Unsung Heroes: Josephine Baker
Star of stage and screen, major civil rights player, member of the French resistance, and recipient of the Croix de Guerre? That’s quite an impressive CV by any standards, and it only just begins to cover the achievements of Josephine Baker, one of the great performers and humanitarians of the 20th century.
Born Freda Josephine Mcdonald in St Louis, Missouri in 1906, Baker’s life got off to a rough start. As a child she worked as a cleaner and babysitter for a reportedly abusive wealthy woman – Baker later spoke of having her hands burnt for making a mistake, and of being told “not to kiss the baby”, presumably to avoid somehow “racially tainting” the child. By the age of 12 she had run away to live on the streets, surviving the East St Louis Riots of 1917, and working as a waitress and a street dancer. By the age of 15 she was onto her second marriage, where she picked up the Baker name she would keep through the rest of her career.
Around about 1921 things started to improve for Baker, as she moved to New York and began dancing in Broadway and vaudeville shows. Initially she was turned down as a vaudeville chorus dancer, described as “too skinny and too dark.” Not one to be put off, Baker worked as a dresser instead, learning all the dance moves from backstage. When a space came up for a chorus dancer she made herself the natural choice, knowing all the routines already, and put on an impressive performance. Before long she was one of the most successful chorus girls in vaudeville theatre.
Though successful, Baker found that continuing racial discrimination in the US led her to feel alienated and disrespected, and she moved to Paris in 1925. Here she quickly came to the attention of the director of the Folies Bergère, quickly climbing to stardom. She became one of the most talked about and photographed women in the world, and by 1927 was amongst the most highly paid entertainers alive (much of her pay being spent on pets. There’s something fantastic about having a pet snake, goat, pig, parakeet, several cats, dogs, fish, a chimpanzee and a leopard.) In 1927 she also appeared in the silent film Siren of the Tropics, becoming the first African American woman to star in a major motion picture.
“She kissed babies in foundling homes, gave dolls to the young and soup to the aged, presided at the opening of the Tour de France, celebrated holidays, went to fairs, joked with workers and did charity benefits galore. She was all over Paris, always good-natured and exquisitely dressed.”
- Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra
Her return to America in 1936 did not go well. Audiences refused to accept the notion of a sophisticated black woman, and newspaper reviews tore her act apart, with the New York Times going so far as to refer to her as “a Negro wench”. She soon returned to France.
When war broke out, Baker did not sit idly by. In addition to playing up her role as an entertainer and boosting troops’ morale in Africa and Europe, she worked covertly for the French Resistance, smuggling secret messages on her sheet music and pinned to the inside of her clothing. This, and her wartime work with the Red Cross saw her awarded the Croix de guerre, making her the first American-born woman to achieve this.
Following the war Baker turned her attention to civil rights activism and unleashed a whole truckload of awesomeness. After her negative experiences performing in the US in the Thirties, Baker refused to perform at segregated clubs, and this insistence is credited with being influential in the integration of shows in Las Vegas. But that was only one tiny facet of her amazing actions in the Fifties and Sixties.
The most work-safe shot of that famous Banana Skirt
You see, Baker wanted to demonstrate that there was absolutely no reason why people of different races and faiths couldn’t live together just fine. So how did she set about proving this? By adopting a dozen children (whom she called her “Rainbow Tribe”), from places as far-flung as Cote D’Ivoire, Finland, Korea and Colombia, and raising them all together. Oh, and she raised them in a castle, the Chateau de Milandes, in Dordogne. Because if you’re going to go to the effort of doing something you might as well go all the way and do it in a castle.
In 1963 Baker stood alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington when he made his “I Have a Dream” speech. Baker was the only woman to deliver a speech at the rally, and was later offered a place at the head of the American Civil Rights Movement following King’s assassination, though she declined.
Over the space of her career Baker managed to be a hugely influential performer, to risk her life as a part of the French Resistance, and to take a major role in the civil rights movement. There’s just far too much kickassery in there to possibly sum up in the space of one post, so for more detailed looks at her life there’s Josephine: The Hungry Heart, by her adopted son Jean-Claude Baker, and Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, by Phyllis Rose.
“Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.”
– Josephine Baker
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
I snapped this one on the tube the other day, after doing a double take to check my eyes were not deceiving me.
Tomorrow When The War Began
I’m very used to seeing Action Movie Posters – they tend to have muscle men front and centre. If women appear then they have strangely low cut tops and are in that curious pose that only women in posters ever adopt.
You know, the one in which they twist around in order to show their bottoms, chest and face at the same time. Seriously – click here, here, here and here for some quick examples. Then walk around all day trying to work out when you ever do that pose naturally.
Here’s a man in the same pose. Note massive coat covering everything.
So you can really play Spot The Difference here. On this poster, not only are there more women than men, but they are all dressed pretty much the same. And no-one is wearing ridiculous costumes. Or standing in a funny way.
