Happy Women’s Equality Day! Celebrate Women’s Suffrage By Watching ‘Iron Jawed Angels’ and ‘Bad Romance’ Parody

Iron Jawed Angels

Women’s Equality Day commemorates the passage of the 19th amendment, women’s suffrage, which the U.S. government ratified the 19th amendment on August 18, 1920 enabling women to vote. 

Too often, people say women were given the vote. Women weren’t given anything. They valiantly spoke out, organized, protested and fought for their rights.
One of my favorite films, Iron Jawed Angels captures feminist activists Alice Paul (Hilary Swank in one of her best performances) and Lucy Burns (Frances O’Connor) in their vigilant struggle to get Congress to pass the 19th amendment. While established suffragettes like Carrie Chapmann Catt and Anna Howard Shaw ran the more conservative National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA) which worked on suffrage state by state, Paul and Burns founded the National Women Party (NWP) in 1917 to rally women and demand a federal amendment. Paul and Burns organized thousands of suffragettes to march in parades in NYC and DC and protest President Wilson during wartime outside of the White House. They endured harassment, incarceration, a hunger strike and force feeding. 
While I wished it had included more scenes with women of color (suffragist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells only makes a brief appearance), the film gives a fantastic overview of the sexism and uphill battle suffragists faced to ensure future generations of women could vote.
Here are two of my favorite quotes from Iron Jawed Angels:
“We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.” — Alice Paul (Hilary Swank)

“You ask me to explain myself. I’m just wondering, what needs to be explained? It should be very clear. Look into your own heart—I swear to you, mine is no different. You want a place in a trades and professions where you can earn your bread; so do I. You want the means of self-expression, some way to satisfy your own personal ambitions; so do I. You want a voice in the government under which you live; so do I. What is there to explain?” — Alice Paul (Hillary Swank)

When we face a daily bombardment of restrictions on abortion access and contraception which threaten our reproductive rights, when legislators like Todd Akin victim-blame and slut-shame women with asinine comments about “legitimate rape,” when laws don’t protect rape and domestic violence survivors, when trans women like Cece McDonald are incarcerated for self-defense, when the LGBTQI community is persecuted for their gender identity and sexual orientation — you realize how vital it becomes to exercise your right to vote. We need to make our voices heard.
In addition to Iron Jawed Angels, if you haven’t seen it (or just want to watch it again), check out the parody of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” paying homage to Alice Paul and honoring the struggle for suffrage and equality.
Now get out there and vote, ladies!

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Women Still a Rarity in Top Film Jobs from the Los Angeles Times:

“Women held 16% of key jobs such as director and producer on the top 250 films of 2010 (as measured by domestic box-office receipts), according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. That’s steady from the 2009 figures and about the same level as in 1998, when the center launched its ‘Celluloid Ceiling’ report.”

Leading Ladies from The Eye:

“From February 10 to 13, Barnard’s Athena Center for Leadership Studies and the group Women in Hollywood will collaborate to create the first annual Athena Film Festival. The festival seeks to be an interactive weekend that addresses issues of female empowerment through film production—featuring both the works of female filmmakers and films about women. The Eye sat down with Kathryn Kolbert, the festival’s cofounder to discuss how the festival will affect the future of female leadership at Barnard.”

The Top 15 Feminist Film Stars from Ecosalon:

” … let’s think about the ladies of authority, the women of wit, the steel magnolias of cinema. For every loveless lass brought to life by a Rom Com Queen, there’s a kick-ass character of empowerment. Here are our 15 favorites.”

The Girls on Film from Den of Geek:

“We may have come a long way since female author, Mary Anne Evans, had to publish under a pseudonym of George Eliot, but it’s blokes that still run the show.

Which is why The Girls on Film is such a breath of fresh air. On paper it sounds like a parody project. A troupe of female actors take on iconic scenes from cult movies, from Fight Club, Star Trek and The Town, reading the same lines, acting the same parts as the men. But the results are no laughing matter.”

The Super Bowl and Violence Against Females from the Daily Kos:

“The other equally critical issue is how we American males define manhood. Far too many of us think it is about violent behavior, warfare, gunplay, mindless and ego-driven competition, and the conquering of each other, or women and girls, by any available means. And this has nothing to do with the debates that have raged for years about there being a spike in domestic violence cases on Super Bowl Sundays because of the drinking and abusive behavior of male sports fans. Hard to pin down that kind of data. But it unquestionably is a day when so many different types of people come together, pause, and watch perhaps America’s bloodiest and most violent sport as if it were a video game.”

