by whichever parent was there. Or, indeed, my Grandma when we lived with her for a while (who is also a huge influence on my feminist tendencies).”
Viktoriya
“Let’s be clear on one thing: my mother (who is Bulgarian) is a farmer’s daughter. Whatever else she became later on, she can still kill and pluck a chicken, cure many common ailments with mysterious herbs, and pick tobacco leaves with her bare hands (no lie: she still has the scars). Of course, that’s not all she is. For one thing, when the local doctor decided to try bloodletting to cure my infant aunt’s colic, my mother snatched her from the doctor’s hands and ran away with her, reasoning that the doctor was a fool and that at nine years old she was clearly more qualified to treat her sister. (Who was fine, by the way, due in no small measure to my mother’s interference.) By the time my mother was thirteen, she had outgrown her local village school, and so she simply packed her bags and moved out of the family home to a nearby city to continue her education.
“At eighteen, when the rest of her friends were getting married and having children, she stayed resolutely single and enrolled at a university instead. A few years later she scandalised polite society by taking up with an older divorcee who – shockingly – was both Armenian and a dissident. When he set off to sea in that dreadfully romantic way that makes sense only in films, she ran the household, raised two children, led the local community group and dealt with the persistent interest of the secret police. She taught me to cook, and to sew, and to knit, and explained that while it was nice to see my father every once in a while, fundamentally I’d have to be prepared to run a household – a community – a country – all by myself.
(The one thing she ever forbade me to do was to become an accountant. Her reason? “Boring.”)
“In this different country, with Communism a fading memory from far away, my mother blends into the background, no different from any of the millions of women in our cities and villages. But when the light is right, and if you know how to look, she is still the twenty-year-old in the pictures: the one with the long hair and the wide smile, who shimmied down the side of a building to sneak away from the secret police and escape, laughing, on the back of her dissident lover’s motorcycle.
I think we can all be grateful she decided to be a mother, rather than an Evil Overlady.
As for the accountancy? I hate to say it, but I should have listened to my mother.”
I had a day out with my Mum the other week, and feeling safely cosseted between the matriarchal protective spheres of Mum and Marks & Spencers, I decided to brave a thing I dread: bra shopping.
I hate bra shopping. Generally I’m not a massive fan of shopping per se; it usually feels like a massive waste of time I could spend doing something actually relaxing, like having a cup of tea, or wandering around a museum. Or sleeping. Anything, really. But I digress.
Bras. I hate them. Where to begin my hatred? A little history, perhaps. I do like a little historical context to flavour a problem. Makes me feel like a proper academic. Except one who uses wikpedia entries a lot – like this one here.
To summarise: basically there was nothing for quite a while (when literally people didn’t wear much at all), then there were togas (or for the ladies, stolas) and people didn’t really care, then all of a sudden there were all kinds of things dedicated to “dealing with breasts”. There were bits of cloth in various arrangements with and without padding, corsets, bodices, and finally something that resembled the modern bra.
Which was never burned, incidently, except possibly in awful household fires. And we had the Madonna cone bra, of course.
Then came the Wonderbra with its rallying cry of Hello Boys, and to be honest I was never 100% clear on whether she was advertising her mammaries to boys, or addressing them as boys, and it all got all a bit confusing so I tried not to think about it. Plus it arrived when I was 14, which is a Bad Time for bosom-related upset.
Skip forward a bit further and we get Shakira declaring in 2002 that it’s:
Lucky that my breasts are small and humble
So you don’t confuse them with mountains
… which I’m still not really sure about, because, again, we’re getting all obsessed over size. Small or big? Which is better? (And why do we have to have better bodies anyway?)
My own ‘humble’ beginnings: for me, the bra was a graduation from the pre-teen crop top and the childish vest into the world of being a Real Woman. Periods were also involved in this uncomfortable phase (and they are also rubbish and make your breasts sore, but you do not have to go to the shop and pay money for them). This was not a good start for the bra and I, and it didn’t get any better.
