May 16, 2013

Meteor Employee Shoots a Bull’s Eye Against Sexism, with Help from the Hawkeye Initiative

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, news | Tags: , , , , , , |
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originally posted at XX Factor/Slate
HAWKEYE

Feminist concern with representations of women in comic books and video games is hardly a new thing, nor is it always greeted with support—just ask Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes Vs Women has inspired intense backlash from territorial gamers. But as more and more women enter these previously male-dominated fields, the possibility of feminists effecting change from within the industry has, logically, skyrocketed. Take the case of Meteor Entertainment/Adhesive Games, where a female employee recently punked her boss, and with outstanding results.

Meteor Entertainment is the creator of the free-to-play mech game Hawken, in which users build their own virtual robots and use them to fight other users’ robots. But the tale of the master prank actually begins with a tumblr called The Hawkeye Initiative.

Founded on December 2, 2012, this project creates and solicits original art that addresses the over-sexualization of women in comics by replacing them with a male hero—Marvel’s master archer Hawkeye—standing in the same pose. (Moviegoers may know Hawkeye from Jeremy Renner’s hotsy-totsy portrayal in The Avengers.) A manly man with super strength and agility, Hawkeye posed as, say, Black Cat from The Amazing Spiderman makes a powerful visual point: that comic book women’s costumes, body shapes, and poses undercut their superpowers by overemphasizing their sexuality.

A Meteor employee and fan of the Initiative, who goes by the handle K2, was disgruntled by prominently displayed office art of a scantily-clad woman. (K2 dubbed the woman “Ruby Underboob.”) She conspired with co-worker and artist Sam Kirk to change out the poster with one of a man, equally sexualized and equally naked. And thus was born “Brosie the Riveter.”

Luckily for our merry mischief makers, Meteor CEO Mark Long loved it. In fact, he copped not just to having sexual art around the office, but also to contributing to the creation of that art. He wrote in an email: “I didn’t just hang the picture on the wall. I collaborated on the design with the artist. He and I came up with the Rosie idea. The underboob is pretty much all my fault. Since then, I’ve learned about The Hawkeye Initiative and the larger gender-flip meme going on in comics and games, which is righteous and transgressive. I’m a dumbass, but at least now I know I’m a dumbass!” He and his employees are now in an “open dialogue about gender in comics and gaming.”

K2 told XX Factor, “I’m glad to see awareness of the gender-flipping meme spreading. I hope and expect to see a lot more of it, and other innovations on the theme, too. There’s more than one right way to do this. The Hawkeye Initiative has put out a call to action for more real-world plays in the gender equality space. The more—and the more real-world—the better.”

K2 is also collecting stories of action on the tumblr GenderShenanigans.

All too often, Internet feminism of the kind practiced by The Hawkeye Initiative preaches to the choir, rarely resulting in or even aiming for concrete outcomes. In the case of Meteor Entertainment and their intrepid employees, though, the idea behind The Hawkeye Initiative produced tangible results. That’s my kind of feminism.

Photo courtesy The Hawkeye Initiative

 

May 10, 2013

Miss Julie and the Timeless Art of Slut-Shaming

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , |
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org_img_1366920767_LCross posted at Ms.

Apparently, some things never get old.

Neil LaBute, screenwriter of such movies as a remake of the 1973 film The Wicker Man, about crazy, man-killing witches, has adapted the misogynist classic Miss Julie, written in 1888 by August Strindberg. (If you haven’t heard of Strindberg, think Rush Limbaugh as a 19th-century Swedish playwright: avowedly sexist, angry as hell and determined to use his platform to debunk such radical ideas as “women are human beings.”)

Miss Julie is often praised as one of the best examples of Naturalism in the theater, which strove to present humanity without any veneer in all it’s sexy, shitty, greedy glory. It takes place in 90 minutes, set in one location and features only three characters: an aristocrat named Miss Julie, her father’s valet, Jean, and the cook, Christine, who is also Jean’s fiancé.

On a midsummer night at Julie’s father’s estate, the patriarch is away and thus the servants are at play at an offstage party in the barn. Miss Julie takes a break from dancing with her servants, which is scandal enough, to flirt with Jean and have a few drinks in the kitchen. An overt display of sexuality and mutual seduction culminates in sex, after which Jean proposes they run away together and open a hotel. When Julie says she wants to go with him but cannot supply him with the seed money (the money is all her father’s, obviously), Jean turns cold, calling her a whore and proclaiming:

You lackey lover! You bootback tramp! Shut your mouth and get out of here! … I’ve never seen anybody in my class behave as crudely as you did tonight … I’ve never seen the like of it except in animals and prostitutes!