Yes, the women are all pretty actor types. But then so are the men.
The film itself (wiki article here) is coming out shortly. I had to check what it was about to make sure I wasn’t making some terrible mistake – if so, I’ll have been tricked into promoting a hideous anti-feminist car crash of a film.
Now, the plot is not without its problems, though mostly around the issue of race rather than gender: teenagers fight a guerilla war after their Australian town is invaded by the Asian “Coalition Nations”. This is such a hackneyed big budget trope (attack by foreigners/aliens), and it clashes a bit with the indie flick, Blair Witch-esque documentary feel I got from the trailer.
I remain hopeful (fingers crossed) that, like the poster, the film will do something different.
Found Feminism? See you at the cinema. Let’s discuss over popcorn.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!
Check it out, another post from me. I ran a few short, sexy opening paragraphs through my head for this, like “You’ve all heard of SPRING CLEANING, well! It’s spring! And thus I am CLEANING MY ENTIRE FACE”, or “INTERNET. I am your pen-wielding LORD AND MASTER. It is TIME FOR MY SUPPLICATION.”
But all of them sounded …well, like that. So imagine I’ve written a far sexier, funnier, less isolatingly-esoteric opening paragraph, and we’ll run with it.
REMEMBER THIS
As you all know by now, I’m a transgender man. As you may not know, I’m doing a medical transition on the good old NHS. Another thing you won’t know is that for (disgusting, enraging) reasons I won’t go into here, my beloved NHS are yanking me about something heartbreakingly chronic as regards my embarkation on hormone therapy.
With this development in mind, I’m going to see Dr. Curtis of Transhealth instead, with the hope that he can cajole my own GP into prescribing me MAGICAL MAN JUICES.
But this requires money. Of course it does. So! To that end, I’m going to start selling some art (a selection of which will be right here on BadRep) for your personal delectation. And that’s not all! Ohhh, no. Let it be known I’m not a guy who does things by halves. Halves are for the weak, and I, dear reader, have the strength of SIXTEEN WEREWOLVES MADE OUT OF NUCLEAR SUBMARINES. Figuratively speaking. I was rubbish at P.E. at school. This is purely figurative strength.
Er, yes. The other non-BadRep related things I’m selling are limited edition art prints (running to an stupidly restricted run of one copy each due to costs) of my own work one of my own websites.1
The relevant link, if you’d like to spend an extortionate amount of money on a single-edition print of some filthy gorgeous pin-up art, is right the hell here. They are vastly more expensive than the things I’ll be selling here on BadRep – but they’re one each, and that’s all there will ever be.
THE CRUSADES ARE OVER NOW
Right here on the good ship BadRep, however, I’m going to be selling wee postcard prints of your favourite film review cartoons and amusing stickers with which you can dazzle and confuse your friends and enemies! And if you’re especially good, I’ll sell off the original pen drawings of the comics, too, for I am a generous god, and have far too much original artwork in my house. Also, it’s on the back of the bulk condom packaging I steal from work. It’s like upcycling! Only with more …sneaky sexual health awareness? I have no idea.
Watch this space for inadvisable BadRep merch like a hawk with nineteen eyes that never sleeps. And then you can rest assured that your money has helped fund some totally inadvisable facial hair.
(Psst: The link I mentioned earlier takes you to my sketchblog. If you want to look at my hip, swanky portfolio, that’s right here.)
- You heard that right. My real website. Where I really live. With my real actual name. This totally feels like relinquishing my superhero identity. BUT HOW WILL I NOW FIGHT CRIME [↩]
An Alphabet of Feminism #25: Y is for Yes
Y
YES
and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
– James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
She asked for one more dance and I’m
Like yeah, how the hell am I supposed to leave? […]
Next thing I knew she was all up on me screaming:
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah– Usher, ‘Yeah’ (2004)
YES! Have finally managed a pretentious appropriation of pop culture as an epigram. Ludacris fill cups like double-Ds.
yes i will yes
Ahem. Yes is the last of our Old English words. It’s gise or gese, meaning ‘so be it’, perhaps from gea, ge (= ‘so’), plus si (=’be it!’), the third person imperative of beon (= ‘to be’). In this form, yes was stronger than its Germanic cognate, yea (much like today) and, apparently, was often used in Shakespeare as an answer to negative questions. We could do with one of them nowadays, no? How many times have you answered a question with yes when you mean no? (‘Doesn’t she….?’ ‘…Yes, she doesn’t’).