Blue Valentine’s Ryan Gosling: The New Voice of Feminism in Hollywood? from BlogHer:

“The ratings war over Blue Valentine may have gotten more press than the stunning film itself — the movie was originally given the dreaded NC-17 branding before The Weinstein Company (who is also fighting the good fight for The King’s Speech) successfully appealed it and earned themselves an R. Surprisingly, it was Ryan Gosling who most notably came to his film’s defense — Melissa Silverstein from Women in Hollywood called him the ‘Hollywood Feminist of the Day’ and was floored by this quote from Gosling …”

“In a Western world where, far too often, human = white and male, queer = white and male, lesbian = white, and woman = white, it is difficult for me, a white gay male, to fully appreciate the struggles for visibility and validation faced by those of us in the queer community without white and male privileges. Why it is that white queer people think telling stories primarily about whites and men is representative of “us” is beyond me.”

Lady Gaga Brings Cholas Back to Pop Culture–Like It or Not from Racialicious:

“What sets Gaga’s use of the term apart, for now – there’s been no video released for ‘Born This Way,’ though she will perform it at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 13 – is the direct use of the word Chola in the lyrics, as opposed to visual shorthand. And that’s where the controversy comes in: the word it’s derived from, Cholo, originated in the 16th century as a slur, similar to “mutt,” in both Perú and Mexico. But in the U.S., some would argue that they’re tied in with the Chicano identity and culture, following the lineage of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s.”

Rediscovering WWII’s female ‘computers’ from CNN:

“Men had built the machine, but Bartik and her colleagues debugged every vacuum tube and learned how to make it work, she said. Early on, they demonstrated to the military brass how the computer worked, with the programmers setting the process into motion and showing how it produced an answer. They handed out its punch cards as souvenirs. They’d taught the massive machine do math that would’ve taken hours by hand.”

“Yolande used her work as a journalist as cover for reporting on Cairo’s power elite – right up to the king — for Israel’s pre-state de facto government, the Jewish Agency. She reported directly to Teddy Kollek, the future long-time mayor of Jerusalem, back when he headed intelligence for the Jewish Agency.”

Athena Film Festival not just for feminists from Columbia Spectator:

“Rah-rah feminism aside, the festival lineup of strong movies with the occasional dash of Hollywood intrigue may also hold attraction for casual cinephiles or the merely star-curious. Debra Granik is one of only 10 women to have ever directed a Best Picture nominee feature film. She and the co-writer of ‘Winter’s Bone,’ Anne Rosellini, will discuss the film with Anne Thompson of the blog Thompson on Hollywood after its screening in Miller Theatre.”

Prevent Official Release of Kanye West’s Women-Hating Monster Video from The Petition Site:

“HipHopConnection.com has leaked a video teaser for the Kanye West hit song ‘Monster’ and what we’ve seen is beyond disturbing. In just 30 seconds, viewers take in image after image of eroticized violence against women:

– Dead women, clad in lingerie, hang by chains around their necks.

– West makes sexual moves toward dead or drugged women propped up in a bed.

– A naked dead or drugged woman lays sprawled on a sofa.”

A Challenge to the Farrelly Brothers from Shakesville:

“That the Farrelly Brothers think sexual harassment and assault is hilarious is not news. The entire premise of There’s Something About Mary was a woman being stalked by multiple men who were deceiving her to try to sleep with her. (Ironically, Brett Favre played the one guy who wasn’t stalking her. Whoooooops!) Kingpin featured a predatory landlady who coerced Woody Harrelson’s character into exchanging sex for rent. Me, Myself & Irene had a scene in which Jim Carrey’s character grabbed a baby off hir nursing mother’s breast and started suckling, to the woman’s horror. One of the many problematic aspects of the premise of Shallow Hal is that the main character, who believes his fat girlfriend to be thin, has sex with her while effectively unable to consent to the actual person with whom he’s having sex. Et cetera.”

Leave your links in the comments!



