Are your boobs bulletproof? Apparently, Friday's are!
First of all, my sincerest apologies for disappearing into the far reaches of the internet but that terrible thing called Real Life decided to poke its nose where it wasn’t wanted. I will tell you all about the Eurogamer Expo, and I still have those goodies to give away, so please forgive my extended absence!
Today, I present to you my observations of the post-apocalyptic female form, with visual examples from RAGE, the recent id Software release. In case I didn’t mention it before, I am a bit of an id fan – seeing as how Doom was the first proper game I ever played – so criticising them was a bit of a forced exercise for me. But criticise I must! When I first saw the trailers and preview footage for RAGE I noted the presence of female characters(!). However, they were distinctly boobed-up and inappropriately attired for life in a wasteland environment, especially given all the violence also included in these vids.
I’d noticed this before in other post-apocalypse/global bad thing games, like Fallout: New Vegas and definitely in Borderlands. It is also apparent in fantasy RPGs like Dragon Age, as well as sci-fi/horror titles like Dead Space. All these women are stereotypically ‘beautiful’, i.e. there is not a blemish in sight, their waists are tiny, their boobs are pert (and, more often than not, on display), their eyes are big and shiny, etc – you get the idea!
However, my quibble here is not just the fact that it is disgustingly demeaning, shallow and pathetic but also that it is totally unreal and impractical. What were the developers thinking?! I’m sure women may seem all alien and scary to design, but when it comes to internal vital organs, like the heart and lungs, they’re in the same place as a man’s. IN THE CHEST. So, why would any vaguely intelligent female survivor of the apocalypse waltz around with the most vulnerable part of her body un-armoured and on display? How are they not all dead? In this world full of bandits, territorial gangs, mutants and some evil authoritarian organisation out to kill them, how is it all the bullets/knives/arrows/rockets/etc have missed the gaping void in their armour exactly where their hearts are?
So there’s that part of the issue. Secondarily, if we look at these women in these games, they look as if they could be glamour models in this day and age. Now, not to cast doubt on the practicality of models in general, but how many of them, do you think, would even survive the initial global devastating event, let alone eke out an existence fighting and killing fellow humans? Personally, I intend to build a labyrinthine nuclear bunker under my house when I can, but I accept that I’m abnormal and most glamour models won’t be thinking of these things. My point being, I am not that kind of pretty and of all the people I know that might survive a wasteland environment none of them are model-esque in their features.
Nor are any of them stupid enough to wear armour that exposes their chest.
So this leads me to wonder whether all of these devastating global events were actually designed so that – in the most Bill Bailey of ways – they killed all the trolls, leaving all the beautiful ladies (in danger) behind. If so, how then can we assume these women survived? Proffering sexual favours with the alpha males for protection? It’s an ogre-ish thing to consider, but what other explanation is there for only the glamorous women surviving?
Destinee, Jani and Mel model the high fashion of the dystopian future.
I doubt that the developers ever think this sort of thing through, as they’re too busy patronising their male audiences with images of huge tits to realise it’s more than just sexist and misogynist. For games that desire heightened realism, they haven’t thought it all through very well, have they?
And that’s before we even go near the fact that all these women are caucasian.
Tom Richards and Stewart Pringle are the co-artistic directors of Theatre of the Damned, creators of the London Horror Festival, and the co-directors and writers of The Revenge of the Grand Guignol, which is running until 27th November at London’s Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton.
Here guest blogger Lydia continues yesterday’s interview about representations of women in horror, and what it’s been like resurrecting Grand Guignol for a modern audience…
So, we’ve just got done talking about the rise of the ‘saw a woman in half’ phenomenon – seems like there are both political and practical reasons why horror can fall into misogyny. Is this stuff as common as people think?
Tom: There’s tons of it. Tons and tons. We choose not to put on plays like that as they don’t interest us, but in the 1940s and 50s when the Grand Guignol was trying to compete with Hammer, they wrote pure exploitation crap. It’s true of all kinds of horror: you can tell a form is dying when it spills out pure sexualised violence. It doesn’t take much money or skill to produce, but it sells, so the lower end of the horror market is flooded with this kind of thing.
Stew: The nadir of all creative horror genres, periods of productivity, and exciting works always end with women being hacked up. Bad horror tends towards unthinking misogyny and ultraviolence.
Tom: The Friday the 13th sequels, for example, are aimed at teenage boys who want to see tits and gore. It’s not that they’re interested in sexualised violence itself, or damaging women; in fact anything emotionally realistic would probably upset or disturb them – they just want as much sex and as much violence as possible within a given time span.