And then he convinces her to kill herself.

LaBute has set his adaptation—currently playing at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles—in 1929, dresses Julie as a flapper and makes Jean into John, whose Long Island accent never lets us forget his class. Unfortunately, these choices do nothing to improve on the intentions of the original. In fact, they serve largely to betray the playwright’s inability to accept that, despite Strindberg’s predictions, feminism hasn’t actually destroyed society. In both versions, Miss Julie’s inappropriate sexual behavior is the result of a radical mother who raised her “to believe in equality, the independence of women, and all that;” taught her “everything a boy learns;” and even dressed her in boys’ clothes. LaBute’s setting simply replaces the feminist boogeymen that inspired Strindberg—a growing societal belief in women’s right to education, legal recognition that women could own property and plays like fellow Scandinavian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in which a woman dares to assert her humanity—with the success of the suffrage movement, the growing availability of birth control, the New Woman and her daughter, the flapper.

LaBute does nothing to address the historical inconsistencies that this creates. Whereas Strindberg’s Miss Julie’s behavior represented a radical departure from that of her peers, LaBute’s Miss Julie, as signified by the flapper dress, is part of a massive, culture-wide trend of women taking their lives and their sexuality into their own hands. Additionally, as Lisa Hix recently pointed out on The Ms. Blog, despite the prevailing image of the flapper as Gatsby‘s wealthy Daisy Buchanan, the flapper movement actually originated among the working class. Nevertheless, LaBute slut-shames his Julie just like Strindberg does, and she, accordingly, hates herself, just as if she were a Victorian aristocrat.

While Strindberg’s characters do go back and forth between extreme and seemingly contradictory behavior, these contradictions remain internal to the characters and in fact become clear only when considered in relation to the stringent social mores and resulting hypocrisy of the time. LaBute’s context provides no such throughline. On the contrary, it only makes it more baffling that these two people carry around this much guilt. Lily Rabe as Julie furthers the confusion by affecting an accent and timbre of voice obviously modeled off of Katherine Hepburn. Sounding like the epitome of the self-defined woman that Hepburn was, while doing and saying things that neither Hepburn nor any character she ever played would do or say, only makes this Julie even more anachronistic, especially since Hepburn wasn’t popular until the ’30s. On the other hand, the choice does drive home the fact that the playwright thinks women in pants are a bad idea.

Perhaps because the parallel doesn’t actually work, LaBute doesn’t address the period other than through Julie’s costume. During an hour-and-45 minute play in which both characters’ main action is “to drink,” he never once refers to the fact that at the time during which he set the play, alcohol was illegal and not in small part because of strong women asserting their cultural influence through organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. While Strindberg’s play features a company of reveling servants who enter the kitchen and dance while Jean and Julie fuck offstage, LaBute’s version fails to take advantage of the fact that a little Charleston or Snakehips could have done a lot to contextualize the offstage action as well as serving, as Strindberg’s dance does, as a visceral metaphor for sex. As a result, the only thing the adaptation adds to the original is running time.

Jo Bonney, who has worked with LaBute before, directs this world premiere. Though Bonney often gets pigeonholed as the woman director who works on really masculine plays, at least half the playwrights she’s worked with have been women. Here Bonney does the job of a director on a new play: She brings what LaBute wrote faithfully to life. But though a director has no control over what the characters say and do, she does have some influence over why. Bonney could have structured the cause and effect of the performance to tell the story of a woman shamed into an unnecessary death rather than that of a woman doomed by her mother’s feminism.

Strindberg would later suffer no fewer than three psychological breakdowns—one for each marriage—during which, for example, he accused one wife of trying to drive him crazy by sending rays through the walls. (Some scholars credit these breakdowns to drug-induced experiments he performed on himself as part of his dabblings in alchemy and the occult.) Perhaps history will provide us with some insight into LaBute’s obsession with stories that punish strong women and warn society against the dangers they presumably pose. I was hoping his Miss Julie would be more than yet another incarnation of his same old thing, but alas.

Unfortunately, slut-shaming still sells.

Photo by Michael Lamont of Logan Marshall-Green as John and Lily Rabe as Miss Julie in Neil LaBute’s world-premiere adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie at The Geffen Playhouse.

 

April 16, 2013

The New Evil Dead: A New Lesson in Masculinity. And Oh Yeah, Tree Rape.

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, review | Tags: , , , , , |
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evil-dead-poster1Cross posted at Ms.

