Another Illustration Interlude
I thought I’d continue where I left off from this post of awesome artists that (as I put it) “get my feminist braincogs turning”.
Emily Carroll
She’s pretty well known, but deserves a mention anyway. I love the glimpse into (predominantly female) costume history I get from Draw This Dress – a shared project with award-winning fellow illustrator Vera Brosgol. Her Valentine’s day comic last year, Anu-Anulan and Yir’s Daughter, featured a lovely romance between two women (well, one’s a goddess, but anyway). Folklore-influenced The Hare’s Bride has a beautiful Carteresque simplicity to it. I love her work, and you should too.
Sarah Gordon
I mentioned Sarah in the last post – working as colourist, she’s one third of The Peckham Invalids team along with Howard Hardiman and Julia Scheele. Her blog is a great read and her art is beautiful. The above wonderfully snooty lady is her own take on one of the characters from the comic. She says: “I’d like 2012 to be a year where I stop hiding all my personal/story work in my head, notebooks and sketchbooks and get it out onto… the internet”. That really struck a chord with me, because my own situation is very similar.1 So I wanted to cheer Sarah on. Hope that’s not too weird. Uh. Yeah! Go Sarah, from a total stranger! And now, dear reader, you must go and Do Similarly.
Patrice Aggs
Thought I’d go a bit more longstanding – Patrice is pretty established, but she is also awesome, so if you aren’t familiar, here she is. Her work is soft-edged and has a kind of instant, gentle appeal – she’s done a lot of popular children’s books and resources for schools, but has a lifelong passion for comics. She’s worked with Philip Pullman and Horrible Histories and on The Snowman (CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIA WIBBLY ALERT) and has signed up to draw a story for new children’s weekly comic The Phoenix. Hurrah for getting children into comics! (TANGENT: Check out this sword-wielding art for one of the other stories. I’d have loved that as a kid. I hope the story’s as good as Neill Cameron’s art makes it look.) The other reason I want her on this post is she’s apparently quoted here2 over on Ladies Making Comics as follows: “Do-it-yourself is far duller than do-it-together. We need to champion each other. Drag the male-dominated blinkered attitude into the dustbin.”
Wise words indeed.
Marc Ellerby
“Chloe Noonan is a monster hunter, but she doesn’t have any powers. She can’t beat up bad guys, she can’t run without getting a stitch. She’s kinda flakey and really not bothered about saving the world. Plus she has to get the bus everywhere. I know, right?!”
I love Marc Ellerby’s clean lines and eye for detail. His monsters are bloody excellent – you can feel how much fun he’s had dreaming them up. Also, no one draws an unimpressed glare (a favoured expression of mine, naturally, as a Strident Feminist Blog Editor) quite like him. So of course, I’m now madly in love with Chloe Noonan, his wonderfully indignant teen monster hunter heroine. She’s amazing. She hurls bombs at monsters and plays in a band whilst loudly cursing both vocations and her schoool-friend sidekick is pretty cool too (also, female: BOOM BOOM BECHDEL BUST). Check her out. Buy the comics. DO IT NOW. That is all.
You know, I still don’t think I’m done. There is so much visual awesome out there. There’s a huge stream of female creators and artists and a rich seam of great heroines, characters, and attempts at inclusive projects out there. They need shouting about as much as possible. While we’re here, though not all my choices on this list are female creators, the women who work in comics, for example (and I know I’ve I’ve not really differentiated ‘illustration’ from ‘comics’ here, but anyway) give the lie to defensive statements on why women are so frequently left off panels at events, and so on. They’re around. You just have to look around you.
For further inspiration for the budding artists out there, I leave you with this photo of Patrice Aggs in action.3
More soon.
- I’ll get around to talking about the team and what we’ve been drawing at some point. I want to talk about these awesome people first, but if you’re curious, trumpet-blowing will happen. I’m, er, shy. [↩]
- At least, I think this is a quote? I wasn’t completely clear, if I’m honest. But it’s great advice, either from her, or inspired by her work. So there you go. [↩]
- If you took it, I hope you do not mind. I haven’t tracked down the image rights, but if it was you and you can let me know, I will credit you or remove it if you’re not digging my use of it, and so on. [↩]
[Gamer Diary] – What I’ve been playing… January 2012
I have decided to ape some of the monthly features of gaming print mags and introduce a “What I’ve been playing…” summary post. Sometimes I can play very few games and other times I can get through quite a bit; more to the point, there’s always something to say but often it might not be strictly in the feminist vein, or there might not be enough to develop into a full article. So this post will be a bit of a test run – I know we’re in February now but I’m looking back at the completed month of Jan here – let’s see how we go, shall we?