The penultimate word in our Alphabet, yes is frequently one of the first words we learn on earth; its meaning is clear and unequivocal, by turns disastrous, passionate, exhilarating, loaded and humdrum – but always positive in the full sense of that word. It is almost invariably repeated, as in Joyce (and Usher) – ‘yes I will, Yes’, the successive affirmations underlining and confirming the first – just like a signature under your printed name, if you listen to Derrida
Sure ‘Nuff n’ Yes I Do
James ‘Awesome Glasses‘ Joyce apparently made much of his novel ‘novel’ Ulysses ending on this, which he considered ‘the female word’. The final chapter, ‘Penelope’, often also referred to as ‘Molly Bloom’s soliloquy’, is 42 pages of just eight sentences, wherein Molly, wife of Leopold Bloom, muses to herself in bed.
For those who have better things to do than wrestle with a modernist doorstop, as the wife of the novel’s ‘Ulysses’, Molly is a counterpart to ‘Penelope‘, wife of Odysseus / Ulysses and conventional model of marital fidelity. The similarity expires fairly quickly, since Joyce’s Penelope is having an affair with ‘Blazes Boylan’, but nonetheless her chapter is often named after Ulysses’ wife. It begins and ends with this yes, and in a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce explained that ‘Penelope’ rotates around what he considered the four cardinal points of the female body – ‘breasts, arse, womb and cunt’ – expressed respectively by the words because, bottom, woman and yes. Some of the comparisons are clear – the womb has long been seen as synonymous with ‘woman’ (however reductively); bottom / arse – ok; because / breasts… um?; yes / cunt – hmm.
I suspect this last pairing has a lot to do with the affirmation of sex: interaction with this organ should be one preceded by yes and punctuated with repetitions of this confirmation (yes yes yes). (Why James Joyce, you filthy…). We see a similar thing in Usher (first time for everything): the repeated yeah, yeah, yeah is a sexual affirmation – ‘How the hell am I supposed to leave??‘. This is about a female seduction (‘she’s saying “come get me”!’), but one that we suspect will not end in when-i’m-sixty-four style knitting by the fire. For one thing, we learn that Usher already has a ‘girl‘, who happens to be ‘the best of homies’ with this club seductress; for another, Ludacris announces they will leave after a couple of drinks because they ‘want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed’. So actually, the art of being a lady lies in effectively concealing a consent that, in private, becomes loud, repeated and unstoppable.
Yes Indeed
Coming my way? The 'Easy Girlfriend' Poster, 1943-4
This is a well-trodden path, and all part of the old idea of how consent given too easily (yes yes yes) – or, in some cases, even given at all – is liable to get females into trouble. A less well-trodden example is Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which devotes several hundred of its thousand or so pages to what happens after the protagonist has proposed to his fiance: though she has accepted the proposal, she fears that to ‘name the day’ herself – or even to consent to a ‘day’ suggested to her – would be to show a forwardness disturbing in a woman. Disturbing perhaps, but probably a relief to the exhausted reader, for she manages to suspend her final consent to ‘thursday a month hence’ for an entire blushing, confused volume of this hefty tome.
We can go further back, of course: in Shakespeare-times, Juliet fears Romeo will think she is ‘too quickly won’. To correct this, she offers to ‘frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay‘ (no no yes), artificially constructing a well-won consent where positive affirmation already exists (history does not record whether or not Juliet was ‘a freak in the bed’). Many would-be Romeos have seized on such fears to assume (or convince themselves) that this is just what their ladies are doing when they give an unequivocal ‘no’, so seduction narratives are littered with lovers assuming their lovers really mean yes when they reply in the negative – examples have spanned Austen’s Mr Collins to modern day Mills & Boon. Apparently, in the latter case, one is supposed to find this irresistible.
Go No More A-Roving
We’re teetering around something rather insidious here, and one aspect of this finds its expression in a 1940s propaganda poster. The ‘Easy Girlfriend’ anti-VD advert placed the blame for the Second World War venereal epidemic squarely with the momento-mori type be-hatted skull (a sexually experienced re-appropriation of the medieval Death and the Maiden trope). ‘The “easy” girlfriend spreads syphilis and gonorrhea’, it blazed – she who says yes too easily is to be shunned by polite society, and will be – naturellement – riddled with disease. Of course, syphilis’ original spread throughout Europe had followed the path of the Grand Tour, but this must have been because Venetian prostitutes were taking expensive package holidays throughout France, Spain, Rome, Switzerland and Turkey, mustn’t it, Lord Byron?
So while you probably disagree with Joyce’s view that yes is an intrinsically female word, it’s certainly one whose utterance is littered with potential problems for women. Yes means yes.
NEXT WEEK: the Alphabet returns for its final installment – Z is for Zone
A while ago I popped down to the post office to collect a large parcel. Inside the cardboard box, nestled amidst plastic frames more akin to Airfix than to heavy machinery, were around 150 separate parts that the instructions promised would fit together into a workable model of an internal combustion engine. This model would be step one in the great Let’s Rebuild an Engine! project of 2011 in our BadRep household.
I had already recruited one colleague to help with the eventual engine rebuild, and she would therefore be present for the assembly of the model. The instructions promised that a 10-year-old would be able to put this together with a little adult supervision. Surely that meant that two 20-somethings should be able to manage it?