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains major spoilers. Also, TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE.

I am not really into gore for gore’s sake: When I go to horror movies, I want to be held in suspense and suddenly surprised, not just grossed out. Luckily for Sam Raimi fans, the new version of the 1981 cult classic Evil Dead manages to combine both surprise and gore. Using Raimi’s signature vertigo-inducing camera work and long, taut pauses, the new movie keeps you on the edge of your seat—until the tension is broken by something terrifying and you practically jump out of it. It’s also got blood. Lots and lots and lots of blood.

The first Evil Dead was a low-budget film that used such old-fashioned techniques as stop-motion to make bodies appear to melt. Though next-gen director Fede Alvarez also used mostly trick props, body modifications and makeup with very few digital effects, the gore in this film is decidedly more realistic than in the original. Likewise, the new film takes itself and the horror genre far more seriously than its melodramatic inspiration.

Though in a clear homage to Evil Dead II, not just one but two people have to sever their own limbs, Evil Dead is not torture porn. Despite its realism, the new movie is still about demons possessing people and doing horrible things to the bodies they are in as well as to the bodies around them. This film is about supernatural evil, not human evil, and the basic human fears it draws on are as much spiritual and psychological as physical. This violence exists not for its own sake, but to teach the characters a lesson, and this time around, the lesson is different.

In fact the film is not strictly a remake but rather a “what if five kids showed up at the same cabin from the first Evil Dead, and had roughly the same things happen to them that happened to the five kids who stayed there 32 years ago?”  Alvarez and Raimi have said they hope to make another Evil Dead II and then bring the two story lines together in Army of Darkness II, implying that the protagonist from this film might meet up with a grown up Ash (Bruce Campbell), from the first. I hope it happens, because the updates this film makes to the original makes the new movie more feminist.

In the first movie, Ash is clearly at a disadvantage due to his sentimental connection to his girlfriend and his sister. You see, in the Evil Dead world, once a demon possesses a body the only way to get rid of the demon is to dismember the body, burn it, or bury it alive. Ash, signified as a girly man by his name–which is really Ashley–cannot accept that the bodies that used to be his loved ones are demons, hesitates to destroy them, and suffers as a result. Though at the end Ash is saved by a symbol of his love for his girlfriend, there is no doubt that the lesson he has learned from his bout with evil is that he has to be ruthless.

In the new movie, David has come back to the cabin, which his family now owns, for the first time in years. He brings his girlfriend and meets two childhood friends there to help his sister detox. But David is disadvantaged not by his sentimental connections to the women in his life, but rather by the fact that he has failed to stay close enough to his family. Named like a king, the manly man David missed his mother’s prolonged illness and death and hasn’t seen his sister in so long he can’t really say he knows her very well at all. His fight with evil teaches him a very different lesson than the one Ash needed to learn: It teaches him to trust his sister and to be willing to sacrifice himself for his family.

Much to the chagrin of feminists, yes, the new movie does include a version of the infamous tree rape scene in the original, but the changes to it are telling. Whereas in the original, Ash’s sister Cheryl is held down to the ground by the branches of possessed trees, in the new movie, David’s sister Mia is held suspended in the air. And whereas in the original the trees are humanized in the ways they hold Cheryl down, the trees in the new film are distinctly trees. The resulting image is more like that of Christ or the figure at the center of DiVinci’s Vitruvian man than that of a woman being held down by a rapist.

The actor’s response to the rape is also different. Whereas in the original, when penetrated, the woman on the ground began to make sexual sounds and to breathe as if having sex, in the new movie, the actor is clearly in terror the entire time. This is violence, not sex. Most importantly, though neither Cheryl nor Mia’s friends believe her when she says she was raped, Cheryl never gets any justice, and her brother Ash escapes alive despite his doubt. Mia’s friends, on the other hand, all die, even her brother David, who finally learns that protecting the women in his life is more important than protecting himself.

Bruce Campbell said on twitter that “Evil Dead is omni-gender in its violence,” but that’s not entirely true. The only sexual assault committed is against a woman, and the only characters who cut themselves are women. But the point of feminism in film is not to avoid representing the horrible things that happen to women; it is to show that women survive despite them.

In the new Evil Dead, Mia is the only one left standing at the end. She slaughters the main demon in an act of physical strength (aided by a chainsaw, natch) that Cheryl could never have accomplished. If only Mia’s friends had believed her instead of dismissing her as hysterical and judging her by her past, they, too might have lived. But neither what the trees did to her nor the losses she has suffered will hold Mia back. This protagonist will not be a victim again.

