treasury islands – Bad Reputation A feminist pop culture adventure Mon, 04 Nov 2013 12:16:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6 37601771 [Guest Post] On American Horror Story, Part 1/2: Lovers and Mothers /2012/12/03/guest-post-on-american-horror-story-part-12-lovers-and-mothers/ /2012/12/03/guest-post-on-american-horror-story-part-12-lovers-and-mothers/#respond Mon, 03 Dec 2012 07:40:00 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=12758
  • We’re pleased to welcome Libby of the feminist-friendly TreasuryIslands blog back to our soapbox today. (She’s officially our most recurring guest!) If you have a guest post a-brewing, email us on [email protected].
  • American Horror Story is sexy.

    No, let me rephrase that.

    American Horror Story is SEXY. It emanates sweet tendrils of hotness, wisps of decadent, lustful sexual deviance and sultry taboo, while trotting apace through a veritable phalanx of horror tropes and borrowing heavily from the classics of the genre. I love it. It is also, in the words of the hilarious Is This Feminist? tumblr, PROBLEMATIC.

    And who’s surprised, really? Ryan Murphy’s work is characterised by its casual misogyny (yo, Nip/Tuck, Glee, I’m looking at you) and so is horror as a genre. So not me, no. I’m not surprised, Mr Murphy, I’m not even angry. I’m just disappointed. Maybe you should go to your room and think about what you’ve done.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. AHS is, by any critical standard, a terrible, terrible show. It’s fractured and bombastic and desperately wants to be, like, profound. But it’s not. It’s… y’know. Crap.

    But luckily, I’m not a TV critic, so I bloody love it. And I’m allowed to love it because cognitive dissonance. This show is simply dripping with things that ought to make me hate it. And I do. I spit expletives at the screen. I rage against the covert anti-abortionism and the exploitative male gaze. And then I rewind and watch it again. Because, like I said. Cognitive dissonance.

    I’m going to handle AHS in two parts. Today I’ll be examining the show’s representations of women as lovers and mothers, before looking at pregnancy, birth and maternal desire in the next exciting instalment.

    Before I go on, beware. Here be SPOILERS.

    Predatory Women in the Male Gaze

    AHS is not much more than your typical haunted house story. It begins and ends with the house, designated ‘Murder House’ by local legend and built by Charles and Nora Montgomery decades before our protagonists – we’ll get to them later – were born.

    The Montgomerys run an illegal abortion clinic from the basement, providing discreet help to women in trouble and fuelling the God complex which eventually sees the ether-addicted Charles sew together a Franken-baby – known as the Infanta – for his wife to care for. If we were looking for a symbolic representation of threat to the constructed (read: patriarchal) order of things, well, it doesn’t get any more obvious than that. Like Dr Frankenstein, Charles blurs the boundaries not just between God and man but also between male and female roles by creating life, upsetting the proper balance of the house and setting in motion the events which follow.

    Nora and Charles’ lives end in a murder-suicide at Nora’s hand. Thus, they become the first to haunt the house.The third post-human (‘ghost’ is such an oppressive term, right?) resident of the house is Moira. Let’s start her story with a little pop quiz:

    You, the lady of the house, enter your home to hear a woman being sexually assaulted. You pick up a gun – because they’re totally safe to have around when emotions are running high – and enter the master bedroom to find your husband raping the maid. You point the gun and fire. Who did you just kill? Was it –

    a) your husband, because he’s a rapey scumbag?
    b) Moira the maid, because, er… um… she’s there too?

    If you said b) Moira the maid, congratulations! You hate women as much as American Horror Story does!

    To be fair, this woman scorned does go on to shoot her husband too, but that maid, well. She was probably asking for it, wasn’t she, all walking around in clothes and getting on with her job and having breasts. What a slut.

    Regardless of her intention or her consent, Moira is now a sexual predator, in death forced to play the role perceived as hers in life, and becomes a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure. The women she encounters see her as a sexless middle-aged woman, while the men (who, it seems, see only what they want to see) see a young, beautiful and carnivorously sexual temptress, seeking to undermine, manipulate or overthrow men through the power of her sexuality. She is the virgin/whore dichotomy made flesh.