Of course, prior to assembly, we had to purchase a few things that did not come as standard in the kit. The first was batteries. The second was beer.
Haynes internal combustion engine model
Alcohol and batteries thus acquired, we put in our takeaway order and opened up the box. Out spilled plastic heaven. A million fiddly parts attached to plastic frames, with tiny numbers on the frames indicating the part numbers. The manual would instruct us on how to assemble it. It also named all the parts, so hopefully we would learn the names of at least some of the moving bits and pieces by the end.
Things started off pretty well. We had Top Gear’s Africa adventure on the telly and the pistons/crankshaft assembly in the cylinder block, and the pistons made satisfying up-down movements when you turned the crankshaft. The instructions said that you needed sanding paper to get the edges of the plastic smooth, but as we lacked sandpaper we made do with nail files, which seemed to do the trick. The whole thing turned so smoothly that we didn’t even need the vegetable oil to make it work.
“This would be even better if it was the right size,” I said as the plastic innards were slowly swallowed up inside the model.
“That would be much more satisfying,” Colleague X agreed, trying to get the tiny screw to stay perched atop the tiny screwdriver, and slot the entire thing into the tiny hole on the side of the crankcase. “This feels more like keyhole surgery.”
“Which is also important.”
“Yes. But not the sort of thing I had in mind when I bought the six-pack.”
I, too, was getting a little restless. Earlier that week I had opened my planner to try to book a last-minute meeting with a senior colleague. He, peering over my shoulder, wanted to know what “Engine Build” was referring to, and why it had so many exclamation marks. I attempted to explain.
“Hmmm,” he said, frowning. “Yes, interesting. But an engine’s a big commitment. Did you think about starting with something a little smaller?”
A motorcycle? Sure. Ultimately, though, I’d decided on the engine, because I was learning to drive a car, not a bike.
“No, not a motorcycle,” he said, just as thoughtfully. “Something smaller. A lawnmower, maybe, or a hairdryer.”
I very pointedly did NOT stab him with his own pen, but instead said that we were doing a model version first.
“Yes,” he said. “I think that’s probably for the best.”
Anyway, other than patience and tact when faced with senior people and their hairdryer suggestions, what did I learn from doing this little side-project?
Firstly, it’s bloody cool. There’s now a little engine model on a shelf in my living room, and if you press the little button it lights up and makes happy engine noises.
Secondly, the instructions may well be wrong. Try the different bits together until they fit. This will probably be more useful that memorising engine layouts.
Thirdly, the reviews and advertising for this product piss me off something chronic. “Ideal for a dad and son project,” one proclaims. Well, yes, it is, but it’s also ideal for a dad-and-daughter and mum-and-son project. Or mum-and-daughter. It’s basically model assembly, and doing this with a kid (without taking over and finishing it off yourself) would probably take an afternoon.
Fourthly, the rocker arm assembly fits on top of the valves and the camshaft, and there’s only one correct way of lining up all the cams on the camshaft. There is no obvious way of knowing what that way is without having them labelled in alphabetical order. (This may require a textbook. Or a mechanic.)
Finally, although doing the plastic model was fun, it is limited in several major areas. It is extremely simplified, for one thing. The water-pump is two bits of plastic moulded and snapped together. The ‘sparkplugs’ are tiny Christmas tree lights that light up according to the position of the crankshaft (so the position does have to be correct, and the wiring is a bit tricky, but it’s not actually how a spark plug works). The dipstick is a completely pointless clip-on piece of plastic that looks like a Barbie accessory, and I still have no idea what it does (although presumably you dip it in things).
Lookit! All shiny and plastic and PERFECT.
You also get the feeling that filing tiny bits of plastic with a nail file is not precisely what engine maintenance is all about. (Although it may well involve nail files. At this stage I have no way of knowing.) Assembling the model did make me more familiar with a lot of the parts, and I think I understand the fundamentals. But it felt a bit… delicate. A lot of the parts were so tiny that you had to hold them by the tips of your fingers, and slot them into place using your nails. It’s the same problem as following a textbook: it’s too clean. I didn’t start this wanting to stay in my living room, with clean fingers and a perfect working model completed in a couple of hours. I want something that will take months and leave me exhausted and exasperated and absolutely triumphant when it is in fact finished.
Colleague X and I sat back and contemplated the finished product while James May and Richard Hammond performed emergency surgery on Oliver in the background.
“Well,” she said eventually, “it’s very nice.”
“Yes,” I said. I pushed the button again, and we watched the pistons move up and down and the little lights pretend to be sparkplugs. “Shall we build the real thing?”
“Let’s.”
- Look out for more Secret Diary of a Female Petrolhead entries as Vik continues her engine adventures (you can read her previous Secret Diary entries in the “Toolbox” category on the sidebar on the right).
