Max Thornton – Bitch Flicks

Touching Friendship in ‘Marie’s Story’

‘Marie’s Story’ dramatizes the real-life biography of Marie Heurtin, a deafblind girl who was taken in by a convent in the late nineteenth century. It’s an intimate portrayal of an unusual relationship between two young women.

Written by Max Thornton.

The relationship between Christianity and disability is complex and many-sided, encompassing stigma and pity, aid and condescension, systematic exclusion and the creation of refuge spaces – and it’s not just an academic concern for scholars of religion. Societies that took shape under the influence of western Christianity still reflect and perpetuate Christian philosophical and ethical ideas, both in cultural attitudes and in policy and law. Disability is no exception. Levitical purity codes, New Testament healing narratives, and Augustinian theology of original sin all contribute to the mishmash of ableism that pervades twenty-first century US culture.

Disability scholars and cultural critics are doing some terrific work to examine and dismantle ableism. Some of my favorites include Andrew Pulrang at Disability Thinking (and his podcast, Disability.TV), the Disability Visibility Project, and the BBC’s Ouch podcast. You don’t have to spend long reading disability criticism to learn that one of the most hated forms of disability representation in popular culture is inspiration porn. The late, wonderful, deeply mourned Stella Young put it like this:

marie's-story-inspiration-porn — Ugggghhhhh

“[In inspiration porn] we’re objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, ‘Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.’ But what if you are that person?”

Hollywood in particular loves inspiration porn, to that point that watching a movie about a disabled person is a source of dread for anyone who cares about disability studies. Will the disabled person be a precious angel, too good for this sinful earth? Will they exist primarily to teach the non-disabled protagonist a lesson? Will they be a bitter cripple who gradually triumphs over this dreadful tragedy? Will I throw up in my mouth?

I approached Marie’s Story with less trepidation than usual, though, both because it’s a small French film rather than slushy Oscar-bait, and because the titular Marie is played by a Deaf actress, the talented young Ariana Rivoire. For the most part, thankfully, my confidence was well-placed.

Marie’s Story dramatizes the real-life biography of Marie Heurtin, a deafblind girl who was taken in by a convent in the late nineteenth century. The convent educated deaf children, but felt ill-equipped to teach a deafblind child who had no communication skills – until one very determined nun, Sister Marguerite, insisted on giving Marie a chance.

So far, so Miracle Worker, and in the early stages the film certainly hits a lot of beats familiar from popular narratives of Helen Keller’s life: the terrible fights with the strong-willed mentor, the transformation from wildling to neatly-coiffed well-mannered young woman, the come-to-Jesus moment of language comprehension. What’s distinctive about Marie’s Story is its convent setting and the normalization of the deaf environment (how many movies have you seen that pass the Bechdel Test in sign language as well as spoken words?).

Wisely, given popular Christianity’s reprehensible enthusiasm for the doubly nauseating Inspiration Porn With Added Jesus, Marie’s Story treads lightly around the religion aspect. No miracle healings or trite theodicies here – the most explicitly theological sequence in the film is a conversation around mortality, when Marie asks in frustration: “Who is God? Where is he? I can’t touch him.” The film as a whole functions as a panentheistic affirmation that she absolutely can touch God: despite Christianity’s emphasis on sight and sound as the primary senses for divine encounter, Marie’s alternative embodiment is the locus for divine encounter through touch and scent. From the opening sequence, in which Sister Marguerite climbs a tree and, looking for all the world like The Creation of Adam, extends a hand to a frightened Marie, this film stresses the power of bodily touch.

The film doesn’t entirely escape certain inspiration porn pitfalls, primarily in voiceovers of Sister Marguerite’s diary entries where she gushes about how much she’s learned from Marie and describes Marie’s transformation in weird racialized and colonial terms of “savagery” and “imprisonment.” However, Marguerite’s own chronic illness keeps the relationship from being too one-sided. It’s in the final third that the film really shines, as Marie develops agency and character of her own, even tending to Marguerite just as the nun had previously cared for her. In perhaps the most moving sequence, Marie teaches her parents how to greet her in sign language, with Marguerite translating and facilitating but never speaking for or over Marie.

Ultimately, this is not a film about Saint Sister Marguerite and her noble civilizing mission to help a poor deafblind girl. Instead, it’s an intimate portrayal of an unusual relationship between two young women (watch for a scene where they lie in a meadow together like Bella and Edward), a quietly beautiful story of faith and female friendship.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. He studies theology, disability, and gender, and gets really excited when they all come together.

‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ Is a Feminist and Comedic Triumph

White men are background players in the world of ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ (and, of those who do appear, there’s scarcely a one who isn’t either comically inept or flat-out evil). As the lyrics of the theme song state, “White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes, but females are strong as hell, unbreakable. They alive, dammit!” The show is fundamentally about the collective trauma of growing up female in a woman-hating world.

Written by Max Thornton.

Like sitcom enthusiasts all across America, I spent my weekend mainlining my latest obsession, Tina Fey’s new show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. NBC’s critical darlings – The Office, 30 Rock, Community, and Parks and Recreation – have all trickled off our screens over the past few years, and Kimmy was to have filled the void; but NBC can’t let itself have anything nice without self-sabotaging, and passed the show on to Netflix. Someone in the network’s upper echelons has presumably spent the whole weekend in bitter self-recrimination for throwing away what would have been NBC’s best new show since 2009.

This poster promises to upend How I Met Your Mother's yellow umbrella and its white, heteropatriarchal norms. — This poster promises an inversion of *How I Met Your Mother*‘s yellow umbrella and the white, heteropatriarchal sitcom norms it represents.

A cynic might suggest that NBC’s cold feet had less to do with the show’s premise (a young woman adjusting to life outside the underground bunker in which she has spent the last 15 years as the captive of an apocalyptic cult) than with its profound lack of interest in the white men who so dominate the television landscape. The opening credits make this abundantly clear: only one white man’s name appears, that of co-creator Robert Carlock. White men are background players in the world of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (and, of those who do appear, there’s scarcely a one who isn’t either comically inept or flat-out evil). As the lyrics of the theme song state, “White dudes hold the record for creepy crimes, but females are strong as hell, unbreakable. They alive, dammit!”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYNbp0u8WjA”]

All of the reviews I’ve seen have lauded the show for handling its dark premise so pitch-perfectly, attributing the comedic transmutation to the showrunners’ biting 30 Rock-honed wit or to Ellie Kemper’s wonderful performance as Kimmy. The real reason it works so well, though, is because the show is fundamentally about womanhood in general. Kimmy’s specific trauma is a reflection of, and metaphor for, the collective trauma of growing up female in a woman-hating world.

The underground bunker, into which Kimmy is forced as a newly pubescent 14-year-old, represents the constraints of heteropatriarchal gender norms, which are most fully embodied in Jon Hamm’s creepy cult leader. He emotionally abuses and manipulates the women he has imprisoned, gets inside their heads, interprets the Bible in a way that supports his lies, and – once he’s on trial – charms and dazzles everyone around him into accepting his nonsense. The bunker-as-patriarchy metaphor is made explicit more than once: in the pilot episode, when Matt Lauer observes, “I’m always amazed at what women will do because they’re afraid of being rude”; when Kimmy realizes her wealthy employer’s loveless marriage is a bunker in its own way; when a certain upscale fitness trend is revealed to be yet another way to keep women in a dark room doing what a man tells them to.