Batman: Arkham City
There were ‘issues’ with Arkham City (as you can read in my previous article), but there were still some good things to say as well. The styling and the graphics were great (as they were in Asylum), and I enjoyed the noir feel that they went for, although it didn’t feel as gritty as the first game. I suspect that may be because once you’ve seen something for the first time it loses its special impact.
City felt a bit too big coming after Asylum without the storyline longevity to really back it up. There’re a lot of side quests and other bits to do and investigate, so the game has expanded in width as opposed to length. Personally, I tend to let the side quests fall by the wayside as I power through the story. It was a fairly competent and engaging(ish) story until the ending (I won’t spoiler but it sucked) despite the near ‘deus ex machina’ way in which they ended the stories of four key characters.
Playing as Catwoman was novel to begin with, but in the end wasn’t a big enough plus as one might have hoped. Adding to the boiling pot were even more gadgets and even more complicated combat moves that you had to remember in order to beat certain baddies. Overall, I think they over-complicated a sound concept that could’ve done a lot better. If you played the first game and are thinking about getting City, wait until it comes down in price first or until they release a copy with the DLCs included.
Assassin’s Creed II
This may seem an odd choice considering Revelations came out at the end of last year, but I played Brotherhood before AC2 so I had a whole 22 years of story to catch up on before I went on to the newest instalment. This is another game series I was late getting into, as evidenced by me still not having completed the first game(s), but I enjoy it nonetheless.
The graphics and world design are always fantastic with these games; they build entire cities before your eyes. The characters are ones that you can invest in; ‘sandboxing’ can be just as fun as the main story; the controls aren’t always the easiest (on PC) but you can get there in the end. This game is super fun, and now I’m clued in on Ezio’s pre-Brotherhood story I can look forward to Revelations. My only quibble is that there are only so many times I can listen to passers-by shouting “He’ll break something, the idiot!” (or any of their repetitive comments) before I’ll consider risking desynchronisation just to kill a few civvies.
Machinarium
A cute little indie puzzle game, Machinarium was a little bit of a distraction in between Arkham and AC2 to cleanse the palette of my brain, as it were. It’s a clever little offering set in a robot city, in which you have to stop some bad robots from killing the King robot and free your girlfriend from the evilbots’ grasps. Various puzzles and stages lead you all over the city until you finally save the day. Artistically it’s simple but charming and my only issue was the overused-in-indie trope of saving a damsel in distress.
Other gaming from January 2012
Those three are, admittedly, the only three games I have completed, but I’ve been dipping in and out of others too! Serious Sam 3: Before First Encounter has so far been good nostalgia-laden fun, but my brain really has been in Open World mode recently and my FPS-ing has suffered as a result. Sonic Generations on PC has also been providing me with some chilled gaming – apart from when I get stuck – as it is bright, colourful and cheery, even in the face of a big baddie who is destroying time. Finally, not one I have been playing, but Skate on Xbox 360 has been my favourite Let’s-Watch-Someone-Else game as I curl up on the sofa and watch my partner switch nollie heel something-or-other around San Vanelona – it is a good game, but the controls can be a bit pesky for a PC purist, and the complete and total absence of any female boarders is a bit dull.
Plans for February
So far, I don’t have any hard-and-fast plans on games; I might revisit Brotherhood as I enjoyed AC2 so much (and I lost my Broho save game). I may also stretch to buying Revelations as I would like to make sure March is clear for Mass Effect 3.
What has everyone else been playing so far in 2012?
Found Feminism: Ann Summers Models
Oh, this one is a doozy.
I wanted to include it because the responses I’ve been getting to it have been quite wide ranging. So, the story begins with that bastion of the High Street Sex Shops, Ann Summers, of whom I have always been reasonably supportive, despite their addiction to itchy lace and the colour pink.
Why do I like them? Because in a world where sex, especially female participation and enjoyment is still taboo, this is a store that unashamedly caters to women and makes sex toys understandable, fun and available.