At least not until the next Evil Dead II.

 

April 4, 2013

The Little-Told Story of Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Todd Lincoln

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, interview | Tags: , , , , , , |
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Mary T. & Lizzy K.Cross posted at Ms.

As the DVD of Spielberg’s latest epic, Lincoln, hit shelves last week, the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. was telling a different Lincoln story: that of Mary Todd Lincoln and her dressmaker, former slave Elizabeth Keckley.

Keckley, author of Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, was born into slavery, bought her freedom, opened her own dressmaking shop and was eventually hired to be the personal dressmaker of the first lady. The tempestuous, intensely personal relationship between the two women—born of shopping trips, creative collaboration and the intimate hours spent in fittings— is the subject of Tazewell Thompson‘s new play, Mary T. and Lizzy K.

When Mary Todd Lincoln left the White House, she suffered a financial crisis. Thinking to help her former employer, Keckley wrote her book in which, as Thompson told the Ms. Blog,

She not only talked about her life as a girl, as a slave and the horrors that she suffered. She wrote about everything she witnessed in the White House. She wrote about Mary’s emotional swings, her spending habits, the outrageous arguments she had with the president, her insane jealousy.

Keckley’s plan was a total failure. Though the book created sympathy for Lincoln, Keckley was widely castigated. It did not sell and Lincoln never spoke to her friend again. Keckley died in a home for destitute women that she, in better times, had founded.

The 100-minute play imagines a conversation between the two women that never happened. It asks, “What if Keckley had come to visit Lincoln when she was confined to Bellevue Place?” (Keckley did, in fact, try numerous times to visit her former friend at the Illinois mental institution, but Lincoln never admitted her.) “What if they had made up?”

Mary T. & Lizzy K.

From an opening scene in which Keckley is finally allowed to visit, Thompson takes the audience back in time, allowing them to witness some of the most intimate moments not only of the women’s friendship but also of Mary’s relationship with her husband. Years of research by Thompson inform the detail-rich characterizations, but on the page the play looks more like something by existentialist Samuel Beckett than an historical costume drama. That’s because, as Naomi Jacobson, who plays Lincoln, told Ms.,

I think he’s distilled [Mary] into a kind of essence. It’s a psychological, emotional portrait. There is a fierceness to her. There is a fighting spirit to her. She is a survivor.

Lincoln shares this fierceness with Keckley, who, unlike her mercurial employer, stays constant. Actor Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris says that, as an educated professional, Keckley was not the type of woman to feign inferiority with her white employer:

She has clawed her way out of the world of slavery and wants nothing to do with that world. (And not in a negative way—because she did actually quite a lot for free slaves who came through D.C. She created the Contraband Relief Association, because there was no like guidebook for a freed slave, and she saw that people didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go, had no support.) From what I’ve read about their relationship, her assertiveness was possibly why they worked so well together.

Nevertheless, the women for whom Keckley worked, Lincoln included, often failed to pay her for her work, and the sense of entitlement underlying Lincoln’s character manifests as racial privilege in one particularly fraught moment. Asked how she approaches playing a character so unaware of her privilege, Jacobson said,

I think these two women had a similar kind of spirit, but what is surrounding every particle of the atmosphere between these two women is the slave/owner relationship. In the air all around them is a given of inequality due to skin color. But then you’ve got Elizabeth giving Mary instruction. Elizabeth becomes not just a confidante friend but also a caretaker and mother. So these women are negotiating a whole set of relationships both spoken and unspoken.

Mary T. and Lizzy K. invites audiences to go on an fantastical journey as well as a historical one. In imagining, “What if these two friends had made up?” Thompson essentially asks us to imagine, “What if the end of the Civil War had represented true racial reconciliation?” But though the audience will find their hearts warmed by witnessing two friends reunited, the truth is never too far away. Abraham Lincoln will be shot. Mary will witness it. Keckley will die destitute. And the races, alas, will not yet have put aside all their differences 148 years later.

The play is well worth seeing. Reconciliation, after all, is a process, and storytelling can be an important part of it. If you’re in D.C., spend a night at Arena Stage imagining a different ending to the story.

To read more of the interviews with the artists, click here.

Photos of Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris as Keckley, Naomi Jacobson as Lincoln and Joy Jones as Ivy (Keckley’s apprentice) by Scott Suchman.

 

April 1, 2013

Race on Stage and in the Rehearsal Room: Tazewell Thompson’s Mary T. and Lizzy K.

