Tag: Female Bodies

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

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.

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

Water flowing
Water flowing

 

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?

maryjesussm

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.

breast-milk

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.

 

 

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Flight’s Unintentional Pro-Woman Message

Written by Lady T. 

Denzel Washington in Flight
Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by John Gatins, has a fascinating lead performance by Denzel Washington and an absolutely harrowing plane crash scene that will make you never want to fly again. It also has a poorly-conceived romance subplot with a character who is not so much a real woman as a distracting trope of a woman inserted to show a different side to the protagonist. No one who is looking for a Bechdel-passing thriller will want to pick up Flight, as there is gratuitous female nudity and few of the female characters are well-developed, to no fault of the capable actresses.
Yet despite the presence of exploitative nudity and poorly written female characters, I found one surprising, perhaps unintentional, feminist message in Flight, in the story involving Katerina Marquez, the female character with the least amount of development and screentime.
Flight opens with the morning after of a sexual encounter between pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) and flight attendant Katerina Marquez (Nadine Velazquez). (There is female nudity but no male nudity, because of course there is, and the lingering shots on her body are pure male fantasy/objectification.) Based on their brief conversation, we learn that Whip and Katerina seem to like each other well enough, but the sex was definitely on physical attraction and no real emotional connection. We also learn that they drank – a lot – the night before the flight.
Later in the day, the passengers board the flight, Katerina helps them to their seats, and Whip mixes several mini-bottles of vodka into his drink, making it clear that he has a serious problem with alcohol and thinks nothing of how his behavior might affect the safety of the passengers.
When the plane starts to fall apart, though, Whip is an absolute master at the helm, remaining calm and controlled and guiding the plane to safety. Katerina, meanwhile, notices a child passenger who has fallen out of his seat when the plane turned upside down. She unbuckles her own seat belt, crawls to the other side of the plane, and puts the child back in his chair, strapping him back in.

Nadine Velazquez as Katerine Marquez and Tamara Tunie as Margaret Thomason in Flight
This is the moment where I decided that I liked Flight, even if it is a very flawed film from both an artistic and feminist perspective, because the script recognizes that human beings are complex, not completely good or completely evil. Whip and Katerina both drank before the flight (and Whip during, which is even worse), but they’re still both capable of acts of great heroism.
During more turbulence, Katerina falls, breaks her neck, and dies. (A review at Bitch magazine decries this dramatic choice as an example of the “woman who has sex in a horror movie dies first” cliche, which I feel entirely misses the point and is downright insulting to a character who died in the line of duty, saving a kid’s life.) Whip survives, though with many serious injuries.
The rest of the film is focused on Whip’s journey as the controversy surrounding the plane crash is hyped in the media, and he goes under investigation. We learn that Whip’s pilot skills are indeed magnificent, and that he saved 96 out of the 102 passengers on board. At the same time, the script and Washington never let him off the hook for his terrible behavior. As the story unfolds, Whip grows increasingly arrogant, reckless, addicted, and dangerous, repeating over and over again that “they gave him a broken plane,” as though this absolves him from drinking/snorting cocaine while flying.

Whip addressing the press outside his ex-wife’s house
Whip finally attends his National Transportation Safety Board hearing (while drunk and on cocaine), where the lead investigator Ellen Block (played by Melissa Leo) reveals that the cause of the plane crash was a damaged jackscrew in the elevator assembly. The crash is in no way Whip’s fault. Sitting in the hearing, even while drunk and pretending not to be, Whip feels as though he’s in the clear.
Then Block drops an unexpected bomb on his head: the empty vodka bottles were found on the plane. Only the flight crew had access to the alcohol on board, and Katerina Marquez’s toxicology report tested positive for alcohol. She asks Whip if he thinks Katerina drank the vodka.
My stomach twisted in nausea when Block asked this question, because I knew exactly what would happen if Whip let Katerina take the fall for the vodka bottles. The media would go into a frenzy. The story about the broken plane would turn into the story of the drunk slut of a flight attendant whose reckless behavior almost ruined the reputation of a decent man who saved the lives of ninety people. Katerina’s rescue of the child on the plane would go largely unnoticed. The media would tarnish her name, all too eager to sink their claws into another story about a fallen woman.
It would be all too easy for Whip to lie. He’s lied already to everyone around him, including himself. The rest of his career rides on this lie. Katerina’s career won’t be ruined if he lies; she’s already dead. There is nothing to stop him from lying — except his conscience.

Whip right before (eventually) doing the right thing
For whatever reason, Whip can’t lie. When confronted with Katerina’s face, he can’t continue with his charade. After struggling with himself and muttering “God help me” under his breath, he says, “No, Katerina did not drink the vodka…because I drank the vodka.” The consequences are swift: his reputation is ruined, his career is over, and he has to serve time in jail, but his conscience is a little clearer now.
Whip refusing to blame Katerina is not a heroic act on his part; it’s simply Whip taking long-overdue responsibility for his actions. But living in a world that blames women for their own rape and abuse, a world that shames women for stepping outside of their prescribed roles, that punishes mistakes any mistakes women make, that finds excuses for famous athletes who rape women and kill their girlfriends, I felt gratified to see a male character refuse to tarnish a woman’s name, even at personal cost to himself.
Katerina is not a character we get to know very well. She only exists in the plot to serve as a parallel to Whip, and she’s naked for no real reason at the beginning of the film. All the same, I appreciated that the male lead acknowledges Katerina’s humanity and her worth as a person. He acknowledges that she doesn’t deserve to have her reputation dragged through the mud. Even though her character is killed early in the film, she is not treated as disposable, because women do not deserve to be treated as disposable. I’m uncertain that this message was intentional on the part of the team who created Flight, but I’m grateful for it all the same. 

———-

Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘Flight’s Unintentional Pro-Woman Message

Written by Lady T. 

Denzel Washington in Flight
Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by John Gatins, has a fascinating lead performance by Denzel Washington and an absolutely harrowing plane crash scene that will make you never want to fly again. It also has a poorly-conceived romance subplot with a character who is not so much a real woman as a distracting trope of a woman inserted to show a different side to the protagonist. No one who is looking for a Bechdel-passing thriller will want to pick up Flight, as there is gratuitous female nudity and few of the female characters are well-developed, to no fault of the capable actresses.
Yet despite the presence of exploitative nudity and poorly written female characters, I found one surprising, perhaps unintentional, feminist message in Flight, in the story involving Katerina Marquez, the female character with the least amount of development and screentime.
Flight opens with the morning after of a sexual encounter between pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) and flight attendant Katerina Marquez (Nadine Velazquez). (There is female nudity but no male nudity, because of course there is, and the lingering shots on her body are pure male fantasy/objectification.) Based on their brief conversation, we learn that Whip and Katerina seem to like each other well enough, but the sex was definitely on physical attraction and no real emotional connection. We also learn that they drank – a lot – the night before the flight.
Later in the day, the passengers board the flight, Katerina helps them to their seats, and Whip mixes several mini-bottles of vodka into his drink, making it clear that he has a serious problem with alcohol and thinks nothing of how his behavior might affect the safety of the passengers.
When the plane starts to fall apart, though, Whip is an absolute master at the helm, remaining calm and controlled and guiding the plane to safety. Katerina, meanwhile, notices a child passenger who has fallen out of his seat when the plane turned upside down. She unbuckles her own seat belt, crawls to the other side of the plane, and puts the child back in his chair, strapping him back in.

Nadine Velazquez as Katerine Marquez and Tamara Tunie as Margaret Thomason in Flight
This is the moment where I decided that I liked Flight, even if it is a very flawed film from both an artistic and feminist perspective, because the script recognizes that human beings are complex, not completely good or completely evil. Whip and Katerina both drank before the flight (and Whip during, which is even worse), but they’re still both capable of acts of great heroism.
During more turbulence, Katerina falls, breaks her neck, and dies. (A review at Bitch magazine decries this dramatic choice as an example of the “woman who has sex in a horror movie dies first” cliche, which I feel entirely misses the point and is downright insulting to a character who died in the line of duty, saving a kid’s life.) Whip survives, though with many serious injuries.
The rest of the film is focused on Whip’s journey as the controversy surrounding the plane crash is hyped in the media, and he goes under investigation. We learn that Whip’s pilot skills are indeed magnificent, and that he saved 96 out of the 102 passengers on board. At the same time, the script and Washington never let him off the hook for his terrible behavior. As the story unfolds, Whip grows increasingly arrogant, reckless, addicted, and dangerous, repeating over and over again that “they gave him a broken plane,” as though this absolves him from drinking/snorting cocaine while flying.