The portion of my adult life that I’ve spent around bras has always involved the fickle inconsistency of measurements. As an experiment, on my shopping trip I got measured in three different shops and tried on more bloody bras than I have done in my entire life. I am, for the record a 34, 36 or 32 A, B or C. So that’s not really a good start. Furthermore, none of these bras, in any of those official sizes, actually fit my chest. Some do better than others, but there is no general indicator of agreed size.
Let’s talk about what they look like. They’re mostly quite ‘girly’, except where they’re meant to be ‘sexy’. Ah, that old problem again. I can have a virgin bra or a whore bra. Great. They contain a lot of extraneous stuff like lace and bows and other frou-frou items that my bosom really doesn’t need, so I spend a lot of time snipping things off bras whilst hoping that the sheer volume of stuff I’m lopping off isn’t in some way structurally vital.
And what about underwire, while we’re at it? No item of clothing aimed at men, designed to sit on sensitive, soft flesh, would include metal wire within a flimsy silk and lace contraption, frequently destined to poke out and puncture your poor, unsuspecting skin. Underwire, together with its evil cousin Padding, is the great illusionist of the bra world. This is not a world in which the bra is only there to clothe, support or protect you. No, it is not a knight in shining armour: the bra is a churl and a pimp. It exists to make your tits look nice. And by “nice” I mean bigger and with cleavage. As opposed to, say, the way they actually look.
Being realistic, since my breasts are not large: I don’t have a cleavage without serious amounts of bra-mirage work, without which any “revealing” top tends to reveal a lot of… sternum. It’s nice sternum, but it’s not the look I’m “supposed” to have. And even when I’m wearing the damn thing, it doesn’t fit. The cups leave gaps where my breasts are not. The straps are too tight or too loose, leaving red marks in my ribs and creating weird bumps of flesh around the sides or under my arms that an anxious person might negatively label “fat”. In the panic room of the changing cubicle, it’s easy to get worried. Especially when one’s chest appears to be both “fat” and “small” at the same time.
Simply put, bras aren’t designed for my body shape. The fact that the bra is a quintessentially “feminine” object makes me feel unfeminine. Sometimes I’m okay with that. Sometimes I’m not. And all of this creates the sneaking suspicion that my own breasts are not socially adequate by themselves. It isn’t nice to feel like your body is inadequate. And for the most part nowadays, I don’t. But I used to. A lot. Especially as an unhappy teenager. Various problems with food ensued. It was not a good time, and it is a not good time that many women (and men) go through.
But bras are not solely the enemy of “small” women. Curvy ladies also loathe bras, and perhaps with even more reason. For them, the bra is often essential. The larger the bra required, the more expensive it is. Also – so I’m told – the more complicated the re-arranging of weight around the body, creating more lines of soreness across the shoulders and an additional aesthetic difficulty of ‘too much’ cleavage at inappropriate times.
Seriously, fuck bras.
But what to do about it all?
- Stop wearing them altogether? Easy for me to say, as long as the weather isn’t cold and it doesn’t rain, but this won’t do for the larger-breasted, for whom some element of mammary management is essential to personal comfort. Similarly, I can’t go bra-less all the time – even for someone my size a trip to the gym requires something to stop the painful bouncing.
- Buy other bras? I keep being told that if I was only measured “correctly” I would be fine. I’m disputing this, because I’ve been measured a lot, and measuring me doesn’t seem to alter the sizes of bras which persist in being made for a particular shape of wearer who is not my shape. A lot of women’s clothes are like this. I shop around for those. Perhaps there are magical bra shops where one can purchase perfect fitting, soft and comfortable bras for around a tenner. I doubt it, though.
- Wear a corset instead! … no.
- Strap them down? Um. Well, whilst I have been known to do this, I don’t want to flatten my breasts all the time any more than I want to inflate them.
- Buy a vest! I do like vests, and there are lots of places that do vests with a bit of extra fabric at the top in case of sudden cold, or rain.