Posted by Holly L. Derr under interview | Tags: , , , , |
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What made you want to write a play about Elizabeth Keckly and Mary Todd Lincoln?

Thompson: I was actually commissioned to write play in 2001 and the only stipulation was that it be set in Washington. When Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena, said “Washington” I immediately thought political and I thought Lincoln. The idea to make it part of Arena’s American Presidents Projects came later.

As I was looking through various books, some of them very academic, very dry, I kept coming across these footnotes that said “Elizabeth Keckly, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, Four Years in the White House.” The footnotes were always connected with Mary Todd Lincoln. So I sought out that book because I really wasn’t getting anywhere, and this is what ignited me.

Keckly’s book is less dry than the other accounts because the way she came into the world, and her life on the plantation and the nefarious humiliations and whippings she received, what she had to subject herself too, and how she pulled herself up out of all of that and bought her freedom, and then she had this incredible business in Washington where she made dresses for Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant and Mrs. Robert E. Lee and some of the highest society in Washington until Mary came along and said, no, you will work now just for me.

What was the nature of their relationship?

Thompson: It was a real complex relationship at a time when the country was being torn apart because of slavery. Here are these two women born the same year from completely different backgrounds: One, a former slave who bought her freedom; the other who was born into great wealth. And they end up coming together through the White House years and become very close friends. One was the personal and exclusive dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, and the other was a person who had all kinds of psychological problems. And yet she sought out this black woman, not only as her seamstress and dressmaker but her emotional support.

Jacobson: Mary Todd was a seamstress in her own right. From the time she was a child she loved it. And she would go and buy fabric and design clothes. She made a lot of her own clothes. Seems to me that there was a meeting of the spirits, a meeting of the minds, a meeting of artists coming together. And then they would go on shopping expeditions together and buy fabric and buttons and talk about this. So they were creating together. And then you’re being fitted and touched and that kind of intimacy. So I can imagine the hours and hours spent half-naked in a fitting, you talk about everything. And Elizabeth became close to Abe Lincoln and close to the family and close to the kids. And Mary didn’t have a lot of other friends. And I think Lizzy was also a powerful, independent, fierce survivor and I think these two women had a similar kind of spirit. Then layer on to that what is surrounding every particle of the atmosphere between these two women: The slave owner relationship. In the air all around them is a given of inequality due to skin color. But then you’ve got Elizabeth giving Mary instruction. Elizabeth becomes not just a confidante friend but also a caretaker and mother. So these women are negotiated a whole set of relationships both spoken and unspoken.

Thompson: Elizabeth Keckly was not the maid of Mary Todd Lincoln. She did certainly make dresses for Mary, but they come together on very equal terms in my play. And certainly Mary’s outspoken and problematic and temperamental and she’s set in her ways and violently jealous and all of those things, but Elizabeth Keckly is not subservient. She’s not pliant. She’s not a wallflower, and she’s extraordinarily expressive about the way she feels, about the way she’s treated and about what she wants out of her life.

Do you think Elizabeth Keckly was as assertive in real life as she is in the play?

Luqmaan-Harris: She would have to be. Form what I’ve read about their relationship that her assertiveness was possibly why they worked so well together. I think Mary Todd Lincoln was a person who needed boundaries. Her mom died when she was very little. And so I think she would respond very well to – and not necessarily as in she acquiesces to everything that Lizzy says, but – I think they have a combative relationship to a certain degree and I also think they have a collaborative relationship in the way you do with your dear, dear friend.

On the page, the play looks more like poetry than prose. How does that inform you as an actor?

Luqmaan-Harris: The punctuation is helpful in that it gives you phrasing, so there’s not so much guesswork in terms of deciphering meaning. But one of the first things he told us was you can have flexibility within that. There are rhythmic choices that might suit you as an actor that goes against the punctuation given.  There are a lot of short phrase period short phrase period short phrase period and sometimes if you were to speak like that it would break up the rhythm. So you do have to find the flow. It’s written almost like a score. I used to be a musician so I’m actually drawn to the writing. I find it quite lyrical. It’s similar to how Shakespeare writes in a way. You get clues in the writing and when there are those mono-syllables it can tell you the intention and what you need to bring to the scene. And then you have these flowing, beautiful lines you know that you are serving a different purpose. So it’s a very good guide.

I noticed that there are no dialects written into the piece. Are you performing with dialects?