Whip addressing the press outside his ex-wife’s house
Whip finally attends his National Transportation Safety Board hearing (while drunk and on cocaine), where the lead investigator Ellen Block (played by Melissa Leo) reveals that the cause of the plane crash was a damaged jackscrew in the elevator assembly. The crash is in no way Whip’s fault. Sitting in the hearing, even while drunk and pretending not to be, Whip feels as though he’s in the clear.
Then Block drops an unexpected bomb on his head: the empty vodka bottles were found on the plane. Only the flight crew had access to the alcohol on board, and Katerina Marquez’s toxicology report tested positive for alcohol. She asks Whip if he thinks Katerina drank the vodka.
My stomach twisted in nausea when Block asked this question, because I knew exactly what would happen if Whip let Katerina take the fall for the vodka bottles. The media would go into a frenzy. The story about the broken plane would turn into the story of the drunk slut of a flight attendant whose reckless behavior almost ruined the reputation of a decent man who saved the lives of ninety people. Katerina’s rescue of the child on the plane would go largely unnoticed. The media would tarnish her name, all too eager to sink their claws into another story about a fallen woman.
It would be all too easy for Whip to lie. He’s lied already to everyone around him, including himself. The rest of his career rides on this lie. Katerina’s career won’t be ruined if he lies; she’s already dead. There is nothing to stop him from lying — except his conscience.

Whip right before (eventually) doing the right thing
For whatever reason, Whip can’t lie. When confronted with Katerina’s face, he can’t continue with his charade. After struggling with himself and muttering “God help me” under his breath, he says, “No, Katerina did not drink the vodka…because I drank the vodka.” The consequences are swift: his reputation is ruined, his career is over, and he has to serve time in jail, but his conscience is a little clearer now.
Whip refusing to blame Katerina is not a heroic act on his part; it’s simply Whip taking long-overdue responsibility for his actions. But living in a world that blames women for their own rape and abuse, a world that shames women for stepping outside of their prescribed roles, that punishes mistakes any mistakes women make, that finds excuses for famous athletes who rape women and kill their girlfriends, I felt gratified to see a male character refuse to tarnish a woman’s name, even at personal cost to himself.
Katerina is not a character we get to know very well. She only exists in the plot to serve as a parallel to Whip, and she’s naked for no real reason at the beginning of the film. All the same, I appreciated that the male lead acknowledges Katerina’s humanity and her worth as a person. He acknowledges that she doesn’t deserve to have her reputation dragged through the mud. Even though her character is killed early in the film, she is not treated as disposable, because women do not deserve to be treated as disposable. I’m uncertain that this message was intentional on the part of the team who created Flight, but I’m grateful for it all the same. 

———-

Lady T is a writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

Guest Post: ‘Women Without Men’: Gender Roles in Iran, Women’s Bodies and Subverting the Male Gaze

Guest post written by Kaly Halkawt.

The author Sharnush Parsipur wrote 1989 a novel that would become what could be called a modern classic in contemporary feminist literature. The book entitled Women Without Men is a story about how five women living in Iran during the 1950s end up in exile from the male-dominated society they live in that has in different ways deprived them their freedom. Although along their path into exile is not a simple one. They must all go through a painful metamorphosis and accept that the freedom they ask for alienates their bodies from society. All five protagonists come together in a garden which serves them as a space free from male domination.

This story has been visualized once as a video art installation consisting of five different videos by the artist Shirin Neshat. The video installation went under the name “Women Without Men” and was created from 2004-2008. The five different videos where entitled after the characters names; Mahdokht (2004), Zarin (2005), Munis (2008), Farokh Legha (2008) and Faze (2008). However the content of the entire constellation has varied based on where the installation has been exhibited.
Based on these five videos, Neshat retold the story once again but this time in a more linear narrative film. However this time she choose to exclude the story of the character Mahdokt, although one could argue that she appears in the film in form of a tree, but before we go into that I want to share my experience of the video installation that I saw at the Stockholm Culture Institute in 2009.
The video for Mahdokht was told through three different screens. Mahdokt fantasizes about planting herself like a seed in the garden and growing into a tree and literally erasing her body into the idea that manifests her spiritual character. Her desire is to through detaching her body from civilization, intellect and culture touch the freedom that seems impossible to gain with a female body in the world the way she experiences it. Mahdokt’s story can also be seen as a comment to the myth about the nymph Daphne who figured in Roman mythology. The myth of Daphne has been told in many different ways, but basically it goes something like this: The god Apollo is captivated by the beauty of Daphne. She refuses to give in for his sexual desire and as punishment the god Zeus transform Daphne into a tree.
A still image from the video Mahdokt

Mahdokt’s character can here be read as a representation of the female body and an attempt to erase the values and symbols the female body has embodied in mythology as the object. Parsipur/Neshat has rewritten the myth of the female body by making it the subject and not the object of the story. Mahdokt is the narrator of her story and she is not a victim. She actively chooses to offer her body to her ideal by becoming a tree in contrast to Daphne who is a victim who is being punished for not sacrificing her body.

Mahdokt’s action is stating that we can imprison bodies, but not ideas.
From a book to video installation and narrative film, Women Without Men is a work in motion. The adaptation for the screen that was directed by Neshat was highly praised by film critics all around the world and won the Silver Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.

The film takes place in 1953 which politically is an unforgettable year in Iran’s history. The democratically chosen Prime Minister Mossadghe was overthrown by the CIA which created enormous protests. The political background story serves as a tool for creating what will be the revolution in the mind of the characters.

Shabnam Toloui (Munis)

In the first shot we see the character Munis committing suicide by jumping down from a roof, however she lives on in the story as the narrator. Later on in the film, we learn that one of the reasons for why she committed suicide was because she lived with a conservative brother who aggressively wanted her to stop following the protests by listening to the radio. He encouraged her to instead get married and “start a real life.”

The day of Munis’ suicide, we learn that her brother organized a suitable man that would come and ask for her hand in marriage. When Munis’ brother refuses to let her go out of the house, she decides to take control over the situation. By sacrificing her body for the sake of her integrity and political conviction, her death does not necessarily need to be read as a forfeit. Munis’ death leads to her freedom and becomes her politics. Its through her eyes after her death that we get to see the protests and demonstrations on the streets of Tehran.

 Pegah Feridony (Faezeh)

It is also Munis action that leads to the awakening of her friend Faezeh. From the beginning, Fazeh is portrayed as a traditional girl who wants to live a “normal life” aka get married and have children with Munis’ brother. However when she finds Munis’ dead body on the street and sees how her brother digs it down in his garden to prevent the news of her suicide spreading and leading to an official shaming of the family name, Faezeh’s world is turned upside down. She gives up the idea of marriage and men and just decides to look for her own piece of mind. Munis’ ghost serves literally as the guide and takes Faezeh to the garden and leads her into exile.

Arita Sharzad (Fakhri)

Fakhri is the eldest of the gang and arguably embodies what Second Wave feminism has criticized: upper-middle class ladies who are bored serving as some sort of poupée (doll) for their husbands. Fakhri’s journey towards change starts when she meets an old friend who reminds her of the freedom that can be the price of getting married. She remembers how she used to write poetry and hang out with people who believed in culture as a political tool for change, an opinion that makes her husband laugh. So in her own “eat-pray-love” escapade, she buys a big house in the garden and leaves her relationship so that she can put energy and time into rediscovering and recreating herself.

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ The Turkish Bath via Amiresque

The fourth character Zarin is a prostitute who decides to escape the brothel when she sees a client’s deranged face while they are having sex. Zarin never talks during the film and like Munis, she uses her body to free herself from the societal norms. Zarin is just her body, we don’t get her background history. I think one possible reading of why she is just reduced to a body in this film is a comment on the stereotypical images of women that have been created within the frames of Orientalism.

Some of the films key scenes are focused on Zarin. In one of the most visual scenes, Zarin is in a Turkish hamam (Turkish bath) and scrubbing her body until it starts bleeding. The misé-en-scene is an exact copy of Jean-Augustue Dominique Ingres’ painting The Turkish Bath (1862). This is a direct comment on the representational prevail of white upper-middle class men. This painting, among others, led to the creation of myths about women from the Middle East. Neshat literally tries to erase this myth in this particular scene.

Orsolya Toth (Zarin)

Another important scene that serves as a commentary for the male gaze is an image of Zarin floating in a river, alluding to John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia (1852). In Millais’ painting, we see the suicide of Hamlet‘s Ophelia where she falls into the river and dies. Ophelia has been the subject of a lot of debate. How should we interpret her character? What values does she embody? This Shakespearian character is either referred to as a sick young damsel in distress or completely ignored and just seen as an object for male dominance in Hamlet. I think Neshat is trying to criticize the fact that Ophelia is almost never seen as her own character and only read in relation to Hamlet. Once again, Neshat tries to turn the female object into the subject.

Neshat uses Zarin’s body to criticize the stereotypical imagery of women in a few key scenes of the film by reproducing the exact same scenery as some historical paintings. However Neshat transforms Zarin’s body from object into subject, thus giving her the tools to go through a metamorphosis and take control over her body so that she can erase the values and ideas represented by men.

By giving each character their own voice to tell their story, Neshat questions the classical representation of women in Arab and Persian cultures. These women start off by being dominated in the patriarchy they live. Socially and politically, Munis is restricted by her brother. Intellectually, Fakhri does not have the freedom and the hope she had before she got married with an idiot (ie a man with power) and Zarin, before entering the garden, is just reduced to a sexual body used as a tool to control her position on a bigger scale since being a prostitute doesn’t always receive a lot of respect from society. But they all find their way to reinvent themselves in space free from male dominance. In case it’s not clear enough, this film is the queen of awesome films about women.