    I could get into how heterosexist this is, but frankly we’d be here for days. The height of Moira’s sexual power comes with the literal castration of the man who most poses a threat to her. Dr. Freud, you’re needed in the Literalisation of Symbolic Acts ward. Bring a towel.

    The newest residents of Murder House are Vivien and Ben Harmon, a Bostonian couple intent on running away and leaving their marital problems behind them, because that always works. Moving into their suspiciously underpriced new home with their adolescent daughter is their first step towards repairing the damage done to the partnership by Ben’s affair with a student named Hayden in the aftermath of Vivien’s miscarriage.

    Just as Moira ends up dead for having sex and getting above her station, so does Hayden. Hayden’s not above throwing herself at Ben, turning up at his home in an act of seduction and intimidation to rival the fatal-est of femmes.

    We’re encouraged into this reading of women as wild by the show’s insistent male gaze.

    A complex mythology that rules whether or not the ghosts age ensures that we get enough young female flesh to look at. There are lingering shots of gartered thighs and softly rising décolletée, there are those close, oppressive, slightly-from-above camera angles that make you feel like you dominate the subject – and there are straight-up no-holds-barred crotch shots. All of these things make sure we know where, and how, to look.

    These women are women as men wish (or as gay men think straight/bi men wish) to see them: willing harbingers of sexual pleasure, built in the eye of the camera from tits and ass.

    They’re supple-breasted and conveniently bisexual, with sexuality so magnetic that Ben must masturbate furiously – crying all the while – to stop himself from giving in to them. Where women are concerned, perceived sexual immorality is a barometer for bad. They are debased, and they will hurt you.

    The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world

    Motherhood comes in for a bad rap on AHS. From episode one (where Vivien’s longed for-pregnancy is spoken of in terms of an unwanted visitor violating the sacred space of the home) to the monstrous child-delivery at the end of the season, childbearing is painted as a threat to patriarchal social order. I’ll talk more about that next time, but for now I want to concentrate on what happens once you’ve got a bleating infant in your arms.

    Another previous resident of Vivien and Ben’s home, and one of the few that is still living, is local Mommie Dearest Constance Langdon. She’s the self-appointed caretaker of the house, an amoral force of unfathomable intentions who appears to consider Mrs Bates and Margaret White her parenting role models.

    Constance is a cruel, jealous single parent, abusing and using her children by turns. Unable to relinquish control of her brood as they age, and thus not allowing them autonomous identities, she ensures that dysfunction reins in the Langdon household.

    She treats her daughter Addie, who has Down syndrome, as a sexual competitor. She imprisons both her daughter and her heavily-disfigured eldest son, the ironically-named Beauregard, in the home (sometimes resorting to shackles and chains as a demonstration of her sovereignty) and gleefully tells Addie that she’ll never be a ‘pretty girl’.1

    Although all of her children are dead before they reach adulthood, the youngest remains as one of the fully corporeal phantoms haunting the Harmon household. Despite her treatment of her children, Constance is willing to kill to keep them together. The whole set-up screams narcissistic abuse.

    Constance’s stranglehold over her youngest son, Tate, has prevented him from self-actualisation and produced an emotionally scarred adolescent, narcissistic and hypermasculine, who apes his mother in his desire for control over the bodies of others, raping and indiscriminately killing in order to exert his ownership. What a charmer.

    Tate’s emotional state almost demands to be analysed as a reaction to Constance’s total control over the boy in the second stage of psychosexual development, which coincides with toilet training and in which autonomy is developed. Constance’s suppression of Tate’s self-actualisation has resulted in a rebellious, cruel, emotionally volatile adolescent who is so eager to please the woman he’s fixated on that he’ll commit terrible acts to gain her approval. It’s desperately clichéd.