This robot is much more sympathetic than most white men on TV (and off it).

The women of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, who have all been victimized by heteropatriarchy, use an assortment of coping mechanisms. Cyndee exploits her victim status to get free stuff from all the people who feel sorry for her. Donna Maria keeps her skills close to her chest and doesn’t let on that she’s savvier than the rest put together. Gretchen goes deep into denial. Kimmy tries to put her past behind her and get on with life. These different coping mechanisms sometimes bring them into conflict with one another; however, it’s only by working together that they can confront and defang their aggressor. This idea, of people who aren’t white men banding together to pull back the curtain and reveal the patriarchal Wonderful Wizard as a sham, is a major theme of the show. It’s as though Tina Fey took on board certain feminist criticisms of 30 Rock‘s tendency to be male-dominated and decided to do something very different.

The show addresses manhood, too, in a wonderful plot where Kimmy’s magnificently queeny roommate Titus takes classes on how to pass as a straight man. Hilariously, his mentor is Hank from Breaking Bad, a show which was also about the destructiveness of white male patriarchy, but which – because it chose to portray this from the perspective of the said white male patriarch – was dangerously susceptible to misreadings from misogynistic fanboys who found Walter White’s badassery admirable. No such danger with Kimmy, in which the reveal that Entourage 2 will not be happening causes a bar full of strangers to break out into cheering and applause. What Titus learns about heterosexual masculinity is that he possesses the ability to fake it, but it’s aggro, destructive, and (contra the sexist mythos of heteropatriarchy) more artificial than the fabulous femmeyness that comes so naturally to him.

It’s worth mentioning that this show can be read as a metaphor for trans womanhood specifically, an idea suggested by the last line of the theme song: “That’s gonna be, you know, a fascinating transition.” Consider: after many years of being lied to about the world and her place in it, Kimmy moves to the big city, changes her name, and conceals her past for her own safety and peace of mind. She is an adult who is still to some extent an emotional adolescent, temporally out of sync with the world around her, which is not wholly unlike the experience of beginning transition as an adult. Again, it’s not a huge leap to read this as a deliberate correction of some of 30 Rock‘s missteps.

There are also ongoing threads skewering wealth and class, the immigration system, and white supremacy – Titus realizing he is treated far better on the streets of New York as a werewolf than a Black man is on the nose, but it’s timely and it’s very funny. I realize I haven’t said much about the actual comedy aspect of the show, but rest assured that it is absolutely hilarious. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt succeeds as a work of intersectional feminism, and it also succeeds as a comedy. It’s everything I want in my entertainment, and I can’t wait for season two.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. A Buzzfeed quiz pegged him as Kimmy, but he feels like more of a Titus.

Athena Film Festival Review: ‘Althea’

You don’t have to be any kind of sports watcher to be compelled and moved by Althea’s story. It is not (though Althea herself might have wished it to be so) merely a story of athletic excellence, but a tale of race, class, and gender, of how these factors are inextricable in the United States: a story of intersectionality.

Written by Max Thornton.

“I never knew.” In a voice soft with wonder and respect, director Rex Miller expresses the sentiment with which he hopes audiences will respond to his biopic about Althea Gibson. “I never knew.”

Miller is likely to get his wish. Unless you’re a tennis buff, or (like me) you live around the corner from a statue of Althea, you may not ever have heard of her. The erroneous factoid still circulates that Arthur Ashe was the first African American to win a Grand Slam, erasing Althea’s legacy.

Statue of Althea Gibson in Branch Brook Park, Newark, NJ. Image via Wikipedia. — Statue of Althea Gibson in Branch Brook Park, Newark, NJ. Image via *Wikipedia*.

Tennis remains nearly the only sport I have voluntarily watched, but you don’t have to be any kind of sports watcher to be compelled and moved by Althea’s story. It is not (though Althea herself might have wished it to be so) merely a story of athletic excellence, but a tale of race, class, and gender, of how these factors are inextricable in the United States: a story of intersectionality.

The details of Gibson’s career – winning the French Open in 1956, with ten more Grand Slam titles to follow in the next two years – are only a Wikipedia search away. It’s both Althea’s complexities as a person and the broader social context of her life that the film portrays with grace and nuance.

As an African American woman, born in South Carolina in the 1920s, raised in Harlem, Althea might not have been expected to play tennis, of all sports. Then as now, tennis was the sport of the genteel, and it seems to have been very much the hobby of the aspirational classes. Althea began playing paddle tennis as part of the Police Athletic League, and was mentored by Black doctors who were also tennis enthusiasts.

At the time, the structures of the sport tended to exclude those who lacked an independent income, so Althea’s success was as much a matter of transcending economic and class barriers as race barriers (not, of course, that these have ever been fully separable in United States history). And yet, despite being hailed as the Jackie Robinson of tennis, she was extremely reluctant to be a civil rights figure. Althea Gibson was not particularly interested in politics; she was interested in playing excellent tennis.

Winning the hell out of Wimbledon, like a boss.

As a Black woman, of course, her life was inherently, unavoidably political. The Athena Film Festival screening of the film featured a discussion with the director, and the politics of Black womanhood were an integral part of this discussion. For much of the film, interviewees describe Althea’s toughness, her steely determination and hard edges born of a childhood playing hooky in the streets of Harlem; yet in all of the footage of Althea herself, she appears very poised, dignified, and ladylike. Black women in America are subject to stereotyping and exclusion from all sides, and have used their double and triple consciousness to make enormously important contributions to the pursuit of justice. Even a Black woman like Althea, who rejects the burden of explicitly fighting for racial and gender justice, carries within her the multiple consciousness necessary to survive in America.

A second aspect of discussion was the film’s silence regarding rumors around Althea’s sexuality. Miller explained that he consciously chose to exclude all mention of the rumors, because with so little information available (Gibson leaves, it seems, no relatives who might have been able to confirm or deny), he felt he would have been able to do little more than pander to sensationalism. Whether this was the appropriate decision or not is an open question. It is certain that Althea was married to a husband with whom she seems to have been very much in love, but it is not hard to read subtext into her close friendship with British tennis star Angela Buxton. Given that rumors did exist in Althea’s lifetime, their omission does leave a lacuna; and yet, given the meticulousness of the rest of the film and the dearth of certainty regarding Gibson’s sexuality, it is hard to fault Miller for shying away from such speculative territory.

Impoverished and forgotten, Althea Gibson planned to take her own life in the early 1990s. Her friend and tennis partner Angela Buxton galvanized the tennis world to provide financial support, and Althea lived another decade. Hopefully, this fine film will help to ensure that her legacy survives long into the future.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

Broken Relationships and Broken Systems in ‘Benched’

It’s quite possible that systemic inequality was never meant to be more than a backdrop, but, regardless of the creators’ intent, the events that took place in the US over the months in which ‘Benched’ aired its first season have brought the inadequacies of our legal system to the fore. In the light of Ferguson, it’s now impossible to watch the show without seeing an indictment of a very broken system.

Written by Max Thornton.