However one thing a bit fuzzy in Women Without Men is the portrayal of men. To sum it up, this is how Iranian men are characterized: men that live in Iran are uncultivated, uneducated rapists who crave control over women with no nuance of humanity in them. This contrasts with the Iranian men who have moved abroad, cultivated by the Western World and who see the value in educating women and treating them equally. But this is a post about the female characters so I won’t comment further other than to say the stereotype of men from Iran is not being questioned.

I never thought I would write an essay where I would find the female characters more well-written then the men. Deux point, Neshat.

———-
Kaly Halkawt is 24 years old and has a BA in Cinema Studies. Before starting work on her Master’s, she moved to Paris for two years, working as a Montessori Teacher and studying French at the Sorbonne. Planning a big academic comeback this semester, she is currently writing her Master’s thesis on a geneology of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University.

Horror Week 2012: ‘The Walking Dead’ and Gender: Why I’m Skeptical the Addition of Badass Michonne Will Change the TV Series’ Sexism

Michonne (Danai Gurira) in The Walking Dead

Warning: if you haven’t seen Seasons 1 and 2 of The Walking Dead, there are spoilers ahead.

Have you ever dated someone because of their potential rather than what she/he/ze brings to the table? Or is that just me?? Well, that’s how I feel about AMC’s The Walking Dead.

While I like the show, I keep watching the zombie apocalypse, based on the comic books, because I keep hoping and expecting it to become great – especially when it comes to the female characters and the show’s sexist portrayal of gender roles.

The conservative characters continually depict retro gender norms. The men talk about protecting the women. The women cook and clean while the men go off and hunt or protect the camp or farm. Yes, Andrea is the exception to the rule. She shoots and kills zombies and patrols the perimeter. But the women take a backseat to the men. They let the men debate, argue, decide.

I criticized Game of Thrones, a show I adore, for its misogyny. But at least it contains strong, intelligent and powerful female characters. Where the hell are they on The Walking Dead???

Which is why I’m so excited about the introduction of Michonne.

In Season 2’s record-breaking finale, Andrea (Laurie Holden) is rescued by a katana-wielding, hooded woman holding two chained, jawless, armless zombies. It was probably the best introduction I’ve ever witnessed. Ever. And that mystery woman would be Michonne. Not only am I delighted to see another female character. But the show so desperately needs another bad-ass woman.

For those who haven’t read the comics (like me), Michonne, who will be played by Danai Gurira (who’s simply amazing in The Visitor and Treme) seems to be a strong, powerful, complex character. She’s clever since she uses two incapacitated walkers in order to seek out the living hide from other walkers. She appears to be a fierce and fearless survivor. But what’s even more exciting is that she’s a woman of color.

Yet I’m skeptical as the show hasn’t done a great job portraying gender so far.

Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) does whatever Rick (Andrew Lincoln), her husband and leader of the group, says, blindly and unquestioningly standing by him. Carol (Melissa McBride), who’s keeping it together pretty well considering she’s lost her daughter and her husband, still clings to men, first her abusive husband Ed and now Daryl (Norman Reedus), who tell her what to do. The writers squandered the opportunity to explore a domestic violence survivor rather than making her a caricature. When we first meet Maggie (Lauren Cohan), she’s riding in on a horse, bashing a Walker (aka zombie) with a baseball bat. She started off so fierce, spunky and sexually assertive. It’s just unfortunate she’s unraveling, a hysterical mess who seems to cling to her BF Glenn (Steven Yeun) for protection.

The two bright spots are Andrea and Jacqui. Andrea is one of my favorite characters. A tough survivor, she’s one of the best shots and guards the camp. She did try to commit suicide, despondent after her sister died. But she’s become determined to live. She’s smart, questions the status quo, and has become more assertive, unafraid to voice her opinion. Jacqui was outspoken and seemed to possess a quiet inner strength. While I wish she’d fought harder to survive, she chooses to end her life, dying peacefully at the end of Season 1. Even though Andrea and Jacqui are the only ones, I’m glad SOMEBODY questions the ridiculous gender nonsense.

In the very first episode in Season 1, there’s a flashback depicting Rick and Shane joking about gender differences. When Rick confides that he’s having marital problems, he tells Shane that Lori accused him of “not caring about his family in front of” their son Carl. And then Rick (who I actually like a lot) says:

“The difference between men and women? I would never say something that cruel to her.”

Wow, so we’re treated to gender essentialism and a lovely tidbit that women are cruel, heartless shrews all in the first episode. This is definitely an omen of things to come.

Andrea (Laurie Holden), Amy (Emma Bell), Carol (Melissa McBride) doing laundry on The Walking Dead

In “Tell It To the Frogs,” Andrea, Amy, Carol, Jacqui wash laundry in a lake. As the women work, they see the men splashing around enjoying themselves. Jacqui, one of the only women with any common sense and a spark of strength, asks:

“I’m really beginning to question the division of labor around here. Can someone explain to me how the women ended up doing all the Hattie McDaniel work?”

YES!! Love this! How about maybe they rotate chores? Or what if (radical idea here) some of the men wanted to cook or clean? Why should the women do all the domestic tasks??

The women proceed to bond over missing their washing machines and vibrators. But then the frivolity is cut short by Carol’s abusive husband Ed who threatens the women and then slaps Carol. While the women try to defend her, Shane steps in and starts beating the shit out of him, getting out all his aggression and frustration about Lori spurning him. So even though Shane warns Ed that he better not ever lay a hand on Carol or Sophia, he’s not acting out of nobility or the belief that men shouldn’t abuse women. Not surprising as this is the same douchebag who later tries to rape Lori and then brushes it off when she confronts him about it.

Talking about women in post-apocalyptic genres, Balancing Jane asserts that while strong women exist, it’s the men who rescue them and allow them their strength:

“[The Walking Dead goes out of its] way to demonstrate that those women had to first be saved by a righteous man. In order for women to become competent and determined, a man had to first stand up and make a space for them. Until a man appeared as savior, the women were doomed to be physically overpowered and sexually exploited.”

Men continually deny women power and autonomy. Dale takes Andrea’s gun away from her (“What Lies Ahead”) like she’s a child, backed up by rapist Shane. So a grown-ass woman shouldn’t have a gun but Carl, an ELEVEN-year-old can carry one! Oh but the little woman can’t be trusted. Ugh. Dale also comments on Andrea and Maggie’s sex lives. Speaking of Carl and guns…Lori voices her opposition for her son shooting yet no one listens to her concerns. When Lori discovers she’s pregnant, Glenn scolds her for not taking her vitamins as if she doesn’t know how to care for herself. Gee thanks, Glenn, it’s not like she’s never been pregnant before.

And then of course there’s the infamous abortion/emergency contraception storyline in “Secrets.” After Lori discovers she’s pregnant, she asks Glenn to obtain medication from the pharmacy for her to terminate her pregnancy (which she admits she’s not sure if it will work). But EC is contraception, doesn’t terminate an existing pregnancy and must be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex or failed contraception. RU-486, which does terminate an existing pregnancy, has to be procured from a doctor, not a pharmacy.

Jezebel, Slate, ACLU and many others wrote about this episode and the myths it perpetuates. Of course showrunner Glenn Mazzara brushed off the criticism saying the writers took “artistic creative license” and he “hopes people aren’t turning to the fictional world of The Walking Dead for medical advice.” Well of course people shouldn’t be. But the media influences people’s perceptions, including medicine and abortion. There’s so much misinformation swirling around abortion and contraception. And it’s this misinformation that anti-choicers use to their advantage.

If ever there was a time for a show to depict a pregnant character having an abortion…yeah, I think a zombie apocalypse would be it. But it’s strange that this abortion/contraception arc occurs in the same episode where people are debating the zombies in the barn and what constitutes life.

Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) on The Walking Dead

But it’s the reaction of those around Lori that most disturbs me. Rick screams at Lori for even thinking about terminating the pregnancy. After Maggie and Glenn return from the pharmacy (granted, they’ve just been attacked by zombies), Maggie chucks the pills at Lori saying, “Here’s your abortion pills!” So not only does Lori not turn to another woman for help (turning to Glenn instead), but Maggie yells at her for her reproductive choice. As Bitch Magazine blogger Katherine Don writes:

“When reproductive choices are navigated by a stereotyped character and manhandled by scriptwriters who don’t recognize a woman’s ability to weight options and make decisions, the woman is robbed of her individuality, humanity and dignity.”

Beyond their “individuality, humanity and dignity,” the women are also robbed of their voice. In “Judge, Jury, Executioner,” the group congregate in the farmhouse to discuss the fate of captured Randall. While Dale vehemently opposes the decision to execute him, he’s the only one who speaks up. Eventually, Andrea, who was a civil rights lawyer pre-walkers, voices her opinion that Dale’s right. Lori, who opposes the death penalty, says nothing, almost always blindly agreeing with Rick. But the worst comes when Carol says she wants no part of the decision and wants them to decide it for her. Excuse me?? You want to forget all about making the hard decisions and just sit back, letting others decide for you??

I’m so fucking tired of the writers silencing the women.

The show’s treatment of race and heteronormativity isn’t a whole lot better. Why does the one black man (what happened to Morgan and his son from Season 1??) have to be silent for most episodes and have a ridiculous name like T-Dog? Where are the LGBTQ characters? What does it say about a show where the most interesting and complex character is a racist?? Yep, sad to say but Daryl’s my favorite. Why do we have to keep hearing racist Asian jokes? Why did Jacqui, the one black woman on the show, have to kill herself??