    Sexualised as it is, AHS’ regular female cast is not made up of victims in the great tradition of the genre: they don’t get cut up, and there’s no running through dark corridors in strategically torn clothing or fumbling ineffectually with locks that they could work perfectly well a minute ago.

    This has caused some people to herald the show as a feminist buoy, bobbing about in the misogynist soup of Horror. Such is the jubilation at the thought that women might be allowed some agency, the flipside is missed. The show doesn’t victimise its women; it demonises them. In this world women are either maidens or mothers, either sexual or not.

    And damn, they’ve got it in for you.

    • You can now read Part 2!
    • Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
    1. Ed’s Tiny Note: For more on Addie and how she is portrayed and treated, there’s a critical look at her role at Fangs for the Fantasy. Down Syndrome Daily also has a roundup of US press reactions to the character, some of which I think betray ableist prejudice in themselves, and some of which make good points.
    ]]> /2012/12/03/guest-post-on-american-horror-story-part-12-lovers-and-mothers/feed/ 0 12758 Revolting Women: Harriet Beecher Stowe /2011/09/15/revolting-women-harriet-beecher-stowe/ /2011/09/15/revolting-women-harriet-beecher-stowe/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:00:59 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7319 This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”. Welcome back to guest blogger Libby from TreasuryIslands.

    victorian black and white photograph of Harriet, a plainly-dressed white woman leaning on her elbow at a table. She is pale and serious looking with a severe parting and ringlets.Women have played their part in revolution since time immemorial. The Trung Sisters rebelled against Han-Dynasty rule in China, 40AD; Boudicca led the Iceni tribe in uprising against occupying Roman forces in 60AD; Queen Margaret of Anjou fought for the crown, successfully, at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471; Lorenza Avemanay led the Ecuadorian revolt against the Spanish in 1803. Women have proven themselves to be worthy opponents on the battlefield and in the halls of power. Harriet Beecher Stowe, though, did none of these things: she wasn’t possessed of great oratory skills, or handy with a sword, and she didn’t lead a great army, nor overthrow an oppressor. She wrote a book.

    One of thirteen children, Stowe grew up in a deeply Christian family. Her father and seven brothers were all ministers, and when she married in 1836, she chose as her husband a scholar and theologian who was much respected by his peers. From the beginning of their marriage the Stowes were ardent critics of slavery. Their first home became a part of the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing numerous runaway slaves on their journey to asylum in Canada. Stowe began to write articles addressing the problem of slavery and making a name for herself as an abolitionist who didn’t run with the pack.

    This might have been the extent of Stowe’s abolitionist activities had it not been for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

    Is it true that they have been passing a law forbidding people to give meat and drink to those poor colored folks that come along? I heard they were talking of some such law, but I didn’t think any Christian legislature would pass it!

    – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 9

    The act underlined the illegality of harbouring fugitive slaves and ensured that anyone who did not aid in the capture of fugitive slaves was criminalised too. For Stowe, this was entirely at odds with the teachings of Christianity. The law may punish those who work against the slave trade, but Christian law was above that; “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour,” said the Bible, “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). Stowe’s abolitionist philosophy is one of the natural rights of individuals – it is the philosophy of Hobbes, of Locke and of the founding fathers and a philosophy written into the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

    It was clear to Stowe that slavery denied huge numbers of people these rights. She wrote in a letter to Lord Denman in 1853,

    [A]s a woman, as a mother I was oppressed and broken-hearted, with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity — because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or
    to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed — who cannot speak for themselves.

    As a woman, Stowe could not effect change by voting or being elected to public office. But she could write. When Gamaliel Bailey, editor of abolitionist newspaper the National Era, offered Stowe $100 to pen a special antislavery piece, she already had a story in mind. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published serially in the National Era beginning in May 1851. When she began writing, Stowe could not have anticipated the impact it would have.

    Reading the book today, the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains troubling racist stereotyping in itself – I re-read it in its entirity recently and blogged the experience in more depth here on my own blog; this post forms a sort of companion piece.