I started watching USA’s new comedy Benched solely because of the cast. The ensemble features The Office‘s Oscar Nuñez, Better Off Ted‘s Jay Harrington, and the wonderful Maria Bamford. (There are also delightful cameos from Community‘s Yvette Nicole Brown and from Albert Tsai, a.k.a. Bert from the late lamented Trophy Wife, one of whose stars, Michaela Watkins, is co-creator of Benched.) Somewhere in the course of its 12-episode first season, I realized that Benched was a little different from the average workplace comedy.

The protagonist is Nina Whitley (Eliza Coupe from Happy Endings, which I promise I’ll watch one day), a high-powered corporate lawyer who has a career-ending meltdown and finds herself transferred to the chaotic, overworked, underfunded offices of public defenders. As one of the show’s taglines puts it, “If you can’t afford an attorney, these guys will be provided for you.”

I know, I know, it sounds scintillating. But it’s really much more fun and more interesting than it sounds.

A lot of the fun comes from the dynamics of the cast. Jay Harrington plays a sharper-edged, ruder character here than he did in Better Off Ted, and he’s clearly having great fun with it as he spars and snipes with Nina. Oscar Nuñez brings the same sort of restrained, seething energy that he brought to The Office (though I’ll admit that seeing him play straight requires a cognitive adjustment I still haven’t fully made). Maria Bamford spends most of her screentime doing her usual blackly comic schtick in the way that only she can, as a woman clinging desperately and tragicomically to her last shreds of mental wellness. Jolene Purdy steals every scene she’s in as sarcastic young intern Micah, a hard-working but no less biting iteration of April Ludgate.

The thing that makes Benched interesting, though, is its setting. I’m accustomed to thinking of lawyers, both on TV and, if I’m honest, off it, as they are portrayed on shows like The Good Wife: members of private firms who are accustomed to dealing in millions, suing each other over legal arcana, and taking on high-profile cases involving high-paying clients. Benched, however, makes law the arena for the scrappy, precarious workplace like failing Dunder Mifflin or little Pawnee.

No one has time for your rich-white-lady crap, Nina.

A sharp contrast is set up between the public defender’s office and the fancy firm for which Nina used to work, and the one for which her tedious ex-boyfriend Trent still works. The P.D.s work in a cramped open-plan office space and they never have enough basic stationery supplies. Their work is a constant struggle just to keep afloat. No priceless vases for the public defenders.

What’s most striking to me about this show is the actual court scenes. There are no thrilling cross-examinations, stirring speeches, or serial-killer convictions in this courtroom. Instead, court is a relentless mill of poverty and structural inequality. The defendants whom Nina and her coworkers represent are the kinds of people who aren’t usually on TV: really poor people. They are homeless, they are single parents, they are disproportionately Black, and they are doing what they can to stay alive. They are often guilty of what they’re accused of, but these are minor infractions usually committed for lack of alternatives, and the reason they’re in the courtroom is because the system targets people like them.

Structural injustice, it must be admitted, is not the main point of the show. It’s primarily a workplace comedy and a relationship comedy, and it mines a lot of both plot and gags from pitting Nina and Trent against each other (they’re opponents in court AND in love! How wacky!). It might be that the centering of Nina and Trent is a bait-and-switch in the style of Orange is the New Black-–a pretty white lady protagonist as Trojan horse for telling other people’s stories. It’s also, of course, quite possible that systemic inequality was never meant to be more than a backdrop, but regardless of the creators’ intent, the events that took place in the US over the months in which Benched aired its first season have brought the inadequacies of our legal system to the fore. In the light of Ferguson, it’s now impossible to watch the show without seeing an indictment of a very broken system.

It’s not yet clear if Benched will be renewed, but I hope it will be, and I hope it will get bolder, because it could be something very very special.

That's not a penis, it's a gavel! — That’s not a penis, it’s a gavel!

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. He watches way too much TV. It’s honestly kind of a problem.

Life, Death, and Cinema in ‘Benny Loves Killing’

There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and ‘Benny Loves Killing’ is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets.

Written by Max Thornton.

“Why horror?”

“Because I think it’s the most flexible genre…the most malleable genre. You are able to experiment and discuss the text without interfering with the object itself.”

So say Benny and her professor in the first set of dialogue in Ben Woodiwiss’s quietly excellent indie feature Benny Loves Killing, setting the scene for the experimentation and discussion to come. Although it has won at least one award for “Best Horror Film,” Benny Loves Killing isn’t really a horror film as such. Or rather it is, to use Benny’s own words, “a meta-horror film. A horror film about horror film. More importantly, a horror film about cinema.” I think one could argue that, whether or not it’s explicitly meta (and there’s plenty of superb horror that is, from Peeping Tom to Cabin in the Woods), horror is always, to some extent, about cinema. As far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, horror films have been self-consciously Jungian, awash with dreamscapes and archetypes, exploiting the visual and sonic immediacy of the medium to inhabit and unsettle the viewer’s psyche.

Notice how her eyes are obscured. — Notice how, in this most visual of media, her eyes are obscured.

But Benny Loves Killing is a meta-meta-horror film, a film about somebody making a film about film. Benny is a French film student in the UK making a horror film for a class, but we don’t actually see very much of her film. There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and Benny Loves Killing is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely.

“Oblique” is a good word for most of this film’s approach – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets. It’s not quite psychological horror, but the narrative does largely follow Benny’s tenuous state: bumming from one friend to another, refusing to take a shower, stealing from those around her, doing way too many drugs, arguing with her mother, having some fantastically creepy nightmares. The direction of the film is gorgeously stylish and evocative, with uses of chiaroscuro and splashes of red that probably deserve scene-by-scene analysis.

There are a few conversations where the characters discuss the film they are making, but the meta-commentary never gets inelegant. In one scene, Benny and her colleague Alex argue about the workings of point-of-view shots: “You sympathize with who you’re looking at, not with the eyes you’re looking through,” Benny insists, invoking the classic killer’s-viewpoint horror shot. If up to this point in the film you had overlooked the subtleties of how point of view is used, from here on you would surely notice how often the camera stays on Benny, with her interlocutor barely in frame – especially when these are men, especially men with power (the professor, the board that controls Benny’s funding, a creeper at a party). The effect is a claustrophobically intense focus on Benny, emphasizing her overwhelming and precarious mental state, but there’s also a complex and nuanced commentary here about gender in cinema.

"You sympathize with who you're looking at" — “You sympathize with who you’re looking at”

The most explicit discussion of gender and cinema occurs in the scene where Benny and Alex are screen-testing an actress who admits that their names had led her to expect two men, and then expresses her wariness of the widespread misogyny in the horror genre. Like any filmmaker who cannot step into the text of the film without thereby becoming a part of it, Benny allows the actress to speak without defending herself. There is no great rush to defend the feminist credentials of horror in general or of Benny’s film in particular, simply the opening of a conversation: is the camera necessarily a male gaze, even when wielded by a woman? Is a camera-on-camera the male gaze doubled or reversed or negated? How do the layers of agency and power operate in a male filmmaker’s film about a female filmmaker’s film?

Benny is surely to some degree an avatar for writer/director Ben Woodiwiss, and the different wigs she dons can be seen as a literalization of the different “hats” an independent filmmaker perhaps inevitable wears, as well as the multiplicity of her relationship to the camera eye. While Benny is not unsympathetic, she is certainly no wish-fulfillment self-insert, either in her personal or her professional life. Her cinematic ambitions are grandiose, but perhaps all talk: she constantly says she’s trying to do something innovative, to make a different kind of film, but nothing we see about the film-within-the-film suggests that it’s anything other than a conventional horror film, with its buckets of fake blood and negotiations with actresses about topless scenes. To what extent, the film seems to be asking, can the filmmaker have mastery over her film and its tropes? Or do film and tropes have mastery over the filmmaker?