Real engines go in real cars. Our glowy plastic engine will have to go in a glowy plastic car.
Amongst my other social problems, I’m a Sci Fi nerd. When done well, Sci Fi (and its cousin Fantasy) manages to untangle itself from mainstream ideas of gender, and can often career down some interesting feminist pathways. Equally, when done badly it can look like a strangely silver and laserbeam version of Traditional Family Values. Take this book, for instance.
Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck
Anyhow, on to finer things.
Now, I particularly love Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck in the revamped Battlestar Galatica. And that in itself would be a Found Feminism, if it weren’t already enormously obvious, especially after everyone (well, some bloke) got their knickers in a twist over Starbuck being played by a woman.
For reference, a good interview with Ron Moore, the director, on that decision is here.
We can rejoice in that decision, and also now in the existence of (new) Starbuck as an internet meme.
Which brings me rather meanderingly to the actual Found Feminism. This hashtag: #thingsstarbuckwouldntsay, started off on Twitter by Katee herself.
Personal favourites, hand picked by fellow Bad Repper and Sci Fi nerd, Steve:
Does this flightsuit clash with my highlights?
I’m sure you’re all going the right way, … men always have a better sense of direction.
How many calories are in this drink?
I can’t go yet. I’m finishing my makeup!
Could Things Starbuck Wouldn’t Say be a Skippy’s List for Found Feminism?
So say we all.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!
At The Movies: Sucker Punch
Dragons. Swords. Guns. Retro gothic steampunk stylings. An all-women ensemble cast with kewl powerz. Imaginary fantasy worlds constructed using the tormented psyche of an innocent plunged into an asylum (a la American McGee’s Alice). Huge explosions. Epic fight scenes. A kick-ass rocktastic soundtrack. Did I mention dragons? I love dragons.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
There was literally nothing from the trailer for Sucker Punch that I didn’t squee with joy over and clap my hands like a small child about. I was so excited. It was as if someone had written down a big list of “things Sarah likes” and then made a film of it. It even had reams of clockwork, zombie nazis mowed down by women with Really Big Guns. Get in.
I bought a vast tub of popcorn and settled down gleefully to absorb the aural extravaganza of a super-cooltasm created Just For Me.
Except…
…I hated it.
…Really hated it.
Sucker Punch is like a blind date who is perfect on paper but in the flesh there’s just no spark. Worse, they are annoying, their opinions and anecdotes are unfunny, meandering nonsense and they lied about how tall they were (I’m 5’9″, this matters). You spend the whole, pitiful date alternately bored and clockwatching or actively fighting down the urge to laugh out loud in mild hysterics at the awfulness of the situation.
The plot is a pile of garbage, which given Zack Snyder directed (300, anyone?) I was sort of expecting. But I at least wanted to be entertained. This was never going to be high art, but it was beyond mindless. I’m summarising for the sake of summarising because the plot is basically irrelevant, consisting of pointless scenes in which the unfortunate actors mug badly scripted dialogue whilst sobbing through mascara until the next fight happens.
So, “plot”.
There’s this girl called Baby Doll (don’t ask) who is put into an asylum due to Evil Male Relative Action (don’t ask). She uses her Sexy Magic Hypno Dance (don’t ask) to summon up a Mystical Goffick World in which other scantily clad women – who may or may not be aspects of either her OR of another girl called Sweet Pea (don’t ask) – Fight Their Demons (like, totally deep, meaningful metaphor, whoa) and Collect Quest Items under the tutelage of Replacement Male Figure (don’t ask). Eventually after many tears, violence, death and bullets, one of them escapes. I think.
TL;DR: Some Kinda OK Fight Scenes Happen. Women Cry Lots. The End.
Like the crap date, the film reeked of desperately wanting to be clever, ironic, sexy and cool. It was none of those things. It wasn’t even a good, silly action film. And I like good, silly action films. The fight scenes were very fast and quite short so you didn’t get any sense of excitement or drama from the battles: they focused on the look of the costumes and scenery rather than the actual fighting.
The whole thing was tedious in a watching-someone-else-play-a-computer-game way. You watched, but didn’t really engage. There was no tension of any sort, at any point. I had no feelings nor empathy for any of the supposed “characters”. Even in the brief moments when I was vaguely aware of what was going on, or why, I just didn’t care. The exception was one tiny scene between the Doctor/Madam and the Pimp/Asylum Owner. Needless to say, this minor moment only served to remind me of what I wanted the film to be like.
I exited the cinema feeling horribly disappointed (to the point of anger), let down, and deeply confused. You see, not only did the film contain all of the things that I liked and I still hated it – but half of the people I was with really enjoyed it. The other half, like me, hated it. There were arguments on the tube ride home. Maybe it’s a Marmite thing.
I hate Marmite.