Luqmaan-Harris: I am doing a dialect. Tazewell wanted us to do a bit but he doesn’t want the dialogue to overshadow the words. Reading the script over and over and over again and the rhythm that is given to you on the page would just pop into my head and a dialect came with it. It’s very lightly peppered with a Southern flair because Elizabeth Keckly, she was born in Virginia but then she moved quite a bit and she was in St. Louis for a while and then she lived in Maryland for a bit and then DC. I wanted to capture a little bit of her worldliness and her refinement in her dialect.

Jacobson: I’ve taken on a bit of dialect without going too far. Taz wanted a hint and I tried to honor that. I tried to honor the accuracy of that Kentucky sound.

What’s it like playing a historical character about whom people already have certain ideas?

Jacobson: I’ve done as much research as I can, but I’m not portraying a historical Mary Todd Lincoln, I’m portraying Taz’s. So my first source of information is the play. I know Taz has done his research, so I trust that. And I’m aware that everyone’s going to be thinking about Sally Field, but there’s nothing I can do about what people expect. I’m trying to be as true as I can to Taz’s vision, to the Mary that I’ve been reading about, and to the Mary that lives inside of me. I can’t bring Mary Todd Lincoln to life. I can bring the woman’s characteristics and her emotional reality and her emotional life through Naomi to the stage. I’ve got a couple of things going for me, and one is that I’m really short. So I try to identify the things in me that are like me. I’m quite bratty and I’m very emotional, and I can be really high and low. And then I try to identify the things that aren’t like Mary and go what does Mary have that I don’t have and then I need to look in myself for those qualities. I can always find it because we’re all human. But if Mary has more of that than I do, I try to get a hook into it and then pull it up out of me and make it live a little larger.

There’s a moment in the play in which Mary Todd uses her racial privilege to intimidate Ivy, Keckly’s assistant. How do you approach such a moment and related issues of race and prejudice in rehearsal?

Luqmaan-Harris: There hasn’t been any sort of dialogue about it. These people just are who they are and there are moments where Mary Todd Lincoln does go back into her past where she grew up having slaves and she snaps into speaking like that to these two African-American women. But those moments are meant to be ugly. They’re meant to expose the quick shift that you can have when you are conditioned to treat someone in a certain way and then all of the sudden—I can’t imagine when the emancipation proclamation came down, I don’t think it was just the slaves who had difficulty adjusting. And for a lot of people who had been slave owners, just because you had slaves doesn’t mean you were brutal to them necessarily. But it does mean that you were conditioned to have slaves around you and you spoke to them in a certain way, you dealt with them in a certain way. I find that our ensemble is a true quartet and so we are all pretty fearless. So there was no discussion really needed about—there were no kid gloves put on. We didn’t have to have a sit down and go, “Okay, we’re entering into this murky territory, everybody remember we’re just acting.” I think we are all extremely professional and we also have a wonderful rapport so it never needed to be discussed, which I actually prefer.

Jacobson: In the moment on the stage it’s about another woman. There’s a protection of Abraham, and she was irrationally jealous of other women. So partly it’s racial, but partly it’s women. Other women flirted with her husband and he flirted back. But it’s hard. There’s a moment I have to do on stage that every fiber of my being bulks at. But all I can do is take the energy that it is in front of me obstructing me and put it behind me and let it propel me forward. I take the obstacle and I make it the motivation. So it’s the female stuff, saying don’t you dare undermine me with my husband, don’t you dare flirt with my husband, and Mary takes it a step further and says, “Go find a rag or a bucket in a corner somewhere and make yourself useful.” And in that moment, if you are on the verge of having love pulled out from under you, you have to weight the rug with everything you can and use whatever you have to use, whatever is at your fingertips to make sure that rug is in place. It’s not about oh I hate you and so I’m going to make sure you stay down, it’s you are trying to usurp my position. There’s imminent threat here. She’s been abandoned before, so this threat is hard-wired into her.

Thompson: I keep the room very spirited, very open. People can say what they like. I keep a very disciplined room as well. We start on time and we have fun. I’ve directed quite a few plays where race has played a very key role. I’m working with actors, I’m working with artists, so we tend to be a much more liberal group. I’ve never hired an actor who I believed had an ax to grind with people of color or women. So there’s never been a problem. I can’t say I approach it like every other play because that’s not true. This play is about social and political issues. But it’s never been uncomfortable. Of course it always opens a great deal of discussion. And sometimes we need to relieve whatever tension comes into the room because these are very hot button issues, very emotional and very controversial. And argumentative issues. But we always know that we’re there for the greater good. I like to do plays that are about something. I like plays that really not only touch the heart but cause people to ask questions and to question what kind of world we’re living in and have us all take a deeper look at ourselves and how we live our lives and what our neighbors might be going through.