We see female empowerment continually stripped away. Lori seems to be the worst perpetrator of gender stereotypes and reinforcing hyper-masculinity. Glenn tells Maggie that he was distracted shooting at the bar because all he could think about was her. When Maggie confesses this in “18 Miles Out,” Lori in her infinite wisdom tells her that she should let “the men do their man-work” and that it’s women’s jobs to support the men. Oh yeah, she also says, “Tell him to man up.” Gee thanks, Lori. Swell advice. So men aren’t allowed to be emotional or sentimental. Only women.

(L-R): Glenn, Andrea, Shane, T-Dog, Daryl on The Walking Dead

Later, Lori, on another anti-feminist tirade (!!!), scolds Andrea for burdening the other women by not cooking and cleaning. Lori says Andrea should leave the other work for the men, like a good little woman, don’t ya know. What. The. Fuck. When Andrea says that she contributes to the group by offering protection and keeping watch (which she does), Lori blurts out,

“You sit up on that RV working on your tan with a shotgun in your lap.”

I’m sorry, did the zombipocalypse also signal a rip in the fabric of time where The Walking Dead characters now live in fucking 1955?! So Lori, women shouldn’t be “playing” with guns or hunting for food or protecting the camp. Nope. Women are only good for domestic duties like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Leave the tough stuff to the men. Silly me for forgetting. Thank god Andrea told Lori and her bullshit off. Maybe Lori’s just jealous of Andrea’s skills since Lori can’t drive a car without flipping it into a ditch.

While blaming it on Lori’s “irrational behavior” due to her pregnancy and “going through a lot of stuff” (um, aren’t they all?), writer and The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman ultimately defends this exchange and the show’s depiction of traditional gender roles:

“Lori is really just aggravated over a lot of things and she’s lashing out. She was serious and she wants Andrea to pull her weight; certain people are stuck with certain tasks and to a certain extent people are retreating back into traditional gender roles because of how this survival-crazy world seems to work.”

So I’m really supposed to believe that when the zombie shit hits the fan, we’re all going to take a time warp? And why the fuck is it a woman, the wife of the leader of the group, who keeps spouting sexist bullshit?!

The horror genre often makes commentaries on humanity vs. brutality. Yet Kirkman clearly doesn’t care about making a social commentary on gender. And to a point that’s fine – not everything must possess some deep message. But there’s no reason the opposite couldn’t be true – an apocalypse spurring egalitarian rather than “traditional” gender roles.

All of the survivors have endured unspeakable horrors, witnessing the slaughter of their loved ones. People react differently to tragedy, some will come unhinged while others grow stronger. And wielding a gun isn’t necessarily synonymous with strength. But why must we constantly see a rearticulation of sexist gender stereotypes? Do people actually think this sexism is justified because they erroneously think we live in a post-feminist society?? When it comes to genres like horror, fantasy and scif-fi, writers can imagine any world they wish. Why imagine a sexist one? Why is everyone on the show struggling to maintain white male patriarchy??

We haven’t witnessed a fierce woman in any leadership role yet. With the arrival Michonne, I’m finally truly excited about The Walking Dead. I’m hopeful that the writers can still turn things around. With Michonne and Lauren Cohan who plays Maggie promoted to series regular, some speculate “Season 3 is shaping up to be a big one for the ladies.” But I’m still skeptical. Michonne has a lot to do to erase the stench of sexist bullshit contaminating the show.

Horror Week 2012: The Final Girl Gone Wild: Post-Feminist Whiteness in ‘Scream 4’
 
Guest post written by Jeremy Cornelius. Warning: massive spoilers ahead!!

Wes Craven’s 1990s Scream trilogy completely rewrote the slasher genre in a postmodern meta-film. In March 2011, Scream 4 was released, ten years after Scream 3 was originally released, starring the original trio: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox-Arquette along with some new teen stars to apparently spur a new trilogy. Yet again, this film rewrites the genre, only this time the film plays with concepts of post-racial, post-feminist girl power by making Ghost Face a white sixteen-year-old girl, Sidney Prescott’s cousin Jill (played by Emma Roberts). Craven portrays Jill as the most violent and aggressive killer of any of the other serial killers in the Scream films. Jill kills mostly other white teenage girls (her best friends), a black police officer who is depicted in a racist fashion, and her own mother. Jill’s vitriolic aggression is fueled by her neoliberal pursuit of media fame and self-consciously performing the role of victim while veiling herself as the white-faced killer draped in a black shroud.

 
Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4
In the original 1996 Scream film, which Scream 4 constantly refers to and reconstructs, a masked killer known as Ghost Face begins terrorizing a predominantly white upper-middle class neighborhood in rural Woodsboro, California. Sidney is the sixteen-year-old protagonist, who is dating a boy named Billy. Her mother, Maureen Prescott, is mysteriously murdered one year before these serial murders and the film starts in Woodsboro. And Gail Weathers (Cox), a TV journalist, covered “last year’s hottest court case,” and the fame-obsessed Weathers is in the process of finishing up a book on the murders entitled, The Woodsboro Murders. Meanwhile, Deputy Dewey Riley (Arquette) is the bumbling deputy on a (usually) failed mission to look after Sidney. Dewey’s character is in the tradition of Craven’s depiction of the two bumbling cops in his first film, and commonly known exploitation flick, The Last House on the Left. Drew Barrymore has a brief cameo at the beginning of the first film (she was the original pick for the character of Sidney) and is the first victim. The unseen killer calls her as she is home alone about to watch a scary movie. After much stalker-esque dialogue between the killer and Barrymore, she is viciously stabbed and hung from a tree outside of her house, where she is left for her parents to discover her body, leading to the first chilling scream as the title comes across the screen.

Sidney is constantly stalked by the killer and becomes an attempted target in her house, but she eventually manages to stop him and take refuge in her room. Time passes and characters develop a little more before the final scene during a house party at Sidney’s schoolmate, Stu’s house. The killer attacks the kids at the party, and Sidney is left alive to confront, who she discovers, are two killers: her boyfriend Billy and his friend Stu. They confess to having raped and killed her mother one year before. Gail comes in and briefly deters the two killers from killing Sidney, but in the end Sidney manages to kill both of them, declaring, as her surviving friend Randy comments, “Be careful, they always come back for one last scare,” and just as Billy sits up surprisingly, Sidney shoots him in the head, and she states, “Not in my movie,” claiming the construction of the Final Girl as a place of productive empowerment for girls and violent defense against women-hating men.

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) in Scream 4

The gaze of Wes Craven’s Scream 4 intrudes on white girls’ domestic spaces. Technology facilitates the killer’s murderous rampage. The killer attempts to terrify them into panic and submission, but they resist this submission to fear such as in the first scene: two girls are alone in a house watching Stab 7 (a thinly veiled, meta-movie franchise with the Scream storyline within the Scream series). One girl goes upstairs because she hears a noise, but then prank calls her friend downstairs with the Ghost Face app on her iPhone. When she goes downstairs after the call is cut short and wanders around the house calling her friend’s name, she gets a call. Assuming her friends’ disappearance is her friend trying to get back at her for scaring her, she assuredly answers the phone, but the killer calls her on her iPhone and tries to scare her into terrified submission by saying, “you’re the dumb blonde with the big tits, whose part is about to be cut,” but she quickly retaliates with “I have a 180 IQ and a 4.0 GPA, asshole.” Of course, in the end, in the Scream tradition of the slasher theme, the killer prevails by stabbing the girl before the title of the film dramatically flashes onto the screen with the Swedish band The Sounds playing in the background. 
Carol Clover theorizes about gender in slasher films in her well-known book Men, Women, and Chainsaws and addresses the concept of masochistic gazing in horror films. Watching these films, though it could be read as sadistic to consume slasher films, are a mascochistic form of “perverse pleasure” through gazing and seeing what “should not” be seen. The audience can identify with the victim in the Scream films and feel the terror that they feel. The camera shows them reacting to the killer’s calls, and the audience sees and hears the same as the victim. So with every suspenseful moment for the character on screen, the audience feels the same emotion of fear. Carol Clover compares the affect of pornography to horror films, saying:

“Pornography thus engages directly (in pleasurable terms) what horror explores at one remove (in painful terms) and legitimate film at two or more.” 

The affect of terror and pleasure, though, seem to also be blurred when thinking about slasher films. Audiences are entertained by the desire to see violence that is unseen. They get a horrific glimpse into the pain inflicted between humans (mostly men killing women), but one productive element of the Scream series presents a productive feminist subversion of these elements of pleasure, pain, humor, and gender. Clover qualifies the commonly found surviving girl at the end of horror films in her essay, “His Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”:

“The image of a distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl.” 

And this position of the final girl in horror films is destabilized in Scream 4, as the final girl and masked killer are the same person. 

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes about the feminist potential in the first three Scream films in her book, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers:

“According to the logic of realism, Scream might well be seen as endorsing violence in the hands of a teen girl. But when viewed in its cinematic context, the film, like the slasher genre in general, provides an opportunity to examine cultural and individual fantasies as they relate to gender and power.” 