The film couldn't work without Pauline Cousty's excellent performance as Benny. — The film couldn’t work without Pauline Cousty’s excellent performance as Benny.

The question is deepened by the mother/child imagery throughout the film. Benny’s fraught relationship with her mother doesn’t precisely parallel her relationship with her film, but it echoes it: despite, or perhaps at the root of, their conflicts, Benny comes from her mother, is shaped by her, inherits her flaws and characteristics. A creative work is its maker’s baby, and the mother gives the baby life but also, in the very life itself, life’s horizon of death, natality and mortality intertwined. The unleashing of the creative work into the world marks the author’s death, but for the auteur, it is also the death of her baby through her loss of control over it, birthed and killed at once in the cutting of the umbilical cord.

If Ben(ny) indeed loves killing, (s)he invites us, with a small smile and a gaze directly into the camera, to confront the lens and its powers of life and death: who, exactly, is being killed? And who, exactly, is doing the killing?

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

Finding Faith and Feminism in ‘The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns’

Nuns are often unsung activists, and convents are underexamined as feminist spaces. In medieval Christendom, entering a convent might be the only way for a woman to have control over her body, her choices, and her reproduction; and, as reproductive rights come under increasingly virulent attack in the US, it could be interesting to consider how a convent might still be that space today.

Written by Max Thornton as part of our theme week on Reality TV.

I have written before about my admiration for nuns. Although rarely present in popular culture as anything more complex than tight-lipped disciplinarians (or, at best, all-singing all-dancing disciplinarians), nuns are often unsung activists, and convents are underexamined as feminist spaces. After all, in medieval Christendom, entering a convent might be the only way for a woman to have control over her body, her choices, and her reproduction; and, as reproductive rights come under increasingly virulent attack in the US, it could be interesting to consider how a convent might still be that space today.

So I was excited to watch Lifetime’s new series, The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns. The show, which aired all of its six episodes within the past month, follows five young women who are in the discernment process of trying to figure out whether they are called to become women religious. If that sounds many more steps away from actually becoming nuns than the show title suggests, that’s because it is. The complexities of Church procedure do not, perhaps, translate too easily to reality TV soundbites. Indeed, at least one sister has criticized the show’s oversimplifications, complaining that:

“The Sisterhood is a ‘reality’ series that really isn’t. While perhaps not scripted, the scenarios are deliberately constructed, the crises are set up in Survivor mode as if a competition is in play, and someone will ‘go home’!”

To which one is tempted to respond, well, yes. It’s a reality show. Of course it has all the characteristics of reality television: a focus on manufacturing drama and sensationalizing wherever possible, the artificial shoehorning of events and interactions into satisfying narrative arcs, avoidance of the really deep interrogations. If you’re not on board with those terms, or at least capable of engaging them with a suitably genre-savvy skepticism, then perhaps reality TV isn’t for you.

Sisters like selfies too! They're just like us! — Sisters like selfies too! They’re just like us!

But once all of the usual disclaimers have been made, there’s really quite a lot of interesting stuff going on here, even for those of us who might not go quite so far as to call the show “surprisingly insightful.” First and foremost, we are being presented with a perspective rarely seen in pop culture, that of young women who (might) want to become women religious. Young women – a demographic so often trivialized at best, demonized at worst – are being taken seriously in their existential quest, whether that quest involves an unnameably deep yearning for the absolute or a panic attack over acne. We are shown women’s communities, women’s interactions, women’s relationships with God. By definition, there are almost no men at all in the whole show: Eseni’s boyfriend shows up a couple of time, and Claire spends a whole evening witnessing to / flirting with a guy at a bar, but that’s about it.

Oh, apart from Jesus. There is SO MUCH Jesus. Catholic Vote slots the show neatly into a proud lineage of “emotional, expressive young women dealing with the notion of becoming a Bride of Christ,” drawing parallels between the young women of The Sisterhood and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The “Jesus is my boyfriend” trope is so interesting because of its indeterminacy: is this the hegemony of compulsory heterosexuality over even those who explicitly reject its demands, or is it a queering of the faith and a way for women to take control of their sexuality within a patriarchal institution?

This question does not get explored in any depth, and it’s not the only issue I wish had been examined. For example, when judgmental white girl Claire objects to African American Eseni’s twerking, it’s clearly a racialized interaction, but that doesn’t get addressed. Similarly, when Eseni expresses trepidation about going to the south, the race angle is never mentioned. The experiences of Black women in Catholicism in the US could be whole show on its own, and since pop culture usually only ever shows Black Christians as being part of Black church, I would have loved an honest look at the role of race in Eseni’s experiences as a Catholic.

Claire is probably trying real hard not to judge Eseni right now, but being judgmental is like 75% of her personality. — Claire is probably trying real hard not to judge Eseni right now, but being judgmental is like 75 percent of her personality.

Additionally, a feminist take on the convent is never really explored. One sister talks about finding fulfillment of nurturing instincts in ways different from traditional family expectations, but she has to make it icky by tying the nurturing instincts to the nuns’ being female. The girls discuss their understanding of chastity a little, but it all does still seem very rooted in a culture of shame.

To my surprise, I found myself in tears over the culmination of one woman’s story. As the only daughter, Christie is acutely aware of how she is thwarting her parents’ expectations by entering religious life, and this was painfully relatable for me. Who knew that becoming a nun and coming out as a trans guy had such resonances? And yet it makes a certain amount of sense, considering the number of narratives we have of female saints living their lives as men. The construction of the nun as a woman who is voluntarily surrendering her sexuality and reproduction (and the idea that this makes her a man) opens up a whole vein of feminist analysis which isn’t brought into the show at all. Feminist analysis and profound explorations of faith are not part of The Sisterhood, but they are almost irresistible responses to it.

Christie just has a lot of emotions about Jesus, okay? — Christie just has a lot of emotions about Jesus, OK?

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. As an Anglo-Catholic who also has emotions about Jesus, he snarks from a place of love.

Folk Mariology in ‘Jane the Virgin’

‘Jane the Virgin’ isn’t about the fetus, and it certainly isn’t about being a passive receptacle. The show’s real coup is its emphasis on the agency of a woman who is a victim of reproductive coercion. Jane is thrown into a reproductive situation which she wouldn’t have chosen, and the show takes her quandary seriously: how does she feel? What does she do next? How does this affect her career plans, her relationships with those around her, her self-conception?

Written by Max Thornton.

The Virgin Mary is a complicated figure in the feminist imagination. The classic feminist critique is that, as virgin and mother, she simultaneously embodies the two contradictory patriarchal idealizations of women. As the most prominent female figure in the mainstream Catholic tradition, Mary becomes the standard against which all women are measured; but, being unable to be simultaneously virgins and mothers, women are doomed to failure from the get-go.

There’s something to this critique, especially if you only consider the top-down decrees of an all-male church hierarchy, but it’s absolutely not the whole story. From early Christian converts, who were able to impute to Mary some of the characteristics of goddesses they had previously revered, to the transgressive folk Mariology of twentieth-century Latin America described by queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, Christian history is rife with Marys who are considerably more nuanced and complex than a mere idealized virgin mother.

