This is an especially grim state of affairs since in the rest of the museums, galleries and cultural heritage sector women actually outnumber their male colleagues – sixty percent to forty.

So it’s heartening that Dr Penelope Curtis, a specialist in sculpture and British art, should have taken up the mantle of Director of Tate Britain. Since her appointment in 2010 she has been largely overseeing The Millbank Project, whose most recent result is The Tate Rehang.

So they’ve got the hammer and nails out.

The London-dwellers among you might remember the old Tate Britain – pictures ordered roughly by category or theme. That big Pre-Raphaelites room with the dodgy John Martin landscapes next door. A room of Modernism. A room of sixteenth-century portraits. That’s all gone.

In its place is a ‘Walk through British Art’ – pictures ordered chronologically, swirling round the main hall, with a timeline at the beginning giving you not the potted history of art, but the history of the Tate itself.

Sugar pots and panopticons

The Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin, still emblazoned with a line from Judges 14 – ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’.

The Tate was founded from a bequest of Henry Tate, of Tate & Lyle – who also did (and do) sugar and golden syrup.

Like the Tate Modern, which was converted from a mid-century factory, the Tate Britain partially re-appropriates an earlier space. The Millbank Prison was originally going to be Jeremy Bentham’s pilot Panopticon, but it didn’t work out and the National Penitentary was demolished and replaced by the National Gallery of British Art – which then became the Tate.

Built on Henry Tate’s sugar- (which in practice means ‘slave-‘) money, and sitting there on the site of Bentham’s prison overlooking the Thames, the Tate has always felt strangely emblematic to me.

Unlike the National Gallery, which has a noble heritage more akin to the great educative state institutions – the Louvre, say, or the Uffizi – the Tate has an intrinsically London spirit and a capitalist soul, with something of the Protestant Work Ethic hanging about it.

Indeed, today the Tate group as a whole earns over sixty percent of its income – staggering when you consider the average equivalent for its fellow UK museums is more like two to three percent.¹

A woman’s work is never done

Most of the painting interpretation has now been stripped out entirely. I always read those explanations slavishly, but I have to say I didn’t miss them at all – in fact, I barely noticed they were gone.

Thoughts of the Past (1859)

But there is a little bit in one of my favourite new rooms of the rehang – the drawing and prints room covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On a preliminary drawing for John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s alt-Pre-Raphaelite Thoughts of the Past, the curators comment on the depicted ‘sex worker’ in her lodgings which (like the Tate) overlook the Thames.

Her industry is compared with that of the Thames itself, and its corruption with the corrupt contemporary society the picture implicitly comments upon.

What was interesting for me here was not only the correct use of the term ‘sex worker’ (I notice that the interpretation available for the final painting on the Tate’s website sticks to the more trad-Art History ‘prostitute’) but also the connection between her work and the city as a whole, its bustle, its trade, its work ethic.

This sits alongside the (for me, at least) unprecedented acknowledgment of female artists and their productions through the ages. We had Mary Beale – seventeenth century, claimed as ‘the first professional female English painter’ – Mary Sargent Florence, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Georgina Macdonald, Mabel Nicholson and many others, all on display.

There was nothing of the tokenistic about this: you just casually bumped into female names in much the same way you might casually notice a few Raphaels in the Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery. They were just there.

The work of painting

Gwen John – Self Portrait

As an example of how ‘women’s painting’ was displayed, one particularly interesting juxtaposition for me was that of a self-portrait by Gwen John. It sat atop two paintings by male artists depicting female models – William Orpen’s The Mirror and Philip Wilson Steer’s Seated Nude. The choice of the John self-portrait here seemed to me to comment implicitly on the relationship between artist and model and, again, different kinds of work.

The Mirror shows a fully-clothed female model in a large hat looking glumly out at us – except she’s not looking at us, but at William Orpen, who can be seen working at his painting in the Van Eykian mirror above her.

Wilson Steer’s painting shows a naked female model, also in a large hat, sitting within roughly sketched unfinished surroundings, in the process drawing attention to painting’s backstage elements, its construction.

Gwen John shows herself fully clothed and looking at the viewer, but she is of course painting herself modelling herself.

These kinds of juxtapositions really bring out some of the nuances of the ‘History of British Art’, and the rehang is full of them. I could also go on about the new room of 1920s silent film responding to two Pre-Raphaelite paintings; the sudden influx of craft, sculpture and 3D works, and the re-instatement of the glorious Blake collection.

And other reviewers have talked at length about the choice to spread a single artist over multiple rooms, so you see the same artist appearing and reappearing at different points throughout the journey, depending on where you are chronologically. I won’t talk about it forever – I’ll just suggest that you go and see it.

1. In fact, my one gripe with this new rehang is that it has an actual, literal, break for the gift shop. As in, you have to walk through the gift shop to get between two rooms in the middle of the big Walk Through Art. Tacky, guys, tacky.

C

CHIVALRY

Chivalry is dead, but you’re still kinda cute.

– Nelly Furtado, Promiscuous (2006)

Chivalry. Not one of feminism’s most pressing issues, but definitely one of its more genteel debates.

Do you, as an attractive female who also happens to be a feminist, deign to take the seat that dude offers you on the crowded tube or laugh hollowly and stick your head back in your neighbour’s armpit? Is chivalry OK?

Personally, my view on this debate is always affected by the point that 99% of the men I’ve met who talk about chivalry with misty-eyed fervour are also the kind of Nice Guys who Really Aren’t Very Nice At All.

But that’s not for here.

What I am interested in is looking at its complex linguistic heritage.

Horses

What’s that sound in the distance?

Why, it’s the sound of clopping hooves – and chivalry‘s etymological root come to join us. Neiiigh.

Animal instincts. Photo by Hodge.

For though chivalry in English means (first definition ahoy!)  ‘the code of behaviour demonstrated by a perfect knight‘, were we French we’d replace ‘knight’ with ‘chevalier‘, or ‘horseman’ – from the root word cheval (= ‘horse’).

The knight, or chevalier, is in origin a nobleman on horseback who goes around rescuing maidens and fighting dragons. He is chivalrous in behaviour, displaying (the word’s second definition) ‘courage, honour, justice and readiness to help the weak’.