Stew: For those cynical sequel makers, women are just a convenient vessel for both tits and blood. A lot of the women being killed are topless or have recently been topless, or are even mid-coitus. We’re seeing it again now in the torture porn genre – a term people argue with, but I think it’s completely accurate. In Hostel for example, all we’re seeing is girls chosen for their looks being chopped up.
Tom: More than that – they’re being chopped up in such a way that it’s clear it’s supposed to be a turn-on. Because the films have decent production values, it’s harder to spot. The people producing this stuff are far more competent with a camera and effects than whatever clown the studios hired to make Friday the 13th part 8. So instead of being a sequence of disjointed tat, it lovingly focuses on the bodies, on the violence, in a style that is erotic in and of itself.
Stew: What we’re refuting here, and in our theatre, is that these stereotypes are intrinsic to horror. It’s a lot more interesting than that. Horror is what occurs at the negative extremity of human experience: the points at which we don’t understand something, can’t cope with something, or are driven to actions that are well outside the boundaries of normal behaviour. That covers everything from hauntings to murder and massacres, death, and losing your mind. Anything that we are not fit to cope with can produce horror. It can go as far as Lovecraft and involve gods from beyond time, or it can be a woman killing her child. Violence can be a part of it, but it’s not necessary.
Tom: You can have extreme violence without horror. There are places the two cross over. You could have a legitimate discussion about whether, say, Rambo is a horror film, because it is undoubtedly a film that sets out to be horrific.
Stew: And then there are films which use the tropes of horror but are not horror. Shaun of the Dead is very gory, and terrible things happen, but really it’s not a horror film because it doesn’t exist to horrify.
Tom: There are a lot of horror comedies where horror provides a kind of desktop theme – the styles and shapes, but not the core. And then you have true horror comedies like Drag Me To Hell and almost all of Sam Raimi’s films: genuinely scary, genuinely unnerving and deeply funny.
Those cross-genre films are often the ones that freak me out the most – you get more involved and don’t know what to expect or what’s expected of you.
Tom: Grand Guignol scripts often work towards implicating an audience and making it disgusted with itself – it works you up so that you’re desperate for the payoff, so you want to see mayhem; you want to see everything destroyed. It reveals a lot about people and it’s fascinating, but you have to be careful not to be merely titillating – if they’re never revolted by it then they’ll never really face the facet of themselves that wanted it. When it’s successful, it exposes some fucked up inner feelings buried in the audience’s subconscious and assumptions.
So that old helpless innocent woman trope shows what people want in gender relations?
Tom: I think that’s actually become rather dated. It was never important that she was innocent, more that she was sympathetic. Back in 1890, even 1950, that meant virginal and naïve. That was the woman men wanted to be with and male writers thought women wanted to be. But those same cynical reasons are why in more modern stuff – not just horror – female characters are becoming more sophisticated, interesting and independent. It just reflects the kind of person the majority of men want to be with.
Cynical, but it rings true. What do these tropes say about men?
Tom: Men seem to be pretty blasé about male characters in horror. They just want them to die
interestingly. Unless it’s the killer, and even then, it’s just hoping for more killing.
Stew: There are very few strong male heroes in horror. Maybe Ash, but he’s a buffoon who happens to save the day. Shaun, in Shaun of the Dead, has toughness about him, but again is buffoonish. There aren’t a lot of great male characters running around in horror as a contrast for the problems with women.
Tom: A lot of men die too, it’s just that their deaths aren’t lingered over. In horror films where there’s a long series of victims being killed off sequentially, perhaps the numbers will be split equally male/female, but the last one is almost always a young woman.
Stew: She has survived to the end because she displayed a level of ingenuity that the others – male and female – were incapable of. It harks back to the resourceful gothic heroine.
Tom: So now we have a combination of factors: women are more likely to sympathise with a resourceful, interesting woman, and men are more likely to feel emotional involvement and protectiveness towards a young, attractive, likeable female character. It lacks subtlety, but for a form which doesn’t focus on character development it often turns out like that.
I see an interesting link to the politics of violence, and in particular sexual violence. There’s still a deeply entrenched assumption that male victims should somehow have been able to fight off their attacker; by being defeated you have been proved not to be a proper man, whatever that means. And the shame related to that can be felt to be worse than the crime itself.
Stew: Well, the killers in cheap slasher films, after hacking up topless women, will taunt male victims about their lack of manliness. Freddie and Chucky will always make wisecracks concerning the masculinity of their male victims. They bully and humiliate them before killing them. And then Jason, who has a hockey mask, massive weapon and is all muscles: he’s kind of an ur-male; masculinity pushed to a horrific extreme.