Together with the revolutionary Ann Summers parties, which are still going today, it provides safe adult sexual education away from schools or the XXX signage of the sleazy, intimidating stores of old. You can still find those stores in some parts of Soho, if you fancy something retro. Pack your own mac.
I love Lucy!
Anyway, Ann Summers ran a modelling competion, and now their windows are full of the image above. The winner, in the middle, is Lucy from Portsmouth. The vote was public and Lucy secured enough votes from whoever votes in public modelling competitions. The general public, I guess, which means that the general public have a very different, and arguably more representational, view of what a sexy woman looks like compared with the usual imagery.
I like the fact that Lucy is a size 16 (I believe that would be just about an ‘average’ size, right?). I like that she has won something she wants to win, that she is smiling and happy and confident. Part of feminism is about being able to look sexy and to enjoy looking sexy – without being called a slut, and without feeling as if you need to starve yourself to death. In which case, hurrah for Lucy!
I don’t know whether I love Lucy, I’m conflicted!
But part of me, perhaps a churlish and mean spirited part, wishes she’d won something else. Something where she kept her clothes on. Something that wasn’t about a narrow definiton of sexiness as standing around in red and black underwear for men to gawp at you.
I don’t like the idea of model competitions full stop – the whole idea that there are winners and losers in a world of body standards. There are too many women, too many shapes of their bodies, for there to be ‘correct’ ones. Sexiness isn’t about size. And this makes it about size. It makes it about “skinny” and “fat” – which is that Marilyn meme all over again, frankly.
Maybe I do love Lucy!
Yet there she is. On the high street. In a shop which is for women. And most of the women I talked to about this thought it was amazing, and when I put my objections about the sexualisation of women to them, they pointed out that this was Ann Summers, which is a sex shop, dammit, and that it was like me complaining that there were chocolates in Thorntons. They had a point. As did all of my friends who do like sexy, lacy (even pink) underwear.
I don’t know, I really don’t. Over to you…
The Maenads are in the Gym: Meditations on 80s Fitness Videos
The followers of Dionysus were called the Maenads – the ‘raving ones’. During worship, and through a combination of alcohol and ritualistic dancing, Dionysus would inspire in these women a state of ecstatic frenzy. So inspired, they would roam in a state of madness, engaging in uncontrolled sexual behaviour, tearing apart animals (and sometimes humans) with their bare hands and devouring the raw flesh.
And so into the Eighties…
During the Eighties, there was a Fitness Craze among the baby-boomers, who ‘from trying to improve society, [in the 60s and 70s…] turned to improving themselves‘. There can be no more evocative symbol of this than Jane Fonda and her striped leotard, although hers was a comparatively straight-edge style compared to some. Let’s pause to take a look at the opening to Jane Fonda’s Workout (released in 1982). It looks a little bit like a dark and threatening Exercise Cult. Even the music is vaguely sinister:
It feels a bit like that to do the workout. Jane ain’t taking no crap, and the video is punctuated with whoops of enthusiasm and the occasional yelp of pain from her exercise minions – one of whom, Leslie, is even invited down front to sing Jane’s very own personal song, ‘Do It’. Leslie appeared in a few more of Fonda’s workout videos, unlike the the guy in the crop top who looks uncannily like Steve Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (Alas, there is no YouTube evidence that this guy ever existed, bar a fuzzy image in the video above, so the latter link – with its excellent headgear – will have to suffice.)
Go for the burn: Bess Motta's 'Aerobicise'
Speaking of that dude, I’ve never understood if the men in the back row are there as misguided eye candy while you sweat it out, or if they’re intended to demonstrate that the workout is suitable for all genders. Have a think about that one.
Do It Yourself
The ‘New Workout’ was the first of 23 workout videos Fonda released and, apparently, the best-selling home video ever made (17 million copies sold). It’s hardly surprising: the DIY formula was a seductive one for (in particular) many American baby-boomer housewives, who were just beginning to own the new and exciting VCR-machine. Indeed, this exercise-at-home option contrasts curiously with these housewives’ stereotypical Victorian counterparts, all inactivity, crinolines and restrictive corsets. Fashion follows money, so the trophy wives of the 1980s would be as likely to flaunt their husbands’ wealth with lycra, fitness gadgets and gyms as elegant laziness; keeping trim between cleaning the house and nuking something for dinner.