What’s next for this play?

Thompson: During the entire rehearsal period I have been coming in with rewrites, with scene changes, with edits, one scene that was supposed to start in one place I’ve moved to another, I’ve written out an entire scene. Because I love to direct and I have a very strong point of view about my play, it would have been very difficult for the first time around to let somebody else do it. If it has a life, and I sure hope it does, I don’t think I’ll have a problem with letting other people direct it. But because the play has three women, I’d certainly like to find a wonderful woman director.

Throughout my whole life women have played a very, very key role. I was raised by nuns, and then my grandmother took me while I was in high school, and while I was in high school I was influenced by a wonderful teacher who was also a poet. Women have always played a very key role in my life so it’s really my way of promoting roles for women, but it’s also my way of honoring and acknowledging strong women in my life. I love both these characters.

Where are the black women directors?

Luqmaan-Harris: I’ve worked with a couple and they’ve both been wonderful, but it’s more on the indie-theater scene. They are around and they are doing amazing work. But I think every step towards progress—they’re steps they’re not leaps. So I’m hoping with this surge of new black playwrights and surge of a more “colorblindly casted” world, I think inherently we will see a surge in the black female directors. It’s my hope anyway. It’s not for lack of trying. For black females there’s a bit of history of invisibility. There’s a long road ahead of us.

So I’m not imagining it–there is a surge of new black playwrights?

Luqmaan-Harris: In New York I have for sure. In New York there’s a new festival called the New Black Fest, which is all about black playwrights and black directors. It is becoming quite a phenomenon. The Classical Theater of Harlem is having a major surge and they have a wonderful reading series on Monday nights where actors can show up and playwrights have new plays that they’re working on so you go up and you do cold readings of plays for an audience. There are people who have voices and those voices are starting to be heard. And they are loud and beautiful and poetic.

 

March 25, 2013

Feminism, the Internet, and the Imagination

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis, teaching, theory | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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To think it thinkable shortcuts no work and shields one from no responsibility. Quite the contrary, it may be a necessary prerequisite to assuming responsibility, and it invites the honorable work of radical imagination. — “On Being White,” by Marilyn Frye

Slide1This paper was originally presented as part of WAM! LA’s 2013 Conference.

30 years ago feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye wrote about the importance of the imagination to feminism in The Politics of Reality. 20 years ago I read the book in a college Women’s Studies class, and to this day my feminism has been inspired by her explication of how to see oppression and imagine freedom. Oppression, she claims in her essay of that name, cannot be seen for what it is if you only look close up:

Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.

While stepping far enough back from a birdcage to observe it’s structure can be done in the space of a small room, stepping far enough back from our lived reality to see the patterns that indicate oppressive social structures can be only done in our minds. As if that’s not hard enough, we must step far enough back to be able to see not only the patterns that have affected us in our individual lives but also patterns that only affect those less privileged than ourselves. In so doing, we both gain clarity of vision and exercise what I like to call the empathetic imagination.

The empathetic imagination is able both to connect the dots between the individual instances of prejudice and limitation that make up oppression and to understand that even limitations that only apply to other people are still oppression. This is not a new kind of feminism, it is in many ways the oldest kind, but it is a kind increasingly at odds with today’s individualized, consumerized culture. From contemporary parenting practices to technology to for-profit online education, our culture encourages people (young people in particular) to place themselves at the center of their experience and of the world around them.

The question for me, as an academic, a writer, and a theater maker, is how can we engage young people in making the connections that allow them to see oppression as a “network of systematically related barriers?” And how do we help them empathize with people they don’t know, discrimination they haven’t experienced, and struggles that are greater than theirs?

First we have to learn to speak their language, by which I don’t mean the slang they use but rather the way that they use images to communicate rather than words. I got on tumblr recently after a few students told me, “It’s where the young people are.” I have heard millennials described as digital natives and boomers as digital immigrants; I consider myself a second-generation digital immigrant: My family was one of the first on the block to have a computer, but it started up in DOS, so that experience doesn’t really help me with today’s click, drag, and drop interfaces. So while it’s taking me a bit to crack tumblr, I can see that indeed it is where the young people are. And it is largely image driven.