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin centres around the lives of a group of slaves working on an Kentucky plantation. The book opens with a discussion between owners Shelby and Haley over the sale of two slaves. Though Shelby’s wife is not happy, the sale nevertheless goes ahead.

    The slaves in question are the eponymous Uncle Tom, a good man and devout Christian, and young Harry, the only surviving son of house slave Eliza. The narrative follows them as they leave Kentucky, Tom on a ship bound for Ohio, and Eliza and her son as escapees pursued by professional slave catchers. Throughout their journeys Tom and Eliza witness the cruelties and indignities of slavery: Eliza is refused help for fear of repercussions; Tom witnesses a suicide and hears of slave babies bred to be sold. When he is sold to a particularly cruel master Tom finds violence not only from owners, but among the slaves themselves, an indignity that suggests that those who are oppressed by the system lose both self-respect and any perspective of right or wrong.

    While revealing the brutalities visited upon slaves from inhumane masters, the novel also relentlessly mocks the hypocrisies of so-called ‘benign’ slave holders, represented by Shelby, who, though they are not violent and cruel themselves, support those slave holders who are less kindly and keep the system running. Slaves were, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in life, under constant physical and psychological assault.

    Stowe made sure, too, to implicate the world at large in the horrors of the slave trade. She directs the story to her readers, referring to ‘us’ and things ‘we’ think. Readers were therefore in cahoots with Stowe from the very beginning, so when she asks of her readers, ‘But sir, who makes the Trader?’ (ch. 12) readers would be bound into guilt, and with good reason. Not just in America but elsewhere too, households profited from the exploitation of slaves; they bought sugar, they milled cotton. Stowe could not have used better means to galvanise support among white American moderates.

    The novel was released as a two volume book in 1852. The original print run of 5000 was woefully inadequate: in the first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the US, more than 1 million in the UK. Opinion was divided. According to Richard Yarborough, quoted in this paper by RS Levin, freed slaves viewed the novel as “a godsend destined to mobilize white sentiment against slavery just when resistance to the southern forces was urgently needed”, while for abolitionists it was a vindication. Readers south of the Mason-Dixon Line were more likely to find the novel sensationalist and unjust – slavery was a much bigger part of their way of life.

    Following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin support for the abolition movement grew. Minstrel shows and stage plays based on the book – ‘Tom Shows’ as they came to be known – became popular, bringing Stowe’s message to a wider audience, and transcending barriers of class and literacy. Inevitably, some Tom Shows took on a pro-slavery stance, but this does not seem to have diluted the effect of the work on the populace. The now famous author began speaking tours, even visiting the UK in her attempt to bring abolitionism to a wider and wider audience.

    The abolitionist movement continued to grow. When Abraham Lincoln won his Presidency in 1860 it was on a platform of antislavery, so when eleven pro-slavery states seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 war seemed suddenly inevitable. Of course, slavery was not the sole cause of the American Civil War; there was a significant difference in culture, economy and industry between Northern and Southern states and disagreements over federal rule versus state autonomy too. Despite these factors, when the fighting began it became clear: this was a battle between pro- and anti-slavery states. When Stowe visited Lincoln in 1862 he is reputed to have said to her, “So, you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

    Slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which put an end to all involuntary servitude save for those convicted of a crime and freed 40,000 or so slaves that had not been granted their freedom in previous state-by-state laws.

    In later years images from Margaret Mitchell’s adapted Gone With the Wind (1936) would supersede those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the popular imagination as the picture of the antebellum South. No doubt both have some degree of accuracy, but it is Uncle Tom’s Cabin that changed the opinion of a nation.

    • Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
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    Revolting Women: Dora Thewlis, Teenage Working Class Suffragette /2011/09/13/revolting-women-dora-thewlis-teenage-working-class-suffragette/ /2011/09/13/revolting-women-dora-thewlis-teenage-working-class-suffragette/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:00:11 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7315 This post is part of a series on the theme of women and protest. The full series is collected under the tag “Revolting Women”. Following on from Steve’s post yesterday about martial arts and the upper echelons of the suffragette movement, welcome back to guest blogger Libby from TreasuryIslands, in the first of two guest posts.