The Roundup: Lady Gaga’s "Telephone" featuring Beyoncé

We don’t usually talk about music videos here at Bitch Flicks, but for Lady Gaga we’ll make an exception. With the release of her nearly 10-minute long music video, the blogosphere lit up. Here’s a sampling of what we found regarding Gaga & Beyoncé, feminism, trans-phobia, exploitation, ironic product placement, female empowerment, the prison of pop music, and the like. Enjoy!
Survey Third Wave communities and one descriptive phrase keeps coming up over and over again regarding Lady Gaga—badass. In such spaces, no higher compliment could ever be paid than that. When so many women feel that their voices are routinely stifled or that they’ve been conditioned to stay silent while men talk first and act first, young feminists understandably find something courageous and enviable about women, particularly women their own age, who force the world to accept them on their own terms. Furthermore, Lady Gaga’s music videos in particular have directly, though a bit clumsily at times, taken on questions of same-sex attraction between women and done so in terms that are far closer to the way it actually exists in reality. The pure fantasy and grotesque parody of lesbianism, itself a construct clearly adopted by men, is at least pushed to the background of her work rather than set forth as the truth.
The first three minutes are lost on me and left me confused, offended, and too pissed of to appreciate the next few minutes. Had the video started when the song started, I might (might) have been able to stomach the rest of the prison scenes. However, after the objectification, glamorizing of lesbian fetishism, and excessive girl-on-girl violence I was too pissed to rationalize sitting through the first dance routine, which could have just as well been the Pussycat Dolls (whom Gaga has written for in the past). Feminist Gaga fans can try to justify this as another example of how she subversively turns what we usually find hot into something that leaves a nasty taste in our mouths and therefore makes a statement, but if any other artist (particularly any male artist) incorporated this much objectification and violence against women we would be outraged. Is it any different just because it’s a woman, or because it’s specifically Gaga?
Noah Michelson interviews Heather Cassils, Gaga’s prison yard girlfriend for Out.com:
What do you think about the new breed of younger pop stars — and some have accused Gaga of this — who claim bisexuality or a kind of pansexuality in an effort to use queer culture for their own personal gains?
That’s been going on since the dawn of time. Elvis stole from African American music. Everybody’s constantly riffing — Madonna stole voguing from poor, disenfranchised black drag queens in Harlem. This isn’t a new concept. I think there’s more reverence with regard to Lady Gaga as she’s obviously educated herself in her trajectory with visual arts practices and the stuff that she’s doing isn’t light stuff. It’s difficult when they’re making millions of dollars and placating to the masses — it’s tricky to maintain that, but I think she tries. And even including someone like me is a part of that. The thing that was kind of interesting was that in between takes I was getting kind of annoyed because the camera guys were really kind of drooling and talking about “girl-on-girl action” and I said, “What about boy-on-girl action?” And she turned to me and said “Oh. Do you identify as male?” [Laughs] And I said, “Well, probably more than you do.” And she said “I’ll be sure to tell people that.” We just had this abstracted conversation about gender in the middle of this shoot, which I thought was really weird and pretty interesting: A) that she would take the time and B) that she would even ask me about that.

Ms. Magazine Blog “Is Lady Gaga a Feminist or Isn’t She?” by Noelle Williams:

Her art provides a running commentary on gender, sexuality and beauty. There are hints of David Bowie, Prince and Madonna in the way she plays with sexuality, but while Gaga acknowledges these similarities she wants it to be clear she is something entirely her own. With her deliberate juxtaposition of conventional platinum blonde beauty and fashionably ugly costumes, she toys with conventional rules of attractiveness. Half of her appeal throughout 2009 seemed to be the question of whether or not she was pretty, whether or not people felt comfortable liking her. “I am not sexy in the way Britney Spears is sexy,” Gaga is quoted in the bio, “I just don’t have the same ideas about sexuality that I want to portray. I have a very specific aesthetic–androgyny.”
Replete with references to films like Caged Heat, Kill Bill, Thelma and Louise, and heaped with nods to golden age sexploitation from Russ Meyer flics to Betty Page pin ups to busty comic book heroines like Wonder Woman (H/T Lisa Duggan and Sam Icklow for IDing some of these for me), Telephone is a high femme pastiche of mini-epic proportions.

The plot is straightforward: thrown into “prison for bitches,” Gaga is bailed out by co-star Beyoncé (in a telling reversal of the usual hierarchy between white and black), and the two then set of on a mission of vengeance against Beyoncé’s boorish beau, played by male model/singer/actor Tyrese. But this bare summary belies the profusion of signifiers strewn across the surfaces of this visual feast of a video. To attempt to account for them all (crowdsource project anyone?) would leave any critic floundering on the shoals of interpretation. So I’ll just focus on one, ahem, prime signifier: Lady Gaga’s penis.

The video is peppered with both real (e.g. Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread, Polaroid, Chanel, Diet Coke, Virgin, Plenty of Fish) and fake products (e.g. Poison TV, Double-Breasted Drive-Thru, CookNKill Recipes). This combination of real and fake allows the video to both enjoy the benefits of product placement, and parody the enterprise in the same swoop. Once again, we’re dealing, I think, with a carnivalesque aesthetic, or a type of conceptualist art that parodies by displaying too loudly or too blatantly that which is being mocked. The comfortably familiar form is being used to market poison, and at the same time its used to promote Polaroid. Gaga’s having her cake and eating it too.
In this entire video, as well as, “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi,” Gaga reverses this gaze in a variety of ways. She refuses the male heterosexual narrative as the only way to see the world, and presents her views in a decidedly “feminine gaze” or at least a gaze that does not abide by male standards. Women’s bodies are not present in “Telephone” for male pleasure, they do not progress a male storyline, nor are women defeated for male purposes of sex or domestication. Women are not “othered.” In some ways, the bodies seen here are for female pleasure, sexual perhaps, or at least aiding in seeing women in positions of power, both as prisoners and prison guards. Women are in control, even in prison and outside of it. Gaga and Beyoncé’s emotions, ideas, and selves drive the story of the music video, not men’s. Women are central, not peripheral, they are the main autonomous actors in control of their destinies. Even as we see women in traditionally powerless situations, in prison, as diner wage workers, or as objectified bodies for male consumption, these positions are problemitized, and their meanings changed. When we see women in these places, we do not get the impression that they are mere tools of the patriarchy. They have agency, they have will, and they are not the “other.” We get a unique and visually appealing story from women’s perspectives, ideals, and world view that is so lacking in today’s media.
10 Hidden Surprises in Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” Video

