Moment to Moment

Reading, Listening, Watching

Reading:

Australian feminist and 'hoyden about town' Tigtog writes wonderfully about a range of issues. Good stuff.

As an aside, is it just me or is the Australian blog scene expanding exceedingly exponentially? Especially Australian women's blogs? And worldwide I've also seen so many fantastic new feminist bloggers that I can't keep up.

Generally I only comment on Australian blogs but I do read a whole range of blogs from around the place -- way more than on my blogroll, I have to admit. But when I first started reading blogs, I could count on one hand the number of feminist blogs I'd stumbled across. Now. Now, well, we are multitude. And that is awesome.

Also on my must-read list at the moment is the weight-lifting wit and wisdom of  Granny Gets A Vibrator.  Check out Liz's  incredibly awe-inspiring before and after pics. Extremely motivating for those of us who like to chuck heavy stuff around a gymnasium.

Also this piece on speaking for others was linked too by a commentor at I Blame the Patriarchy. Very interesting. I might come back to it later if I can wrap my head around it.

Listening:

The Magic Numbers (thanks to Nicole) and The Audreys. I've also being playing 'Jessica Numbers' by The New Pornographers over and over.

While we're on music, what's with all those hip-hop artists using that pseudo-chipmunk chorus thing at the moment? You know what I'm talking about. I blame Kanye West.

Watching:

Howl's Moving Castle. I love Miyazaki's films and the Studio Ghibli work in general is truly amazing. The one issue I have with his films is the music. Oh god, the music is awful. It's this cheesy sounding faux orchestral tinkling that makes me want to throw things at the screen. More specifically, I very much enjoyed this film and I rushed out to read the book it is based upon, and which it resembles only very superficially. Plus, Christian Bale is hot even when you only hear his voice.

Pride and Prejudice. The new version. It was very pretty and all, but Keira Knightly was woefully miscast and the whole thing felt very truncated, like a Cliff's Notes version of movie of the book. Mediation upon mediation. A photocopy of a photocopy. In other words, What Laura Said.

Oh and knitting: a feather and fan scarf for a friend, as well as a little  something for a Duck.

The Unbearable Sadness of Being a Lefty

I just had to sign an AWA.

(No, this is not a full-time job but rather a casual gig marking university essays. Yes, I mark essays and other assignments. From third years even. If you're a uni student, I expect you to quake in fear. Quake! QUAKE! Bwa ha ha.)

I haven't read it all -- I know, I know -- but it doesn't seem too awful. So no horror stories from the Brave New World of Workchoices here, yet, but as someone who's looking for work I do feel as if the ground has shifted a little under my feet.

And, of course, filling out this AWA has hardly been a 'negotiation' between myself and my employer. The employer sent me the forms, I filled them out and sent them back. I don't know if the rates of pay are the same as when I did the work last year, all I know is that I need the money and I'm getting rather bored with writing the odd magazine article and polishing my resume.

So all this rhetoric about 'choice' and choosing terms which suit me rings rather hollow. The only choice I had was to whether to fax the form back or mail it.

Miffed? Me? Nah (I blame Fyodor)

Since I don't check my site stats every day I was very surprised by the hits I got from Whedonesque.

Then I followed the comments back and it turns out I got ripped into for "not being original" and for saying Xander was "feminised". Let me quote some of the comments and then address the points the commentors raised.

Re: my lack of originality. This one galls because I wasn't really trying to be original so much as charting out some feminist responses to Buffy from my own perspective. If I was trying to be an original groundbreaking blogger I'd probably have packed up and gone home by now in recognition of my fairly meagre bloggerly talents. Anyway:

"Glancing down further, and I'm just scanning now, this writer admits s/he hasn't even seen ANGEL, and therefore I'm a better authority on this topic than s/he. So are you, probably.

...why are we reading this again?"

Ouch! I dunno, why are you reading this if it's so boring and I know nothing?  *sobs*

I was just looking at the reasons why feminists love Joss Whedon's work, FROM A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE, and in part two I am going to look at why we're also hard on him. I wasn't intending to write a full-on academic exploration of every single feminist theme in Buffy and Firefly and Angel. I'm a fan, this was a fan writing from a personally feminist perspective as to why I love Buffy and Firefly and may well love Angel if I ever get the four solid months to watch it. If I did write an academic treatise on the subject, it would significantly longer. And I certainly wouldn't put it on my blog because no-one would ever read it because it would use lots of words like "hegemony". I love the word hegemony.