Key examples can be found in the legends of King Arthur and his horsebacked Knights of the Round Table – in particular Sir Gawain and the so-good-he-couldn’t-be-gooder Sir Percival (who later becomes Wagner’s Parsifal).

The chivalrous are those on horseback.

But it’s the secondary meaning of chivalry that we best recognise today: ‘courteous behaviour, especially towards women’ (that is, giving up your seat on the tube, which Percival would totally have done if he didn’t travel everywhere by cheval).

Courtly-powered lovin’

Chivalry – and the courtesy that defines it – is also the base idea behind courtly love, which the devoted may remember we addressed separately in the Alphabet Glory Days.

Charles I – Equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck

This is what the knights are doing when they’re not out fighting –  sighing for love among rose bushes, swooning at the touch of a ‘lily-white hand’ and definitely giving up their seats for a woman on the medieval commute.

And it was said to have been invented by a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Before she married Henry II and brought her French customs over to England, Eleanor had a period presiding alone over a predominantly male grouping in Poitiers.It seems inventing an elaborate code of chaste devotion to a single lady – courteous behaviour, if you will – was a good way for Eleanor to bring these bored and potentially restless knights into order – and, I assume, to block potential sexual aggression at the same time (cf. the court of Elizabeth I, which saw a resurgence of ‘courtly’ devotion to ‘Gloriana’, the ‘Virgin Queen‘).

Courtship

With these courtly roots, it’s appropriate that, during the English Civil War, the word chevalier should lend itself so enthusiastically to the Royalist cause in fighting for king (and court).

In this context, the Cavaliers were enemies to the Roundheads and cousins to chevaliers via the Latin source-word ‘cabellarius’ (also meaning ‘horseman’).

The origin of this term is actually pre-war, in the grouping of courtly ‘cavaliers’ at the original Carolingian court (a bit like the courtly lovers at Poitiers).

These included the ‘Cavalier poets‘, a conglomerate of literary courtiers formed by the King himself, including Robert Herrick and Edmund Waller.

The term in this usage is ambiguous, though. On the one hand, cavalier was often used in allusion to the King’s refined (indeed ‘knightly’) sensibilities, which, incidentally, included a famous love of horses – as the many magnificent equestrian portraits of him attest.

But, in a pejorative sense, the cavalier poets were so named because they were famously ‘roistering gallants’ and ‘libertines’. This is cavalier‘s other meaning: ‘haughty, disdainful or supercilious’ or ‘offhand and unceremonious’ (a bit like wearing your hat at a ‘rakish’ angle).

So cavalier is almost a contraction in terms.

The Don

This is the very ambiguity we find in Mozart’s great libertine opera, Don Giovanni, written about 100 years later. The ‘Don’ is a nobleman and serial womaniser. He’s a standard-issue rake, in fact: we learn in the Catalogue Song that he’s seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone.

Sir Charles Grandison

He is throughout referred to in the Italian as a ‘cavalier’, understood (and, for us English-speakers, translated) according to context variously as ‘gentleman’ (nobleman on horseback) and ‘rake’ (careless womaniser) – as in the opera’s subtitle, ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (‘the debauchee punished’).

Thus, when Don Giovanni takes the pretty peasant girl Zerlina away from her finance, Masetto, to show her his castle (no, really), Don Giovanni ‘reassures’ the jealous Masetto by saying he needn’t worry – his fiancee is ‘in the hands of a cavalier‘.Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Masetto is afraid of. “Let the cavaliere make a cavaliera out of you!” he trumpets at the departing Zerlina – he knows what’s going down (this).

Court to City

Back to English climes.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Queen Anne halved the size of the English court and moved it out of central London.

In so doing, she ultimately ended up transferring power from court to city – and courtesy became civility (from the Latin cives (= the city)).

The White Knight accompanies Alice through the forest

This is the age of opening doors, watching your language and standing up when a woman enters the room. Chivalry has gone domestic; men are civil now in Britain. Only the hot-headed Italian Don Giovannis are still cavaliers.

But when Samuel Richardson wanted to depict a perfect (but domestic) Englishman, he still made him an aristocratic knight (Sir Charles Grandison). Jane Austen did too: her paragon of virtue (himself based on Sir Charles), is pointedly named Mr Knightly (Emma).By this point it’s faded away to a name rather than a title, but the gentleman still has a vestigial horse (if you will).

White Knights

Strangely enough, the vestigial horse becomes more literal in the modern age, in the form of the ladies’ proverbial ‘ideal man’ – a chivalrous gentleman. Mr Right is also a ‘knight in shining armour’.

He’s even a  Lewis Carroll-esque ‘White Knight’, a noble rescuer (as in the song ‘My White Knight’ from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, where the knight in question will, her mother thinks, ‘save’ Marian the Librarian from Old Maidery).

Remember when Grace first meets Leo – the Great Romance – in Will and Grace? He’s on a horse in Central Park. That’s how you know he’s a Big Deal Romance.

Never trust a man on horseback

And, to conclude very crudely, I suppose this is what happened to chivalry .

It became the polite behaviour of the  gentleman – enshrined in tradition and developed over a couple of hundred years to become our friend offering me a seat on the bustling 21st century commute and sitcom single girls dreaming of their ‘Mr Darcy’.

But I still hear the sound of clopping hooves. The fantasy may be more Sir Gawain than Don Giovanni, but you know what they say – the apple never falls far from the lexical tree.

• For more from the Alphabet of Feminism – a whole series of posts about language, gender and history – visit the Alphabet category. Contains lots of hand-drawn illustrations!

A surprisingly difficult part of this was establishing what we talk about when we talk about post-punk. Roughly, the term refers to the wave of musical experimentation which took place in the wake of punk from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. It was informed conceptually by the art-school background and grounding in political and cultural theory of many of its members, and distinguished by musical, vocal and lyrical experimentation and by a frequently self-conscious and self-critical approach to the idea of being in a band and making music. All of which meant that it sounded, to varying degrees, original, arresting, and odd.

Post-punk’s disorderly, subversive and category-resistant nature has seen it marginalised in accounts of its era, although the past few years have produced a handful of useful retrospectives, as well as the early-2000s revival of post-punk musical techniques which, if you still can’t explain what it is, at least make it easier to explain what it sounds like.

