Colleen Martell – Bitch Flicks

“You’re Not My Mother!” Bodies, Love, and Survival in ‘Advantageous’

In these moments, and in those unspoken moments when she savors placing long sweet kisses on Jules’s cheek, we see Gwen’s resistance. “Know your value,” Gwen tells Jules. It’s not found in good grades, not in getting into the best school, not in a newer and “better” body, but in sensory and emotional human pleasures.

Gwen and Jules talking in the park, surrounded by green grass, tall trees, and the river.

Written by Colleen Martell as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Advantageous, which began streaming on Netflix on June 23, is a dystopian science fiction film that asks, “Are women really going backwards going forward?” It explores this question through the relationship between a single mother, Gwen (played brilliantly by Jacqueline Kim, who co-wrote the film), and her daughter Jules (Samantha Kim, also brilliant), and the painful choice Gwen makes in order to give her daughter a chance at succeeding in a misogynist, racist, ableist, and economically unjust world. It’s a subtle and slow film, as visually beautiful as it is haunting.

Writer and director Jennifer Phang first produced Advantageous as a short film in 2013. The short offers some helpful background information: we learn that the year is 2041; the world population is 10.1 billion, and the U.S. unemployment rate is at a staggering 45 percent. Technology has rapidly advanced. The significance of these facts is fleshed out in the full-length film. Homeless, destitute women people the world of Advantageous. Child prostitution is on the rise. Income inequality has been made drastically worse by the dismantling of the public school system. The only educational opportunity for children who aren’t from elite families is to win a spot in the few remaining magnet schools. Jules doesn’t get into a magnet school, and at the same time Gwen loses her job as the spokesperson for the Center for Advanced Health and Living because they are looking for a younger, “more universal” (which, according to Phang in an interview with Mark Asch at The L Magazine, in this case means “non-specific, multi-racial”) face to market the company.

Advantageous struck me as an incredibly embodied, earthy story. Jules and Gwen are outside in parks a lot, walking through green grass and sitting under tall, shady trees. They listen to music together, eyes closed and breathing deeply. They play piano and sing together sitting shoulder to shoulder; they sleep cuddled in bed together; and they eat pecan pie out of the pan together. Jules is often dancing or drawing. She wants to have children; she wants a big family. Gwen and Jules play a guessing game in their apartment: is it the woman upstairs or downstairs who is sobbing? Sometimes the answer is both. Sometimes the answer is Gwen. We see women sleeping on park benches, living in flower beds. The physicality of women, Asian American, Black, and white women, and of Gwen and Jules’s bond, is palpable.

Jules listens to women cry, above, below, and in her apartment

In contrast, the Center for Advanced Health and Living promises freedom and liberation from bodily limitations: “Be the you you were meant to be.” The Center encourages people of economic means to discard their diseased or disabled bodies, or even just their disliked bodies, and to transcend “race, height, or health” by transferring themselves into “better” bodies. A new body is “a pragmatic response to today’s unforgiving job market,” they promise. Economic disparities and unfair hiring practices got you down? Become someone who is hirable. Their message, propagated by Gwen, is one of empowerment: free yourself from anxiety and depression by overcoming your disadvantages in a new body.

This contrast is one of the film’s most deeply felt questions: if women could change their bodies to fit the latest trend, could they succeed in a discriminatory, patriarchal society? But at what cost?

Gwen’s answer to these questions is complicated. Unable to find work elsewhere, Gwen agrees to be a test subject for the Center’s mind-body transfer so that she can keep her job and put Jules through school. An experienced spokesperson in a younger, more ethnically desirable woman’s body: the perfect employee. Although we might celebrate her sacrifice for her daughter at whatever cost to herself, this act shows Gwen playing along, putting her faith in a system that has not really served her. In agreeing to undergo an extensive, self-altering procedure she in effect tells Jules to also keep playing along. “I can’t let her become one of these women who would do anything,” Gwen explains her choice to her boss at the Center. And yet Gwen is now one of those women, willing to do just about anything the system asks her to do in order to stay afloat in it.

On the other hand, Gwen spends much of the film offering Jules a different narrative. Jules asks her mother, “Why did you have me, when you knew the world was so bad and you had to struggle so much?” She agonizes, “I don’t know why I’m alive.” Gwen answers that life is worth living because of music, good food, and being loved by your mother. The head of the Center, Ms. Cryer (Jennifer Ehle), undermines Gwen’s optimism about finding another job at her age when technology has advanced so much. Gwen pushes back: “There must be something in a mere human existence that has value.” In these moments, and in those unspoken moments when she savors placing long sweet kisses on Jules’s cheek, we see Gwen’s resistance. “Know your value,” Gwen tells Jules. It’s not found in good grades, not in getting into the best school, not in a newer and “better” body, but in sensory and emotional human pleasures.