Another explanation is the quality of the workout itself: there’s a pleasing sense of female camaraderie on Jane’s workouts – she’s occasionally ironic, and consistently determined that you should smile while you do your umpteenth set of sit ups (I never knew it was possible for your abs to hurt post-workout, but I was ignorant). At peak moments she shouts ‘Come on! If I can do it, you can do it!’, apparently forgetting that she trained as a professional ballet dancer, whereas we, her viewers, are more likely to be professional slobs. She believes in you!
Running Wild
That said, she’s also MAD – look at the ‘cool down’ section of the ‘Advanced’ workout for evidence. Rumours that she was filming the video on a diet of espresso, ice cream and cocaine remain unconfirmed, but she’s certainly on some kind of drug, even if just adrenaline. She drives her mob onwards, onwards, always onwards, and I always think there’s something vaguely Maenadic about the hoots and howls of pain she elicits from her class.
However, looking at similar videos of the time it seems that such a frenzied approach to exercise was completely normal: in the Canadian TV series 20-Minute Workout (1983-4), the instructions are shouted out by Bess ‘Aerobics Queen’ Motta almost as parts of a ritualistic cowboy song. The overall effect is unsettling, if not completely hypnotic:
Here’s Bess again, in a slightly more extended Aerobicise opus (the original 1981 show, whence 20-Minute Workout was a spin-off). For some reason, at this point she seems to require two versions of herself to work out with simultaneously. It gets very weird from about 2:40 onwards, at which point the line between ‘exercise-at-home cardio workout’ and ‘strangely synchronised proto-American Apparel soft porn’ becomes blurred to say the very least:
Both these are filmed with a pizazz lacking in Jane Fonda’s no-nonsense camerawork and they perhaps explain why, though Bess may have been Aerobics Queen, Jane was the housewives’ favourite. These are so lacking in practicality that they’re almost music videos; and indeed there’s a ‘genuine’ Sexy Workout prototype to compare them with, in the shape of Olivia Newton-John’s 80s cult classic ‘(Let’s Get) Physical‘ (1981).
Here, with a crazed energy akin to Fonda’s – but a sexual energy that’s more Bess Motta – Olivia Newton-John stalks a gym in something suspiciously akin to a thong-leotard. She pushes fat blokes around until they become ripped blokes shining with sweat (who then walk off into the changing rooms hand-in-hand…) – yet, ironically, the video was set in a gym in order to pacify hand-wringers who found the title too sexual.
Thematically and choreographically, this is almost an inverted reworking of the song 1950s icon Jane Russell sings to the US Olympic team in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:
I’m not in condition to wrestle
I’ve never trained in a gym
Show me a man who can nestle
And I’ll pin a medal on him– Jane Russell, Ain’t there Anyone Here for Love? (1953)
Here, again, the woman is a kind of Exercise Divinity (note the Greek reference in the murals!), but not yet the Olivia NJ-style fitness dominatrix, just a sexy slavering (and physically passive) male muscle-fan.
The Maenads Today
Many modern exercise videos start from celebrity and work back (Kerry Katona, Davina McCall), but they seem to set out to strip their celebrity fitness instructors of all trace of the divine: Davina (whilst being instructed by a mysterious woman sitting cross-legged in full gym kit just behind her) howls at the exercises (‘They’re really hard!!’), while Katie Price/Jordan’s 2005 effort The Jordan Workout is full of ‘I’m shattered!’, although I somehow doubt working out was the main intention of this particular video, given what Jordan is wearing:
It’s interesting that the camaraderie is still there, but the star is no longer the instructor: instead, you’re ‘sharing’ the star’s expensive personal trainer for the price of a DVD. Perhaps as a result, whereas Jane and Bess are driving you on to ‘better yourself’ (we’ll leave the body fascism issue at the door for brevity’s sake), Jordan and Davina are much more prosaic about the whole thing. They even feel the need to give you a context for their workout: we learn that Jordan made her video because she wanted to be ‘back in her g-string and on the beach as Mrs Andre in just twelve weeks’. And look at how the sex appeal has changed: it’s gone from a kind of primordial Dionysian cult to a bit of a cheeky snigger at Jordan’s knickers.