    Monday 8th March, 1907. The Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons is closed as a precaution as the Dickinson bill receives its second reading. The bill, which would see the enfranchisement of around a million propertied women in the UK, is talked out. In protest, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) decide to march on Westminster.

    Twelve days later, several hundred women gather to make their discontent known. Among them are local WSPU groups from Yorkshire and Lancashire, a ‘clog and shawl brigade’ of workers from cotton and worsted mills. The House of Commons is defended by more than 500 police.

    Seventy-five women are arrested. The following day a photograph appears on the front page of the Daily Mirror of a young woman, flanked by a pair of police officers. Her skirts and shawl in disarray, her hair wild. She appears to be shouting. Her name is Dora Thewlis, a weaver in a Huddersfield mill. She is just sixteen years old.

    Black and white photograph of a young white woman with loose dark hair being marched through the streets by two police officers. Each officer is holding one of her wrists.

    When she appears in front of the magistrate, one Mr Horace Smith, he is aghast:

    The child cannot be a delegate or anything else. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. You ought to be at school. It is really a shocking thing that you should be brought up to London to be turned loose […]. Where is your Mother?

    Later:

    Here is a young girl of seventeen [in fact she is 16] enticed from her home in Yorkshire and let loose in the streets of London to come into collision with the police. It is disgraceful for everybody concerned.

    Like the prosecutor who, during the Chatterley trial, asked “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”, Smith reveals by his indignation just how out of touch the establishment is with the lives of working people. Says Jill Liddington in her book Rebel Girls:

    First, men like Horace Smith had not the remotest understanding of child labour, let alone the half-time system widespread in the north. His pontification is tragically revealing about the dimensions of inequality. Second, Smith saw ‘young girls’ and ‘London streets’ as having only one possible reading: moral looseness and semi-prostitution. The word ‘entice’ says it all: Dora had been ‘enticed’ down onto the London streets, in her turn to ‘entice’ innocent young men. […] It remained unthinkable for respectable women to demand citizenship by taking to the streets.

    Dora Thewlis was borne of an environment hostile towards working women; an environment that relied heavily upon the textile industry, but one in which trade unionism was heavily resisted by factory managers and owners and in which the Yorkshire Warp Twisters had fought two strikes,
    successfully, to prevent women entering their profession. As an active member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), who (according to her mother) had since the age of seven, ‘been a diligent reader of the newspapers, [able to] hold her own in debate on politics (Liddington, p 112), Thewlis was well aware of the inequity of society.

    For the mill workers of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the failures of capitalism were apparent in the hierarchies of the factories. Mill workers were encouraged by their physical environment to isolate themselves by specialism so that ordinary labourers were looked down upon by spinners and sorters, who in turn were sniffed at by the overseers. This segregation, inevitably, extended outside the factory walls, and for workers of different grades to socialise together was unusual. Outside of large factories small firms too held a paternalistic sway over the lives of their workers, fighting constantly to keep down costs and able to ruin the reputation of any worker that refused to toe the line. The ILP sought a number of economic reforms, summarised by Robert Haggard in this book as “an eight hour working day; the abolition of overtime and piecework; the prohibition of the employment of children; public provision for the sick, the disabled, the aged, widows and orphans [and] free, non-sectarian primary, secondary and university education”, as well as a fair minimum wage. The party was evangelical in its belief that the world could be a better place for everyone through socialism.

    Ardently supporting the ILP, it was not surprising that Dora Thewlis would embrace suffrage with the same fervour, and she joined the Huddersfield branch of the WSPU as a founding member in December 1906.

    So it was that Thewlis found herself arrested and remanded to Holloway. Once in prison, Thewlis was bathed, given a prison number and uniform and separated from her comrades. Inside the once belligerent, combative Thewlis grew lonely and wan, convinced she had been forgotten. Though she remained in Holloway only six days, Thelwis became a cause célèbre. Christened the ‘Baby Suffragette’ by the Daily Mirror, she was dogged by reporters at both ends of her journey back to Huddersfield. Portentously, no members of the local WSPU came to meet her.