Tom: Of course, this is in slashers, one of the lowest forms of horror; it doesn’t really go anywhere interesting with those ideas.
It’s kind of interesting that even in it’s most simplistic form, people are so addicted to these ideas – the miseryporn biography stories about horrific child abuse that my elderly female relatives are addicted to have so many of the same tropes.
Tom: I think it’s an urge that is common, if not to everyone, then to the vast majority of people, to vicariously experience the negative extremes of human possibilities. To understand somehow what that feels like. The forms in which people enjoy or find it acceptable to explore that differ, but it’s not exclusive to 16-24 year old men.
Lydia: So in fact we have ended up with several distinct things which go by the name ‘horror’. There’s the inherited tropes and structures – the kind of desktop theme that you describe horror comedies playing with, all capes and bats and fainting virgins. Then there’s the market – primarily made up of teenage boys – for unsophisticated tits and violence served up as concentrated as possible, so they sometimes end up overlapping and confused. And then, finally, we have various approaches to the exploration of the negative extremes of human experience. Since the latter plays on the audience’s deeply help assumptions and fears, in its weaker forms it can slip into mere titillation and reinforce stereotypes, but when elevated to an art from, it can shake and move you, reveal yourself to yourself.
Stew: And be fucking scary, yeah.
All images used with permission, copyright Theatre of the Damned, or under Fair Use guidelines
Tom Richards and Stewart Pringle are the co-artistic directors of Theatre of the Damned, creators of the London Horror Festival, and the co-directors and writers of The Revenge of the Grand Guignol, which is running until 27th November at London’s Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton.
Guest blogger Lydia grabbed them for a chat about representations of women in horror, resurrecting Grand Guignol for a modern audience, and sawing women in half. Well. Sort of…
Let’s start off by facing up to the accusation that women in horror are condemned to inhabit a narrow range of stock characters. Is this the case in the Grand Guignol? What are these characters? Where did they tropes originate? What purposes do they serve?
Stew: It can seem sometimes that the women in horror only embody the Madonna/Whore complex, and that men have their own Cunt/Hero division. It’s actually not as straightforward as that. When those tropes crop it’s usually for reasons concerning the practicalities of how horror works – there is a need for heroes and villains.
EJ Martin in Laboratory of Hallucinations
Tom: Horror doesn’t often have a lot of time to spend developing sophisticated characterisation, and uses shorthands as a result. The most obvious and irritating stereotype is the angel of the house, or the innocent virgin, the best example being Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The character’s common in older Grand Guignol, though as the plays grew more sophisticated they’re increasingly rare. It’s simply because, for fairly obvious reasons, if you want people to be upset about a character being destroyed then you want that character to be someone they feel positively towards. In the early 20th century, the easiest way to do that was to bring in a nice, sweet posh girl who was rather inept, so you get a lot of them.
Stew: Another common one is the Hag, which crops up not just in the Grand Guignol but throughout horror. As we found out fairly recently, she’s the proto form of the psycho-biddy, which is a major horror cinema trope, starting with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The hag figures in Grand Guignol, as in a lot of literature before that from Spenser onwards, are generally suggested to be women who have rejected their femininity – women who have become masculinised in some way or are specifically anti-maternal: they eat children, they destroy children. That’s a figure that goes back right through literature and myth. The Grand Guignol used that history together with figures from contemporary Paris: brothel madams and drunks and women who for other reasons were seen as no longer trading in the economies of sex.
Tom: The evil women in Grand Guignol can be really fun – and they’re often interesting characters. Let’s face it, there are no great characters in the Grand Guignol, or in horror generally- it’s not going to contain Hamlet. So a slightly stereotyped but also powerful and charismatic figure is often about as exciting and interesting a part as any man or woman is going to get in this kind of material.
So the gothic trope – of the woman who looks too hard and too deep and finds terrible things, seemingly punished for curiosity and empowerment – that doesn’t crop up in the Grand Guignol?
Tom: That’s a gothic trope, but was never in the original Grand Guignol, which doesn’t deal with those gothic elements of haunted houses and graveyards.
Stew: The Grand Guignol grew from Théâtre Libre which was naturalist theatre, and which existed to reflect the scandal sand stories of Contemporary Paris and Europe more widely.
Tom: Particularly working class Paris.
Stew: If you view it as an analogue of Zola or Huysmans, you’re not far wrong. Zola was one of the first who talked about prostitutes and drunks and told their stories without making them into moral points. And the Grand Guignol is essentially an amoral universe.
