Reading Gender

CHARACTERS

Whoever appears. But ten actors will be sufficient - seven women and three men - if and only if they are versatile and understand that this is a text, not of characters but of situations. (Ahern, p273)

One of the brilliant things about The Eternal Feminine is that in it Rosario Castellanos wrecks merry havoc with traditional narrative structure even as she also places under a very close lens the concept of what it is to be a woman, especially a Mexican one. The introduction as it appears above sets the stage for a truly surreal exploration of play structure and gender roles that I would expect out of a much more contemporary work. In the scene where Lupita discovers her husband's infidelity - I will be examining only this scene, to better illustrate my point - the stage business that Lupita herself undertakes and that happens around her, almost in a separate diagenetic space from Lupita herself, undercuts her dialogue with ruthless efficiency even as she proclaims herself a paragon of womanly virtue. I would expect this sort of undercutting from Buñuel, who himself worked in the 1970's and was considered very avant garde and ahead of his time, and I'm a little shocked to discover how resistant I was to the idea that a Mexican woman playwright from the same time could be just as powerful.

One of the things that I find most interesting is something that Baumgardner and Richards discuss in Manifesta, this naming of names, this decrying of allegiances that is conspicuously absent in the text of this part of The Eternal Feminine. It is not shocking because of its absence, which is in fact the norm not only in most works of art but in society as a whole, but because as each statement emerges from Lupita - about her children, her duties as a wife, her house, her gift from her husband - we are required by Castellanos' writing to ask ourselves: Is this something that I would do? Is this something that I think? Would someone looking into the flows and eddies of my mind be as offended as I am right now? By marrying unquestioning bourgeoisie characters and dialogue with harshly undercut stage direction and an almost absurdist plot device Castellanos positions us effectively to carry out a little discovery making of our own.

When Castellanos calls for actors who are versatile, who understand the importance of situation over character, she also asks us as an audience to be willing to open ourselves up enough to make of the situation we are presented a character study of our own. To see within the characters staged some aspect of ourselves, or of our society, that we might be at liberty to ignore if it were the character of Lupita herself that we were meant to connect with. The character of the betrayed wife is archetypal, pulling in all sorts of connotations that distract from the situation of uncaring assumption that leads Lupita herself to discover that her life has not been everything she expected it to be. Just as this work is not at all what I expected when I was told that we would be reading a Mexican play from the 1970's at the beginning of the semester. Thankfully my experience of discovery has been entirely more enjoyable than Lupita's.


Works Cited

Ahern, Maureen. 1988. A Rosario Castellanos Reader. Austin: U of T Press

Baumgardner, Jennifer and Richards, Amy. Manifesta.

Blog the Ninth

One of the most dangerous parts of being a teenager, and especially a teenaged girl, is the alienation and lack of support that Pipher so clearly illustrated in Reviving Ophelia. Without anyone who girls feel that they can trust to talk about their issues, more and more of them succumb to the pressures of modern Western society and suffer from eating disorders (as covered in Wolf), depression, self-harm and addiction. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among teenagers, and girls are much more likely to attempt suicide than their male counterparts.

An organization that has dedicated themselves to fighting back against these problems is To Write Love On Her Arms, based out of Central Florida. Started with a short story and a MySpace-based plea for money to help fund a friend's treatment in 2006, TWLOHA has become something of an iconic force in the scene of music that occupies Warped Tour crowds and the iPods of teenagers who most need this kind of support. It isn't a massive multi-national organization with hundreds of employees and a vast, sweeping plan for aid and impact across continents, but its mission has the potential to affect some of the people in this country that are most in need of the kind of help it can offer. Having someone from one of your favourite bands tell you that you're not crazy and you're not alone won't do you any good if you don't have running water or a roof over your head, but if you're hurting inside and don't have any other meaningful source of emotional support, sometimes it can make all the difference.