It's a close run thing, but I would probably rather eat all this than watch that film again
Like a trauma victim (and speaking of which, this film contains pretty much every abuse trigger in existence handled with the tact and sensitivity of a brick in a sock), I am now trying to post-rationalise the film into being less awful.
The effort of trying to think of any way in which the film is “acceptable” or “average” or even merely “an alright way to pass the time if you are really bored” is beyond me. I’m too angry.
My poor, betrayed brain mourns the loss of the film it wanted to see. The film that was screaming quietly inside, trying to get out.
Like me in the cinema.
Writing this post has actually been somewhat cathartic and therapeutic, so thank you for being there for me during this terrible moment in my life. And for understanding. It’s appreciated. I’m actually starting to feel a little better for having relieved myself of this weight and have begun, a little, to think of the positive sides. Like that I don’t need to see it again. And that really it was just a big, long, not-very-good trailer for the computer game. Which I am looking forward to. The acting will probably be better.
Oh yeah, and like a really unironic sucker punch (geddit?) I’ve just realised that this film totally passes Bechdel. Yeah. Woo. Way to perfectly prove that just because there’s more than one female character and that they manage to talk to each other doesn’t mean it’s any bloody good. Or even particularly feminist. Which this film isn’t, by the way.
Fortunately, it is such utter drivel that it won’t register as meaningfully anti-feminist because nothing it contains is meaningful or worth registering.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- You like Marmite.
- Um… Dragons? For a few minutes, anyway.
- … by reading this review you accept that I have warned you to the best of my ability, and do not blame me for wasting your time and money.
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- You will be sad over all the things it could have been.
- You are tired of explaining to fellow cinema-goers that women dressed in their sexy pants fighting evil doers is not “empowering”.
- You will then have to watch Warlock: The Armageddon, which I am reliably informed is actually the worst fantasy film ever made, in order to be able to rank Sucker Punch against this grim standard.
- If we give that man any more money, he might make another just like it.
Unsung Heroes: Interlude
Partway through the Unsung Heroes series, it seems like a good time to stop for a brief interlude and a slight shift in focus.
Kinda like that issue of Time Magazine where they said "the person of the year is everyone", only less cheesy. (photo via Flickr, taken by user Jessica E Sideways. Shared under a Creative Commons license.)
This post, then, is about those people; people who are getting on with the everyday business of making change happen. That ranges from people who work in charities, NGOs, and support organisations; people who lobby and campaign; and people who are acting on the change they’d like to see in their interactions with the people around them.
So here, then, are just some of the many organisations run by awesome people, doing awesome things on a daily basis.
- African Feminist Forum – They run biennial conferences for feminist activists in Africa, and make efforts to include the voices of groups often marginalised within African feminism (and arguably feminist movements in many countries) – commercial sex workers, women with disabilities, and bisexual rights activists.
- Central American Women’s Network – They’re working to improve the political, social and cultural rights of women in Central America through advocacy and campaigning, and raising awareness in the UK and US. Freedoms in Honduras have been a particular issue since the coup d’etat of 2009.
- Women’s Budget Group – Based in the UK, they’re bringing gender analysis to economic policy, because it’s hard to work for an equal society when the vast impact of government expenditure is skewed in favour of one portion of the population.
- British Insitute of Human Rights – Because human rights for everyone is very much a feminist issue, and the BIHR are one of several fantastic groups supporting that. (See also: Liberty, Amnesty International)
- Race On The Agenda – Too often the history of feminist discussion has been marred by an unfortunate exclusion of the voices from often-marginalised groups such as the Black and Asian communities. ROTA are one of the organisations helping to keep things more inclusive.
- Powerhouse – Women with disabilities are another group that’s been too often pushed to one side or rendered invisible. Run “by and for women with learning disabilities”, Powerhouse bring focus to this.
- The Feminist Library – Libraries are basically the most awesome things ever, and this one carries a huge stock of feminist literature. It should hardly need explaining why this is an entire industrial-sized vat of pure brilliance.
- The Survivor Project – I want to include these folk, because judging from what I’ve read they’re awesome, but unfortunately they seem to be without a website currently, so, er, you’ll have to find them yourselves later. They’re a non-profit working against domestic and sexual violence against anyone, but with a particular focus on trans* and intersex survivors. It’s an issue that’s all too often ignored in the mainstream. (If in the future a website becomes available, hopefully we’ll be able to draw attention to it.)
This list isn’t even remotely exhaustive, and couldn’t possibly hope to be. There are more people out there working to support good ideas than I have any chance of adequately enumerating here. The fact that I can only post a tiny, miniscule example of some of the many groups and organisations involved in this is, honestly, brilliant. It’d be a worrying sign if every beneficial organisation could be summed up in the space of one post. For more comprehensive overviews of the groups out there though, do check the members list for the Women’s Resource Centre and the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations. (Of course, that only covers groups based at least partially in the UK. The list gets even longer when we go global.)