Tom: There are certainly characters you’re expected to sympathise with or like, but it doesn’t ever punish. It doesn’t punish for being good, it doesn’t punish for being bad, it just basically rains destruction down upon pretty much everything.
Stew: The gothic universe is a moral one, and very distant from natural. In many ways the kind of work Théâtre Libre was doing was a stand against that gothic high melodrama which you might see on the Parisian stage. So a lot of those female tropes, a lot of what you’d find in an Ann Radcliffe novel or even in Edgar Allen Poe’s more explicitly European gothic fiction don’t actually find their way into the Grand Guignol.
Tom: To me, most of the interesting bits of the grand Guignol – and what we do – is not really, as it might sometimes seem, the destruction of women by men, but the destruction of humanity by inhumanity. Rather than having a big monster that looms and attacks (although that sometimes happens) it’s more interesting to look at a human become a monster, and then to see that human monster inflict damage on themselves and others. For writers in the early 20th century, it was easiest to use innocence or maternity as a symbol for the most human aspect of a woman.
Stew: And in men, you’re likely to see an oversophisticated doctor causing damage on the individual’s humanity – on a happy person or on a happy relationship. Scientific progress, more than immoral behaviour, is seen as destructive. The amorality and inhumanity of science is more frightening than the superhuman or superstition.
Tom: So you get all these mad scientists who believe that they can defeat death or uncover the secret of consciousness by hacking up your brain and of course they’re male because of the time they were written and set.
So the more sophisticated plays can explore monstrousness without falling back on those gender stereotypes?
Tom: Absolutely. An example is A Kiss Goodnight, which we produced last year. It opens with a man who has been terribly physically disfigured by his wife – she threw acid in his face. He has intervened in court to prevent her being sent to prison on the condition that she visits him this one last time. So we have a man who seems saintly and who has been destroyed by a woman who is beautiful externally but is, if not monstrous, at least capable of monstrosity. We find out, in due course, that he isn’t a nice chap either, and it’s never clear if his inner monstrosity is a consequence of his physical destruction, or whether he always contained it.
Stew: I think the play suggests that they were both always capable of these terrible things.
Tom: It seems that they were always very well matched, and the play involves getting their physical appearances to match their inner monstrousness as they destroy each other.
So the gore and grossness is not necessarily to do with sin, or having moral damage physicalized?
Tom: The Grand Guignol doesn’t make that kind of judgement. A lot of horror does.
Stew: In the Grand Guignol the amorality and inhumanity of scientific progress is more frightening than immorality or superstition or even the superhuman.
Tom: It explores forces which are seen to destroy or damage humanity: disease and mental illness, religion – that is, religion itself, not God.
Stew: It is important to point out that whilst the Grand Guignol itself is amoral, it was undeniably part of a continuing trend of increasing violence against women in theatre and onstage. In magic for instance, Jim Steinmeyer writes brilliantly about the sawing-a-woman-in-half routine. It’s so hoary now we see it as similar to pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but in fact the action is a horribly violent and brutally misogynistic piece of show which is entirely about killing a woman – putting her back together is optional. At the time, as soon as the trick was invented it was everywhere, everyone had their box illusion and it was always sawing a woman in half, with names like “destroying a woman”, “disintegrating a woman”.
And although there’s little skill involved in the trick, you never see an assistant sawing the magician. So is there an aspect again of who has power over whose body?
Stew: It started happening in the Twenties and Thirties, and I think there was a political aspect to it – these performances formed a backlash against women’s increasing prominence.
Tom: In that specific case I always thought it was simple practical reasons: sawing someone in half is awesome, and magicians want a beautiful assistant for sales reasons. Ergo: woman in halves.
Come back tomorrow for Part 2, in which we talk blood, boobs, cinema’s influence on Grand Guignol portrayals of women, slashers, Final Girls, and more…
All images used with permission, copyright Theatre of the Damned
A Snapshot of the Past
The wonderful website Letters of Note is always worth reading (or following on twitter), and recently they posted a letter which made me reflect on how far we’ve come in a few decades.
Astronomer and physicist Carl Sagan wrote in 1981 to an organisation called “The Explorers Club”. Some history is needed here: this was a group founded in 1905 in New York, as a club for those who pursue “Scientific Exploration” (including both Explorers and Scientists). A letterhead he mentions in the note says To the conquest of the unknown and the advancement of knowledge. Back around 1900, the idea that women could be part of either of those professions or join the club wasn’t considered. The club then remained men-only for decades in the name of tradition.