The girl violence in the Scream films takes a new direction as Jill takes on the role of the killer and enacts violent murders against mostly white teenage girls, a black man, and her own mother in the film, symbolically, hyperbolically constructing post-feminist girl power gone horribly wrong. Jill’s performs a coy demeanor and unassaultive character at the beginning of the film, which is starkly contrasted after her unveiling to Sidney as the killer in the second to last scene of the film. She asserts her position as the “empowered” female remake of Billy as the killer and Sidney as the victim, saying “I don’t want to be like you. I want to become you,” right before she stabs Sidney, thinking she murders her. Jill then proceeds to stab herself, throw herself onto a glass coffee table (evocative of a scene out of Fight Club) as a way to bodily victimize herself. 

Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) in Scream 4
J. Jack Halberstam in his article, “Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine,” describes the temptation wrapped up in the symbol of Apple products in relation to the creation myth. Halberstam discusses cybernetics’ relationship to gender and deconstructs the symbol of the Mac apple, and he claims,

“We recognize the Apple computer symbol, I think, as a clever icon for the digitalization of the creation myth [. . . ] The bite now represents the byte of information within a processing memory.” 

He discuses the temptation of biting into the forbidden fruit, which Eve does despite the prohibitions offered by God to her and Adam in Eden. Halberstam relates this Biblical story to the marketing of Apple products with the bitten apple logo on Apple products representing a capitalist seduction of consumer technology and information. Craven takes this concept one step further by having most every character in Scream 4 tote around some Apple product. The Ghost Face killer calls different characters on their iPhones before each murder. The killers use Apple technology to facilitate and capture the murders on film by using webcams to record each murder and post them onto their blog, reconstructing a do-it-yourself remake of the first Scream film within the sequel. The placement of Apple products throughout the film could be read as a synergistic business pursuit by the film makers, and in some ways, people probably were influenced to purchase a new iPhone after seeing this movie. The film also skillfully challenges the obsessive (mis)use of technology, and the Apple products, to use Halberstam’s analysis, symbolize capitalist seduction and female exploitation through violent murders. In “The Scream Trilogy: “Hyperpostmodernism” and the Late Nineties Teen Slasher” by Valerie Wee, she deconstructs the hyperpostmodernism in the Scream films:

“This shift to hyperpostmodernism was motivated by several factors: (1) the development of new media technologies such as cable, video, and an increasing range of digital media; (2) the emergence of a new teen demographic in the United States; and (3) the entertainment industries escalating commitment to cross-media promotional and marketing practices.” 

As Wee argues, the Scream franchise’s insistence on including new media, promotion, and adjusting to the “emergence of a new teen demographic” applies perfectly to Scream 4’s hyperpostmodernism as a next step in the evolution of the series.

L-R: Jill Roberts (Emma Roberts) and Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) in Scream 4

The teenage girls in Scream 4 are constantly on their iPhones in the film and are connected to Ghost Face through their phones. In the first scene of the film, there is a comment made that there is now a Ghost Face app. for the iPhones so anyone can replicate the killer’s voice as a prank call to friends. Female bodies become fused with technology: they become as fused with it as it is their source of survival and simultaneously the killer’s invasion into their white middle-class spaces. Halberstam writes:

“The female cyborg, furthermore, exploits a traditionally masculine fear of the deceptiveness of appearances and calls into question the boundaries of human, animal, and machine precisely where they are most vulnerable — at the site of the female body.” 

Viewers disidentify with Jill and see the violent masochistic pleasure in watching Scream 4. This poses an interesting dilemma of white girl power manifesting in violence and aggression targeted against other white girls, black men, and mothers. Jill symbolizes the ultimate pursuit of individual identity and separation from her community. She manifests her rage and expectant media fame by slaughtering her friends, her mother, and others in her community to escape it. Jill embodies the ideology of post-feminism and exceedingly demonstrates her white neoliberal pursuit of a murderous “girl power” at the violent expense and exploitation of people in Scream 4. 
———-
Jeremy Cornelius, a queer feminist writer and aspiring women’s and gender studies academic making his way in Philadelphia. Common activities include zine making, obsessively watching b-horror movies on Netflix, dressing like a gay sailor from the 1920s, and writing about queer childhood (to take the phrase from J. Jack Halberstam and Kathryn Bond Stockton) and coming from the U.S. South. Common pen name for zines and social media accounts is Riot Robin because of the Robin (from Batman) tattoo on his left arm.

Quote of the Day: Jennifer Livingston

Jennifer Livingston, a morning anchor for a CBS affiliate in Wisconsin, took some time on air Tuesday morning to respond to a letter she’d received from a viewer.
The letter claimed that by her “choice” of being obese, Livingston was not being a “suitable” role model for young people, especially young girls.
Instead of putting aside the letter and not internalizing the criticism (as media personalities must do frequently), Livingston felt the need to address the letter in front of her audience. She’d received an outpouring of support after her husband–an anchor on the same station–posted the letter on his Facebook page.
Livingston’s take-down of the letter-writer has gone viral online. National news and entertainment outlets are picking up her story, and Ellen DeGeneres tweeted in support.
Jennifer Livingston delivers a poignant editorial.
In the segment, Livingston says:
The truth is, I am overweight. You can call me fat — and yes, even obese on a doctor’s chart. But to the person who wrote me that letter, do you think I don’t know that? That your cruel words are pointing out something that I don’t see? …Now I am a grown woman, and luckily for me I have a very thick skin, literally — as that email pointed out — and otherwise. That man’s words mean nothing to me, but really angers me about this is is there are children who don’t know better — who get emails as critical as the one I received or in many cases, even worse, each and every day. … 
I leave you with this: To all of the children out there who feel lost, who are struggling with your weight, with the color of your skin, your sexual preference, your disability, even the acne on your face, listen to me right now. Do not let your self-worth be defined by bullies. Learn from my experience — that the cruel words of one are nothing compared to the shouts of many.
She points out that October is Bullying Prevention Awareness Month. As she articulately points out, children do not bully in a vacuum. Children act what they observe, and a quick look around the adult world–from the covers of tabloids in the grocery store to political pundits–show “bullying” (whether in the form of judgment, concern-trolling or outright hate and discrimination) as the norm.
People like Livingston need to continue to speak out to remind us all that bullying education and prevention doesn’t just belong in elementary school.
Women’s bodies have long been seen as public property (especially if those bodies do not fit the ideal). We audiences are so desperate for women to come forward and speak out against this that we’ve begun creating the quotes ourselves.
We’ve heard some remarkable verbal attacks against women’s bodies and sexuality lately, and thankfully, heard and seen the “shouts of many” reverberate back at them. Acts like Livingston’s should be celebrated, applauded and encouraged. May the well-reasoned shouts prevail.

—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

‘True Blood’ Asserts a Pro-Choice Reproductive Rights Message

Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley) and Pam De Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten) in True Blood

Warning: If you haven’t seen True Blood, Season 5, Episodes 10 and 11, spoilers ahead!!
 
I’m pretty much hooked on True Blood. A sexy TV show with a female protagonist, female friendship, diverse and complex female characters, dreamy brooding men (eh, vampires) with tortured souls — what’s not to love??  
The popular series has long been called an allegory for LGBTQI rights with its phrases “God Hates Fangs” and vampires “coming out of the coffin.”  TV show creator and former showrunner Alan Ball sees True Blood as an analogy for “anyone that’s misunderstood” while author Charlaine Harris envisioned her series of novels which inspired the show as framing the vampires as a minority fighting for equal rights.  
But in the last 2 episodes, another parallel has been drawn: the struggle for reproductive rights.

