Dystopias: The Roundup
Check out all of the posts from our Dystopias Theme Week here.
The radical notion that women like good movies
Check out all of the posts from our Dystopias Theme Week here.
When speaking over the phone, Sharon’s enthusiasm for this pioneering adaptation of a Caribbean Canadian sci-fi novel emanates as though this was a fresh and newly discovered idea. In fact, Sharon has been working on creating this film for the past 15 years (while also establishing herself as a published playwright, writer, actor and award winning director) and although the journey has been long, she strongly believes that now is the perfect time to transition this well-nurtured idea into tangible reality.
As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?
Ha!
I can’t keep count of the number of times the fact that women menstruate has been used as a reason to render us incapable of doing something. However, the fact women can have children (while cis-men cannot) is arguably our greatest power in a time of crisis.
And just as the film articulates these contrasting attitudes and dilemmas with regard to controlling powers and zero sum attitudes, so too does it address these issues within themes of gender, sexuality and authority.
Don’t judge me.
I am a fan of the ‘Sharknado’ franchise put out by the SyFy Channel.
The Oxford Dictionary defines dystopia as “An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.” Literature and pop culture are brimming with examples of dystopian landscapes because they serve as a vehicle through which we can follow certain ills in society to their potentially logical and tragic conclusions.
Check out all of the posts from our Masculinity Theme Week here.
Director James Kent: “People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. “
Furiosa, the “Wives,” the Vulvalini, and Max’s triumphant return to the Citadel finds the once chained-to-their-pumps milk mothers now opening the floodgates and pouring water down on the people below. It seems likely that our sheroes and the milk mothers will move forward on the “plentitude model” – bathing in an abundance of sweet, thick human milk, sharing water access, and growing green things from heirloom seeds – rather than continue in the scarcity model exemplified by Immortan Joe, with the milk mothers as capitalists profiting from their own production.
So yes, ‘Jupiter Ascending’ provides women and girls the “you’re secretly the most important person in the solar system” narrative that is so often granted to cishet white men, the demographic who already are treated as the most important people by virtue of the kyriarchy. What’s missing, however, is the part where Jupiter taps into her secret set of special skills.
Masculinity is a pervasive concept in our culture, setting the tone for our entertainment, our politics, and our interpersonal lives. This is because masculinity itself traditionally belongs to men who are, to quote blogger Twisty Faster of ‘I Blame the Patriarchy’, “the default human.”