Sagan was adding his voice to others in the early 1980s asking that women should be allowed to be members. His letter is polite, but one middle paragraph is a brilliant list of women who have contributed to the pursuit of new knowledge:
There are several women astronauts. The earliest footprints — 3.6 million years old — made by a member of the human family have been found in a volcanic ash flow in Tanzania by Mary Leakey. Trailblazing studies of the behavior of primates in the wild have been performed by dozens of young women, each spending years with a different primate species. Jane Goodall‘s studies of the chimpanzee are the best known of the investigations which illuminate human origins. The undersea depth record is held by Sylvia Earle [pictured below]. The solar wind was first measured in situ by Marcia Neugebauer, using the Mariner 2 spacecraft. The first active volcanoes beyond the Earth were discovered on the Jovian moon Io by Linda Morabito, using the Voyager 1 spacecraft. These examples of modern exploration and discovery could be multiplied a hundredfold.
The Explorers Club changed their policy later that year, and now do not restrict based on gender.
But that’s not the part which gives me hope.
If you read the rest of Sagan’s letter, the extraordinary thing today is how reasonable he’s being. He’s genuinely trying to convince the Club, using facts and appealing to logic, that they should make this change. There’s no hint of anger or appeal to fairness. He doesn’t say women deserve equality, and only calmly points out that if you want a ‘social club for the boys’ you shouldn’t claim to represent all scientists and explorers in 1981. In fact he (as a member) acts as though they could have every right to exclude women because of tradition, but that they’re mistaken and women should in fact qualify under their own rules. (I’m not saying Sagan wasn’t passionate about equality, at all – his belief in it comes through clearly in many of his books and documentaries, and he’s an absolute hero. I think he was being deliberately polite.)
However, I expect that someone writing to the Explorers Club today might send a very different message. A message which includes the questions “What do you think you’re doing?” and “Why are you being so incredibly blinkered?”. I can well believe that there was prejudice against the quality of women’s roles in science in 1981: there’s prejudice now. But I think the average expectation of what is normal and fair has genuinely shifted, to the point that Sagan’s letter reads as quite oddly passive today.
In the week when Google celebrated Marie Curie’s 144th birthday, I enjoy anything which reminds us that we need to move away from the token lady scientist when looking at women’s roles in the discovery of new frontiers. This letter is, I hope, an anachronism today. I also dearly hope it won’t seem normal again in the future.
Personal (R)Evolutions: Raven Kaliana’s Fragile/Sacred
When people talk about art changing lives, I think Raven Kaliana’s work is the kind of thing they mean. Using a mixture of live actors and puppetry, her company Puppet (R)Evolution uses ingenious staging to show what cannot be shown in live action.
The first play of Kaliana’s I saw was Hooray for Hollywood a while back. It told the story of her own horrific childhood in the child sex industry. The play showed adult actors from the waist down (just jean legs, skirts and overheard dialogue) and focused on the level – both emotionally and physically – of the children, who were portrayed with puppets.
I first saw Hooray for Hollywood in July 2010 and wrote about it then for feminist mag Fat Quarter. More recently an abridged version of the play has been filmed for wider distribution and showed at an event on ending child pornography held at Amnesty International Headquarters. The work is powerful, brave, and through ingenious staging conveys what it would be near-impossible to bring out for open discussion any other way. Frequently Hooray for Hollywood is played with a talk afterwards, hosted by various child protection charities.
Puppet (R)Evolution’s current play, Fragile/Sacred, was on as part of the Suspense puppetry festival.
Whereas Hooray for Hollywood was already an extremely creatively-presented play, Fragile/Sacred pushes the boundary further and forms more of an art piece. Once again part of Kaliana’s autobiography, and drawing this time from her teens, the entire performance is wordless, and uses four live actors along with a minimal number of puppets.
The set is a large, square tunnel – with each side draped in a different material, used to great effect to convey everything from undergrowth to water to a hospital ward. The opening sequence of the abusive father figure holding a light-up model of a home and pushing his hand into it and licking his hand – clearly getting a sexual kick out of it – set up the creepiness of the story’s homelife, and was one of the most uncomfortable few minutes of stagetime I have ever seen.
I feel I very much benefited from seeing Hooray for Hollywood first, and feel the two plays could, perhaps, complement each other on a double-bill. As it was, I’m not sure if those coming to Fragile/Sacred afresh would have understood all of it.
However, that said, the play is as much about atmosphere as it is about plot. The father figure character (opening scene aside) is oddly inexpressive – tightly-wound and capable of violence, but the actor playing him nonetheless gives little away facially. I say ‘the actor’ as the part is also sometimes played by a puppet for the longer-range scenes.