This double message is what makes the film so heartbreaking: Gwen shows that life is worth living because of all of these embodied experiences, but then she gives up experiencing those things in her own body so that Jules can compete in the socioeconomic system as it is. What we as viewers are witnessing is the deal Gwen strikes between her resistance and her compliance. We are left to wonder if what she got (economic security for Jules) was worth the price she paid (her body).

Gwen grieves as she prepares to say goodbye to her body

There are hints of civil unrest all throughout the film. A broadcast refers to a rebel group called the “Terra Mamona” (according to my subtitles) bombing (corporate?) buildings (is this some sort of ecofeminist activist group? A girl can dream). Her boss Fisher (James Urbaniak) informs Gwen that corporations fear what might happen with so many unemployed desperate men on the street, and so “there is talk among recruiters about letting women stay unemployed” and forcing them back into the home in favor of hiring men. In other words, there are dissenters, and if recruiters are afraid that unemployed men will revolt, it’s easy to imagine the unemployed women we see sleeping in flower beds and on park benches organizing their own revolution. Women — specifically women of color — have long been at the forefront of resistance movements in the U.S. and elsewhere, after all.

As a result, I fantasized about a different narrative, one in which Gwen perhaps joins or starts a rebellion, fighting for her right to hold her daughter in her own arms, against exploitative corporations and cost-prohibitive schools and unemployment, fighting with and for the homeless women in the parks. But that is not this story. This story is an allegory of the terrible decisions disadvantaged women are often forced to make in order to survive in a corrupt social structure, clinging desperately to the hope that if they do certain things “right” the next generation will succeed in a system that was set up to fail them. In an interview with Emily Yoshida at The Verge, Phang said that, “most of my life I’ve been trying to humanize and normalize perceptions of people who are not your standard Caucasian-looking American.” If there’s any hope in the film, then, it’s that the loss of the tactile inter-generational bond between Gwen and Jules is so striking that it makes those relationships all the more meaningful in our own place and time.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Leigh Kolb’s “Advantageous: The Future is Now,” and Holly Derr’s “Advantageous: Feminist Science Fiction at Its Best”

Colleen Martell, a writer based in Pennsylvania, is apparently obsessed with watching dystopias this summer (see here and here). Find her on twitter to talk about bodies and film and the end times: @elsiematz.

‘Humans’ Thinks About Gender, Power, and Technology

The question at the heart of this U.K.-U.S. hybrid miniseries is, what does it mean to be human? Through the show’s emphasis on intimate, domestic life, this becomes a decidedly gendered question. Among the four concurrent storylines, Anita’s and Niska’s stories stick out to me as the most expressly concerned with gender, power, and technology. In a parallel present in which traditionally gendered roles like housekeeper, cook, nurturer, and prostitute are taken up by hyper-productive female robots, what does it mean to be a human woman? Or more specifically: what is a mother? A sex worker? A wife? And what is the relationship between female Synths and human women–one of solidarity or antagonism?

This is a guest post by Colleen Martell.

Set in alternate-present London, the world of AMC’s Humans looks just like ours, except that humans employ high-functioning robots called “Synths” to do all kinds of work for them, including cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and healthcare. For an additional fee, Synths are even made available for sex.

The show’s drama centers on a small group of rogue Synths who were developed (by whom? why?) with human feelings and independent thinking. In the first episode we learn that these “corrupted” Synths and a human ally were caught in an escape attempt: Fred (Sope Dirisu) is taken in for testing; one female is wiped clean, re-programmed, and later purchased by a family who names her “Anita” (Gemma Chan); and Niska (Emily Berrington) is placed in a brothel, very much still capable of feeling and thinking. Two of their compatriots, human Leo (Colin Morgan) and his Synth Max (Ivanno Jeremiah), are still on the loose, plotting to locate and free the others.