Conclusions – well, there are strange intersections here between sexuality, female camaraderie and the drive towards fitness. Personally, I reckon Jane’s still the best – and let’s not forget she also has an excellent political record – but I will leave you with this video, made in 1983 by Debbie Reynolds (of Singin’ in the Rain fame): Do It Debbie’s Way.
Do It Debbie’s Way (1983).
The next time I’m fed up down the gym, I am going to fling the dumbbells down in disgust and flounce off, offering as explanation merely: ‘I spent years at MGM making musicals! This is the lousiest exercise I eveeeer haaaad!!!!’
‘Tis Pity I Can’t Watch This Every Day For The Rest Of My Ever
I always worry about writing about theatre. I worry I’m not going to write about it like everyone else. I had this problem at Uni, where I studied the bloody thing. Everyone else would write about it in this classic, scholarly way and there’d be analysis and secondary critics and stuff, and I… well.
Have you ever seen those videos of Harry Potter fans in Japan? Go and YouTube some now. Okay. I’m like that, but with Jacobean revenge tragedies. I will camp out on the internet and snipe front row tickets and then work seventy hours of overtime to afford them. I will sob behind my fingers and moan, “Their love is so real” to myself as characters stab each other up on stage. I will embarrass the actors and everyone around me by simultaneously crying and cheering during the applause at the end. I’m getting a tattoo of one of the stage directions from John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, for crying out loud. A tattoo. This is a Thing for me. I’d reblog gifs all over Tumblr for The Changeling and Edward II if such gifs existed.
But they don’t, because it’s just me.
I get away with writing flailing fanboyish nonsense for my film reviews, but I don’t know how far I’ll get away with it for this. Let’s see.
What it is, is that I went to see Cheek By Jowl’s new production of the aforementioned ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore at the Cambridge Arts Theatre last week. It’s a modern dress production, featuring a single, static set, a nearly omnipresent ensemble cast, and modern dance. Oh, and lots and lots of sex and violence. It’s directed by Declan Donnellan, who took a modern dress production around London in the ’80s, and this is his new version that’s doing a big tour around France and the Sydney Festival, before coming to roost in London’s Barbican Centre in the near future.
Before I trundle on in my usual obtuse fashion, let me outline the plot of ‘Tis Pity for you, in case you don’t know it. Once upon a time in Parma, Giovanni falls in love with his sister Annabella. It’s requited and consensual and they carry on in secret for some time. Annabella is, unfortunately, being courted by sixty zillion guys other than her brother, and her father’s all, “please marry someone because your brother’s a bit useless, ps. don’t marry your brother lol”. It’s all okay and she can put off marriage virtually indefinitely, which is relevant to her interests because she’s in a very nice relationship with Giovanni, ta very much AND THEN SHE BECOMES THE PREGNANT and GUESS WHAT it’s obviously her brother’s. So, in order to divert the dreadful shame of being pregnant out of wedlock, she marries Suitor #1, Soranzo, who is not a very nice man (with previous abusive history) and who has an even worse manservant called Vasques, who likes to shiv people. Soranzo finds out Annabella’s pregnant, Vasques does some Sherlocking and finds out it’s Giovanni’s, and Giovanni, with time-honoured 24-carat flawless logic, decides to avert the on-coming crisis by killing Annabella, ripping out her heart, and taking the heart to a party. Then, everyone dies.
It’s the best play.
I was amazed at the audience, first. It was all – ALL – middle class couples about twice my age! They didn’t look as though they were there for the same reasons I was, to put it tactfully. I felt decidedly shifty in my spiked collar and skinny jeans, with my boyfriend and my ‘hawk haircut. Aside from the central relationship, I was looking forward to seeing how homoerotic this production had made Vasques’s relationship with his master, Soranzo. And, yes, I wanted to see squirting blood and eye-gouging. That’s what I was there for, and I clutched my Feelings Scarf (the stripy scarf I take to every film or play I see so that I can cuddle it and cry into it; I am ridiculous) and was essentially self conscious right up until Annabella (Lydia Wilson) came on stage.
As soon as she emerged, I lost my comparing-myself-to-the-audience anxiety completely. With ‘Tis Pity, I’m used to Annabella being painted as this passive recipient of Giovanni’s (Jack Gordon) affections. She is tossed about between her suitors and her brother, and it’s never really clear what she wants because you only ever see her through the lens of the men and their desires – so she’s this unattainable, Madonna/whore figure that I’d never really felt I could connect with.