In Season 5, viewers are introduced to the inner machinations of the Authority, a theocratic vampire government. In “Gone, Gone, Gone,” the Authority appoints creepy Elijah (who looks like he stepped out of a bad 80s hair metal band video) as the new Area 5 vampire sheriff in Bon Temps. When he arrives at the vampire bar Fangtasia, he bullies the fabulously sardonic Pam De Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten) and fierce survivor (turned vampire) Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley)…aka my new favorite female duo. Elijah informs them of the Authority’s new mandate where vampires must create 30 new “baby vamps” in the district.  
Hmmm…sound familiar? Not unlike legislative restrictions on abortion access and contraception. 
After Elijah leaves, Tara muses to Pam that she will create 2 new vampires as she always wanted kids anyway. But Pam tells her: 
“No. We procreate because we want to. Not because some dickhead dipped in afterbirth told us to.” 
Later, Tara decides to take a stand. She tricks Elijah into thinking she’s accidentally killed someone while turning them into a vampire, then she swiftly decapitates him. When Pam enters the room, annoyed and exasperated, Tara tells her: 
“We’re not running. No one fucks with us in our house.” 
In last week’s episode “Sunset,” Pam fears the repercussions of Elijah’s murder from the oppressive Authority. Pam explains to Tara (who’s never heard of the Authority) how the regime doles out both laws and religious doctrine. Tara replies: 
“They can both keep their fucking laws off my body.”
Yes, yes, yes. Just one of the many pro-choice mantras feminists declared protesting the proliferation of heinous anti-choice laws.
But Pam responds: 
“No, they can do whatever they want with your body.” 
Again, sounds eerily like what conservative anti-choice legislators are trying to do: control women’s bodies any way they can. 
Sure, True Bloodis a gory, soap opera romp. But underneath the show’s glossy exterior, Tara and Pam’s conversation conveys the dangers and implications of anti-choice legislation.  
Ball acknowledged the political undertones as he said in an interview that Season 5 was inspired by the Republican primaries and watching Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. He started thinking about what it would be like to have a theocracy in America. He also found it “terrifying…how many people agree” with them.  When you stop and think about it, reproductive health is a big part of our lives. Whether we’re using it, talking about it or advocating access. Yet pop culture and media render it almost invisible. 
Reproductive rights are too often absent from film and TV. While notable exceptions exist — Maude, Grey’s Anatomy, Roseanne, Dirty Dancing, Private Practice, Friday Night Lights, Greenberg, Vera Drake, Degrassi, Sex and the City, Girls — most movies and TV series don’t show characters having abortions. But it’s not just abortions missing from plotlines. Besides a few examples — Sex and the City, Girls, Knocked Up, The Walking Dead, Lola Versus,The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Sons of Anarchy — pop culture has a “weird silence on birth control” and condoms.  
Anti-choicers have launched an all-out war on reproductive justice, demonizing abortion and contraception. And pop culture has remained fairly silent. Now, I’m not saying it’s the job of films and TV shows to educate. But media “reflects and shapes our values and opinions.” It can reinforce tired tropes and stereotypes, perpetuate myths or shed light on a topic and spark dialogue. Media impacts the way we view the world around us. 
Besides salacious sex and shocking plot twists, True Blood transcends mere escapist fun. Weaving reproductive rights into its plot, it makes a bold statement about oppressive governments and the repercussions if we don’t fight back. 
With the proliferation of legislative attacks on reproductive rights, we contend with a daily battle for our bodily autonomy. It’s nice to see this struggle reflected in mainstream media…even amongst vampires, fairies and werewolves.

Quote of the Day: Actor/Director Sarah Polley on Women’s Bodies in Film

In an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered, director and actor Sarah Polley spoke about her new film Take This Waltz. She also discussed how we need more female directors and the unique perspective they can bestow on female characters. One of our awesome readers, Her Film’s Kyna Morgan, alerted us to the interview. What struck Kyna was Polley’s fantastic quote on the sexist portrayal of women’s bodies on-screen: 
“I feel like with young women, their bodies are constantly objectified and used in a sexual context. With older women, [their bodies are] constantly the butt of a joke. For me, the seminal scene that illustrates that is, in About Schmidt, when Kathy Bates gets into the hot tub and Jack Nicholson is horrified and the audience is supposed to scream. 
 “I remember being so deeply offended by that scene. One of the first times you’re dealing with an older woman being naked in a movie — it doesn’t happen very often — and it’s the butt of a joke, or it’s supposed to horrifying. [In a shower-room scene in Take This Waltz] I wanted to show women’s bodies of all ages, kind of without comment, and the only conversation around it is about time passing and what it means, and about sexuality and relationships. That it not be something contrived to produce an effect, necessarily.” 
Yes, yes, YES!! I’m delighted to see an actor and director speak openly about ageism and the objectification of women’s bodies.

Hollywood often portrays only thin, young, white women’s bodies. Women of color, older women and large women — if portrayed at all — are often depicted as hypersexual or asexual, often for humor or derision. Besides Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren and re-runs of The Golden Girls (which I cannot get enough of!), we rarely see female actors over the age of 50 portraying characters embracing their sexuality.

In film and TV, we often see schlubby, overweight, or older men with beautiful, young (or younger), thin women. Couples Retreat, Hitch, King of Queens (pretty much anything with Kevin James), Still Standing, As Good as It Gets, Manhattan, The Wackness, The Honeymooners…I could go on and on. The message is that it doesn’t matter if men age. Ultimately, their looks don’t matter. But as beauty is deemed our only commodity, women must perpetually look young and sexy. Our physiques are only important in enticing and captivating the male gaze.

Reduced to our appearances, women are told time and again that beauty, youth and thinness determine our worth.

We’ve seen toxic bodysnarking recently with Ashley Judd speaking out against the media and the patriarchal policing of women’s bodies, Jennifer Lawrence’s body deemed too fat to play Hunger Games‘ Katniss Everdeen, Lena Dunham’s weight ridiculed and criticized (and lauded!), and Scarlett Johansson annoyed by sexist diet questions. The media polices women’s behavior and scrutinizes their appearance.
Photoshopped faces and bodies saturate the media, bombarding us with unattainable beauty standards. We rarely see imperfections on-screen. No wrinkles, spots, saggy breasts, plump bellies or cellulite in sight. No flaws. Only perfection. It’s no wonder so many girls and women struggle with eating disorders and negative body image issues. The media constantly tells us we’re not good enough. We must be slimmer, curvier, smoother, younger — always different than what we are.
Bodies come in all shapes, races, ethnicities, ages and sizes. And that’s okay. No, it’s better than okay. It’s great. It’s time Hollywood stopped purporting conformity and started embracing diversity.

Is ‘Prometheus’ a Feminist Pro-Choice Metaphor?

Noomi Rapace (Dr. Elizabeth Shaw) in Prometheus

Warning: massive spoilers ahead!

A pseudo-prequel to Alien, Prometheus raises existential themes of religion, god, faith, science, creation, mythology and evolution. While these are all worthy topics, I’m much more interested in Prometheus’ treatment of its female characters and its commentary on reproduction. Is director Ridley Scott’s new film a pro-choice metaphor advocating reproductive justice?
I was ridiculously excited to see Prometheus. As I’ve shared before, Lt. Ellen Ripley was my icon growing up…as she was for many of us. And Scott admittedly loves showcasing strong, intelligent female leads.
Here the incredibly skilled Noomi Rapace plays the female protagonist Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, an archaeologist guided by her curiosity and buoyed by her religious faith. She and her colleague/partner Charlie Holloway discover caves with paintings signifying our creators or “Engineers” as they call them. When corporate Weyland Industries (a pre-cursor to Alien’s Weyland-Yutani) funds their expedition, they go in search of the beginning of humanity…with horrifying consequences.
The film is problematic with its weak dialogue and flimsy characters. Aside from Rapace’s Shaw and Idris Elba’s Janek (Stringer Bell cigar-smoking and playing an accordion?? Yes, please!), I seriously couldn’t give two shits who lived and who died, which is particularly annoying since Alien rested on the strength of its nuanced character development. But where the film captivates is in its exploration of reproduction.
Patriarchy perpetuates rape culture and infringes on reproductive rights. Alien centered on rape and men’s fear of female reproduction. Littered with vaginal-looking aliens and phallic xenomorphs violating victims orally, these themes resurface. But this time around, Scott’s latest endeavor also adds abortion and infertility. As ThinkProgress’ Alyssa Rosenberg asserts, Prometheus bolsters the Alien Saga’s themes of “exploration of bodily invasion and specifically women’s bodily autonomy.”
Holloway goes on a diatribe to Shaw about creation and meeting our creators. He says that everyone can create. Shaw responds, “Not me,” shedding tears as she laments her infertility, something rarely depicted on-screen. Their conversation seemed to comment on how society views women as broken and not fulfilling their ultimate purpose unless they give birth.
While Shaw doesn’t give birth, she does become pregnant.
When David the android (Michael Fassbender) obtains some of the mysterious “black goo” from the temple, he poisons Holloway by placing a drop in his drink. After Holloway and Shaw talk about creation and infertility, Shaw has sex with the infected Holloway.
After Holloway dies (torched by a flame-throwing-toting Vickers), David examines Shaw for any infection. He then tells her that she’s pregnant (say what??). She knows this is impossible because of her infertility. Even though she’s stunned by this revelation — because of its improbability and her infertility is a source of pain — Shaw wants it out of her immediately.

But David doesn’t want her to have an abortion, insisting she be put in stasis and trying to restrain her. Like Ash in Alien, it appears David had an agenda to try and keep the creature inside Shaw alive. David tries to thwart Shaw’s agency and bodily autonomy, forcing her to remain pregnant. Hmmm, sounds eerily similar to anti-choice Republicans with their invasive and oppressive legislation restricting abortion. No one has the right to tell someone what to do with their body.
After fighting her way past people, Shaw enters a medpod, a surgical “chamber,” which is only designed for male patients. Now before anyone says that the chamber was intended for secret passenger Weyland (a dude), it still subtly reinforces patriarchy nonetheless. Why couldn’t a medical chamber offer procedures for all genders rather than just defaulting its calibrations to male?
Undeterred, she programs the machine to remove a foreign object. She watches as her stomach is the mechanical arms remove the alien creature and then is stapled up. Hands down this was the most riveting scene (and squeamish…aside from that creepy eye scene), watching a terrified yet steely determined Shaw assert control over her body and her reproduction.

Now, not everyone agrees that Shaw was pregnant or that her procedure should be called an abortion. Some say yes, others argue no, and still others are unsure. Rosenberg asserts it’s not really an abortion as Shaw “isn’t pregnant but rather infected” and the surgery doesn’t result in “the termination of her pregnancy but a premature birth.” But Scott himself calls it a pregnancy.