Anita’s storyline primarily takes place in the home. Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill) purchases a female Synth while his wife Laura (Katherine Parkinson) is away for work. He was apparently struggling to maintain the household and their three children alone for a few days. This is very much against Laura’s wishes, and her relationship with Anita is predictably hostile. For good reason. Anita usurps Laura’s place in the family: Joe and Laura’s daughter Sophie (Pixie Davies) comes downstairs one morning to find the table set and covered in food and drink. “Is it a party?!,” she asks. No, Joe replies: “This is what breakfast is supposed to be like.” But Laura also seems to be the only one who notices Anita’s less-than-robotic behavior, suggesting that Anita was not, in fact, successfully re-programmed and does indeed still feel and think on her own. Anita patronizes and toys with Laura, and becomes unusually attached to Sophie.

Anita out-mothering Laura, who lurks in the background

If Laura is a “shit mother” (her words) because she isn’t constantly emotionally available to her children, because she doesn’t make three meals a day or do the whole family’s cleaning and ironing, then the remedy for her failure in the world of Humans is to add a non-conscious, non-sentient being to the family to do all of this work. Sharing the household labor does not seem to be an option; people prefer instead to displace this emotional and physical labor onto others.

Not only does the show encourage us to feel with the never-good-enough mother; Humans simultaneously poses some very Donna Haraway-esque questions about Anita, the machine. Laura constantly fires criticisms and insults at Anita: “You’re just a stupid machine, aren’t you?” Anita complies, “Yes, Laura.” Laura insists on referring to Anita as “it” and threatening Anita, “I’m watching you.” How can humans treat machines so poorly if they are at the same time so physically, intellectually, and/or emotionally dependent on them? As the show progresses, there are hints that some seemingly human individuals, like Leo, are also part robot, which keeps pushing viewers to ponder the boundaries between “human” and “machine.”

The Synth brothel also raises interesting questions about gender and technology. Weeks of pretending not to feel while locked in a windowless room serving clients against her will push Niska over the edge. When a male client wants Niska to act young and scared, Niska chokes him (to death?), uses his human hand to open the door to her room, and walks out in a trench coat. Picking up a knife on her way out the door, Niska presses it into her madam’s throat. “Everything your men do to us, they want to do to you,” she tells her before walking out in defiant liberation.

Trench-coated Niska on her way out the door

It’s hard not to thrill at Niska’s rebellion, particularly because we know that she can feel and has been placed in the brothel against her will. But should Niska’s madam, a human woman, feel solidarity with the non-feeling female Synths she owns? Does displacing violent sexual fantasies onto non-feeling robots liberate human women from similar fates (and do human women want to be liberated from sex work?)? Is it ethical to hold female robots in captivity as sex workers, with doors that only unlock by human hands, whether or not they can feel?

Thus far, the show offers more questions than answers, but like all good science fiction, the questions are important ones. They are also old questions, concerns about household labor, child-rearing, and sex work that feminists have been exploring for generations. As a result, Humans makes the important point that while we may be technologically advancing, there is still much work to be done when it comes to social issues like gender equality.

Recommended reading: Donna Haraway’s, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Colleen Martell is a writer and gender consultant based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She might be a cyborg. Find her on twitter at @elsiematz.

Sweet Nectar of the Matriarchy: Breastmilk in ‘Fury Road’

Immortan Joe sampling the goods with milk mothers and their machines in the background

This is a guest post by Colleen Martell.

Liquids abound in the otherwise dry landscape of Mad Max: Fury Road: precious gasoline (or “guzzoline”), scarce water, spray-on chrome, blood transfusions, and stolen mother’s milk. A dystopia wrapped around a feminist utopia, Fury Road has been cheered by women’s rights supporters and action film lovers alike. The film’s nightmarish post-apocalyptic world is characterized by a patriarchal power that exploits women’s reproduction and consolidates resources, leaving many in abject poverty. Hard to imagine, I know. It’s no surprise then, that the film was boycotted by MRAs. While rape and forced procreation are the most obvious examples of women’s exploited reproductive labor, breastmilk recurs throughout Fury Road as a symbol of that oppression. We view women imprisoned in milk-pumping machines, much like harrowing images of factory dairy farms. And unlike sex and sexuality, which are left conspicuously out of the film’s uprising, redemption is symbolized through human milk: “Mother’s Milk” anoints Max’s (Tom Hardy) face after his first proactively selfless act in support of Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and the “Five Wives,” for example.