And then of course there’s the fact that the above list has only covered organisations, groups, and charities. We’ve yet to even touch on the vast array of feminist bloggers, writers, artists, and others out there making their ideas visible. Or the yet wider group who don’t have a public podium from which to spread their message but are engaged in thinking about, discussing and living with this as a part of their daily world view.
What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of us, and the collective weight behind this set of ideas is formidable. And that’s seven shades of kickass.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
An Alphabet of Feminism #24: X is for X
X
X
Intro
X is for X is unique among Alphabet posts in that the letter does not stand in for a word – like A for Amazon and B for Bitch – because, in fact, the letter is the word.
The Eleanor Cross replica at Charing Cross, London.
Yet this word – simultaneously standing in for itself and existing as an independent unit of meaning – is possibly one of the most widely-used symbols of all. How exactly this might be relevant to a consideration of feminism will be herein considered, but I hope my indulgent readers will excuse a slightly cheeky use of theoretical thinking. We all know each other well enough by now, don’t we?
VCR
The most straightforward significance of X is, as Latin-fans will know, ‘ten’ / ’10’ (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X). Two tens side by side is XX, or twenty / 20. How many tens can you think of? Ten lost tribes of Israel, ten commandments, ten plagues of Egypt, ten dimes in a dollar, ten years in a decade. It’s a pleasingly round number, and an easy times table, even if it frequently loses out to ‘twelve’ / ’12’ in mystic significance.
But x is not simply a linguistic unit: it is also a visual one. Two diagonal lines; two Vs touching each other; a crossover; a cross; a cross-roads. Like ‘0’, which means ‘oh’, ‘o’, ‘zero’ and ‘nothing’, it represents one of its meanings aesthetically: it is a cross. Thus King’s X and Charing X (this last was named for the Eleanor Cross built on the site by Richard I to commemorate the funeral procession of his wife) – but, perhaps because of its relationship to the Greek letter ‘Chi’ (‘Ch-‘), which is the first letter of ‘Christ’, x can also signify he-who-died-on-a-cross (‘X-mas‘), although it actually looks more like the St. Andrew cross, which makes up the Scottish flag.
Crystalised
In numerical terms, though, x can also take on the role of an unknown quantity – ‘Find the value of x‘, where the x is italicised to mark its distinction from ‘x’. It is ‘unknown’, not ‘multiply’, an absent value rather than a pluralised one. Here too, we bump into a common significance x has: it represents absence. It is the legal signature of the illiterate (‘I cannot write; here is the x that represents “yes, I agree” but also “no, I cannot write”), and the standard stand-in for a quantity that is unknown or not yet provided (‘Dear X’).
The unknown or unstated quantity has also fed over into censorship: an X-rated film is one only suitable for those aged over 18. It was replaced in 1982 by the ’18’ certificate, but such certificates have frequently been seen by directors as more of a target than an impediment: Hitchcock’s extremely grim Frenzy (1972) was conceived to coincide with the USA’s revised R-rating so that the Master of Suspense could claim his place in the pantheon of horror with a badge of censored honour.
Hitchcock's Frenzy.
This was his penultimate film, and the only one to carry an ’18’ certificate in the UK or receive an ‘X-rating’ after the age restriction was moved up to 18 in 1971. It’s about a rapist serial-killer. If the accusation of misogyny leveled at him impedes your appreciation of Hitchcock’s films as a whole, I would not recommend this one. It features an extended rape scene shot with a disturbing emphasis on its supposed eroticism, and some true masterpieces of misogyny in the dialogue.
There’s also this scene, which features Babs’ death: from the moment Rust enters the frame we know she’s dead, and the line which precedes the attack, ‘You’re my kind of woman’ (whose results we have already seen in graphic form on his previous victim) precedes one of Hitchcock’s most underrated panning shots: the camera backs out down the stairs and out into the street in what the director himself dubbed ‘Bye Bye To Babs‘. This is the second of the film’s rape-murders and one no less disturbing for being ‘exed out’ – its self-censorship makes its own point.
There is a beautifully dark irony in how this most censored of Hitchcock’s films is also one focused almost entirely around silencing and deleting women – exing them by using the Latin prefix ‘out of, from, utterly, beyond’ (ex), thus, in verbal form, ‘to delete, to cross off’ (as in ‘to x‘, to ‘cross’, which can also be ‘to thwart’ – ‘Don’t cross me!’). This is the x-form that gives us ‘ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend, ex-wife‘, so that the x acts as a negative, canceling out the word that follows it, making the spouse a stranger, and the act of so doing is, in fact, an act of deletion – ‘exing‘ someone, crossing them out (indeed, we frequently drop the specifics altogether, don’t we? ‘My ex’.)