For me, a large part of the significance of post-punk was that it seemed to involve an unprecedented amount of women as artists, fans, and critics. Its musical, political and aesthetic influence can be traced in many subsequent female-friendly movements, including twee, riot grrrl, grunge and electro. Some post-punk women – the Slits, the Raincoats, Lydia Lunch – have made a more enduring dent in popular consciousness than others, and some of them are more ‘hmm, interesting’ than ‘fuck yeah, hidden early-80s gem’, but all the artists featured below are worth a spin.

Extending the gains of punk’s emphasis on DIY culture, accessibility and amateurism, post-punk women were able to take their bands in experimental directions, producing lyrics which explored the female experience in startlingly innovative ways, and music which itself took on what Slits bassist Tessa Pollitt described, when I interviewed her for the book, as a ‘new, raw, and female’ form, a self-consciously radical sound dealing with rarely-expressed emotions like embarrassment, awkwardness and anxiety.

In terms of subject matter, post-punk’s ideological concern with the politicisation of the personal, and with identifying and promoting authenticity in the face of popular cultural stereotypes, lent itself to exploration from a feminine and feminist angle. This concern with authenticity was expressed in the songs themselves, which were produced, structured and presented in a way which set them apart from the glossy manufactured products of mainstream artists. It was expressed too in lyrics which demystified and deconstructed conventional femininity, love, sex and romance, and which analysed social and cultural pressures on women or the tensions of personal relationships in implicitly political ways.

There is far more to post-punk, and many more women within it, than I have space for here. The Young Lady’s Post-Punk Handbook provides a good starting-point to other women and bands in the movement, but here are ten from me to kick off:

1. ESG

ESG, from South Bronx, based their pioneering sound on a love of James Brown, Motown and disco. Spotted at a talent contest, they began to play New York’s cutting-edge clubs, where their sound dovetailed neatly, if unexpectedly, with that of the No Wave scene, and went on to share billing with PiL, Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio.

ESG’s blend of hip-hop and girl-group lyrical sensibility was sampled incessantly by acts from Miles Davis to Tricky and Public Enemy to Liars – although the lack of royalties received antagonized the band, who addressed the issue with typical panache in the 1993 single ‘Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills’.

2. Raincoats

The Raincoats attempted an unsweetened exploration of the social and sexual experience for women, mapping a landscape previously foreign to mainstream rock – a female-centred one of self-consciousness and self-doubt. Their debut’s self-effacing musical communalism has seen it described as the first ‘women’s rock’ album.

3. Slits

From the art-student squats of London’s Ladbroke Grove via Germany, Spain and English suburbia, the Slits made slippery and spacious dub-punk hymns to sex and shoplifting. ‘Love und Romance’ burlesques the banality of boy-meets-girl, ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ analyses retail therapy as addiction, and ‘Typical Girls’ castigates conventional femininity as a profit-driven invention.

For more on the Slits I’d recommend Zoe Street Howe’s Typical Girls? The story of the Slits.

4. Bush Tetras

There’ve been whole essays written on this song as key to life in late-70s crisis-riddled New York, but Pat Place’s stabbing guitar and Cynthia Sley’s vocal darting between grouchy imperious disdain and incipient panic are more than enough to recommend it.

5. Lydia Lunch

The infernal anti-Blondie, or perhaps the sub-par Patti Smith. For Lunch, the extent of her musical ability ‘wasn’t the point. I developed my own style, which suited the primal urgency I needed to evacuate from my system’ (quoted in Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984).

Lunch’s performances were, according to contemporary music writer Roy Trakin (quoted here) ‘very influential in freeing people from the idea of technique as being somehow prerequisite to talent’.

6. LiLiPUT

Surrealistic in their Swiss-German and English lyrics, rudimentary in their technique, and the subject of a 40-seconds-long Yummy Fur song (Why don’t you listen to Liliput / Where punk rock starts and ends?), but great for all that.

7. The Bloods

New York’s finest queer anarcha-feminists. ‘Button Up’, their only single, is absurdly ahead of its time kink-funk.

8. Mo-dettes

Sharp-tongued and stylish Anglo-Swiss outfit. Had a complicated relationship with the partisan feminism of some of their contemporaries, but their arch, insouciant music was less ambivalent. ‘White Mice’ giddily champions female sexual agency, ‘Two Can Play’ dramatises relationships as struggles for autonomy and control, and ‘Foolish Girl’ catalogues the misadventures of a girl who renounces feminism for an unhappy marital ending.

9. Au Pairs

At the intersection of left, feminist, queer and antiracist politics, Birmingham boys and girls the Au Pairs made radical, slyly danceable music. A good introduction to them from the Kitchen Tapes’ Rupinder Parhar can be found here.

10. Linder Sterling

Muse to Buzzcocks and Morrissey, a visual and performance artist whose work critiqued cultural expectations of women and the commodification of the female body, an unequivocally militant feminist and occasionally a musician with the band Ludus. Ten post-punk points if your response in 2010 to Lady Gaga’s meat dress was to sniffily point out that Linder did it better at the Hacienda nearly thirty years ago.

For more on the background, careers, music and politics of these and other girl groups, and a look at the history of women in music from Ma Rainey to Pussy Riot – please consider buying the book!

‘I like your shoes!’ she said. ‘They have red bits at the back!’

‘Thanks,’ I said, beating a swift retreat before she noticed that the ‘red bits’ were in fact open wounds filled with my encrusted blood, patching the backs of my ankles like some kind of visceral rash.

I should have said ‘They’re Christian Louboutin’.

Christian Louboutin's 'Ballerina' slippers, with an 8-inch heel

Vertigo

The shoe designer beloved by female celebrities everywhere (Jennifer Lopez has a whole song about them) is so proud of his trademark ‘red sole’ that he recently took erstwhile collaborator Yves Saint-Laurent to court over red sole copyright infringement. He’s also currently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Design Museum.

He’s notorious for being one of the first designers to insist, in the early 90s, on a heel that truly towers – his shoes average at about 4 1/2 inches; the highest peak at dizzying 6 (‘but mostly only dancers can wear them‘) and if you’re looking for someone to blame when you survey the heights on the high-street and sigh, you could be more unjust than to point your finger at this foot-obsessed Frenchman.

As a teenager, Louboutin’s eye was caught by a ‘No Stilettos’ sign at the Museum of Oceanic Art, Paris: ‘I wanted to defy that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.’ He’s stuck to this original image for most of his career: there are very few wedges or block heels in his collections; instead, his heels are thin, vertiginously high and splattered with those red soles.