Compared to Hooray for Hollywood, Fragile/Sacred is very light on puppetry. It has a father puppet, a rabbit and a raven, as well as some shadow-puppets, but the play also makes good use of models and toys to convey the larger scenes. Puppetry in this play is just one element in a large range of innovative techniques used to convey the story.
Watching adult actors move toy cars or toy helicopters around added a layer of non-optional make-believe to the production. I occasionally found the lines between characters playing and representation of wider plot a little difficult to discern, but that in a way added to the dreamlike quality of the piece.
I found the complete lack of dialogue a little difficult, but – as in the earlier play – this is about a protagonist who sees a lot, but is often scared to speak or act. The character seemed on the surface to be very passive, yet was making brave and bold moves throughout the play. The dreamlike quality of the production conveyed a kind of inner sanctuary that the protagonist retreated to and drew strength from.
A fascinating, artful and thoughtful production – and an absolute must for lovers of physical theatre, as well as anyone working in fields which touch on the themes of abuse. But, strange as it feels to say, I found Fragile/Sacred – the gentler of the two plays I’ve seen – was slightly more difficult for me than Hooray for Hollywood with its more straightforward plot. While Hooray for Hollywood was entirely viewed from the protagonist’s (physical) point of view, Fragile/Sacred seems to be viewed from mostly inside the protagonist’s mind, where there is an often luscious stillness while horrors swirl around her and worlds blend together. That said, the two pieces do inform each other hugely, and I repeat my call for a double-bill.
- ravenkaliana.com
- Puppet (R)Evolution
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Photos by Emma Leishman and Tinka Slavicek
A Little Feminist, Queer Opera Music?
Grab your drinks, we’re going to the pub to watch opera. It’s going to be amazing! Queer Feminist Cabaret Opera Mash-Up. In the pub! Get in.
I’ve been spending time with opera singers Clouds and Jessie, talking about their company Better Strangers and upcoming show,Ah! Forget My Fate: A Brief History Of Women In Opera (Abridged) at Islington’s King’s Head theatre. I asked them some semi-intelligent questions, and they gave me some pretty damn cool answers.
Tell us a bit about yourselves.
“Better Strangers started with Clouds and Jessie, two queer feminist geeks. We met through LARP and bonded over a mutual love of opera, together with frustration at the lack of available jobs. Clouds is now in her second year of a singing course at music school. Jessie is a youth worker at the East London Out Project, and does freelance community arts with people with profound and multiple learning disabilities. We both have literature degrees. Jessie likes queer theory and graphic novels. Clouds likes metal and baking. Pleased to meet you!”
Men at work. Kinda. Not.
“Better Strangers coalesced into an actual concept some time around May 2010. Our stated aim is to create musical performances by, with and for all kinds of women, and to use these to reach out to people who might normally feel excluded from opera.”
We love the idea of feminist opera – what role does it play in opera as a whole and in the wider arts world?
“To the best of our awareness, Better Strangers is the only feminist opera company in existence. There are occasional feminist productions dotted around, but no other companies dedicated to performing them, as far as we can tell. So that’s a start. In addition to putting on feminist productions of existing operas, we’ll be commissioning new music from female composers, asking female writers to contribute song lyrics and stories, and opening up discussions about women’s roles in opera, and how and why they need to change.
“At least two thirds of any singing class in a music school is likely to be made up of women – most of them sopranos – and yet each commonly performed opera will contain two, maybe three roles for the ‘female’ soprano, mezzo or alto register. It’s a hugely (and in some ways needlessly) competitive world. So, instead of wringing our hands about the dwindling interest in opera and classical music, why not create more? Our commissioned works will address this problem in two ways: firstly, by including more soprano, mezzo and alto roles; and secondly, by scoring many of them for small groups of instruments, so that they can be easily performed with limited space and resources.
“As well as performers, we’re encouraging contributions from female directors, MDs, producers (BadRep’s own Sarah C is working with us right now), composers, technicians, librettists and artists. Women composers are more widely recognised now than they have ever been, with Performing Right Society awarding funding for music written and commissioned by women, but there is still a lot of work to be done. We hope that as we bring the work of stage professionals and writers to light, women might start to be taken more seriously across the arts world.
“Our feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit. We at Better Strangers are interested in stories, and particularly stories that aren’t often told. This means listening to all kinds of different people – women, QUILTBAGs, people of colour, people from lower income brackets, people with disabilities, and anyone else who has something to share with the world.”