Not this Annabella! Nope. She’s a tiny, scrappy waif with a half-shaved head and tangled hair, adjusting her laptop with her feet so that she can watch a film with her headphones on. Her bedroom – the set where the whole thing takes place – is adorned with posters for True Blood and Dial M For Murder, absinthe and The Vampire Diaries. She has tattoos and scruffy sneakers. Just visually, I found her easy to bond with: like someone I could have met in the pub. “Shame, though,” I thought, watching her bounce about on her bed, waiting for the lights to drop and the play to properly start, “that the play is mostly from Giovanni’s perspective.”
While that’s textually true, it certainly wasn’t the case for this production, which literally revolves around Annabella. She’s practically on stage all the time, even when she’s not participating in a scene. She’s picked up and hoisted about. She leads the dance numbers. She gets dressed up as a Madonna, complete with lit-up fairylight halo. She has all these extra actions and reactions, and when she speaks, she speaks… clearly. She fights back when Soranzo (Jack Hawkins) hits her. Her decisions about herself and her love life are clearly made, physically and verbally, and she makes her mind explicit. I was, frankly, amazed, having never really seen Annabella performed with this kind of clarity and sympathy before. I’m normally a Giovanni kind of guy – I always read him as this obsessive, devoted, atheist whose life is ruined by his social context and coercively-assigned religion, but Donnellan’s staging gives Annabella such agency that watching it, I found my allegience changed.
Soranzo, Annabella’s abusive suitor, whom she marries in haste to cover her pregnancy, was also painted rather more sympathetically than usual, which I found problematic. Yes, I know it’s boring and tedious to have Soranzo just be this using, bastardous wanker with no other dimensions at all, but, for the love of god, he hits her! He hits her and draws blood! He beats her and fetches a coathanger as if to forcibly abort her pregnancy! Come on! And then, we get this bizarre little insertion of tenderness where he buys her baby clothes and they look at them together and he’s sweet and tender, and you can see she’s changing her mind about him, and that’s not in the text, that’s been deliberately added – but why? Tell me I’m not the only one to find that intensely fucking awkward. I mentioned the coathanger, right?
As you can imagine, this production isn’t going to be easy viewing for everyone. It never is. It’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore. It’s a sympathetic play about incest that features heavy violence. This, however, is a marvellously hard-hitting, sensuous, lush performance all lit in red and green, which makes the action simultaneously really gory and really… I don’t know, tactile? (Men get their shirts off a lot and touch each other. I was a bit overwhelmed. You gotta understand.)
Oh, wait, wait, one other thing: Vasques (Laurence Spellman). In the text, Vasques is pretty much uniformly a Super Bastard. He double-crosses everyone, faithful only to his master – also a bastard – and doesn’t hesitate to seduce and murder his way around the cast, eventually to gloat over how he, as a Spaniard, has outdone the Italians in revenge. And in this production, he’s amazingly likeable! I mean, he’s still a double-crossing, seducing bastard, but he has vulnerability and passion. He folds Soranzo up in his arms and cuddles him. (Oh, and he also has a male stripper bite out the comic relief character’s tongue on stage. He caresses and kisses said stripper while he does it.)
Ford should have called this play Sex and Violence and Incest Party in Parma, Wooooo, and I think Donnellan’s production certainly does the text justice. There’s a lot of bodily fluids either visible or implied (at one point Vasques visibly orgasms whilst licking someone’s shoes, for example) and the whole thing is amazingly visceral to an extent where audience members were cringing and gasping around me. Religion seeps through the action to a huge extent, as is only proper – there’s veils and rosaries aplenty, and a bleeding-heart Jesus on the wall. You end up feeling that, were it not for a societal damnation of incest and premarital sex, Giovanni and boisterous, playful Annabella would be happy together; their separation through the external (ecclesiastical) pressures on her to marry is heartbreakingly, agonisingly painful.
Oh, and there’s a dancing cardinal.
If you have the means and time to go and see this production, I cannot recommend it highly enough. You won’t see anything else like it, and ‘Tis Pity is performed so rarely (probably due to the content!) that when a company does do it, it’s because they really relish it, and it shows. It really shows.
SUFFICE TO SAY, my Feelings Scarf got a good wringing.
- ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore hits London’s Barbican Centre from 16 Feb-22 March 2012. For the full tour, click here.
Illustration Interlude
Hello, I’m Miranda and I am into illustration.
Illustration – or, as Wikipedia rather charmingly defines it, art created to elucidate or dictate sensual information – is really important to me. It’s basically what I would do all the time if I had my way. And I’m not the only arty person on Team BadRep, either, as you may know. One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about being part of this site, in fact, is the opportunities it has raised for me to discover new illustrators from around the world, including feminist Gond tribal art and east Indian Mithili art. As I write this, I’m awaiting my copy of Sita’s Ramayana from Tara Books, so I’ll be talking about that on here soon.
This, though, is a quick post about illustrators I’m especially digging this minute. Each of them has done some work that I found interesting and beautiful with the added dimension that it also got my feminist braincogs turning, or straight up made me smile.
I’ll probably come back to this topic every so often, but to start with here’s some people you should check out.
Tiitu Takalo
Based in Finland, and mainly working in Finnish, but her art is powerful enough that you don’t need to be fluent in Finnish to love it. I interviewed her last year about her work and her feminism – read it here. I am fangirlishly proud that this site is on her links page, I can tell you! My favourite thing she’s done is probably Keha (The Ring) which is about growing up, falling in love, and boxing, but her zines are also beautiful.
Howard Hardiman
What Lengths would you be prepared to go to?
So I met Howard at a small press art fair Markgraf and I had a stall at, and I picked up issues 1 and 2 of his comic The Lengths. It’s now on issue 5. In his own words (quoted here), “…it’s a comic based around a series of interviews I did with male escorts working in London a few years ago and tells the story of Eddie, one young escort… who’s struggling with trying to do the job while craving both the adventure it offers him and the prospect of a relationship with an old friend”.
It is also very good. It’s a thoughtful, introspective comic, meandering poignantly through ideas around sex work and attitudes to it, selfhood and masculinities. I really like his decision to portray all the characters as human/dog hybrids. It just works.
On another tack, Howard’s also writing The Peckham Invalids, talking of which, scroll down!
(Oh, and according to his site bio, he’s been described by Simply Knitting magazine as “suave”. This has really only made us dig him more.)
Julia Scheele
There’s a lot about Julia’s work I love – short mini-comics like this and this, for example. I’d recommend following her work generally, but I’d particularly recommend The Peckham Invalids. I have issue 1, and it’s off to a promising start. The entire premise is a Bechdel-busting pile of badass, and features women from a range of ages and backgrounds, y’know, having their stories told, and stuff.
In 1906, as Britain surges on a tide of industrialisation driven by the brave innovations of the boldest and the best, Ms York has opened the doors of her modest home in Peckham. A group of poor, young, ill-educated, disabled and abandoned girls found their way to her and under her auspices are learning about the power they have feared the most in the world of oppression and stark inequality: their own.
So, to recap: a comic about disabled teenage superheroines in 1906 Peckham. My interest is hugely piqued, my hopes are high, and the art is looking great.
- Julia’s Art Blog
- thepeckhaminvalids.com
- Sarah Gordon, who colours The Peckham Invalids – also a talented artist
Cat Mariner
“I’m pretty sure that tiny, irrationally furious, pompously indignant animals are the funniest things on the planet.”
And who are we to argue?
Cat’s just launched her Etsy store this week, which is great, because the image above is surely the greatest alt-Valentines card imaginable (although Snails In Love… Totally Gross is surely a contender). I am particularly jealous of her command of facial expressions, and particularly enamoured of this image of the rainbow creatures that live in puddles.
I am in the process of loudly petitioning her to produce a picture book or a comic. Pray add your voice to the clamour, and purchase a card on your way out.
I’m going to stop there because it’s late and I have to sleep but please do check these people out, gift them your money and tell your friends about them.
There are more people I want to tell you about, but I think I’ll style it out into a second post!
Laputa: Skypirates Against The Patriarchy!
Exciting news! My very favourite film, Laputa (aka Castle In The Sky) has just appeared on YouTube with its rare original English dub rather than the grotesque Disney version featuring James Van Der Beek. This is, of course, bad and wrong and you definitely shouldn’t go and watch it all.