But I digress. As for the Angel comment -- well, again, I never set myself up as The Joss Whedon Authority, I was talking about a feminist response to his work from my own perspective. I have been meaning to watch Angel, and it's not out of any disrespect for Whedon or his work that I haven't seen it -- it's more out of time, and accessibility, and just having lots of stuff to do.

It does frustrate me to be taken to task for not discussing certain things, which happens quite a bit in the blogosphere. "Why didn't you talk about xyz!" seems like such a lazy way of making a point. I can't address every single point of every single topic I write about: it's impossible. And the joy of the Internets is that we can all share and share alike our opinions and beliefs. Yes, I should watch Angel, no, not having seen Angel doesn't invalidate my views on  Whedon and feminism, it just means I have more to find out.

I also suspect that these readers may have misjudged my post from its title, which was a joking reference to comments by certain people hassling me to post it -- and it was certainly not meant to indicate my status as An Authority. It was also a peculiarly Australian reference that was meant to convey the fact that this was not, in fact, a Joss Whedon post that anyone particularly wanted or needed. My bad for being a little bit too clever -- or not clever enough -- for my own good.

But enough about me.

Re Inara and my views on her being negative:

"If she is (including Inara in the negative bit), the author has missed one of the strongest feminists comments that Joss has made - that women in control of their bodies are not victims; that prostitution has become a form of victimisation since men started running brothels and pimping women."

Well, in the part duex of the post I have  written about the schism between sex positive and radical feminism and how it can be mapped out in the character of Inara, and I was going to link to a couple of awesome posts about this issue which say it all more much intelligently than I can.

I also find Inara troubling because she doesn't actually do much and for this I blame the writers, not Inara as character or Morena Baccarin as actress. I don't have the answers when it comes to the whole sex positive vs the radicals thing -- some days I see myself as a sex positive feminist, other days a radical feminist, and some days I don't even see myself as a feminist. Anyhoo...

"I also have to say that this article has one of my pet hates about some feminist criticism where she mentions that Xander is 'feminised'. This sort of hijacking of decency and niceness into solely female qualities strikes me as kind of cliched, basically inaccurate and as a bloke somewhat annoying (if she'd mentioned his ineffectiveness in combat or the way he often plays the victim role as being typically female qualities as depicted in film and TV I could have given her the benefit of the doubt but to say that not being 'a jerk' makes him feminised gives me the grrs)."

I really think this commentor misunderstood my point about Xander reading as feminised. I don't think being feminised as a bad thing, but in the world of the show (initially, his character grew significantly over the seven series) Xander is portrayed as having stereotypically feminine attributes -- kindness, gentleness, often being afraid, etc. And he is tormented AT SCHOOL for these character traits which is what I meant by being 'punished'. He doesn't fit in, he's an outsider, and I read his outsider status as coming at least partially from his refusal or inability to enact stereotypical masculine behaviours.

One of the points of feminism is to actually suggest that certain characteristics are not in fact anything to do with gender and that anyone, male or female, can be kind, gentle, and a bit of a scaredy cat at times. In fact, feminism is pretty down on the whole concept of gender to begin with, but more about that later.

Also, if you compare Xander to many of the other young male characters in the show, you will find that most of them are indeed jerks. It's not that being a jerk is a male quality; it's that Xander is shown to possess 'feminine' qualities that assist him in not being a jerk and set him out from the pack of young men. Which turn out to make him more of a man than any of the pathetic little boys that pop up on the show as date-rapists, jerks and jocks. I think Whedon very deliberately undermines the stereotypical masculinity of all of his male characters in numerous ways and I think this is a good thing.