Remember the controversy around this New Zealand church billboard?

The CW’s new show Jane the Virgin is a folk Mariology for the twenty-first century, and in a lot of ways it’s a pretty great one. Perhaps the show was initially been pitched and greenlit on the basis of its absurd and contrived premise – a pregnant virgin! who is artificially inseminated by mistake! – but, just like with the Virgin Mary of Christian myth, you’d be missing out on a lot of fascinating nuance if you disdain it purely because it’s fantastical.

Like the Mary of Christian tradition, Jane is an idealized woman on paper: chaste, engaged to a good man, committed to her faith, and determined to live an upright life. At the urging of her devout abuela, Jane takes a childhood vow of chastity until marriage, but a mix-up at the gynecologist’s results in a virginal pregnancy. Jane may be a pregnant virgin who tries to adhere to traditional morality, but she is definitely not the Virgin Mary reborn. She has no intention of remaining a virgin in perpetuity like the sainted Mary of Catholicism, and she plans to relinquish the baby to its intended parents; her own conception to an unwed teen mother was far from immaculate; so far from sticking heroically by her, her fiancé proves to be kind of a douche. Sharp writing and superb acting from the delightful Gina Rodriguez combine to portray Jane much more sympathetically and realistically than some of the hyper-idealized images of a perfect, sinless Mary.

jane-the-virgin-poster-the-cw — In reality, Jesus’ mom definitely had darker skin, hair, and eyes than the whitebread lady up top.

In its haste to focus on the baby Jesus, Christianity has too often reduced Mary to a passive receptacle, an incubator who performs her reproductive function with the minimum of fuss, a reactive figure whose greatest display of agency is to accept the reproductive coercion of the supernatural. Jane the Virgin isn’t about the fetus, and it certainly isn’t about being a passive receptacle. The show’s real coup is its emphasis on the agency of a woman who is a victim of reproductive coercion. In a political climate of dramatic assaults on reproductive freedom, it’s not hard to see Jane’s accidental insemination as a general-audience-friendly version of the reproductive coercion that people with uteri face from a whole array of actants, including the anti-choice lobby, intimate partner violence, and economic instability. Jane is thrown into a reproductive situation which she wouldn’t have chosen, and the show takes her quandary seriously: how does she feel? What does she do next? How does this affect her career plans, her relationships with those around her, her self-conception?

I’d like to see Jane the Virgin take its interrogation of hierarchical Mariology further. I want to see a deconstruction of the whole meaningless concept of virginity (and perhaps the show is headed that way, with Jane gradually coming to acknowledge that her worth as a human being is not tied to her sexual activity or lack thereof). And I want to see a critical engagement with Abuela’s Catholicism, which, despite being both profoundly resonant theme and plot driver, remains fairly one-dimensional, being characterized primarily by exhortations to sexual purity and a vapid insistence that “God never gives us more than we can handle.”

Jane with her mom and abuela, a "strong Latina matriarchy." — Jane with her mom and abuela, a “strong Latina matriarchy.”

There are plenty of other reasons to love Jane the Virgin. Nearly every character is Latin@ and there are a lot of well-rounded female characters (including queer Latina women). Arguably the central relationship is that of Jane and her mother Xiomara, which is complicated and wonderful. The show has a jocular self-awareness of its frequent silliness without being mean-spirited about the telenovelas from which it derives, especially in the glorious character of fictitious telenovela superstar Rogelio de la Vega. It also has the best use of a TV voiceover since Arrested Development.

Only seven episodes have aired so far, with the eighth due to air next Monday. In those seven hours, Jane the Virgin has proved itself to be one of the best new shows on TV. Long may it continue.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. He’s never happier than when he can combine talking about pop culture, theology, and feminism.

Nudging Up: The Nice Comedy of Adam Hills

Comedy can be potent when it’s a transfiguration of rage at injustice, or of inner demons and self-loathing – but it can also just be nice. Adam Hills is a nice comedian. He’s not punching up or down: he’s not punching at all. At most, he’s nudging up.

Written by Max Thornton.

I suspect a lot of us are very, very sick of the constant attempts to defend bigotry in the guise of comedy. It just never stops. Every single week, it seems, some dude on Twitter or the stand-up circuit gets called out for a shocking instance of racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia (or, if we’re really lucky, all of them at once), and then he and his minions dig their heels in because it was just a joke!

How many more times do we have to say that nothing is apolitical? How many more times can we explain the “punch up” principle? Sure, there are times when it’s more complicated than that and more nuance is called for, but it’s a good guiding principle, and it is not a difficult one to grasp.

And so, for our sanity, we adore our openly feminist comedians, people like Wanda Sykes or Margaret Cho or the Citizen Radio folks, as a necessary counterweight to the reactionary garbage that comprises much of comedy. These comics are performing a kind of alchemy, transforming their political anger into acts that entertain while speaking truth to power. Comedy can be potent when it’s a transfiguration of rage at injustice, or of inner demons and self-loathing – but it can also just be nice.

Adam Hills is a nice comedian. His stand-up set Adam Hills Stands Up Live, which aired on Britain’s Channel 4 in late 2012, isn’t about mockery or ridicule or attack (whether justified or not). He’s not punching up or down: he’s not punching at all. At most, he’s nudging up.

Look, how about we just don't talk about how it's possible for people outside the UK to watch this, okay? — Look, how about we just don’t talk about how it’s possible for people outside the UK to watch this, OK?

I’m not, of course, claiming it’s somehow apolitical, but this particular set doesn’t feature jokes about, say, gender relations or the government. On his TV show The Last Leg, he is sometimes more overtly political, calling out body-shaming, condemning rape threats, or having a spat with the Westboro Baptist Church, but the politics with which his stand-up is shot through is that of disability consciousness.

Adam Hills has a prosthetic foot. He has covered the summer Paralympics for television in his native Australia or in Britain for the last two competitions. In some ways Adam Hills Stands Up Live is a very gentle primer in the nuances of disability consciousness.

Disability is a slippery category, one with fuzzy borders and a lot of contested terrain. Different disabilities have different, sometimes non-overlapping concerns. Conditions like mental illness, cognitive impairment, and Deafness are not necessarily included under the disability umbrella, whether through the preference of the people concerned or through their exclusion by others. The classic distinction between visible and invisible disabilities has been problematized by pointing out that many disabilities vary in visibility depending on the circumstances. Disability activists long ago distinguished disability as a social category from impairment as a bodily reality, analogous with the feminist distinction between gender and sex, but, like the sex/gender distinction, the disability/impairment distinction has recently come to be recognized as more complex than this simple dualism.

Hills points toward this slipperiness when he says, “I don’t consider myself disabled,” but elsewhere in the set refers to “other people with disabilities,” implying that he is part of the category. It’s a recognition that you don’t always have control over whether or not you are part of a social category. While he notes that “I am extremely lucky to have been born with a ‘disability’ that doesn’t dramatically affect my life,” Hills certainly doesn’t use that as a way to distance himself from other disabled people – on the contrary, he is very involved with disability and its slippery cousins.