    Following her return home Thewlis regained a little of her spirit. “Don’t call me the ‘Baby Suffragette'”, she told one reporter, “I am not a baby really. In May next year I shall be eighteen years of age. Surely for a girl that is a good age?”. The sobriquet belittled Thewlis, just as Horace
    Smith had, opening her up to ridicule both in the press and from her fellow suffragists. There was a feeling of alienation among the Huddersfield suffragists who felt attention had been drawn away from their cause by disputes over Thewlis’ age and Mr Smith’s comments about “enticement”.

    By August of 1907 the image of young Thewlis being arrested had been turned into a picture postcard, and, though Dora herself had remained largely quiet on the matter, relations between the Thewlis women and the WSPU had become strained. It’s difficult to know exactly what caused the tension, though Dora’s mother Eliza, who tended to claim a greater role than she ought in the branch dealings, undoubtedly did not help the situation. A letter was dispatched to the Thewlis home asking Eliza Thewlis to work agreeably or resign from the branch.

    All Thewlis and her cohorts wanted was to be granted the right to vote. The had to abide by the law of the land, they argued, so why could they not have a hand in creating it? It is worth noting that, despite the WSPU’s significant working class membership, they did not fight for universal suffrage, but the right for women to vote on the same terms as men. It was, in the words of one nameless critic, “not votes for women, but votes for ladies”; only a meagre few would meet the property qualification required by law. Dora Thewlis, with her socialist zeal and youthful indignation, would not be one of those women.

    The WSPU, with their motto of “Deeds Not Words” was founded in 1903, in the wake of perceived inertia in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). They became increasingly militant, with a policy of breaking the windows of government buildings introduced in 1908, with
    the first hunger strikes taking place the following year. In 1912 they began attacking the contents of post boxes, and the campaign of violence and arson escalated. The following year Emily Davison became a martyr to the cause, dying following head injuries sustained in what is likely to have been an attempt to grab the bridle of the King’s horse at the Derby.

    It is frequently argued that such militancy did more to harm the suffragist cause than to progress it, and that the constitutional actions of Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS and the Women’s Freedom League did more to earn the enfranchisement of Women.

    The Qualification of Women Act was passed in 1918, allowing female householders (or wives of householders), women with an annual household rent of at least £5, and female graduates of British universities to vote if they were over the age of 30. Thewlis, who had emigrated to Australia (where women had been granted the vote in 1901) before the outbreak of war, never saw the enfranchisement she fought for. She never returned to Britain, and died in 1976.

    • Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
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    That Friday Linkpost /2011/08/19/that-friday-linkpost/ /2011/08/19/that-friday-linkpost/#respond Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:00:03 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=6890
  • Sarah Dobbs over on Den of Geek takes a look back at Ghost World, ten years on. And some of us feel a bit old.
  • Fun, bouncy column looking at female characters and “female-positive” titles in comics: She Has No Head!
  • Our mate Libby over on children’s lit blog Treasury Islands finds a book aimed at four to eight year olds. It’s called “Maggie Goes On A Diet”. What really made us furrow the collective brow, though, was the cover illustration, which clearly anchors ‘making sure your appearance conforms’ and ‘looking good in a pink dress’ as the main motivators lil’ Maggie should have for said diet. Come on. Four to eight year olds. Seriously. And what the hell was wrong with MAGGIE SAVES THE ALBATROSS FROM EXTINCTION or MAGGIE’S FIRST FLYING LESSON, anyway? Diet, schmiet. When our ed was eight her main priority was “how to meet SuperTed”. Not “scrutinising the calorie count in the Angel Delight in case SuperTed has a frankly unsolicited opinion on that shit”.
  • Dad sews Wonder Woman costume for girl invited to a party where boys were asked to dress as superheroes while girls had to be princesses. BOOM! What an awesome dad.
  • Here’s a video from Indian publishing house Tara Books, who we’ve frothed over before – the artist behind Sita’s Ramayana “sings her scroll” – The Patua is a form of narrative graphic art, comprising a series of panels, stitched together to form a scroll. It belongs to a nomadic performance tradition when song-writer and artist went from home to home, showing pictures ad singing out their stories. Traditional stories and local news were part of their repertoire. Now contemporary artists also look to events reported in the mass media, especially drawn to news that is dramatic and emotionally charged. Very excited for the book to arrive in 2012…
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    Princesses, Pigsties, Pirates and a Publishing Problem /2011/05/18/princesses-pigsties-pirates-and-a-publishing-problem/ /2011/05/18/princesses-pigsties-pirates-and-a-publishing-problem/#comments Wed, 18 May 2011 08:00:51 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5536 Today’s guest post came winging over to us from Libby, who runs the blog TreasuryIslands, which you should read ‘cos it’ll charm your socks off.