For those who discount Shaw’s abortion because it’s a foreign object or not a traditional fetus, look at Breaking Dawn. Bella’s vampire/human fetus grew at a rapid rate, made her sick and almost destroyed her body. Yet she chose to keep it. My point is that Shaw could have as well. Instead, she chooses an abortion.

But whatever terminology you use — and I’m in the camp that calls it an abortion — you can’t ignore the abortion metaphor.
Rather than merely succumbing to the trappings of the Mystical Pregnancy Trope, which reduces women to their reproductive organs, we instead see a metaphor for patriarchal constraints trying to strip women of their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.
Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (actor Noomi Rapace) after having abortion in Prometheus
But before I start jumping up and down that a summer blockbuster features an abortion, there’s a few probs here. The word abortion is never uttered. Nope, not once. Instead, it’s referenced as a “procedure.” When Shaw enters the medpod, she initially attempts to program a caesarean, again not an abortion.
Prometheus also suffers from some problematic gender depictions. While both Prometheus and Alien thrust their female leads into terrifying situations, Shaw and Ripley drastically differ, not only in their personalities and worldviews. But in the way the films treat them.
Alien possessed a strong feminist commentary on sexist patriarchy silencing women’s voices and attempting to objectify and violate their bodies. Unlike Ripley, both Shaw and the icy, seemingly villainous Vickers are sexualized. Both Shaw and Vickers are punished — Vickers by falling into the stereotypical trap of being a cold, selfish shrew and Shaw for her sexuality. Although I’ve got to point out that while Vickers was definitely selfish (not stopping to help a stumbling Shaw when outrunning the crashing ship), I think she made some smart decisions surrounded by an assload of people making idiotic ones. And um, I don’t blame her for not wanting an infected Holloway onboard (which Ripley also tried to do with Kane in Alien). Weyland also makes a sexist statement about inheritance and how David is the closest thing he has to a son, despite his flesh and blood daughter Vickers. It’s as if a daughter is meaningless to him.
Ripley wasn’t defined by her relationship to a man nor did she need a man to survive. But Shaw does…or at least an android taking the form of a man. Yes, she’s a resilient survivor. Although David makes a point to express his surprise at Shaw’s survival, saying he didn’t know she had it in her (ugh, cue bad pun). But aside from her self-induced abortion, Shaw ultimately must rely on others: the squidlike xenomorph extracted during her abortion to save her from a violent Engineer as well as David to escape the planet as he can fly the Engineers’ spacecraft. Although Shaw is the one who determines their course.
Perhaps these gender problems are meant as a commentary on the incessant sexism plaguing today’s society. Or maybe Ripley was such a quintessential feminist film icon that this film pales in comparison.
While it’s not as feminist as it could or should be, The Mary Sue’s Zev Chevat sums up what I liked most about Prometheus:
“Mixing in allusions to birth, the body as battleground, and a female character’s absolute will to regain control belong in this series as much as slimy extraterrestrials. It’s what the Alien films do well, and what Prometheus does best.”
Prometheus is an incredibly flawed film. But when reproductive justice faces a daily barrage of attacks, I have to applaud its efforts to depict its female protagonist not only choosing an abortion, but fighting for her right to exercise autonomy over her body. Especially when so few films and TV series do.

Reproduction & Abortion Week: ‘American Horror Story’ Demonizes Abortion and Suffers from the Mystical Pregnancy Trope

Warning: if you have not watched all of American Horror Story Season 1, there are massive spoilers ahead!

American Horror Story co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk wanted to create a TV series that truly scared people. And they’ve definitely succeeded in their goal. But why the hell are they so afraid of abortion and women’s reproduction?

Inspired by The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining, the creepy, eerie and phenomenally acted and well-written show follows the Harmons — cellist Vivien (Connie Britton), psychiatrist Ben (Dylan McDermott) and their daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) — as they move from Boston to Los Angeles to heal over past traumas of a stillbirth and infidelity. They move into an old haunted mansion in this “violent, erotically charged horror story about a troubled family.”
American Horror Storysucked me in immediately. Besides passing the Bechdel Test many times, strong, clever, interesting women abound. The performances by Connie Britton, Jessica Lange, Dylan McDermott, Frances Conroy and Taissa Farmiga are outstanding. 
Britton, who co-headlines the first season, wanted Vivien “to be somebody that was accessible, somebody who was strong and not victim-y. Which is something that’s always really important to me, no matter what I’m playing.” Britton almost didn’t play Tami Taylor in the TV show of Friday Night Lights didn’t want to merely play a coach’s wife on a show “dominated by men” and have her character “fall into the background.” Murphy has called the bravura Constance (Jessica Lange) a “survivor” and according to Britton, he called Vivien “‘a heroic character’ and describes American Horror Story as a horror for women.”
A horror for women? Sounds promising. Ahhhh but not so fast! If the show is for women, why do we see women objectified, conflating sexualized images with rape, assault and violence. And why the hell is it obsessed with demonizing abortion and pregnancy?? 
In the series premiere, we first encounter Vivien in a gynecological exam (after a brutal stillbirth) and her doctor prescribes her hormones. Eco-friendly Vivien, who uses organic products and doesn’t like using anything synthetic, responds:
“I’m just trying to get control of my body again, especially after what happened.”
That line might just be the most prophetic in the series. The female characters’ bodies are continuously invaded, brutalized and dominated. 
In the series premiere, Vivien is raped by the Rubber Man, thinking she’s having sex with Ben but who’s really ghost Tate. At the end of the episode, we learn Vivien’s pregnant…with twins…by two different fathers. It’s crystal clear that as soon as Vivien gets pregnant, she’s having a “mystical pregnancy” and will give birth to a demon baby. Vivien has a nightmare that she can see a hand (paw or claw??) moving underneath her swollen pregnant stomach. In “Open House,” the obstetrician tells Vivien and Ben that “every woman worries she’s got a little devil inside her.” We’re also told several times that one of Vivien’s twins is growing at an alarmingly rapid rate. Vivien eats cooked offal and later ravenously devours raw, bloody brains, paralleling the liver-eating scene in Rosemary’s Baby. Murphy attributes this to the baby having “demonic cravings.”Angie, the ultrasound technician, faints when conducting Vivien’s ultrasound. When she meets with Vivien later in a church, Angie tells her that she saw the devil on the sonogram, “the unclean thing, the plague of nations, the beast.” 
As the fabulous Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency, in her outstanding “Tropes vs. Women” video series, writes:
“It’s common practice for Hollywood writers to have their female characters become pregnant at some point in their TV series. These story lines are almost always built around women who have their ovaries harvested by aliens or serve as human incubators for demon spawn – basically the characters are reduced to their biological functions.”
Sarkeesian goes on to quote Laura Shapiro who called the Mystical Pregnancy “a type of reproductive terrorism:” 
“…It makes becoming pregnant seem disgusting, frightening and nightmarish…The problem from my point of view is that pregnancy and birth are natural processes that are being distorted into torture porn, ways of punishing women and exploiting their terror to up the dramatic stakes.”
After she learns of Vivien’s pregnancy, Hayden (Kate Mara), Ben’s student who he had an affair with (and who’s killed after she tells Ben she’s keeping their baby), becomes obsessed with stealing Vivien’s baby. And if one babystealer wasn’t enough, Constance and former house dwellers Nora (Lily Rabe) and Chad (Zachary Quinto) conspire to steal Vivien’s unborn baby too. Babysnatching! Cause that’s what all women and gay men do. Oh wait, that’s what all “crazy” women do…Wait, aren’t all women “crazy???” (The show’s treatment of mental illness is a topic for a WHOLE other post). 
As each of these characters can’t procreate (Constance due to her age, Hayden and Nora as they’re dead, Chad a man…who’s now dead), they covet Vivien’s capacity for reproduction. They objectify Vivien, reducing her to a vessel, an incubator for the baby these characters so desperately yearn to possess.
Vivien’s pregnancy is in many ways the crux of the show. Even on the poster, a pregnant Vivien arches her back seductively as the Rubber Man hovers above with outstretched hands, as if waiting to pluck the baby from her womb. 
In “Piggy Piggy,” Leah, Violet’s former bully, tells Violet the devil is real. She discloses information in the Book of Revelations from the Bible:
“In heaven, there’s this woman in labor, howling in pain. There’s a red dragon with 7 heads, waiting so he can eat her baby. But the archangel Michael, he hurls the dragon down to earth. From that moment on, the red dragon hates the woman and declares war on her and all her children. That’s us.”
In “Spooky Little Girl,” medium Billie Dean tells Constance that a child conceived by a human and a ghost (Vivien and rapist Tate) would result in the antichrist and would bring about the apocalypse. In the penultimate episode, when Vivien gives birth, scenes flash between the horrific current situation of Vivien dying — a scene inspired by the film Demon Seed — and Vivien and Ben’s joyous delivery of Violet 16 years earlier. But Vivien dies in childbirth, giving birth to one baby who lives (and who’s a murderous sociopath) and one who dies. 
In fact the entire season, from the first episode to the last, revolves around Vivien and her pregnancy who inevitably becomes the allegorical “Woman of the Apocalypse.” Hmmm, so we should all fear women because they could at any moment incite the end of the world. 
According to American Horror Story, we shouldn’t just be terrorized by pregnancy. All aspects of reproduction should scare the shit out of us, including abortion.
In the title sequence for each episode, we see jars of aborted fetuses on the shelves in the basement –again fueling the fire of fear and disgust surrounding abortion. It feels like the messages implied here are “good” women don’t get abortions and abortions are gross and scary. Don’t believe me? Trust me, it gets reinforced over and over again. In fact, because of the macabre show’s obsession with abortion, Feminist Film renames it “American Abortion Story.”
Abortion is discussed throughout the series. Vivien and Constance (who says her “womb is cursed”) talk about abortion after Vivien worries something’s wrong with her baby. After the Harmons move to LA, Ben returns to Boston to accompany Hayden to get an abortion. We witness her emotional instability after Ben checks his phone (because you know, no one in their right mind would choose to get an abortion…eyeroll!). Then Hayden changes her mind and decides to keep the baby…which she never has since she’s murdered.
In the 3rd episode, when Vivien takes the “Eternal Darkness” house tour,” she discovers the history of the Montgomerys and Charles’ “Frankenstein complex.” In 1922, surgeon Charles Montgomery and his socialite wife Nora lived in the house. When they need more money to pay their bills, Nora arranges for Charles to perform illegal abortions on young women. 
The “Eternally Damned” tour guide also condemns the Montgomerys’ performing abortions: “But the souls of the little ones must have weighed heavy upon them as their reign of terror climaxed in the shocking finale in 1926.” Reign of terror? Is that what you call abortions?? At first I thought I must have missed something…perhaps the girls were being murdered. But nope. The abortions are the “reign of terror.” Lovely. 
As Tami at What Tami Said astutely points out, the inception of the house’s evil, its pull in harboring pain, despair and tortured souls, all stems from one person: an abortionist. Oh and to hammer home the point that abortion equates to evil, the episode is entitled “Murder House.”
In another episode, we learn in a flashback that one of the women’s boyfriends, angered by her abortion, kidnaps Nora and Charles’ baby Thaddeus and murders him. Charles “reconstructs” Thaddeus (aka the “infantata”) with the baby’s body parts, animal parts and the heart of one of the aborted fetuses. Nora tells Charles she tried to breastfeed him but it wasn’t milk the baby was craving. We witness bloody claw marks above her breasts. Nora goes on to say:
“We’re damned Charles because of what we did to those girls, those poor innocent girls and their babies.”
So basically Murphy and Falchuk are saying, “Fuck you, reproductive justice!”
Think Progress’ Alyssa Rosenbergfinds American Horror Story “seems to suggest that the end of a pregnancy before term, whether by miscarriage, abortion, or murder, is the ultimate expression of evil. Abortion Gang’s Sophia rightfully condemns the series as an “abortion horror story” and “anti-choice propaganda at its worst.” Tami at What Tami Said criticizes the series for its “conservative and anti-choice messages” including “doctors who perform abortions are bad;” “women who receive abortions are promiscuous and selfish, therefore bad;” “abortion = murdering babies.” 
By portraying Charles and Nora as greedy, preying on young girls reinforces the notion that all abortion providers are greedy, evil predators. And American Horror Storyisn’t telling us that illegal, back-alley abortions are bad. No, it’s telling us ALL abortions are bad. 
The most terrifying aspect of American Horror Story isn’t the shocking gore or gasping plot twists. When our reproductive rights face a daily barrage of attacks, it’s frightening that the series so blatantly perpetuates myths surrounding the fear, stigma and shame of abortion and pregnancy. Reducing women to their reproductive organs, we’re told women’s sexuality and reproduction should scare us and as a result, women’s bodies should be punished and controlled. I’m getting so fucking sick and tired of ignoring sexism, misogyny and anti-choice bullshit just to watch TV.