In this virtual space, I can use images in ways that help viewers make connections between individual instances of discrimination and prejudice (what we in academia call critical thinking). The success of the post below, which has been reblogged/liked about 15,000 times and counting, shows that tumblr’s users are already asking questions about whose stories our culture values and about representations of oppression (or the lack thereof) within those stories:

Slide1 Slide2 Slide3 Slide4 Slide5 Slide6 Slide7

My question is whether these same viewers are willing to engage in an even more radical act of the imagination: Using words to create their own images in their minds. My internet plays, written about social issues with as few descriptors as possible in the same space as a blog post, challenge readers to engage imaginatively with words by turning them into images, thereby engaging imaginatively in the creation of the stories, the characters, and the worlds. Whether we imagine stories that reflect the systemic oppression that is reality or stories that reveal the possibility of a new, more free reality, when we create our own images we engage in a radical, counter-cultural act.

The more life I live, the more I am forced to confront how little control we have over anything, how little power we have to align the myriad forces that have to align in order for us to achieve our goals and realize our dreams. I think we tell stories largely to organize what is actually chaos. Stories put events into a narrative in which we can identify cause and effect. They embody intangible forces in characters, put words to our deepest fears and desires, and paint pictures of what cannot be seen by the eye.

When we summon the imagination to tell stories that feature people who are other than us, we teach ourselves to empathize with them. I write plays like A Woman and Her Doctor in such a way that none of the characters have a defined race, challenging readers to imagine the play in their head with characters who may look quite unlike the characters that populate most Hollywood films, television, and theater. I hope the same tumblr users that respond so strongly to pure images will be interested in using words to create their own images as well. The experiment is in progress.  Input is welcome.

 

March 25, 2013

10 Funny RapIST Jokes

Posted by Holly L. Derr under feminist analysis | Tags: , , |
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dildo

Trigger Warning: Rape

I went to a comedy club last night. I’ve been before, so I knew what to expect: Lots of penis, and penis of poor quality at that. To keep myself from getting too annoyed, I thought it would be fun–or at least distracting–to count sexist jokes. About two minutes in we got a domestic violence joke about Rihanna. Then I realized as an intersectional feminist I should count racist jokes, fat jokes, and homophobia too. Then I ran out of fingers to count on. Then we got a full seven-minute defense of Tosh.0 and rape jokes. Then the MC followed up the hilarious performance of the pretty blonde by sexualizing her and encouraging the audience to do the same. Then, I hung my head in shame and cried, “My God my God, you’d be totally justified in forsaking us.”

Then I came home and wrote my own stand up routine. I was inspired by three things: the hilarious blonde’s choice to turn the penis jokes on their heads (pun intended) by doing a routine about a visit to the gynecologist; the MC’s bit making fun of his homophobic friends; and Mel Brooks’ take on his own comedy:

How do you get even with Adolf Hitler? There’s only one way to get even. You have to bring him down with ridicule. One of my lifelong jobs has been to make the world laugh at Adolf Hilter.

As long as rape culture makes rape jokes acceptable, let’s use the opportunity to take these guys down. Next time you’re at an open mic, feel free to see if a few of these can’t turn the conversation around:

I mean, what’s with these guys, rapists? Are they like, (in stupid guy voice) “Well, I’m too ugly to get anyone to sleep with me any other way. (Doing best slack-jawed yokel) Uh-duuuuurrrr.”

Poor rapists, they have to work extra hard these days. I mean these self-defense classes are really working. Now that the word is out that the best moment to fight back/attempt escape from a rapist is when they take one hand off of you in order to whip it out, they have to like practice their hand-eye coordination and you know really work on phalange strength, keep their fingers nimble. Word is they’ve developed a training video. It’s called Grand Theft Auto.

What did the rapist say when his Mom tried to get him to pay rent? “Fuck you!”

Didya ever hear a rapist justify pedophilia? (In stupid guy voice) “How was I to know she was a kid! All my adult women friends carry baby dolls around!” Yeah. Hey rapist, is that so they can show the doctor where you hurt them, too?

Hey did you hear about what’s happening at UNC? Apparently a student was told she violated the honor code by speaking out about her rape. She was like, “Ummm, I think you may have confused the honor code with the bro code.”

A rapist walks into a bar. Nobody notices.

Man, these poor guys in Steubenville. I mean, what are they gonna do with their lives? For a whole year they’re not going to be the most privileged people in their community! It’s unconscionable! And now, for the rest of their days, they’re always to going to be those guys that elicited the sympathy of an entire nation. Tough break.

What did the rapist say when his mom threw him out of her house? “Fuck you!”

Two rapists walk into a bar. “Ow!” they say, “That hurts!” So I’m like, “Just lie back and enjoy it, motherfuckers.”

A rapist, a priest, and Roman Polanski walk into a bar. The bartender looks ‘em over and says, “Help me out here. Which of you is which?”

 

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