Anyway, I should have watched my language more carefully here and made it more obvious that I see Xander as a feminist character because he transcends stereotypically male roles, just as Buffy transcends stereotypically female roles. Now does that mean that a character who is stereotypically feminine/masculine can't be feminist? Which leads me to this comment:

I dislike the notion that making female characters more masculine somehow instantly makes them feminist. That's one of the things about feminism that always bothered me. It always seemed that in their moral outrage of the treatment of women they stripping women of their femine aspects. They weren't becoming empowered women, they were becoming men.

As this article points out, Ripley is pretty much just a dude. Aside from the scene with the bikini (which would be been incredibly creepy if it had been a dude) that character could have been a dude. Not really my idea of a feminist icon.

The thing about Buffy that made her a feminist wasn't that she was a chick that kicked ass, but that she kicked ass without needing to become a man to do it.

I completely agree with Saje here on the Xander issue; Xander not being a jerk doesn't make him feminised. I always though Xander was one of the most real guys on television. He's not an ass on the level of Snydley Wiplash but that doesn't make him a chick. Hell even Spike had feelings and shared them quite often and he's bad-assed mean old vampire that was without soul for most of the show, but this author doesn't chacterize him as being "feminised.""

As a radical(ish) feminist, I believe most of our ideas about gender -- as distinct from biological sex, don't confuse sex with gender folks -- are in fact culturally and socially constructed, and that we are, as a species, hampered by our insistence that men are men and women are women and that certain behaviours are in fact innate in either gender. I see no reason why a man can't be 'pretty' and a woman 'tough', yet these characteristics are typically deemed to belong to the opposite gender in both instances. Also, the penalties in most societies and cultures for transcending gender boundaries are quite heavy.

I'd also argue that popular culture actively works, in many instances, to reinforce ideas about gender and how men and women should look/behave/appear.

So for me, in a textual analysis, talking about characters transcending gender roles is important because it not only indicates a feminist sensibility on the part of Joss Whedon, but because of the way pop culture works as a reinforcer/reinscriber of gendered values.

Buffy is so cool precisely because she bends gender in an interesting and still quite unique way, and the characters in the series don't conform to gender expectations. Women can be strong, tough, angry, promiscuous, torturers etc; men can be the same things but also sensitive, caring, kind, fearful etc. Whedon doesn't just cast his characters along "female = weak and must be rescued" lines and "male = tough and strong and always being the rescuer". It's not that either masculine or feminine is better, it's just that as ways of looking at human behaviour, gender is ridiculously narrow.

As the commentors at Whedonesque pointed out, there ain't nothing new in this idea, at all. And in the decade since Buffy began, there's been a helluva a lot of writing, academic and otherwise, on this topic. There's no way I could begin to cover every inch of ground, and I suppose that's why I didn't publish this post in the first place. Until I made the mistake of admitting I'd written it and then certain people asked me to put it up. I blame Fyodor.

The comments weren't all depressing for me. I also really liked this statement, which made a really good point that I didn't in my original post:

One thing I love about Joss shows is women aren't paragons of virtue. They're also pillocks sometimes. And when they make mistakes, they aren't 'punished' necessarily in the ways you might see elsewhere. They are allowed to make mistakes and still be strong, intelligent, desirable - not forever the femme fatale or damsel in distress.

Excellent addition and one that I think is really important: women aren't saints. Women aren't 'better' than men or 'worse' than men. We're all fully human people.

And I love BtVS precisely because the characters were, for me, as close to people as any fictional characters could be. They became almost real. I wept copiously when I watched the finale, even though I hated series 7, and after I watched it I felt a real sadness that the characters weren't going to be with me any more.

Anyway, I've survived the wrath of the Whedon-lovers -- which is kinda like being lashed by feminists, in that it always surprises me to be attacked, no matter how gently, by my own team. I expect much worse when I tackle possible feminist critiques of Whedon's work.

A mite whimsical in the brainpan

Far out. I've just have 5000 hits. That's 5000 hits people, and they've all -- all but for about 400 -- been from Whedonesque.

I'm feeling a bit faint. I might need a lie down and a cup of tea.

Playing House

Tomorrow, several members of JW's family decamp upon us. This is nice and all but it brings me out in all sorts of tizzes and makes my nerves flutter alarmingly.