If you buy the theory that Hitch was himself a Horrible Misogynist (which, with regret, I think I must – in this film at least) – the fact that he chose a kind of Jack the Ripper style return to his London roots for his attempt on the R-rating is a masterpiece of gyno-negation (yes I made that compound up, but I’m running with it):
Solicitor in Pub: Let’s hope he slips up soon.
Doctor in Pub: In one way I rather hope he doesn’t. We haven’t had a good juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they’re so good for the tourist trade. Foreigners somehow expect the squares of London to be fog-wreathed, full of hansom cabs and *littered* with ripped whores, don’t you think?Frenzy (1972)
Heart Skipped A Beat
It is, then, fantastically dark yet undeniably fitting that x is frequently appropriated as a symbol of sexytimes: XXX (thirty) means ‘extra strong’, via an x homonym extra. Thus it is an identifier for pornography and x-rated movies, and, in the form .xxx is a ‘sponsored top level domain’ (what?) intended as a voluntary option for porn sites (instead of .com, .co.uk etc), to allow clear classification and prevent The Children accessing such sites ‘by accident’. The difficulty here, of course, is that it requires binary identification of What Is Porn and What Is Not (of which more presently).
In lower-case form, xxx connects love and lust: most people know of x = kiss (I’ve always wondered if there’s something in ‘k’ being an ‘x’ that may have hit a wall), but Wikipedia claims ‘xxx’ means ‘I love you’ through the power of three. Like ‘heart’, which is a very different thing from ‘love’ (‘I heart NY’), ‘X’ is frequently something distinct from ‘kiss’, and rarely a simple representation of it. Just look at Holly Valance, whose 2002 single ‘Kiss Kiss‘ (and its predictably lips-obsessed video) repeatedly blocks out what comes after ‘my…’, replacing it with a ‘mwah mwah’ which is frequently not even mimed in the video, and, as the song progresses, gets increasingly mixed out, blanked out and fragmented.
Don’t play the games that you play
‘Cause you know that I won’t run away
Why aren’t you asking me to stay
‘Cause tonight I’m gonna give you my (mwah mwah)– Holly Valance, ‘Kiss Kiss’ (2002)
Where this is all leading is, of course, ‘tonight I’m gonna give you my XX’… which is also ‘my XXX’. Add to this the traditional association of mouths and vaginas (whose natural endpoint is the vagina dentata, whence a man ‘always leaves diminished’) and you have a really rather porno-tastic song all round (yet one that would never come with a domain name culminating with .xxx).
Basic Space
By contrast, xoxo means ‘kiss, hug, kiss, hug’ (less sexual all round) and is another way of using letters as symbols for something else – O is ‘hug’ because it enfolds itself, yet that self-enclosure also makes it 0 = nothing. To borrow the assumptions of the seventeenth century, this ‘nothing’ is also equivalent to ‘cunt’, since it is an empty space (as in Rochester’s poem ‘Upon Nothing‘, which describes ‘nothing’ as ‘a great uniteD What‘ (pronounce ‘what’ to rhyme with ‘cat’ to get ‘pussy‘)). Similarly, in Hamlet, Ophelia tells the protagonist she thinks ‘nothing’ – which, he replies, is ‘a pretty thought to lie between maids’ legs’, and (given that ‘th’ was frequently pronounced ‘t’ in the sixteenth century), in the light of this you may wish to reconsider the meaning of Shakespeare’s title ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. There is a curious irony here in the use of ‘x’ and ‘o’ side by side: one crosses out and refuses, the other is ‘nothing’ in the first place.
Stars
You have all been mighty patient, but here I draw towards a conclusion: x is a letter so many-layered as to refuse any comprehensive analysis. But this is itself quite appropriate, because those of its meanings I have looked at here all hinge around negation or deletion. That these should happen to focus around sex and (specifically) the vagina is not necessarily something intrinsic to the letter, but it certainly tells you a lot about how that letter is used. Blocked out, crossed out; rendered titillating or exciting; exclusive or exclusionary – exit, stage right.
NEXT WEEK: Y is for Yes
Oh dear. This is another “is it, isn’t it?” Found Feminism.
"I go for a walk and just head straight for the dark world!"
I’m actually quite interested in the muddy waters of “well, is it feminist?” because I think it helps us understand the wide representation of ideas over the project. Anyhow, on with your selected submission. I picked up this one whilst engaged in other nerdy pursuits and it’s a comedy sketch of a meeting between 80s-to-the-present computer game heroines Princess Zelda and Princess Peach talking animatedly (see what I did there?) about their lives, loves and future aspirations.
Clicky to watch: Zelda and Peach
I love the concept, especially the foregrounding of previously “invisible” women, the implied critique of “woman as quest object” and the way that the conversation renders passive kidnappees into active participants.
However, I am less keen on the inane “all girls love a bad guy” undercurrent. Perhaps it would have been better if rather than simply switching from one (stereo)type of man to another, the two of them had decided to go off and do something for themselves?
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!