    Very quietly, in April, a study was published that found that in American children’s books published between 1900 and 2000, female characters were under-represented by a ratio of 1.6:1. Not much happened. Then, at the beginning of this month, the Guardian wrote it up, and the Daily Mail tried their best to misrepresent it, failing to note the criteria used, representing the research as if it had been conducted in the UK, and generally being, well, a bit Daily Mail about the whole thing.

    Book cover from 1916, About Harriet by Clara Whitehill Hunt. showing a dark-haired little girl in a white dress with a yellow balloon in a yellow hatTwo things then happened. The lovely lovely Daily Mail comments section went mad with people declaring (presumably based on the many years of research that each of them had done) that the results were clearly rubbish and anyway a bit of sexism never did me any harm now get in the kitchen and put my tea on. The Guardian‘s commenters largely ignored the piece, or said ‘no shit, Sherlock’ and went back to what they were doing before. So far, so par for the course.

    But this lack of inquisitive attention is wrong for two reasons: first, this is a massive undertaking, so, y’know, kudos; secondly, these findings are Important. Important enough to use a capital ‘I’: at a time when children are developing their own gender identities, their literature both represents and defines what is expected of them. We need to know what those expectations are; the expectations that come not from our own choice of books for our children, but from what the literary establishment deems ‘good’ award winners are – rightly or wrongly – arbiters of taste, gatekeepers of acceptability. So when a study comes along that pays particular attention to, amongst other things, a century-worth of Caldecott Medal winners, we should be sitting up and taking notice.

    Children’s books, and books in general, are not here-today-gone-tomorrow entities; they persist. In short, voices from both the distant and recent past are telling our children that women are simply not as important as men.

    I’m not going to blather on about why it’s important for the message of gender of equality to be strong in the cradle and the classroom, nor why the repression of female characters in children’s fiction reinforces patriarchal gender systems, because if you’re over at BadRep you probably already know (and if you don’t, plenty has been written on the subject before).

    I am going to blather on about why on earth this disparity between the genders hasn’t changed very much in a century.

    So, let us return to the statistics. Since the early 1970s, studies have repeatedly found girls and women to be under-represented in children’s fiction, and this latest one is no different. It finds that in central roles male characters have a representation of 57 percent, and female characters only 31 percent. Significantly, it notes that “no more than 33 percent of books published in a year contain central characters who are adult women or female animals, whereas adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent”. You can get a free PDF of the whole study, by Janice McCabe, Emily Fairchild, and others from universities in Florida and Indiana, here or read the abstract here.

    cover art for Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke showing a small blonde girl sitting happily next to two giant pigsNot only are there fewer female characters in books in the first place, but “reader response research suggests that as children read books with male characters, their preferences for male characters are reinforced, and they will continue reaching for books that feature boys, men, and male animals”. This disparity of gender representation is made even more significant when we learn that boys redefine female protagonists with whom they identify as secondary characters1 and recast secondary male characters as central when retelling the same stories2. Educators, too, make a distinction between the genders when choosing appropriate literature for their classes, opting for stories with male protagonists more frequently than female even when their self-reported politics would suggest they do otherwise. 3

    It is worth mentioning at this stage that the numerical representation of the genders and the stereotypicality of the behaviours those genders present are separate issues, and while the latter is fascinating in all sorts of ways, it is a large enough arena of study to warrant a separate post.