29 year old founder Jamie Tworkowski is a Christian, and the Christian ethic is clear in the mission statement of the organization and the bands that support it, but it isn't exclusively meant to further Christian goals. Rather reaches out to anyone who's hurting and needing help, and the explicitly go out of their way to include people who do not consider themselves Christian in their continuing efforts to foster a safe, supportive community.

They send a portion of all their proceeds directly to treatment and recovery groups from a number of countries( listed here) and their "To Write Love On Her Arms" and "Love is the Movement" shirts have been raising awareness of their cause in a fashion-forward way for the past few years, opening up a line of communication about issues that are often difficult to discuss.

(And it might interest you to know that the vast majority of their merchandise is produced by American Apparel in downtown LA by workers receiving a living wage. As to where the cotton is sourced from I cannot say, but I feel that Enlow would be suitably appeased.)

Ethnography!

Research Design
Throughout the course I've been struggling with the heteronormativity of both the readings and the class discussion, and although bell hooks has talked about the challenges and benefits of lesbianism in Feminism is for Everybody there hasn't really been a discussion of gender identity. As someone with a variant gender identity that has pretty substantially affected my career aspirations and path I wanted to discover if any of my friends had had a similar experience.

Methodology
I decided to use the most readily accessible method of querying a large group of my friends, an internet poll using livejournal's built-in polling capacity. I had 61 respondents, and below I've included the questions that I asked, what the responses were, and a selection of the comments that my post generated.

Poll Responses
Do you consider yourself:
Female: 50
Male: 4
Other/NA: 7

Does this identification agree with the bits you had at birth/your societal gender?
Yes: 50
No: 11

(It is interesting to note that exactly one of the respondents who selected "Male" also selected that his identification agreed with his societal gender)

Do you feel that your gender identification/presentation has inhibited your career in any way?
Oh my god, yes: 8
Yes: 24
No, I am a straight white upperclass male. 0
No, I am insanely lucky. 28

On a scale of 1-10, how much has your gender/sexuality/gender identification affected your work history?
1 12
2 10
3 10
4 8
5 2
6 6
7 8
8 4
9 1
10 0

(One of my friends pointed out that I hadn't established that 1 was the least and 10 the most, I edited my post to reflect that since I was unable to edit the poll itself)

Have you ever not gotten a job you were qualified for because of your sexuality, gender, or gender identification?
Yes: 12
No: 46
No, but I haven't gotten one for reasons I will elaborate in a comment. 3

Did you have to change your career aspirations because of your gender, sexuality, or gender identification?
Yes: 5
No: 56

Some of the descriptions given from respondents about their career path changes are as follows, their identifying information has been withheld for their privacy.

It more complicated than this, but a combination of being a girl and not wanting to do drugs caused my first and only boss as a lighting tech to make my life miserable until I quit and basically ran away from the industry all together.

The world told me girls suck at math and computers. Now I'm doing library stuffs.

Originally wanted to be a K-8 teacher, but figured nobody would want a tranny teaching their kids.

My Observations
The poll post generated over 50 comments and started a number of conversations that were extremely informative. Given that these are people who I know quite well and have communicated with for years in an interactive online forum, the thing that surprised me the most was discovering that a few of them objected to the implication that they were insanely lucky to have not experienced significant obstruction in their career because of their gender. I found it somewhat interesting that the only person who commented about the choice positively is one of the older women on my friends list who is very much a product of the second wave, who thanked me for allowing her to state that her success was an "insanely lucky" thing because she had done nothing to deserve it more than anyone else.

I also got into something of a verbal dust-up with one of my friends whose primary undergraduate area of focus is ethnography and social study over the bias inherent in my questions and specifically the inexact nature of the question "On a scale of 1-10, how much has your gender/sexuality/gender identification affected your work history?". This led me to examine my motivation in both my question selection and my approach to the concept of ethnography in toto.