Despite my fairly staunch commitment to not playing The Patriarchal Wifely Game (ie, being the cook, the cleaner, the moral and emotional centre of the family and so on) (not that there's anything wrong with those things, it's just that they come wrapped up in a big bow called 'femininity' that I have  problems with) I sometimes find myself falling into rather alarmingly traditionalist thought patterns.

The first of these is that I must have a spotless house for the visitors. I must bake some cookies or scones or somesuch for the visitors to eat. If there is a problem around the house, or something messy or untidy, then it is My Fault and I am A Failure because I Am Messy. I am a messy woman. I am a slattern.

The thing is, dear reader, I  truly am not a particularly tidy person. I like to keep things clean but then I strew my shit around: papers, knitting, books, odds and ends. JW is also not a very tidy person and for the most part this is okay: we accrue the detritus of daily life, and then occasionally we have a big tidy-up. Rinse, repeat, rinse. I have better things to do than spend my whole time cleaning the damn house.

But sometimes. Sometimes I do care, and care deeply, and JW doesn't seem to feel this connection to how clean the floors are or whether or not the bed is made in the same way I do and what people will think if they see the mess. What people will think of us. Of me.

And it's not that JW doesn't care if there are little muddy pawprints all over the wooden floors or if you can't sit on the couch because it's covered in newspaper, it's just that he doesn't care about it like I care about it. Like mess is somehow related to my value as a human being.*

I've also noted the way our jobs around the house tend to arrange themselves along traditionally gendered lines. JW takes care of a lot of the stuff in the yard, like lawn-mowning and hedge-clipping and so on. I tend to do stuff like 'tidying' and dusting and indoor type jobs. We both spend equal time doing the wshing up, laundry, floor-cleaning and the bathroom, so this isn't a whinge about the time I spend doing housework vs. the time he spends, just pointing out how things seem to go.

Part of this is due to the fact that I work at home and so I see the dust and the untidyness for more of my day than JW does. JW is also quite a substantial man and so he gets to do a lot of the 'heavy-lifting' type jobs around the place -- things I simply can't do, such as lifting up a bookcase still loaded with books and moving it around.  But a lot of it is just an unspoken agreement that he does the 'man' stuff and I do the 'woman' stuff.

Anyway, in light of these not very deep thoughts, the other day I decided to mow the lawn instead of just expecting JW to do it. We have one of those push-mowers that you have to lean your whole body into, and it took me about twice as long to do it as it usually takes JW, and by the end my arms were bloody sore. But I'd done it.

Which takes me back to cleaning up before the visitors arrive, and wanting JW's Mum to be impressed with how tidy I am, and how well I look after her son. Cringe.

So I have to go and tidy up the spare room now. Sigh.

Still life with dog and extreme mess.

*BTW -- JW has done his fair share of tidying up for the rellos, so don't think I'm hatin' on the man. I'm not, and I have no issues with the actual amount of housework either of us do.

Still on gendered work,  JW has mentioned that he often feels a lot of pressure to be mechanically inclined and fix cars and do that sort of blokey pottering, which is something he's deeply uninterested in, so I am well aware this is a knife that cuts both ways.

Mutual Appreciation Society

Good things about blogging #4678: Nicole. I met Nicole through blogging (actually through another blogging friend, Anthony.)

Nicole is one talented person: she is extremely creative and makes the most astonishing things from fabric and yarn and beads and other odds and ends. Not only that, but she's funny and interesting and seems to fully inhabit herself. I liked her from the moment I heard her laugh -- a real, gorgeous laugh that fills up any space it enters. And she laughs a lot, which is a good thing. Nicole also has an incredible sense of colour and texture: in her craft she has a great knack for choosing combinations of fabrics and notions that work brilliantly.

On Saturday Nicole gave me a needle roll with a pair of vintage needles inside, a pincushion with handmade pins, and a cute little measuring tape covered with felt. The roll and the measuring tape feature some red and white material I have Nicole last year which I rescued from my Mum's bags of scrap fabric.

It had originally been from a dress my Mum wore in the 70s -- a smock-type thing that had become stained. I think it was probably even a dress that Mum had made on her old Singer sewing machine.