    Children’s literature is particularly sensitive to sociopolitical forces. It’s probably not surprising, then, that this study finds spikes in the parity of gender representations coinciding with the second – and third – waves of feminism, so the books published in the 1930s-1960s show less gender parity than those published before and after, and more equal representation of the genders in books published after 1970.

    Take this graph – Ratios of Males to Females, Overall Central Characters, Child Central Characters, and Animal Central Characters across the full set of 5,618 books the study analysed, spanning a century from 1900-2000:
    Graph from the study showing bar charts, Ratios of Males to Females, Overall Central Characters, Child Central Characters, and Animal Central Characters, Full Set of Books, 1900-2000

    These peaks and troughs in the equality of gender representation paint a worrying picture. When the feminist movement is active, female and male characters do move towards a parity of representation. But when feminism goes off the boil, so does gender equality.

    What does this mean for the futures of feminism? Are we destined to keep pushing the message, safe in the knowledge that it will be quickly unlearned if we stop? We cannot rest on our laurels. The third wave feminist movement has, arguably, made feminism more accessible, and this can only be a good thing. But history teaches us that we need to take the waves out of feminism, to keep working, to question inequality whenever we see it mindful that old habits die hard.

    “Ending discrimination”, says Kat Banyard in her book The Equality Illusion, “will require a no less than a total transformation of society at every level: international, national, local and individual.” Our children’s books are an indication of this, and a litmus test by which progress can be measured.

    You can find more musings on various aspects of kid lit over at my blog TreasuryIslands, including an ongoing series on feminism for beginners with heaps of recommendations. Meanwhile, here are a few of my fabulous feminist favourites.

    Totally awesome feminist children’s books:

    Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer, translated by Chantal Wright
    Isabella doesn’t like being a princess. She doesn’t like being waited on, she doesn’t like smiling all day and she doesn’t like her pretty frocks. She’s had enough. Throwing her crown into a pond, she awaits her punishment from the king, but when he sends her to live in a pigsty, the results are far from what he expected…


    Captain Abdul’s Pirate School by Colin McNaughton

    Pickles is a pupil at pirate school. A reluctant student, Pickles learns how to talk like a pirate, make cannon balls, fight and get up to all the mischief expected of a pirate at sea. Leading a mutiny against the teachers, Pickles shows bravery, cunning and compassion.

    Only on the last of the book’s 32 pages is Pickles revealed to be a girl named Maisie.

    Cover art for Give Us The Vote - a green-tinted photo of Dora Thewlis being arrested by two policemen, with the title overlaid in red scribble font

    Katie Morag Delivers the Mail by Dr Mairi Hedderwick

    With a little help from her dungaree-wearing, tractor-driving granny, Katie Morag delivers the mixed up post on the Scottish island where she lives. She’s a great young heroine with a seriously badass gran.

    Give Us The Vote! by Sue Reid

    Based on the true story of Dora Thewlis, 16-year-old suffragette. A Yorkshire mill worker, Thewlis took part in a mission to break into the Houses of Parliament in early 1907. She was arrested and imprisoned, a move which found her on the front page of the tabloids nicknamed ‘the baby suffragette’. Part of the My True Story series, Give Us the Vote! is an excellent lesson in first wave feminism.

    Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.

    Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

    1. a finding by Elizabeth Segel, whose 1986 work is referenced in the study.
    2. Bronwyn Davies noted this in her 2003 book Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender, and it’s also referenced.
    3. Deborah A. Garrahy’s 2001 study “Three Third-Grade Teachers’ Gender-Related Beliefs and Behavior” is worth a look for more on this, in The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 81-94.
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