Earthbound

Where such heights can lead is well illustrated by the fate that meets Little Women‘s sixteen-year-old Meg, who wears high heels to a ball – ‘The stupid high heel turned… It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get home’.

The sign Louboutin recalls inspiring him as a child

Yet this is the sort of height we’re talking about, for the 1860s. Poor Meg was rather dowdily earth-bound compared to Louboutin’s fantastical ‘ballerina’, whose eight-inch high ‘slippers’ are displayed above left. ‘Isn’t the classical dancing ballet slipper the ultimate heel? The heel which makes dancers closer than any other women to the sky, closer to heaven..’ waves Louboutin, airily, in explanation.

Elevation

He’s predictably fascinated with elevation – the exhibition is full of ‘pedestals’ and ‘birds’. But he’s gone a lot further than previous designers: Meg may have been dowdy in comparison, but even the flappers of the Twenties had modest block heels, and the Fifties heel looks almost mumsy nowadays.

One of the pairs exhibited here is accompanied by an apologia from Louboutin, thus: ‘This shoe is not suitable for walking in. You can only walk from the taxi to the nightclub, and back, on the arm of a man’. When asked about the point that women can’t run in his heels, intended for his ‘confident and empowered’ working women (apparently) Louboutin was incredulous: ‘Who runs at work?‘.

Yet he’s also fascinated by showgirls and ‘classic’ vintage-style women (such as his great admirer, Dita Von Teese, who makes a holographic appearance in this exhibition morphing into a Louboutin pump, in a rather literal appropriation of the fetish we’ll come to presently). Such women, he says, can dance and gyrate for hours at a stretch from atop dizzying heels – Louboutin learned all about this during an early career stint at the Folies Bergere, where showgirls used to put cuts of bloodless meat inside their heels to make them more comfortable.

Perhaps this is echoed in the sexualised red Louboutin sole (originally hastily-applied Chanel nail varnish) – a flash of red as easily representing the raw and bloodied foot itself as the raw and (un)bridled sexuality of the wearer.

Venus in Furs

Helmut Newton's Self Portrait With Wife and Models

‘A good shoe is one that doesn’t dress you but undresses you’, Christian reckons – a statement with which Helmut Newton (left) would undoubtedly have agreed. The short David Lynch / Louboutin collaboration film Fetish (2007), extracts from which are on display here, shows sequences of otherwise naked women wearing a series of ‘unwearable’ Louboutin shoes – following Louboutin’s conviction that the part of the female body most naturally fetishised is (you guessed it) the foot.

He’s even got a mini foot anatomy: one of the pumps on display here has a very low vamp, which was initially unpopular. ‘Then I realised, it’s because of the slit‘, he recalls – an unfortunate word, given that he means ‘toe cleavage’. Too much ‘slit’ apparently makes women feel ‘dirty’, but Louboutin’s well into it, although the instep is his favourite part of the foot, perhaps because of his famous belief that the appeal of the high heel is its approximation of the shape a woman’s foot assumes during orgasm.

The fetish

Of course, Sigmund Freud uses the shoe and foot as an illustration for his writings on the fetish – the mother’s shoe, says Sigmund, represents the penis the child originally assumed she has, and to fixate on it assuages castration anxiety. But symbolic castration via the foot pops up in Louboutin’s favourite fairy tale (whose centrepiece shoes he’s working on for an upcoming film):

‘[The eldest step-sister] could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.”

The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son […] He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red.’

– Cinderella, The Brothers Grimm

The mad but occasionally insightful Bruno Bettleheim sees the stepsisters here attempting to make their big feet more dainty, ‘and therefore prove their femininity’ through a symbolic castration (with a literal twist in stage versions, where they are usually in drag). The problem of the shoe being too dainty is one surprisingly near to Louboutin’s methods: although the average female foot size is a 5, he designs and constructs his shoes in size 4 ‘because I prefer to work on a small thing’.

‘He understands women and makes them feel like Cinderellas’ purrs Diane von Furstenberg on the designer. Indeed, it feels appropriate that stilettos, whose c20th renaissance is credited primarily to the 1950s couturier Roger Vivier (for Dior) owe their name to the Italian ‘dagger’ (hence their unpopularity with parquet flooring).

Domination

For me, the images in Fetish of these women crawling and sidling about in painfully unwearable shoes sums up this retrospective rather well: a fascination with immobility, and a craving for Fabulous Female Domination that suggests more power than it would actually have were it being negotiated from atop a pair of Louboutin pigalles.

But you look like you could walk down the treacherously lumpy terrain of my naked back, make me lick your Louboutin boots…

‘I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,’ said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica.

– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

• Christian Louboutin, Retrospective at The Design Museum, London SE1. Until 9 July 2012.
]]> /2012/06/13/when-you-are-queen-christian-louboutin-at-the-design-museum/feed/ 0 11145 /2012/01/10/on-thatcher-icons-and-iron-ladies-rhian-jones/ /2012/01/10/on-thatcher-icons-and-iron-ladies-rhian-jones/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:00:49 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=9235 A spectre is haunting London. My daily commute, never a joyful affair, has recently been lent a further dimension of irritation by adverts on buses, hoving into view with tedious regularity, bearing the image of Meryl Streep dolled up as Mrs Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Thirty years on from Thatcher’s rise to power, and after a minor rash of small-screen depictions – Andrea Riseborough in The Long Walk to Finchley, Lindsay Duncan in Margaret – Streep will now portray her on the big screen, the prospect of which I could have happily lived without.

Having as I do firsthand experience of the impact of Thatcher’s thirteen years, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death – although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass – is something to which I’ll be largely indifferent. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.

Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, and to consider the effect of her gender on her role as a woman in power. Quick, before the next bus goes past.

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

– Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign.

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.

Iron Maidens

Thatcher’s image, rather than appealing solely to a particular aspect of femininity, was a tense mixture of conflicting and mutually reinforcing signifiers. Angela Carter identified it as a composite of feminine archetypes, including Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, Elizabeth I as Gloriana, Countess Dracula, and one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts – tropes sharing a certain type of burlesqued and grotesque dragon-femininity. The 1981 Falklands conflict allowed the discourse around Thatcher to reference the precedents of both Queen Victoria and Churchill, and she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia’.