Most strikingly, Hills frequently performs with a sign interpreter in order to welcome a Deaf audience to his shows. He incorporates the interpreter into his act, tells a number of jokes about the ins and outs of sign language, and interacts with the Deaf members of the audience.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfl7D4_joZU”]

Early in his career, Hills avoided mentioning his artificial foot in his act: “I wanted to prove myself as a comic before talking about this. I never wanted to lean on my leg.” Now, however, he is a public figure who talks and jokes about his disability without playing into ableist stereotypes of the inspirational supercrip or the bitter crip. His jokes about disability and sexuality draw attention to the odd ways in which people with disabilities are simultaneously desexed and hypersexualized, taking on the tipsy friends who wonder if he ever “uses it” in sexual situations as well as the woman who blurted out, “Can you still have sex?” (Answer: “Uh, yeah! What does your husband do? Does he take a run-up?”)

On top of all this, his James Brown bit is some of the purely nicest comedy I have ever seen. White male comedians, stop taking your inspiration from the Daniel Toshes of the world, and learn from Adam Hills instead.

Also, if you dress like Dr. Frank-N-Furter, I will fall in love with you. — Also, if you dress like Dr. Frank-N-Furter, I *will* fall in love with you.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

Almost Perfect: ‘Attack the Block’

Basically, the alien invasion is a way to explore the idea that poor kids in rough situations might act in ways that look like senseless yob violence to the outside observer, but internally have their own logic and sometimes even heroism. It’s a hell of a response to a mugging.

Written by Max Thornton.

Since I moved to the US, I find myself getting a little wistful every Nov. 5. It’s not that I want a Catholic monarch on the British throne, or that I’m anything other than deeply suspicious of dudebros in the mask – it’s the cultural traditions I miss. I have a lot of fond memories of attending the neighborhood bonfire (with the first mulled wine of the season flowing freely), and of sneaking through locked parks after dark to find the best place for watching the fireworks. The Fourth of July just isn’t the same, not just because it lacks the crisp crackling autumnal chill, but also because of the quintessentially British ambivalence surrounding Guy Fawkes Night. Are we celebrating the fact that a man tried to blow up Parliament, or the fact that he failed? Are we cheering on the apparent anarchism of the act, or the conservatism behind it? Or is it just that he tried to do something big and failed, which makes Guy Fawkes a very British hero?

America is not very interested in having these conversations with me. So I deal by watching Attack the Block, one my favorite movies of the past few years.

Attack the Block is a British science fiction/horror/action movie about an alien invasion of a South London council estate, and the whole film unfolds over the night of Nov. 5. A young woman named Sam is mugged by a gang of kids on her way home, but as the night progresses she finds herself forced to work with the kids to combat the aliens attacking their block.

Writer-director Joe Cornish has said that the origin of the story lies in his reflections on his own experience of getting mugged. He wanted to humanize his attackers and understand their actions without excusing their violence. This foundational compassion and empathy is evident throughout the film, even in the attitude toward the murderous aliens, who, in a nifty parallel, can only be effectively resisted once their motives are understood.

There is a split-level social consciousness to the film. If you’re on the lookout for it, there is an ongoing commentary about race and class in the UK, from the biting observation that Sam’s absent boyfriend is only interested in helping poor children in “exotic” foreign lands, not the ones struggling at home, to Moses’ theory that the aliens are the next logical step, after drugs and crime, in a government conspiracy to eliminate black boys. If you want to ignore these moments, though, you can just enjoy an engaging SF action romp whose characters are all poor and mostly people of color. Although the film begins with the sympathetically endangered, middle-class-accented white woman presented as our protagonist, it’s a clever bait-and-switch for the white middle-class viewer, because the real hero is Moses – a black, working-class-accented gang leader. (Bear in mind that accent is still the major indicator of social class in Britain, with hundreds of subtleties indistinguishable to the non-British ear.)

Moses (John Boyega) having to be a hero.

It is not only in his name that Moses echoes the biblical Moses. He kills the first alien, just as the biblical Moses killed the Egyptian overseer, and then has to go on the run and be a leader for his people, despite being what many would consider a less than ideal leader figure. Of course, a major difference is that Attack the Block‘s Moses is not leading his people into exodus. On the contrary, he’s helping them defend their home. The “block” plays the role of the spaceship in much of futuristic SF (and the names of the block and its street are nods to classic British SF writers: Wyndham, Ballard, and so on). It is the characters’ home, the one place in the vast void that they can call their own; they feel solidarity with the others who live there, even if they don’t know them; they want to protect it from the outside threat, but there are elements threatening it from the inside too.

My one real complaint about the movie is its paucity of female characters. Sam winds up being a kind of Smurfette among the boys, and the brief scene with some of the kids’ sisters and female friends is sufficient to convince me that there’s an incredible parallel movie to be made about a gang of working-class girls protecting their block from alien invasion. So there certainly are named, speaking female characters, but I would want a bit more a female presence in the film for the absolute perfection I want from it.

Plus, for how low the budget was, the aliens are pretty damn scary.

Other than that, however, I consider Attack the Block a more or less flawless film. This Nov. 5, consider watching it, even if that means subscribing to Netflix DVD solely for this purpose. It’s worth it. Believe it.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

High School Hospital: ‘Red Band Society’

‘Red Band Society’ presents the high-school dynamic explored in a sick-lit microcosm. It’s largely fluff and nonsense, but it’s quite entertaining nonsense on the whole – not least because Octavia Spencer is a treasure and is marvelous as the superheroic Nurse Jackson.

Written by Max Thornton.

A TV dramedy about teens who live in a hospital is perhaps the logical next stage in a culture where The Fault In Our Stars was such a phenomenon. In fact, I would guess that someone pitched it as “Breakfast Club meets TFIOS.” Red Band Society presents the high-school dynamic explored in a sick-lit microcosm. It’s largely fluff and nonsense, but it’s quite entertaining nonsense on the whole – not least because Octavia Spencer is a treasure and is marvelous as the superheroic Nurse Jackson, while it’s an absolute joy to see My So-Called Life‘s Wilson Cruz back on TV.

Because of my interest in disability theory, I was interested to see how the high-school dynamic might play out in a hospital context, but to be honest the show isn’t doing as much with it as it could. Not least this is because of the show’s metaphysics, which it lays out there both in the premise – it’s narrated by a comatose boy who can see and hear everything that goes on around the hospital, and interact with the other patients when they are under for surgery (though not when they’re asleep, for some reason) – and in an explicit statement of mind-body dualism made by one character to another: “Your body isn’t you. Your soul is you.”

I’m so involved in body-affirming scholarship, including disability and crip theory, that it kind of shocks me when I hear such forthright statements of dualism in pop culture. Rejecting mind-body dualism wasn’t just an abstract philosophical decision for me; it dramatically changed my life. While I know (oh God, how I know) that telling yourself, “I am not my body, I am just in it” can be a life-saving consolation in times of extreme bodily distress, I don’t think it’s ultimately a tenable way to understand your existence in the world. In many ways, this is what crip theory (and its intertwined conversation partner, queer theory) is about: refusing to accept mind-body dualism and its passive reinforcement of a normative narrative about what constitutes a healthy, whole, socially acceptable body.

My point is that, despite its setting, thus far Red Band Society hasn’t shown much interest in engaging with disability tropes beyond letting its characters take time out from being ~brave and inspirational~ to be snarky, bratty, illegal-substance-pursuing teens. Which, to be fair, is a great step up from classic media portrayals of disabled people as either inhumanly angelic or miserably bitter: at least these characters are the center of their own drama, not vehicles for the edification of able-bodied people.