Artwork by Alex Campbell
The show features a lot of pieces for women performers. What are your opinions on the roles available to women in opera?
“The premise of Ah! Forget My Fate! is that women are very frequently typecast. The most common types of female characters are the weepy virgin, the terrible slut, the saucy servant girl, or the boy. In operas written before 1820 there were a lot more witches and evil sorceresses, but the villain’s role was handed over to basses later on. That’s it. If you’re a weepy virgin or a terrible slut in an opera written after 1830, chances are you’ll go mad or get consumption and die. Bad luck!
“How does one sing with consumption anyway? A wasting disease of the lungs and throat plays havoc with your timbre. There are a few exceptions, of course. We just want to create more of them. Besides, what about the mezzos who want to play a bold, upstanding young hero? Or the basses who want to play weepy, consumptive virgins?
“There is a heavy heteronormative gender bias in opera, which is kind of silly because not all sopranos, mezzos and altos are women, and not all tenors, baritones and basses are men. CN Lester of En Travesti is a gender neutral mezzo. Florestan of Lashings of Ginger Beer is a female baritone. Yet it’s expected, in opera as in life, that women and men will fit into these nice little boxes with a set type of voice and a set type of role to go with it, and it’s astonishing and disturbing how often the woman’s voice is silenced at the end of an opera.
What’s next for Better Strangers?
“After Ah! Forget My Fate, Better Strangers will be having some fun with devised performance. Alongside that, we’ll be doing some education work in community settings around how awesome opera and feminism are, and how opera does have something to offer people who aren’t rich and white, honest. Also in the works is a show in which all the dead heroines of famous operas rise again as zombies and take their revenge.
No, really. Keep an eye out – it’s going to be awesome.
- Ah! Forget My Fate! is on
Wednesday 16 November1 and Friday 25 November – book your tickets here.
- It seems this date has now had to be cancelled – so all the more reason to try to make the second one! [↩]
Tomboy Time! An Interview with mars.tarrab
This week I went along to see Tomboy Blues: The Theory of Disappointment at South London’s Oval House Theatre as part of their “Lady-led” season. The play is a two-hander written and performed by nat tarrab and Rachel Mars. Together, they form the cunningly named mars.tarrab.
I got an insight into their work, and into their minds, before I’d even gotten into the auditorium. Alongside the programme (with its photo of a barbie doll shoved into a pair of boxer shorts worn by an androgynous figure) was something that looked like one of those ghastly tick-box questionnaires. Except it wasn’t. Instead, it presented a whimsical but pertinent checklist about the performers (tall/small), the show and how you could get involved to help them (cake baking or pant sewing) with future projects.
Scientists. For Science!
The play is an hour long and it’s about tomboys. Hurrah! It’s also about the challenges of growing up feeling confined by limited gender options, and the accompanying problems of underwear, of going into the “right” toilet, of working out who you are, who you want to be, and how to fall in love and be yourself. The pair use pseudo-science, white labcoats and some strange experiments alongside clownful vignettes, sad stories and bizarre situations that describe accurately, and often painfully so, the experience of “disappointment” – how our hopes and expectations of life can fall short when we’re confronted with the brick wall of “what is expected”.
I especially loved the physicality of the two performers, their deft ownership of the space, as well as the glimmer of the personal at the edges of their characterisation. It’s funny and very, very heartfelt – I found myself watching bits of my own childhood and teenage experience onstage. The awkward, clumsy, strangeness of having a cis female body but not feeling especially feminine, and not feeling sure that was allowed, or sure of how to be “in-between”.
Everyone else had come out as these beautiful butterflies and I’d come out as a kind of butterpillar
– Tomboy Blues
The show ended with a discussion with Gendered Intelligence, who work to help improve awareness of gender issues in the public sphere, especially amongst young people. We talked about the word “queer” and what it meant, about how tomboyism might sit under the queer umbrella, and about anxieties of perhaps not feeling “queer enough” sometimes as a person happy within their body yet unhappy with the social requirements of being feminine.
Photo: Kevin Clifford
I also managed to catch up with nat and Rachel via email, to prod them a little further about their work and their ideas.
Tell us a bit about yourselves and your work so far.
“We met four years ago at a live art performance workshop, and were immediately intrigued about each other’s work, histories and bodies. We made our first show, 27 Ways I Will Never Fuck My Mother by mashing together our two solo shows, then made a spoken word piece called Trauma Top Trumps. Tomboy Blues is our third show.”
Why did you decide to do a piece on tomboys?