Justine Picardie, in a grimly fascinating read, roots Thatcher’s style in the rigid grooming of well-turned-out 1950s femininity in general and her sartorially plain Methodist upbringing in particular:

Interviewed by Dr Miriam Stoppard for Yorkshire Television in 1985, she gave a glimpse of a childhood desire for the luxury of colour, and shop-bought extravagance, whether a new dress or sofa cover: ‘that was a great expenditure and a great event. So you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on it. My mother: “That’s not serviceable.” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable.’

Even at the height of her political power, she chose to retain the ‘pretty’ and ‘softening’ effects of her trademark horrible bows. Alongside this tendency towards aspirational frivolity, she cultivated connotations of the provincial housewife – a ‘Housewife Superstar’ – wearing an apron while on the campaign trail and being shown washing dishes while contesting the party leadership.

Her ‘Iron Lady’ speech distinctly echoed the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman… heart and stomach of a king’ construction associated with Elizabeth I in its drawing on the tension between conflicting signifiers:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World. A cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of those things? Yes… Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke.

Not a Man to Match Her?

Thatcher’s courting of various feminine roles did not prevent the assigning of masculine attributes to her – notably in oppositional parodies and satire. Her iconic Spitting Image puppet was shown wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigar, addressed as ‘Sir’, and given a more or less explicit emasculating effect upon male colleagues and political opponents:

Outside satire, the 1984 Miners’ Strike has been conceptualised both as a mass emasculation of ordinary male miners and an overt bout of cock-duelling between Thatcher and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, each of whom were criticised for an absolutist and stubbornly Napoleonic approach to the conflict rather than a more ‘feminine’ openness to negotiation and compromise.

As Dawn Fowler notes in her consideration of dramatic treatments of the Falklands War, a problem with such portrayals of Thatcher is that she ‘can be represented as simply denying her true feminine self in favour of a crazed fascist agenda.’ The Comic Strip’s satirical take on Thatcher’s battles with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council presented her as the victim of alien or demonic possession, the ending of which left her soft and passive – restored to her presumably appropriate, natural form. Both applauding Thatcher for her ability to overcome ‘traditional’ feminine weakness and irrationality and behave symbolically as a man, and castigating her for her failure or suppression of a ‘true’ soft and accommodating female nature, are equally dubious in the qualities they seek to assign to ‘real’ women.

Thatcher was repeatedly likened to a female impersonator, a man in blue dresses. The reason for this is simple, and apparently shatterproof: we have so firmly linked power and masculinity that we think a powerful woman is a category error. Instead of changing our ideas about power, we change the sex of a powerful woman.

– Sarah Churchwell

No Job for a Lady?

While Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister was of course a landmark for women in politics, her much-vaunted ‘grocer’s daughter’ outsider status was mediated through an Oxford education and marriage into wealth. The number of prominent women serving as MPs and Cabinet ministers prior to or alongside Thatcher – Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield, Betty Harvie Anderson, Jenny Lee, Barbara Castle to name a few – make her ascension exceptional but not unique. Nor should Thatcher’s progress in the male-dominated world of British politics obscure how little she actually did for women once in office: the lack of women appointed to ministerial positions; her disparaging of ‘strident Women’s Libbers’; her invariably male ideological protégés. Historian Helen Castor, discussing the ‘extraordinary’ parallels between the iconography of Thatcher and that of Elizabeth I, points out that both women emphasised themselves as the exception to a rule:

…what those two women both did was not say, Women can rule, women can hold power. They both said, Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.

At a point where Thatcher’s chosen ideology is resulting in falling standards of living for women – and men – across Britain; where the dim and insubstantial Louise Mensch can manage to position herself as a rising star, and where the Home Secretary’s political decisions make fewer headlines than her choice of shoe, I’m relieved to see that attempts to rehabilitate Thatcher as any kind of feminist icon are largely being resisted. It remains to be seen whether The Iron Lady, and its fallout in the form of frankly offensive Thatcher-inspired fashion shoots, means that her image is now undergoing a further transcendence into the realms of irony and kitsch (as has happened with both Marilyn and Che), or whether this is part of a conscious revival of the political associations her image originally carried and to which we are being returned – conditions profoundly unfriendly to female independence and agency despite the women occasionally employed as their shock troops.

]]> /2012/01/10/on-thatcher-icons-and-iron-ladies-rhian-jones/feed/ 8 9235 /2011/12/05/review-the-first-actresses-national-portrait-gallery-london/ /2011/12/05/review-the-first-actresses-national-portrait-gallery-london/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:00:53 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=8836 Perhaps one reason we now refer almost exclusively to ‘actors’ is that, for the longest time, the word ‘actress’ was synonymous with ‘prostitute’. Presumably this relates to the Immodesties they are obliged to suffer on stage; as Shakespeare in Love taught us all so well, pre-Restoration these were considered so severe that women were not allowed on stage at all.


Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies

This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looks at the moment immediately after Charles II reversed this rule, and it’s a fun little look at some portraits, caricatures and paraphernalia of women who were allowed on stage, ‘from Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons’. It’s focused on portraits, but there are some super little earthenware tiles with different actresses on them in Room 3. There’s also a facsimile of the Yellow Pages-style brothel directory, Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies; or, The Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, illustrating the fall from grace of the once ‘Convent and Garden’ of Westminster Abbey – a bit too close to eighteenth-century Theatreland for PR-comfort. Since its reissue by the History Press this book has now achieved some cult status – the guy next to me, looking at it, said to his companion, ‘You know, Gladys: Harris’ List – that’s the one we’ve got in the toilet’.

Nell (c.1651-87) opens this exhibition – a talented comic actress, although she is popularly most recognised for inspiring Charles II’s last words ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ (she survived him by barely a year, fact fans). There are two portraits of her here, in both of which she’s got her mammaries out. This exhibition would have these as evidence of her ‘skillful manipulation’ rather than ‘brazen hussydom’; the second portrait shows her naked to the waist and looking directly at the viewer with a gaze at once languid and challenging. You might be reminded of Manet’s Olympia, condemned as ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ on its first exhibition at 1863, mainly because the nude is looking directly at the viewer rather than obligingly turning her head away for better ogling comfort. And indeed, such a tension between looking and being looked at probably underscored a lot of the moral uncertainty about the early actresses.