Mum had cut the hem from the dress for her quilting, and then never used it (and she stopped quilting about 15 years ago). And so it found its way into a bag of remnants and I rescued it,  and then carried it around with me from uni to Sydney to Perth, thinking that one day I might make something from it. If I ever learned to sew.

As the years passed I realised I'd probably never get around to using it, so when I met Nicole and saw her handiwork, I gave it to her, not thinking about it much. And look what she did with it!

Receiving gifts is always wonderful -- but a handmade gift? A handmade gift from the scrap of a dress my mum wore in the 70s? That's a special sort of special.

I know it's a strange thing to get attached too -- a small square of material -- but it reminds me of Mum and how much she loves making things too. And now it's part of something I can use on a daily basis while I also make things.

It's enough to make me sniffly.

Ahem. So thanks Nicole. It's a wonderful gift and I love it.

The Joss Whedon Post We Had to Have, or Joss Whedon and Feminism, Part One

I don’t mean for this post to stand as the be-all and end-all of the way feminism views the oeuvre of Joss Whedon. Rather, there’s been a few thought-provoking posts out there in the blogosphere about Whedon’s depictions of women, his female heroines, and their relationships with the men around them.

So here's part one: The Good. Feminists love Joss Whedon (mostly) because he basically gave us a TV show we could call our own. The hero, Buffy, was a complex female character who fought off the allegorical dangers of adolescence and ‘being female’ in the form of vampires and other monsters.

Whedon created the character of Buffy specifically as a mixture of weakness and strength. He has stated explicity that he wanted Buffy to be one of society’s most vulnerable – a young girl – and yet also a superhero: the inversion of the scared young woman who usually meets her fate early in a horror film by being eaten/chopped to bits etc. And this works brilliantly within the horror genre, because unlike the conventional realism of say, a cop show, horror allows a much more metaphorical reading of daily life.

Horror has long confronted us with out fears in a mitigated, metaphorical form: a fictional monster almost always functions on some commentary on what a culture or a society finds most terrifying. Monsters also tells us – as does horror – about our bodies and the dark fears we have about them, exploring what Julia Kristeva called ‘the abject’; the fears of being cut and penetrated and drained and so on.

The first couple of seasons of Buffy dealt with the real concerns of most adolescents – fitting in, making friends, family problems, relationships and so on, by reflecting them in this  allegorical mirror. Take the episode of BtVS called ‘The Pack’ in which a group of teenagers go on a murderous rampage after being possessed by hyena demons. It captured perfectly just how threatening a tight-knit gang of young people can be to any outsider;  especially their peers.

Within the show, Willow and Xander are both interesting and I’d say feminist characters. Xander is a male character but one who reads as feminised, and despite his attempts to enact a certain sort of masculine behaviour, he comes across as being a ‘nice’ guy instead of a jerk, and he suffers for it: he is effectively exiled within the school for his lack of masculine conformity. He also functions are the moral centre of the show, especially in later series, and his sense of fair play and equality usually wins out (with some slippages): see, for example, when he buys Cordelia the prom dress she desperately wants but can’t afford.

Conversely Willow is the girl that we (we geeky nerdy feminist types, anyway) all identify with. Buffy is who we sometimes wish we were, but Willow is who we feel the deepest empathy and identification with. And as the show developed over the seven seasons, Willow became the most interesting, and powerful, character. And like many long-time fans of Buffy, I became increasingly frustrated by the way the show stymied her character, especially in the sixth and seventh series. But I’ll save that for the bad.

Of course, as the series evolved character roles changed and the monsters changed to reflect different issues and realities.  I don’t have time/space/patience to do a blow-by-blow exploration of the whole seven series and the way feminist themes were teased out.

I haven’t seen Angel so I can’t really discuss it, but in Firefly Whedon also presents sympathetic, largely interesting and non-stereotypical female characters. Zoe is probably the most ‘masculine’ character aboard Serenity, considering the positive traits typically ascribed to the masculine – she is stoic, calm, strong, heroic etc. Then there’s Kaylee, who is unabashedly sexual without being overly sexualised, and of course there’s the Buffy-esque (only crazy) figure of River who is both strong and fragile, broken and yet integral.