“Our work comes, foremostly, from ourselves and our experience. When we were getting to know each other we found places of similarity and difference, and the common tomboy childhood (and adulthood) was ticklish to us to explore. nat’s friends were having kids, she was looking again at childhood and was alarmed at how often it still is ‘pink for a girl and blue for a boy’ even in these supposedly broken open gender dialogue times. It was also the time of Caster Semenya and her disqualification.”
What kind of research did you do – did you find anything that surprised you?
“We talked to paediatricians, psychologists, tomboys (big ones and small ones), family, friends, mothers and fathers, and ourselves, and we looked at current consumer trends (and their attackers, like Pink Stinks). We were surprised that 50% of women identified at tomboys in childhood, and also at the amount of confusing and conflicting information about tomboys and queerness.”
There’s a bit in the show that talks about the “missing tomboys” – women who identified as tomboys when younger and now do not – why do you think that is?
“We think its a combination of wanting to conform, interest in boys/feeling like you should have an interest in boys, family pressure, high heels, bars and thongs for 7-9 year olds, and negative perceptions of any kind of femininity that isn’t ‘classic’. Plus, there isn’t really an accepted identity that is ‘Adult Tomboy’ – most often it is just ‘lesbian’, which doesn’t take into account straightness, or other kinds of gender queerness at all.”
The full title of the show is “Tomboy Blues or the Theory of Disappointment”. Do you think that being a tomboy has the potential to be a positive as well as a disappointing experience?
“Absofuckinglutely. The title is intended to be playful and provoke thought rather than suggest conclusion. The whole exploration of the piece is about that positivity in all its challenges both from within and without.”
- Tomboy Blues runs at Oval House until 19th November – click here to book.
A Short Post on Transgender Remembering
This weekend is Remembrance Sunday, and I’ve been umming and ahhing as usual about whether to wear a red poppy/a white poppy/no poppy. Whatever your personal poppy choice, I think most people would agree that there’s value in the remembering.
The memorialising of the First World War is long established and institutionalised, to the extent that no politician will be photographed poppyless. But remembrance can also be a deeply political, even radical act. Especially if you’re remembering people that many would prefer to forget.
In a couple of weeks, on the 20th November, it will be the 13th International Transgender Day of Remembrance. Before I started blogging at BadRep this wasn’t a big date in my calendar, but two moving posts by other team members last year made me realise that it should have been.
Why does it matter? As Gwendolyn Ann Smith of the Remembering Our Dead project puts it:
The Transgender Day of Remembrance serves several purposes. It raises public awareness of hate crimes against transgender people, an action that current media doesn’t perform. Day of Remembrance publicly mourns and honors the lives of our brothers and sisters who might otherwise be forgotten. Through the vigil, we express love and respect for our people in the face of national indifference and hatred. Day of Remembrance reminds non-transgender people that we are their sons, daughters, parents, friends and lovers. Day of Remembrance gives our allies a chance to step forward with us and stand in vigil, memorializing those of us who’ve died by anti-transgender violence.
There’s another kind of remembering which needs to be done. I’m a big gender history nerd, and although I’ve spent years reading about changing gender roles and expectations; women in history; gay, lesbian and bisexual history, there’s are gaps in my knowledge around the experiences and heritage of the transgender community.
So I went along to a recent talk by Juliet Jacques at Westminster Skeptics in the Pub about transgender history from the 19th century onwards. My ignorance was laid bare. I knew about the 2004 Gender Recognition Act – I was working at the Equal Opportunities Commission helping to implement it in 2005. But I’d never heard of the Compton Caféteria Riot in 1966 (there’s a documentary) nor of Boulton and Park, James Barry, Lili Elbe or Magnus Hirschfield. (Fun fact: most of the pictures of Nazis burning books show the bonfire that took place at the Hirschfield Institute.)
Jacques’s talk is available as a podcast here and here are a few other quick history resources: a brief history of trans people in the media on Jacques’ blog, a trans timeline here, and this nifty interactive LGBT history timeline which includes a lot of dates and events significant to trans history. I also found this post on film representations of transsexuality interesting.
Recording, recognising and remembering the histories of marginalised groups might seem like an academic endeavour, but it has a vital political function. The stories of transgender, gay and bi people, of disabled people, of women, of ethnic and religious minorities, of the poor, have been both accidentally and deliberately erased over the centuries. By remembering, we can restore these missing voices to history, and we have ammunition when we’re told that x behaviour or y social group is a modern scourge, that they’re unnatural or against tradition, or that this is the way things have always been.
Note: Between writing this post and publishing it I also found out about the International Intersex Day of Remembrance, on 8 November.