-
So I’ve bought loads.
And they’re great.
Here’s a guest post reader Michael Pereira sent us which then generated a mini-discussion, so there’s also a little bit of BadRep Towers Q&A tacked on the end.
I’m a massive fan of Star Wars – from back when I was growing up watching old VHS tapes containing 1980s commercials (and that fizzy line that would go down the screen indicative of tape data decay), to the voluminous novels and graphic novels I read as an awkward teenager, through to the infamous new trilogy with all its flaws – and there definitely are many flaws. Even if we excuse the bad dialogue of 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, the ongoing debate about the canonicity of the Star Wars timeline, or even Jar Jar Binks, there are distinct flaws present in the first trilogy which make the films fare pretty badly in the politics of difference.
For a fantasy science fiction world with all kinds of alien species, the first Star Wars trilogy didn’t fare well in terms of embracing real-life social diversity. There were very few non-white or female characters, and when they were present as main characters, they weren’t exactly charitable representations. Leia is defined first by the fact she is female (gold bikini, anyone?), and (perhaps because there are so few women in the galaxy?) even her own brother is initially attracted to her. Although Leia had many heroic tendencies, the original trilogy would surely fail the Bechdel test since there are so few women visibly present in speaking roles. Don’t get me started on the lack of (human) ethnic diversity – put it this way, when the species of Mon Cala mari are better represented than human diversity, you know something’s wrong.
This aside, I’ve quite enjoyed a recent offering from the Star Wars cash empire: the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (or TCW). The premise of the series is that it’s supposed to take place in the couple of years between Episodes II and III. The later novels and films have integrated a little bit more diversity into the series, even trying to retcon why there are so few women around in the Empire (it’s due to the Emperor’s sexist ideology).
TCW is set in the period where destined future villain Anakin Skywalker is now an established Jedi Knight and takes on an apprentice of his own. The moment of Found Feminism for me arrives with the five-foot-something appearance of his apprentice: the awesome Ahsoka Tano. Ahsoka (nicknamed ‘Snips’) is an unruly teenage Jedi whose aggression and flagrant disrespect for authority is markedly similar to Anakin’s.
After some reflection, I found myself liking Ahsoka more and more. She’s a swashbuckling Jedi risking her life on a regular basis with bravery and self-sacrifice, but sometimes she also shows a capacity for self-criticism and learning, and at no point do the other Jedi pass demeaning comment on her on the basis of her gender, nor is she defined as a character by any sense of sexuality. Most of the criticism she does receive comes as a result of her young age and brash manner. It’s refreshing to see a character like her represented in a less gendered way, and that the ways in which she is both awesome and flawed don’t come down to essentialist concepts of femininity or female sexuality. She isn’t depicted in a putative gendered manner – even when other Jedi such as Anakin or Mace Windu are exemplars of a archetypical masculinities, from ‘hunky hearthrob’ to ‘badass motherf*cka token black guy’, Ahsoka’s merits as a character come from her inner resolve, personal strength and her commitment to the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic, and not her looks, what she wears or who she fancies.
Granted, I suspect most episodes of TCW fail to pass Bechdel, and there are few moments of female interaction which do not involve talking about men1 It’s hard to call TCW a ‘feminist’ show by most stretches, but it is refreshing that this action-packed show, which has little to do with romance, does not exclude women from roles of leadership and armed conflict.
BadRep Towers: Thinking about Star Wars continuity for a moment, Ahsoka obviously isn’t in the movies. Although LucasFilm isn’t exactly famous for continuity, what do you think will happen to her at the end of the series?
I think she’s going to die, but the question of her fate will probably be answered in the final (perhaps 5th?) season. The show builds up a positive and somewhat simplistic view of the Republic, partly because it’s a kid’s show, but there’s a sense of pathos for the older audience who know all the relationships between the clones and Jedi will break down – and that Palpatine is really the bad guy. Ahsoka’s death is prophesised between the episodes 3×09-13, but these episodes were very weird and hard to interpret.