Later on, we get Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), powerful, tragic grande dame. She appears in Room 3 painted by Thomas Lawrence as public intellectual, tutor to the royal children – and at a vantage point that forces us to look up at her imperious face, rather than to avert our eyes from her naked bosom. This is hung alongside a number of grandiose actress-as-Muse paintings, large as their themes, and also including Muses of Comedy and society amateurs like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

But even in the late eighteenth century ‘actress’ still wasn’t a career you’d want for your wife. Thespiennes like Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (1754-1792) and Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829) – both exhibited here – gave up their acting careers, on request, upon marriage. While the eighteenth-century gentleman was not renowned for being into female careers in general, the issue here seems to be more ‘other men looking at your wife’ than anything else: after all, these men were ‘forward thinking’ enough to marry an actress in the first place. Perhaps they were nervous of the number of early actresses, like Nell, who had affairs with kings and nobles. If so, they had a good few hundred years of uncertainty left: Edward VII was still pretty into actresses at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship’ he complained to Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), eliciting the tart response ‘And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.’ (It may have been such impertinence that led to her replacement by another actress, Sarah Bernhardt, shortly afterwards.)



Dorothy Jordan in travesti - engraving after the John Hoppner painting in this exhibition

But, as this exhibition shows, one of the primary moral gripes with these early actresses was actually about something a bit unexpected: the travesti roles many of them built careers on. There are some fascinating visual representations in this exhibition of actresses – like Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816), whose bosom apparently ‘concealed everything but its own charms’ – in their famous ‘breech’ roles, both Shakespearean (stalwarts like Twelfth Night and As You Like It) and just… male (Tom Thumb). It seems that, after decades of young boys aping womanhood, the first actresses set themselves the challenge of continuing the noble tradition: it was conscious decision, rather than occasional dramatic necessity, for many of them to adopt the travesti.

The Immodesty here implied resulted in endless caricatures, many of which are exhibited here. My favourite was entitled ‘An Actress at her Toilet; or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’ – though perhaps even stranger were the portraits of various male actors, including David Garrick, in drag – enormous hoop and all – as a kind of forerunner to the pantomime dame.

Take a feminist friend and thrash it out in the Portrait Gallery café with their superior yoghurt and granola, says this reviewer. And visit John Donne on the top floor, if he’s not gone into cleaning yet.

• The First Actresses runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 8 January 2012.
]]> /2011/12/05/review-the-first-actresses-national-portrait-gallery-london/feed/ 3 8836 /2011/11/10/a-short-post-on-transgender-remembering/ /2011/11/10/a-short-post-on-transgender-remembering/#respond Thu, 10 Nov 2011 09:00:40 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=8321 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 20^th November, it will be the 13^th 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 19^th 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.

• LGBT History Month
• Women’s History Month
• Black History Month
• UK Disability History Month
]]> /2011/11/10/a-short-post-on-transgender-remembering/feed/ 0 8321 /2011/09/05/revolting-women-an-introductory-overview/ /2011/09/05/revolting-women-an-introductory-overview/#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:00:19 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=6059 Last winter’s wave of student and youth protests held many points of interest, but one of the most amusing was the Daily Mail‘s pearl-clutching front page on what it chose to call Rage of the Girl Rioters, in which it claimed that ‘rioting girls’ had become ‘the disturbing new face of violent protest’. While the article betrayed predictable anxieties about social protest in general, the visible presence of female agency was an ingredient that occasioned a particularly salacious shock.


Comemmorative dollar for the Little Rock Nine, six of whom were women

What this highlighted, besides what we already know about the Daily Mail‘s peculiarities, was its historical ignorance of female involvement in popular protest. Contrary to the fears of Middle England, this is nothing new – we have, like John Sullivan’s comic creation, been revolting for years. Centuries, in fact, from the demonstrations by upper class Roman women in protest at state restrictions on their use of luxury goods, through the involvement of women of all classes in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the great civil rights struggles of the twentieth century (left), to female participation in the current unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Chile. We have marched, struck, rioted, occupied, petitioned, organised and agitated not only on behalf of our own interests as women, but also as part of broader social movements and collective actions, both peaceful and violent, carried out for social, political and economic reasons.

Often women’s involvement in protest has drawn on their gendered role within families and communities. Women played a significant part, for instance, in the riots over food supply, quality and price which swept Europe during its transition to a capitalist market economy from the 16th century to the 19th. Historians like Temma Kaplan, E P Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis (and, er, me) have seen female participation in these protests as an extension of their role in the sexual division of labour, including food procurement and preparation, which lent legitimacy and authority to their involvement. The prominence of women in local networks of communication, and their presence in social centres like market squares as part of their daily routine, also allowed them to collectively mobilise and organise – the equivalent, under agrarian capitalism, of creating a Facebook Events page.

There is, however, a myriad of other movements and moments in which women have taken part as workers, students, trade union organisers, family members, and consumers, as well as on grounds of class, race, sexuality, and political principle. There’s even a Wikipedia list of female rebel leaders dating from the 9th century BC to this year’s uprising in Ivory Coast, which, even though this series is concerned less with individuals and more with women’s mass participation in protest, is still pretty cool.

Just as their presence is still being obscured in reports of current events in the Middle East, so women have historically been absent from many popular and academic accounts of protest. The advent of feminist-influenced social history from the mid-20th century sought to correct masculine bias within traditional narratives of labour history or liberal teleologies, both of which had marginalised or misrepresented the involvement of women. Conversely, strictly purist or doctrinaire feminist narratives of history have also tended to ignore popular movements which did not advance a specifically feminist programme, regardless of how heavily women may have been involved. Both of these approaches resulted in the omission, until recently, of women from the histories of protest movements like Chartism in which they played a significant part.

The place and properness of women in protest has long been a bone of contention, with discourse surrounding their involvement portraying them as hysterical, unwomanly, deviant, or deranged. Sheila Rowbotham, in her historical study of women and protest, notes that:

It is at the point where the revolution starts to move women out of their passivity into the conscious and active role of militants that the mockery, the caricatures, the laughter with strong sexual undertones begin.