There are six members of the titular society:

Seen here in no way invoking The Breakfast Club. — Seen here *in no way* invoking *The Breakfast Club*.

Charlie, our comatose narrator, offers commentary primarily in the form of zingers. He has a Tragic Backstory of which every single beat has been wholly predictable, although the latest episode ended on a Charlie-related moment that was ridiculous even for this show, so who knows what’s ahead.

Leo is a recovering cancer patient whose leg had to be amputated. At least once per episode, one of the characters will remind us that pre-cancer Leo was a stereotypical jock who wouldn’t have given these people the time of day, and look how he’s grown through adversity! Soccer was Leo’s jam, and because Nurse Jackson is not bound by the laws, rules, and circumstances governing us mere mortals, she happens to know an amputee athlete who agrees to train Leo. However, Leo ultimately decides against the training, because he doesn’t want to be known as an amputee athlete. Honestly, this smacks of the writers not wanting to deal with actual amputee athletics training: wouldn’t he at least try one training session before giving up on his lifelong passion and imagined future?

Dash is Leo’s BFF. It took until the most recent episode, the fifth, before Dash finally got some characterization of his own, beyond how he relates to the other characters. Dash is also Black. JUST SAYING. When he’s not trying to seduce the young nurse, smoking weed with the ward’s resident hippiechondriac, or getting jealous over Leo (which causes all the other characters to tease him about being in love with Leo, because boys can’t have close friendships without it being gay, and everyone knows homosexuality is hilarious), Dash is a graffiti artist extraordinaire. Also his lungs don’t work right or something, but who knows, it never seems to impede his life in any way.

Emma is my favorite. She’s bookish and smart, and she tries to do what she thinks is right by people, but she has a streak of fire in her which can sometimes lead to poor decisions. She’s in hospital for anorexia, and stays in a ward with cancer patients and people needing transplants, because… reasons, I guess? Whatever its logic, this juxtaposition does make for interesting possibilities in exploring the stigmatization of mental illnesses and psychological disorders, which can occur even among communities of the sick and the disabled: Leo yells at her that she doesn’t need to be in hospital, she’s only there by her own choice.

Kara is my other favorite, the bitchy cheerleader who is completely self-aware of her role as gratuitously mean hot girl. On the whole, she revels in taking the other characters down a peg or two, though it has been hinted more than once that massive self-esteem issues underlie her unpleasantness. She has an almost symptom-free heart condition, but isn’t on the donor list because of her pill-popping. Also she has awful power lesbians for moms, because, as Charlie says in a line that is certainly a verbatim quote from the writer who suggested it, “What? Dads fall for a nanny all the time. Why not moms?”

Jordi is the new kid. (Kara is technically a new kid as well, but she can’t be the Everyman character because she’s a girl, and not just a girl but a mean girl.) He’s boring and annoying, and I feel like he and his abandonment issues walked straight off The Fosters and into this show. It’s cool that the Everyman is Latino, but I am super done talking about Jordi and his annoying hair and dumb personality.

There are some adult characters other than Octavia Spencer, too: a Dr. Sexy type who is even more annoying than Jordi (but thankfully gets less screentime); a ditzy nurse; assorted parents floating in and out – but none of them are all that interesting.

It’s not clear yet whether Red Band Society will last out the TV season. I hope it does, because, for all its faults, this show can be very charming, and I think there’s potential for something new and exciting beneath the cheese.

Also, somebody thought this ad was a good idea. It was rightly pulled after complaints.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

‘It’s A Girl’: The Importance of the Reproductive Justice Framework

The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Written by Max Thornton.

It’s easy to be seduced by the rhetoric of choice. We all want to believe we’re free agents, exercising our will with maximum autonomy. Who wants to be the product of social forces and discursive systems that circumscribe the very possibilities of your existence before you’re even born?

The reality is, though, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, every choice a person makes is radically delineated by a vast web of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and material influences. Systemic change, then, isn’t simply a matter of individuals making different choices; nuanced, contextually-sensitive analysis of the many forces at play is crucial.

Reproductive justice isn’t as simple as choice and can’t be reduced to being “pro-choice.” The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Evan Grae Davis’ 2012 documentary, It’s A Girl, attempts to analyze some of the factors at work in the issue of sex-selective abortions in India and China. The film’s great strength is its clear divide of focus, to examine in turn the different contexts of India and China, showing how the same issue in both countries has a quite distinct matrix of causes.

Fun fact: if you google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh. — Fun fact: if you Google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh.

In India, a heteropatriarchal tradition has united with rampant capitalism to produce a context in which sons are financially valuable while daughters are an economic drain. The payment of dowries is technically illegal, but that hasn’t put an end to the cultural practice of the bride’s family paying the groom’s, sometimes quite extravagantly. Consequently there is immense social, cultural, and economic pressure on women to provide sons.

The limitations of the choice framework are abundantly clear when the film shows a rural Indian woman talking openly and unrepentantly about killing her own female newborns: it’s a choice she made, sure, but this choice was circumscribed by so many discursive and material circumstances, the combination of poverty and patriarchy that keeps women wholly dependent on their husbands, the entrenched devaluing of female life, the failure of law and government authorities to enforce the laws that exist… I can’t help comparing the many women in the US who abort fetuses because they would be born with disabilities. Again, this is a choice they make, and it is (or should be) absolutely the pregnant person’s decision whether or not to continue being pregnant; however, it is a choice enacted in a cultural milieu that considers disabled lives not worth living, an economic milieu that treats disabled lives as a burden, a political milieu in which healthcare is so precarious that many families lack the resources to care for children with disabilities.

Similarly, in India there are very many factors at play, and the film might have benefited from engaging a critique of a few more of them, such as the compulsory heterosexuality and cissexism of treating every infant as though its birth-assigned sex will dictate its entire life course, and the unchecked capitalism that exacerbates the issue.

In China, the situation is quite different. The end result – sons are valuable, daughters are a drain – is the same, but the equation that leads to this result is not heteropatriarchal tradition plus capitalism, but heteropatriarchal tradition plus government control of reproduction. The one-child policy has been in place since 1979, with an exception for rural families whose first child is female – they can try again for a boy. Women who are found to be pregnant illegally face forced abortion and forced sterilization. (Again, I found myself irresistibly drawing comparisons closer to home, this time to the anti-abortion lobby in the US and its campaign to recriminalize abortion, perhaps willfully ignorant of the fact that forced birth is just as dystopian a violation as forced abortion.)

It’s A Girl is particularly strong in its analysis of China’s situation, both its roots and its ramifications. For example, the “gendercide” against female infants has resulted in a generation whose males vastly outnumber its women, and this has led to a spike in sex trafficking and the kidnapping of child brides. Concurrently, there is a young sub-society of undocumented children, who were born illegally and have no official existence and thus no access to healthcare, schooling, passports, and other benefits of citizenship.

Special mention of this supercool woman, who rescued an abandoned infant and who I want to be friends with.