It’s the first Studio Ghibli film proper, and it’s a corker, containing two reasonably kickass female characters, a steam train chase, skypirates, magic crystals, airships, a mysterious floating city and some damn fine robots. It’s a sort of steampunk sci-fi ecofable. It even has a section set in what is clearly a parallel universe Welsh mining town, inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s trip to Wales and interest in the miners’ strike in the early 1980s.
Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli can generally be relied upon for more interesting and resourceful heroines than your average Disney or Pixar fodder, even if they are a bit, er identically similar. But in Laputa you can read the whole film as a condemnation of patriarchal power. Seriously – the government, the military and the monarchy line up against a girl and her male friend (who represent the future, protecting one another and fighting alongside each other as equals) and a band of pirates captained by a truly formidable woman.
There is a bit of a science vs nature theme, but it’s not clear cut, as the pirates rely on technology as much as the military do. Technology and nature are shown to be in harmony in the great overgrown gardens of the ancient city of Laputa, tended for centuries by a solitary robot.
Anyway, back to the womens. Orphan Sheeta is the central character, and although she might at first seem more passive than the Ghibli girls to come in Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and Howl’s Moving Castle, she is quietly courageous, getting in a fair bit of fighting, struggling, attacking, escaping and running away. In the dramatic first minutes of the film, for example, she acts boldly and bravely and strikes out against her captors:
It’s also worth bearing in mind that Laputa came out in 1986, and Sheeta represented a fairly significant departure from your average anime heroine at that point. As well as being smart, resourceful and brave, Sheeta is powerful. Interestingly, she inherits this power – in the form of the ‘levitation stone’, a secret true name and powerful magic spells – from her mother.
Although her counterpart, the headstrong Pazu, styles himself as her protector, and does do a bit of rescuing, the traditional gender roles are blurred. Rebecca Johnson highlights this in her essay Kawaii and kirei: Navigating the Identities of Women in ‘Laputa: Castle in the Sky’ by Hayao Miyazaki and ‘Ghost in the Shell’ by Mamoru Oshii:
Even the role reversal displayed between Sheeta and Pazu is prominent, questioning the notion of gender roles that men and women take. For example, Sheeta tries to protect Pazu after their initial capture by the army, denying that she needs help. In this instance, both characters are “damsels in distress” since they are both under the threat of the army. Instead of taking on a traditional role as a damsel, Sheeta takes on the male role of protector.
There are also two scenes in which Pazu cooks for them both, which is a little thing, but it makes me happy. Go go normalizing atypical gender behaviours!
In the climactic scene they stand side by side, holding hands as equals, and act together as their (feminine) compassion compels them to an act of terrific (masculine) violence and destruction in which they sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
The other main female character, piratical matriarch Dola, is just wonderful. She’s a bit like Granny Weatherwax crossed with Desperate Dan. Here she is outsmarting, outfighting and outrunning her burly band of sons (she appears around five minutes in):
My favourite bit is the way she discards her skirt when things start to kick off. Rebecca Johnson sees Dola as a particularly radical character in the context of the dominant social ideals of Japanese womanhood. As she says:
Dola treats the world around her as personal territory without fear or hesitancy. Leading her family, a band of pirates, she is a take charge woman who shows her Japanese audience that women are more than capable of casting away the kawaii syndrome plaguing them…
The Japanese word for mother is “okasan” which literally means “the person at the back of the house”. However, it is safe to assume that Dola, as her sons’ captain, is far from being “the woman at the back of the house.” Really, Dola is defying the common stereotype of Japanese women because her success is not being measured in terms of the motherly and wifely capabilities by which many contemporary Japanese women are judged. The common Japanese phrase “women are weak but mothers are strong” is one-sided, and proved wrong by Dola. Her characterization and actions show that she is not only a strong mother but a smart and strong woman in her own regard too.
For all her ferocity and ruthlessness, Dola does have a compassionate side and becomes deeply protective of the two orphans once they have proved themselves to her. Arcadean has an interesting analysis of Dola’s shifting gender identity, although I don’t completely agree with it.
Even now the film fills me with wonder, and the original score and use of silence (intolerable to Disney, apparently) is full of beauty. It left a lasting impression, and is probably responsible for my interest in anime and manga, and certainly for my profound love of robots. And I reckon you could do a lot worse on the role model front than Sheeta and Dola.