The vicious alarmism and mockery drawn by female involvement in politics, with which suffragists and civil rights agitators found themselves contending, is already evident in several cartoons on female Jacobins and campaigners for constitutional reform. Political cartoons of the 18th and 19th century were rarely noted for their subtlety, and caricaturists tended to focus upon the disorderly nature of political females, as well as imputing to them an ‘unwomanly’ loose or aggressive sexuality. Cruikshanks depicted ‘The Female Reformers of Blackburn’ as vulgarly outspoken and blowsily dressed, distastefully dominating their political platform, and J L Marks’ ‘Much Wanted: A Reform Among Females!!!’ gives its female protagonists suggestively brandished rolled-up papers, poles clutched between their knees, and – oh yes – hands clasped in their laps to form a gaping dark hole, setting out their desire to usurp male power as well as their own wantonness. As, perhaps, does the presence of all those upthrust pikes, swords and cannons in depictions of the women’s march to Versailles. And of course Cath Elliot’s recent piece on online harassment, by which politically uppity women are impugned as frigid, or sluts, or lesbians, provides a piquant reminder of this glorious tradition.

Women in protest don’t merely have attacks from the right to worry about. Their involvement does not take place in a vacuum – women protest not only as women but for multiple reasons of sectional interest, and the gender identification of protestors has historically generated conflict and tension with identities based on race, class, sexuality, and ideology. To take just one example, the involvement of women in 20th century industrial conflict, acting in support of or solidarity with male industrial workers, has been criticised by some feminists who view such conflict as manifestations of an unhelpfully macho patriarchal culture from which women should separate themselves.

Nor can it be assumed that female involvement in social protest will naturally result in an outcome which is cognisant of, sympathetic to, or even comfortable for women. After the Women’s March to Versailles, women as revolutionaries became a potent symbol of the power of the French Revolution, and the young Republic was eventually personified in the figure of Marianne. But, as Joan Landes has argued, Marianne’s visual prominence did not mean that women obtained significant political, social, or economic advantages during the French Revolution; the new Republic’s politics was one of laws and texts in which Marianne’s image bore no concrete significance. Similar tensions are apparent in the complex relationship of Iranian women with the after-effects of the 1979 revolution, and the contention that the presence of women in the current ‘Arab spring’ uprisings, when acknowledged at all, is being appropriated and used symbolically.

In addition to the examples given in links above, this series will look in greater detail at case-studies of women’s involvement in social, political, and economic protest, their motivations and methods, their successes and setbacks. It’s been a long, hot summer of discontent and it shouldn’t be any surprise to see women as well as men taking their place in the sun.

*

• Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.
]]> /2011/09/05/revolting-women-an-introductory-overview/feed/ 5 6059 /2011/06/23/blueswoman-etta-baker/ /2011/06/23/blueswoman-etta-baker/#respond Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:00:57 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5835 There’s a fantastic feminist body of work devoted to recognising and celebrating the achievements (and even the existence of) women in blues music, not least the landmark Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis. Thanks to the toil of Davis and others, the songs and performances of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Victoria Spivey and Ma Rainey are finally taking their place in the notoriously masculine and misogynist blues canon. So I won’t reinvent the wheel – go read about them, learn about them, listen to them. Instead I thought I’d introduce a less well-known blueswoman, Etta Baker.

I say ‘less well-known’, what I mean is less familiar to the general public. Since she was ‘discovered’ in the 1950s (she was included on an album of field recordings of folk music, Instrumental Music from the Southern Appalachians , after a chance meeting with folk singer Paul Clayton) there have been plenty of tributes to her musicianship.  Bluesman Taj Mahal said she was the greatest influence on his guitar playing, and Bob Dylan went to visit her in 1962. When you listen to Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right (a rewrite of one of Clayton’s songs) I reckon you can hear Etta Baker’s influence quite clearly.

The album she recorded with her sister Cora Phillips in 2005, Carolina Breakdown, is casually incredible. Her astonishing skill is obvious, even to a cloth-eared listener like me. But it all seems very relaxed. I suppose that kind of confidence is what you get for playing the guitar for 90-odd years (she started learning when she was three…)

Here’s a radio interview with Etta Baker in 2005 and you can listen to some of her songs, see pictures and read more about her life on the Music Maker Relief website. Baker has none of the tragic glamour of Billie Holiday or the stature of Bessie Smith. When you see pictures of her, she’s… well, she’s a little old lady.  She’s usually grinning, wearing ill-fitting sweaters, and with the same owl-like glasses that the Queen wears. The admiration she has won is all down to how she played, and not how she looked.

She is not and never was a star. As well as playing the blues, she raised nine children and worked for 26 years in a local factory. Susan Simone of Music Maker Relief puts this in context:

Listening to Baker’s talent, the first question that comes to mind is why didn’t she get onto the stage earlier. To understand this, you need to understand how life was in the Carolinas for people who were living a hardscrabble life of farming and mill work. Opportunities for music were local not national. Skilled musicians played with family, for local dances, at church, or may be in a nearby town…. “My husband could play piano real well,” Baker reflects. “I believe we could have made it, but as he did not want to leave home, there was nothing I could say.”

Performing on stage or to large audiences is of course no measure of talent, or even of influence. And in interviews Baker herself didn’t seem to have any regrets. But when I hear her and her sister play I can’t help but wonder about all the other ordinary extraordinary women we’ll never know about.

 

Further reading

• Review of Carolina Breakdown
• Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis on Amazon
• Blog series: Feminist discourse in the lives and works of American blueswomen of the 1920s
  • Part one
  • Part two
  • Bibliography
  • Happy birthday Bessie Smith
  ]]> /2011/06/23/blueswoman-etta-baker/feed/ 0 5835 /2011/03/23/at-the-movies-true-grit/ /2011/03/23/at-the-movies-true-grit/#comments Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:00:32 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=4027 Internet, I’m sorry. I’m not a Coen Brothers fan. The last film I saw by them was O Brother, Where Art Thou? which I primarily watched because it’s based loosely on the Odyssey, and I’m nothing if not an epic poetry nerd. People told me to hold my trousers and undergarments close about me lest I laughed them off. All leg-coverings, I’m afraid to say, remained steadfastly, unamusedly attached. I didn’t like it. I was ostracised from the film-loving community for six months. It was a sad time.