Write Up
My problem, when it comes right down to it, is that the prompt was somewhat limiting. It is impossible for me to approach the concept of work and gender without also addressing what bell hooks refers to as the intersectionality of oppression, the way that race and class (and sexuality, and gender identification, and body modifications, and everything else that identifies you as "not normal") affect the expression of gender inequality. And as my friend accidentally helped me figure out, part of my problem is my deep misgiving about the construct of the ethnography. I find it inherently problematic to presuppose that by observing, by asking insightful questions and injecting yourself within a culture you can somehow gain a more "authentic" understanding than the people who are fully acculturated and participating members, which you then share with others. It strikes me as a bizarrely patronizing approach to a problem that I prefer to approach more in the vein of Kate Bornstein and Julia Serrano and other pioneering gender activists- As a piece of the machine struggling to find a better and more fulfilling method of existence while trying to slowly form out of the machine something that will allow everyone to be whatever shape they desire to be.

Blog the Eighth

The two responses to Lisa Belkin's article that I found after I managed to stop seething with heteronormativity and class-based rage were this Columbia Journalism Review stub and this excellent piece about Silda Spitzer. My principle problem with the argument, which is something that both of the responses talk about and bell hooks does an excellent job of highlighting in FIFE, is that only upper-class women with partners in lucrative jobs even have the choice of "Opting Out".

And as Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about in The F Word, the "Opt-Out" phenomenon is not equally accessible to everyone because not all women have experienced the same access to education that enables you to be a person with a Masters' choosing to leave the workplace in the first place- Women of Color are far less likely to have had the access and support to get that degree in the first place, and are more likely to need the money from their job to support themselves due to the massive racially motivated wage gap that compounds their difficulty as women in an unequal work environment.

And then there's the part where none of the articles even mention the possibility of women not being married to a man who can support them, or even a man at all. Because single mothers and lesbians don't exist, don't you know. [/rage]

Blog the Seventh

After being sick and spending most of Spring Break in the lonely, internetless wasteland of my grandmother's basement I'm a little behind on my blogs, but I'm going to catch myself up as best I can so that I can carry on focusing on the current projects in class.

And the movie that I'm going to be talking about this week is...



I'm sure you're all so excited. My biggest problem with this movie, if I can be said to have only one, is the fact that stalking is glorified in this movie to the point of being the romantic "ideal". When Bella discovers Edward in her bedroom she isn't upset, but rather appears to be somewhat aroused, even when it is revealed that he has been watching her sleep for months.

Then there's the plot point where this older man (vampire, "cold one", whatever) has been choosing adolescents to form into perfect, eternal partnerships forever, in some sort of bizarre reimagining of the eternal bond of marriage into something even more ghoulish and frightening than the idea of having one and only one soul mate who can possibly complete you is already. It's unclear how much choice the children are given, and despite further life experience they remain subservient to him, as does his "wife" whom he apparently chose in the same process. I found this to be exactly what bell hooks talks about in FIFE, the women are not being given agency to determine their own sexual destinies, a fate made even more explicit by the metaphor of immortality and permanence, and the decisions about their partnerships are decided by "fate", as executed by an older white man who is explicitly put into a position of power over them. It's creepy stuff.

Even creepier is the saga of Bella's pregnancy (which crops up after the Twilight movie, but which will no doubt be brought to life in the subsequent films in all its brutal, horrifying glory) which highlights excellently the issues raised in Rowe-Finkbeiner's discussion of modern motherhood and reproductive rights. It's hard to compare having a half-vampire, super-quick-developing messiah of a daughter with every day motherhood but the question of when and if a girl should bear a child was something that struck me as a horrible, horrible oversight in the books. It was never even mentioned that she had any option other than to have the baby, even though it very literally killed her to bear it. The scene in which it is literally gnawed out of her body as she dies of the trauma is one of the most traumatizing things that I have ever read, up to and including accounts of rape survivors. That something that graphic can be considered perfectly acceptable fare for young adults (especially with the subtext that it was a good thing that she literally was beaten to death by her child while bearing it, and that that was the correct choice for her to have made) literally frightens me.