BadRep Towers: We found some forum posts from parents saying how much their daughters admire Ahsoka – though there are a few questions about her costume being raised which we also thought were interesting – do you think her bare midriff is a less applaudable design decision, or does it fit well with her teenage tearaway identity?
This is one subject that I didn’t want to acknowledge because it’s so complicated – but it is a critical consideration if we’re looking at this as feminists. I just did a Google image search to remind myself of her different outfits, and I found some fanart, ‘sexy’ cosplay outfits, and a few actual pictures from the series. In a way, I think that reinforces the answer I was originally going to give to you. My view is this: the show is expressed through a male gaze in the sense that in a series about war, technology, weaponry and realpolitik, almost all of the people in positions of authority (clone commanders, Jedi generals, Palpatine, Dooku, Yoda etc) are men. To be honest, I don’t know how to interpret Ahsoka’s bare midriff. In one sense you might say that because it’s science fiction, all kinds of kooky outfits can exist to highlight non-human styles and costumes. You might also say that female Jedi tend to dress a little bit differently to male Jedi. On the other hand, when I did that Google search, under ‘related searches’ there’s ‘ahsoka tano pregnant’. I’ve also found some fairly sexualised fan pictures. So I think it’s fair to say that among a large number of (probably) male fans, her outfit has been interpreted as ‘sexually provocative’.
I think this is the kind of issue that people will have to interpret in their own way – just because she dresses in a certain way that some men definitely think is sexual, doesn’t mean there isn’t scope for alternative interpretations. However, I’m no sociologist, and I’m not a woman. I lean on the side that it’s a bit ‘male gaze’ since Padawans would officially wear something like what Obi-Wan did in Episode 1, and judging by some of the fanart out there of what is a fictional teenage girl.
BadRep Towers: Touching on something you said earlier about heroines being defined by sexuality or romantic roles – do you think Ahsoka’s relative lack of sexuality is actually, perhaps, an existing trope? I’m thinking of young female warriors such as Joan of Arc (what TVTropes calls the ‘Jeanne D’Archetype’, although they list Leia as an example, which might not fit your take on her!). I like Joan-type figures so I don’t see this as a bad thing, but I think it’s interesting that trends in TV and Hollywood are often so overbearing that a reaction against “defining women by their sexuality” is to remove sexuality wholesale. Would you put her down as a Jeanne D’Archetype?
The short answer is that I’m not quite sure how to think about this issue. There are so few female characters in significant roles in TCW – 3-10 characters represent the whole of the galaxy’s female gender. As you point out, Jeanne D’Archetype is defined in non-sexual terms, and Ahsoka fits this. She also has a rare force power that can see the future, so that and being part of a religious order kind of puts her strongly in this trope. But without doing a discourse/content analysis on 80 episodes of the show, there are a good few instances of other significant female characters portraying a sexual/romantic dimension. Padme’s is Anakin’s secret wife; Duchess Satine has a hinted romantic relationship with Obi Wan (but she isn’t defined by it) and there is a controversial banned clip of one episode where the dark Jedi Asajj Ventriss kisses a clone as she kills him.
I think it’s quite notable that Ahsoka is one of the most important female characters and is not defined by who she fancies. Of all the things I am currently watching and streaming, it’s probably the only instance.
- Michael moderates and blogs at Noumenal Realm and tweets at @NoumenalRealm. Last year at a talk he gave, Michael was critiqued for perpetuating a ‘white and bourgeoisie elitism’ for his Kantian/Adorno-influenced views on art and culture. If it’s possible for a British Asian from a working class background to be accused of being a white dead German, he supposes its okay for him to be accused of being a feminist too. His favourite character in Star Wars is Palpatine.
- Examples of this include Ahsoka working with Jedi Apprentice Barriss Offee on a difficult mission where they are on their own without support, and an instance where Senator Amidala works with head of state Duchess Satine of Mandalore to solve a corruption scandal, each expressing their political values along the way. [↩]