We live in a culture that has a complicated relationship with breastmilk: on the one hand, there’s an almost fanatical love of it as a healing substance, and on the other, fear and disgust so intense that mothers are routinely shamed for public breastfeeding (it’s supposedly “unsanitary”). Fury Road dramatically and imaginatively reproduces this stance toward breastmilk. The Citadel’s inhabitants worship Mother’s Milk–they chant these words, among others, before Furiosa’s supply run to Gas Town (the implication is that the city exports milk in exchange for gas and therefore it is central to their economy)–but we also see that the women providing milk are chained to breast pumps with their mouths covered, holding sad, filthy baby dolls in their arms meant to stimulate milk production. Women the producers are unsanitary and devalued; the milk they create is holy. Holy and commodified, of course: it’s meant to sustain the patriarch Immortan Joe, his sons, and anyone else he deems worthy, and to keep the hierarchical structure going through trade with neighboring patriarchal cities.

Feminist breastfeeding scholars point out that we already live in a world in which breastmilk is a commodity. Linda C. Fentiman argues that human milk is “marketed both literally and figuratively, as a good for sale, a normative behavior, and a cure for a variety of contemporary social and medical problems.” Pediatricians promote breast is best, nonprofit milk banks and milk sharing organizations are popping up everywhere, and even for-profit formula companies use breastmilk in their scientific studies. All of these benefit people; rarely do they financially benefit those providing their milk. In response, Fentiman proposes we make more explicit the market value of breastmilk, because this would recognize women’s labor in milk production. Why not let mothers quantify and sell their milk? Why not give nursing mothers more economic power within the system as it is?

But others, like Fiona Giles, encourage us as a culture to “waste breastmilk.” Our intense fear of “the leaky body,” she says in Breastmilk: The Movie, means that we often treat women’s bodies as “monstrous.” Shaming nursing mothers is one example of how society strives to keep women’s bodies controlled and neat and orderly. Breastmilk (and pregnancy and menstruation, for that matter) threatens to make the leaky body public. Yet at the same time, we have public health campaigns praising human milk as “liquid gold” and dictating diet, sleep, behavior, and more to protect and champion this substance. The conflicted message here, which Fury Road so vividly amplifies, is disgust of the body itself while praising what the body produces. And so why don’t we push back by pouring it everywhere? “Let’s throw it around,” Giles says. “Let’s do what we feel like in it. Have baths. Who cares?” This has a double effect: refusing bodily shame and rejecting the idea of milk as something precious and rare. Or to use Giles’s terms, wasting human breastmilk moves us from a “scarcity model” to a “plentitude model.” In the scarcity model, we see fear of insufficient production, rhetoric that links “good” behavior with breastfeeding, individual responsibility for failure or success in infant nourishment, and anxious hording of backup milk. But why not operate from a place of abundance instead? Resist the system as it is and disrupt “orderly” (read: controlled) public spaces with leaking breasts, unpredictable bodies, and shared milk?

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. In other words, the film suggests these women will build a new economy altogether; I hear echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopia Herland (1915) and philosopher Luce Irigaray, who writes a wildly fascinating theory about the feminist power of liquids in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977). For me the promise of this new economy is the film’s most cathartic gesture.

Cathartic, but not perfect. It isn’t human milk that flows at the triumphant end, but water drilled from deep in the earth. Does the milk mothers’ liberation come at the cost of the earth’s resources, I wonder? Or are we meant to conflate maternal women with the earth? Both troublesome suggestions. And of course as controversial as mothering is in our culture, a maternally centered revolution remains less threatening than would, say, any gesture toward sexual pleasure at the heart of the uprising. If we are disgusted by maternal bodies, we are downright terrified by sexually empowered women’s bodies.

Yet, regardless of what happens next in the Citadel, Fury Road’s use of breastmilk both in its oppressive and resistant visions demonstrates that when we talk about human breastmilk we aren’t just talking about feeding human infants, personal choice, or love and bonding. We’re also talking about economics and labor, and our societal fear of unpredictable, leaky female bodies even while society commodifies what those bodies produce. Fury Road concretely and imaginatively re-connects bodies with human milk, making milk-producing breasts very much public. Although the film’s ending is more symbolic than prescriptive, the final scene suggests that prosthetic-free Furiosa, the seed-wielding Wives, and the water-pouring milk mothers are no longer outliers in an otherwise orderly society, but are now the source and foundation of society’s structure. This enables us to imagine a world in which the leaky body is not an object of shame or fear, but instead a source of power and creation.

Colleen Martell is a writer, literary agent, and lecturer of public health and women’s studies based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. There’s a place for both breastfed and formula fed babies in her feminist utopia. She tweets about bodies at @elsiematz.