A perfect film would perhaps have committed to a fuller analysis. At 64 minutes, this documentary runs a little short, and could easily have found time for a discussion of, say, the impact of globalization – which might have mitigated the occasional moment of awful hypocrisy and paternalism, such as the one interviewee who outright indicts these countries by comparison with (I paraphrase slightly) “countries where women are fully equal.” (Tell us more, Sam Harris.) Nonetheless, overall It’s A Girl is a solid popular introduction to a fraught topic, and not a bad entrypoint into thinking through reproductive justice issues with nuance and complexity.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. The event where he saw this film was kind of weird, but he made a cool new friend. Hi, Lillian!

‘Matilda’: Women, Class, and Abuse on Page, Stage, and Screen

For my birthday this year, my partner took me to see the Broadway musical of ‘Matilda,’ which I loved. The cast recording has been in regular rotation on my iPod ever since, and this week I decided to watch the 1996 film again for comparison.

Written by Max Thornton.

Like many a precocious young bookworm, I counted Roald Dahl’s Matilda among my very favorite books from an early age. Matilda was relatable – her classmates classified her as The Smart One; she adored her teacher; she had found her earliest and best friends among books – but she was also aspirational for me: she was kind and well-liked, she was brave enough to stand up to injustice, and the only time she ever loses her temper in an uncontrollable screaming tantrum it’s in an entirely justifiable, even heroic, confrontation with her evil headmistress. In a way, she was my first role model.

For my birthday this year, my partner took me to see the Broadway musical of Matilda, which I loved. The cast recording has been in regular rotation on my iPod ever since, and this week I decided to watch the 1996 film again for comparison, with a particular eye to the treatment of class. It had been many years since I last saw the movie, and all I really remembered was hating the changed ending, but I conjectured that a transplantation of a very British story to an American context would illuminate some of the differences in UK and US attitudes toward class.

In the book and musical, Matilda’s parents are, regardless of their precise economic status, clearly lower-class, in the “trashiest” way possible. In Britain, the relationship between social class and economic class is complicated: having money doesn’t necessarily make you middle-class (and not everyone wants to be middle-class, as they seem to in the US – working-class pride is strong, while being middle-class is associated with a certain bourgeois pretentiousness). Dahl codes the Wormwoods as insufficiently respectable from a bourgeois perspective: they use “excessive” beauty treatments and wear garish clothes; they play bingo and eat dinner in front of the TV; they have only contempt for literature and education; they are loud, dishonest, and – worst of all! – proud of their loudness and dishonesty.

Most of these markers of the lower classes make the transatlantic leap, but the film takes care to add some new ones for the US audience: junk food, being overweight, kitschy artifacts. The movie Wormwoods live in a nice house full of nice things, but they commit the unforgivable sin of having bad taste. These class markers are important as signifiers that their American dream is a sham, even on the terms of the American dream itself.

By contrast, Miss Honey is the deserving poor, whose economic misfortune does not reflect her character: she values education, doesn’t own a TV set, doesn’t indulge in beauty products, in fact lives ascetically, like the good poor people who don’t waste their money on smartphones and refrigerators… The musical makes the contrast explicit between Mrs. Wormwood’s anthem “Loud” and Miss Honey’s gentle song “My House.” Miss Honey has a roof, a door, a chair, a table, pictures on the wall, lamplight to read by: “It isn’t much, but it is enough for me.” Matilda’s mother, however, recommends “A little less brains, a lot more hair! / A little less head, a lot more derriere!”

“You’ve gotta be loud, loud, LOUD!
You’ve gotta give yourself permission to shine,
To stand out from the crowd, crowd, crowd!”

Like the children at the beginning of the book and musical, Mrs. Wormwood has self-esteem and isn’t ashamed of it. It’s perhaps not surprising that the theme of “people who have self-esteem but shouldn’t” is cut out of the movie. Back in the 90s, long after the era of normalized institutional child abuse in which Dahl grew up but before all of this tedious media handwringing about millennials being thin-skinned and entitled, we tended to think that self-esteem was a good thing. Well, Americans did – it’s always been considered rather déclassé in Britain. So self-confident Mrs. Wormwood is a villain, while modest Matilda and diffident Miss Honey are the heroes.

The movie excises this “self-esteem is bad” message, and instead amplifies the book’s rather weird messages about women. The villainous women are those who do womanhood “wrong.” Miss Trunchbull is too masculine (even played, in the musical, by a man in drag): she’s athletic, strong, violent, not conventionally attractive; she dislikes children, and objects to the “Mrs. D Mrs. I Mrs. FFI” poem by asking, “Why are all these women married?” – indeed, her own female honorific is usually removed so that she becomes “the” Trunchbull, a monstrous hybrid figure of female masculinity. Mrs. Wormwood, meanwhile, errs on the side of too much femininity: she dyes her hair and uses tons of beauty products, overindulging in the artifice and frivolity that comprise femininity in the misogynistic imagination.

YOU'RE doing womanhood wrong!! — YOU’RE doing womanhood wrong!!

(There’s an undercurrent of transmisogyny here, too: the women who are rejected are either too masculine or too artificially feminine, two modes of attack often used to delegitimize trans women’s womanhood.)

Miss Honey, the “good” adult female character, displays neither masculinity nor “artificial” femininity. She is meek, nurturing, softspoken, gentle, conventionally feminine – and, in the film, is deeply emotionally invested in a doll from her childhood. A good woman, it seems, is infantilized in her femininity.

You're pretty, so you're doing womanhood right!! — You’re pretty, so you’re doing womanhood right!!

For all its mixed messages about class and about femininity, this is ultimately a story most powerfully about two abuse survivors creating a family and finding healing together. As Miss Honey tells Matilda in the film, “You were born into a family that doesn’t always appreciate you, but one day things are going to be very different.” As the tempered nature of this line suggests (doesn’t always appreciate her? Try doesn’t ever), the abuse theme is here rather downplayed. Mara Wilson brings exactly the sort of presence we wanted from a child protagonist in the mid-90s – precociously delightful without being alienating or smug – but her Matilda is a smart kid, and not much more. Book-Matilda and musical-Matilda have a streak of otherworldliness to them, a dissociative tendency perhaps not uncommon among abuse survivors; whereas when movie-Matilda is getting yelled at by her father, she just kind of gives him the stinkeye and then skips away to scheme without seeming to internalize his abuse. Obviously the theme of child abuse is going to get downplayed in a PG family film directed by Danny DeVito, but it’s explored with such nuance and sensitivity in the book, and especially in the play, that it’s rather a shame the movie chose to steer for a tone of purely magical whimsy, rather than magical whimsy with some depth.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the treatment of Matilda’s telekinesis. In the book, Matilda’s power is something mystical, perhaps dangerous (in one practice session, she zones out entirely and tells Miss Honey, “I was soaring past the stars on silver wings”); in the film, it’s pure whimsy. This, I think, is why it’s narratively necessary and satisfying for the book to end with Matilda losing her power – the book acknowledges that telekinesis is an astounding, paradigm-shifting power, whereas in the film it is but a wizard wheeze.

I don’t think the film of Matilda is terrible, but I don’t find it particularly good either. It’s resolutely child-friendly, softening the sharpest and nastiest edges that helped make Roald Dahl’s books so compelling and enduring, even as they reproduce some of the most problematic tropes of their society.

Go see the musical if you possibly can; it's wonderful. — Go see the musical if you possibly can; it’s wonderful.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. Believe it or not, he actually cut a bunch of material from earlier drafts of this piece.