  So when people were piping delirious at me that there was oh my god, a new Coen Brothers film out! – I wasn’t massively over-excited. I also heard it was a remake, and I’m not vastly excited about those, either. And then I heard it was a Western; the film genre I’m least excited about. So please understand, then, the genial ambivalence that coursed, skin-tone-knuckled, through my laid-back veins as I sauntered casually to see True Grit last Thursday.

  *** For those who’ve not seen it, the SPOILER WARNING goes here.***

  I went to see it at my local Picturehouse cinema, which is my favourite cinema in the world (except for the old Odeon in Pwllheli, Wales, which has honest-to-god curtains and an usherette – or at least it did last time I went, which was in the 90s!) because of its serene, sociable atmosphere and gorgeous staff. It’s nothing like Vue, which – despite having equally beautiful staff – stresses me out with its up-selling and chemical-weapon nachos. By the time I’d got to my seat, I was practically horizontal with how much chillaxing was going down Chez Moi, and even the beautiful car advert with the people tangoing barely got my blood pressure above a whisper.

  The film began. A young girl’s voice proclaiming her story and the death of her father. Something flickered deep in the back of my mellow mind as my feminism gland quivered, detecting an atypical female lead character. Sure enough, hypnotically well-written sentence followed well-spoken phrase, and there she was: 14-year-old Mattie Ross (the hilariously under-championed-on-the-poster-credits Hailee Steinfeld), out to avenge her father’s death in a backbiting, injust world dominated by grizzled old men whose extensive facial hair is only out-done by their bastardliness.

  She is sharp, intelligent and scheming – easily either the equal or superior of the men she takes on – with an unshakeable sense of duty and justice which tides her actions along throughout the film. She will see the man who killed her father hanged, damnit, and he will be hanged in her state, in full knowledge of the reason for his hanging. She takes on scurrilous scoundrels at their own game and betters them, taking advantage of their constant underestimating her powers of perception and reason, and her stalwart determination.

  But this is a man’s world – specifically, an old man’s world. Every character other than Mattie is weather-beaten and dog-eared regardless of how long they’ve been on the earth. They’re as ancient and savage as the wilderness around them and they’re a lot more worldly-wise. Mattie isn’t naive, and has a strong sense of the way things should work, but she isn’t as jaded as the men whose company she keeps, and this throws up great, gaping chasms of inexperienced vulnerability for her to bridge every once in a while. She is genuinely shocked and outraged when, for example, Matt Damon‘s (surprisingly well-acted – it is Matt “Puzzled Indifference” Damon we’ve got here, after all…) Texan ranger, LaBoeuf, expresses a desire to capture the same man that she pursues, and have him hanged in his own state for his own reasons.

  The society Mattie finds herself having to navigate for the honour of her father cannot even countenance her being their equal. She is constantly belittled and spoken down to, even though she proves herself a formidable adversary. The men she encounters infantilise her, call her “baby sister” and regularly denounce her as “ugly”, as though the only expected worth she is meant to have in the world is her beauty. She easily proves that she has more than looks to offer – but that’s not what she’s meant to offer.

  I am thoroughly depressed to admit that I was expecting a rape, having not read the book and given the common trope of “Strong Female Character Ends Up Raped” in films. Now, I don’t know how this pans out, therefore, in the book the film is based on, but Mattie is grossly manhandled and spanked in the film by LaBoeuf after she follows he and his rival Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) out into the wilderness. He trivially overpowers her – as a barely pubescent 14-year-old – and the whole scene feels like a total violation, despite such abuse being common in the historical context of the setting. It’s awful, and culminates in one of the times that Cogburn steps in to save her.

  That’s the other thing – Mattie does end up getting rescued quite a bit. All things considered, I can actually get behind this. All the situations in which she finds herself in need of rescue are situations that either come about as a direct result of, or are exacerbated by, her stature. She’s bloody tiny! Comments on her size are manifold – she’s a “fleabite”, “skin and bone”, and a “horsefly”. She’s more determined and courageous than either of the great big chaps she takes with her on her quest, but she’s knocked off her feet by the recoil of a rifle, and is thrown about like a doll when LaBoeuf spanks her. She isn’t powerless, but she is young – and female – and with that comes an inescapable physical vulnerability which comes up time and time again in the film.

  But she wins. Oh yes. She completes her revenge cycle, and she wins. The film closes on her several years later, describing herself as “never having time enough for family” of her own. She out-survives all the members of her family – and, tragically, Cogburn, who saved her life – and is unassailably strong for it. You get the strong impression that the story the film tells is only one of her many stories, and it was certainly not the last time she went off adventuring. That’s what I like to think, anyway. I loved her.

  

  THE FURTHER ADVENTURES. Coming to a cinema near you! IN MY MIND.

  Oh, did I mention how fucking hilarious the whole thing is? It’s weird, dry, creaky, strange humour and I love it. The dialogue is solid and glittering as polished brass, and the characters are all highly engaging, and it’s a pleasure to hear them speak. The film’s also a joy to look at – it’s all in Gritty Realistic Brown, but in a golden, glowing way, rather than a used-coffee-filter way. Machinery, horses and scenery are fetished to roughly the same amount, and I derived a great deal of pleasure comparing Mattie’s smooth, young face to the craggy old men, rocks and steam trains that surround her, because I’m a freak with no life and a grand love of textures.

  ONE MORE THING. There is, as is only correct and proper for the time, racism in this film that’s just casually there and not even questioned and it’s horrific. There’s a pretty brutal hanging scene, and the Native American fellow isn’t even allowed to say his final words before the sack is tugged over his head, cutting him off mid-flow. I am disappointed to say that the audience I found myself with laughed at that, though I’d like to believe that it was a nervous laugh out of shock and disgust, rather than amusement. Black humour is one thing, and it’s clearly quite an extreme situation, but it’s deeply uncomfortable nevertheless, because horrendous attitudes towards indigenous American people still exist.

  YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

  • Mattie is one of the finest and most likeable lead characters I have ever seen
  • It’s well-written and genuinely hilarious (like, shout-with-laughter-disturbing-the-other-cinema-goers-hilarious)
  • The characters are engaging, really well-scripted, and engrossing to watch
  • It is exceedingly good to look at in a visual sense

  YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

  • You know, I have absolutely no idea what would unrecommend this film to you. Perhaps if you’re really, really allergic to Westerns? And hate panoramic shots of mountains with a passion rivalled only by that of my hatred for toesocks?
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