Beyond the specifically feministy slant of both shows, the other reasons many feminists love Whedon’s work is because he’s not afraid of moral complexity. Take, in BtVS, the view on the killing of humans. Yes, lots of vampires and other monsters are disposed of fairly heartlessly, but when humans die, the consequences are depicted as complex, far-ranging and real in a way that you rarely see on television. Most of the characters who are dispatched of in Buffy series are mourned and mourned deeply – the best example, of course, is Joyce, Buffy’s mother.

These aren’t specifically feminist concerns, of course, but I think that any feminist critique of pop culture is interested not just in depictions of women but in depictions of relationships and all their complexity. It could also be argued that female-centric modes of story-telling have usually been constructed as being about relationships – see the dichotomy between stereotypical men’s films or ‘action’ movies, and women’s films, chick flicks, romantic comedies.

Whedon’s shows destabilises these boundaries because he gives us action and relationships: he gives us ‘talk’ about women’s feelings and beliefs, and also gives us ‘action’. He further destabilises the boundaries by making Buffy not an honorary male – like, say, Ripley in the Alien movies. Buffy remains an extremely feminine girl even while she does typically masculine things like rescuing others and exhibiting huge strength, and that this very girliness breaks down the typical distinctions between male and female.

In Firefly and Serenity, Whedon’s moral complexity is more about society as a whole and how it operates. Firefly is a more conventional outsider narrative – the scrappy band of heroes fighting against the powers that be – but I think the Reavers and their creation is a really interesting development that I would have loved to have seen given the long-form treatment as a series. Not saying that the movie wasn’t great, but TV shows offer a far greater scope for teasing out ideas, threads, and characters in a way that is impossible with the necessarily truncated world of cinema.

In Firefly, Whedon is also implicitly concerned with ideas about ‘family’ and the ways that post-modern families are cobbled together not out of blood relations – though these are also important. From a feminist perspective, the idea that you can make a family out of those who share common goals is important: the collective that respects the individual is an important part of feminism. I may be stretching it a bit here, because I don’t think Firefly is as implicitly feminist as BtVS, which I'll get to later.

Okay, that's enough for now.

This Post is About Joss Whedon (sort of)

I just wanted to let you know my post on feminism and Joss Whedon is 1500 words long and I haven't even begun to discuss my issues with Firefly. It will also have a recommended reading list, but I did resist the urge to include footnotes.

I think I'll post it on Monday, BTW, Perth time so don't expect it before midday.  Just letting you know, ok, so you can schedule it into your diaries and set aside a good 15 minutes or so. You may want to make a cuppa beforehand or duck down to the nearest coffee shop for a latte and a snack. Maybe a blueberry bagel? With cream cheese? I love blueberry bagels. The best one I ever had was in NYC of course.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to write about the futuristic concubine and sexual economies. Ta ta for now!

This Post is Not About Joss Whedon

Performance anxiety: when you know people actually want you to do something, but you keep putting it off, because you are afraid of failure, and you wonder why you even mentioned it in the first place, and god knows there was a reason why you never published the damn post anyway because it kinda sucks, and does anyone really want to read a post in which you write about Kristeva and abjection in the context of BtVS?

Or, consider this an open thread. Say what you want.

(With the proviso that I retain the right to delete comments I find abusive, tiresome, unpleasant or pointless, or just because I feel like it.)

Just sayin'

Compare the way the aftermath of Cyclone Larry has been handled in Australia with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Hmmn.

Okay, the comparison is a little bit facile -- the scale of the disaster after Katrina was much bigger, due to the geography of New Orleans, and population densities in the Gulf coast area.

My point is mainly that Australia managed to have rescue and clean-up services on the ground around Innisfail hours after the cyclone passed over. Peter Beattie was up there pretty much the next day and today, two days after, John Howard has also visited the devestated areas. Food, water and tents were sent up as soon as was practical and emergency services are working hard to restore water supplies and electricity.

It will take time for the community of Innisfail to recover and the clean-up is going to be a long and trying process. My thoughts go out to everyone up north who was affected by the cyclone.

But, I'm also glad that as a nation we still have effective and useful ways of dealing with emergencies and that we can provide out own citizens with the help in times of need. And, of course, I'd like to see this spirit extended to other areas and not just natural disasters'.