Guest Writer Wednesday: In Which ‘A Dangerous Method’ Forces Me to Change My Mind About Keira Knightley

Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method
Cross-post by Didion originally published at Feminéma.
I totally get it now.
I’ve never quite understood why Keira Knightley is an A-list star, nor why she gets such good roles (like Atonement, Pride & Prejudice, and Never Let Me Go) – until I saw her in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011). It always seemed to me she was being cast against type. Whereas those earlier films insisted she was a quintessential English rose, as Lizzie Bennet in P&P she appeared to me more likely to bite one of her co-stars than to to impress anyone with her fine eyes.
What Cronenberg gets (and I didn’t, till now) is that Knightley’s angular, toothy, twitchy affect shouldn’t be suppressed but mined instead.
Keira Knightley
Now that I’ve finally seen A Dangerous Method, I can’t imagine another actor taking on the role of the hysteric Sabina Spielrein to such effect. Jewish, Russian, fiercely intelligent and tortured by her inner demons, Sabina is the perfect dark mirror sister of Jung’s blonde and blue-eyed wife (Sarah Gadon), who always appears placid, wide-eyed and proper, and sometimes apologizes for errors such as giving birth to a daughter rather than a son. Now that’s a rose of a girl.
Sarah Gadon as Emma Jung

Maybe she seems exaggerated, but Jung’s wife embodies the self-control and physical containment of their elite class as well as their whiteness. No wonder Jung (Michael Fassbender) is so thrown by Sabina. For all her physical contortions, Sabina is also open to change, open to the darkest of insights. She opens up her mind and her memories to him with stunning willingness, revealing black thoughts associated with dark sexual urges. The more she ceases repressing those memories and associations, the more she reconciles them and begins to heal — and begins to use her quicksilver smarts in a way that shows her full embrace of the “talking cure”. No wonder she captivates Jung’s imagination, which is only the beginning of his growing disloyalty to his wife.
Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Keira Knightley

Knightley’s impossible skinniness only enhances her performance here. Whereas in most other films her body gets presented to us as yet another ridiculous size-00 slap in the face to the rest of us fat pigs (and don’t you forget it, Ashley Judd), in A Dangerous Method her body exemplifies a lifetime of self-punishing neurosis. There’s nothing more improbable than seeing her heavy dark eyebrows and her olive skin — and hearing about her sexual arousal via humiliation — all the while bound up in those cruel corsets and lacy, white, high-necked dresses that on any other woman would be persuasive signifiers of her chastity.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that what I found most impressive about Knightley’s performance was the way she showed how the later, “healed” Spielrein – the one who no longer screams and juts out her chin — was a recognizable incarnation of the earlier hysteric. Her clenched and slightly hunched shoulders, her black looks, her tight mouth. She’s a whirlwind of intellect and energy, and the performance is brilliant. As the excellent JB writes over at The Fantom Country, “Even in relatively calmer moments, she seems trapped inside a state of ceaseless panic, caught, gasping for air, in the dragnet of some trawler that never sleeps.”

Keira Knightley
This is especially important for the contrast between her corporeal presence versus that of Jung and Freud, who exert an absurd degree of self-control and containment, like disembodied brains. When she kisses Jung for the first time, his weak response is to note, “It’s generally thought that the man should be the one to take the initiative.” When someone refers to the “darker differences” between the two, we know those differences are both racial and sexual — and that Spielrein is the dark one, the one whose vagina has needs and rages, and smells like a real woman’s vagina (thanks to Kartina Richardson’s terrific piece, “Keira Knightley’s Vagina”). It makes me wish that Knightley rather than Natalie Portman had appeared as the lead in Black Swan — again, a statement I never thought I’d make.

Keira Knightley
Spielrein and Jung’s other patient, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), both profess to a startling optimism about analysis: “Our job is to make our patients capable of freedom,” Gross pronounces, a sentiment Spielrein shares but cannot realize. Her own ecstasy peaks as Jung gives her erotic spankings; clearly, humiliation still retains its primary charge. The film doesn’t explore the gendered nature of hysteria, which brought so many women low during those decades a hundred years ago, but it does highlight how one’s freedom was limited by other cultural boundaries — most notably race. Spielrein looks genuinely crushed when her new interlocutor, Freud, pushes her down with the observation, “We’re Jews, Miss Spielrein — and Jews we will always be.”

Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud
We don’t very often call it hysteria anymore, but we still see manifestations of inexplicable corporeal neurosis in girls and women that defy explanation, as in the strangely infectious case in upstate New York this year. How amazing it would be to find a filmmaker to address the subject. I’ve always thought that someone could take the 1690s Salem witch hysteria as a case study, Arthur Miller-style, to try to explore some of the contributing factors behind such mass outbursts of tics, twitches, and personal misery. And I’d love to have Knightley involved again, honestly.
People love to talk about the synergy between Cronenberg and his frequent male lead, Mortensen, as being one of the great director-actor combinations of the last decade. But now that I’ve seen what Cronenberg got out of Knightley, I want him to unearth new roles for her instead so we can see more of what she can really do once she lets go of the English rose routine. I totally get it now: Knightley can act. And I’m genuinely looking forward to more of it.
Feminéma is a blog about feminism, cinéma, and popular culture kept by Didion, a university professor in Texas, who celebrates those rare moments when movies display unstereotyped characters and feature female directors and screenwriters behind the scenes. Most of all she just loves film. Take a look at feminema.wordpress.com.