I could literally go on for another eight or nine paragraphs about things that are wrong with the book, the movie adaptation, and the rest of the series, but instead I will finish with this wonderful and uplifting tidbit: Catherine Hardwicke, who directed Twilight with a predominantly female crew on a fairly small budget and limited shooting schedule, was offered roughly the same budget and schedule to do New Moon, the sequel, despite Twilight's killer box office. She turned it down and it was subsequently given to a man, Chris Weitz, with a bigger budget and a longer filming schedule. Uplifting, huh?

Blog the Sixth

Is there anything wrong with this picture?

Or rather, it might be more accurate to ask "What isn't wrong with this picture?" As Wolf points out there are an overabundance of images of women in this culture that encourages the judgment of real women by the standards created by the photoshopped masses of advertising women.

Not only that, but in the ad Dior equates addiction with beauty, which would be eerily self-aware if they weren't still implying that beauty is something that you're trying to attain.

This ad I find much more encouraging:

Fifth post, now with 100% more music!

One of the things I really wanted to do in my playlist was to stress that you can put a critical eye on anything. Sometimes the most seemingly frivolous things - like pop music - have the most to say about our culture and what we really think about gender.

The first two songs in my playlist definitely function in a set, and illustrate perfectly the point that bell hooks makes in Being a Boy. Even though the Cobra Starship cover of I Kissed A Girl uses the same backing track and the same lyrical inspiration, somehow a song about sexual discovery and transgression becomes a song about violence and aggression. The undercurrent of sexual potentiality is there, but it's been reformatted, "gettin' all the honeys in the club excited", has reimagined male homoeroticism as yet another ploy to win female affection. Both performers have primarily heterosexual histories and self identities, but even if we did not know that it would have been implicit in the songs- Both of them are not about being comfortable with one's sexual identity, but rather center around the anxieties and dangers of transgressing on well established borders.

The second set of songs, Panic at the Disco's Lying is the most fun a Girl can have without taking her clothes off (a quotation from a book, but definitely not without significant meaning) and Paramore's Misery Business, are less focused on transgression, but place just as much emphasis on adolescent sexuality. I find it very odd that in both songs the antagonist is female, despite the fact that Hayley Williams of Paramore is not only a female vocalist, but also writes the lyrics for her band. It puts the focus on something that Pipher brings up in Reviving Ophelia, this troubling inability for teenaged girls (Hayley Williams was 17 when the album was written) to find stability within themselves, and as an extension, to empathize with others. It also shows clearly how women, when functioning inside the patriarchy, can be just as brutally effective as men in enforcing the so-called "women's role".

The reason I include Mindless Self Indulgence's Get It Up have less to do with the actual song itself (although it is one of my favourites by them) but rather to use it and its production as a starting point to talk about the band itself and the music industry as a whole. MSI is composed of 4 people, and unlike most bands where the "token girl" is in a relatively unimportant role, the girls in MSI (Lyn-Z on bass and Kitty on drums) compose the entire rhythm section, which in a band that produces primarily dance music is very important. And what's more, in this particular song the guest vocals are rendered by Jimmy (the lead singer)'s wife, Chantal Claret, who is herself the lead singer of a band called Morningwood. There is no presumption that a woman is "only" going to show up to deliver guest vox, or is going to be the "cute one" who stands in front of a bunch of guys who know how to play their instruments and sing. Not that those aren't completely legitimate art forms, and any female involvement in the music industry is honestly a move in the right direction, given how traditionally male-dominated music in general and the rock scene in specific have been. But it's really heartening to see a band that functions on an egalitarian basis, for whom the girls are necessary, vital members, and a husband and wife can sing a rollicking good dance song about his inability to get it up.

Personally, I think it's a step in the right direction.