Gudbuy t’jane’s “Lady Gaga sets the record straight:

As a trans woman, she mostly caught my attention due to the transphobic and intersex-phobic rumours about her being either trans or intersex. While these rumours were typically a product of living in a transphobic and transmisogynist culture, Lady Gaga’s response was one of gender and genital essentialism, stating that her vagina was offended by the claims. 

To me, the absurdity of that mismatch is part of the point: incredible frivolity combined with serious issues. People go to clubs and complain about reception while prisoners cannot get a proper phone connection and are strip-searched for no other reason than the guards’ prurient interests all the time. Outside of a Lady Gaga video, however, it usually isn’t the same people who have a dance party and are abused in prison (at least not simultaneously), nor do the dance parties (which occur at the same time as mass murder) usually happen at the crime scene.

By collapsing the distance between these events, “Telephone” points to the absurdity of a world in which people dance even though they are aware that other people are suffering, an awareness intensified by the very medium for which “Telephone” was created.
Thus begins the epic dance break—celebrating a new America. An America that steers away from gender constructs. An America where you don’t have to wear pants! Lady Gaga is the modern-day Wonder Woman—a DC Comics superheroine created in the early ’40s and regarded as the model of the feminist movement. Created by Dr. William Marston, Wonder Woman is an Amazon princess sent to earth to assist America in the war effort. Called upon by the goddess Aphrodite, Wonder Woman was “created as a distinctly feminist role model whose mission was to bring the Amazon ideals of love, peace, and sexual equality to ‘a world torn by the hatred of men.” However, Wonder Woman loses her powers if a man binds together her trademark bracelets, and she’s commonly depicted as being chained by male villains and having to break free of their power and control. We see these details referenced through Gaga’s chained-getup in the prison sequence, and in the Wonder Bread appearance.

Fox News reaction:

Gaga’s relationship with feminism is uneasy and uncertain, not unlike my own, and even as she has more recently copped to being “a little bit of a feminist” after a long period of rejecting the term, her work seems more inclined toward interrogating and challenging culture, sexism, and exploitation without necessarily overtly condemning it. This video is no exception, dabbling as it does in lesbian undertones combined with a monstrous revenge fantasy and mass murder literally draped in American flags, and concluding with the infamous Thelma & Louise hand-clasp which serves as a forceful barring-of-the-door against the meddling of trifiling men who’d seek to break our terrifying yet compelling heroines apart. The visuals are riddled with sex from beginning to end, but it’s complicated sex, a queer romp dressed up in straight drag. The lingering shot on Beyoncé’s cleavage is so unabashed as to be uncomfortable, which is insane considering the amount of women’s cleavage media serves up on a daily basis, but like the product placement, we are accustomed to it being more subtle. The overtness here renders our standard voyeurism into something downright embarrassing. The prison-yard makeout-sequence is likewise skewed and queerified, as it shows a lesbian hookup that would be of great appeal to straight men if only it involved two women with larger breasts and more traditionally-feminine presentations; instead we see Gaga paired with a decidedly butch partner, whilst surrounded by fellow inmates representing a diversity of genders, shapes, sizes, and ethnicities.
The Bitch Magazine discussion:
Kelsey: so she went to jail for murdering that guy and it was supposed to be a statement about celebrity and fame and now she is sort of doing the same thing but starting in “fame jail” where there are lots of hot lesbians
Kjerstin: so she’s sort of addressing the intersex rumor, but as one blogger at gudbuytjane pointed out, is it transmysoginistic to be like “see, no dick!”
Andi: That’s definitely what I thought. Maybe she wants to start it up again?
Kjerstin: it also happens so early in the video
Kelsey: she has been so intentionally vague about the intersex thing, I’m surprised she’d address it like this (or maybe I’m not)
Kjerstin: it’s extra shocking
Kelsey: but yeah, like gudbuytjane said, it’s like “Oh thank God she doesn’t have a dick now I can relax”

In an interview with Carson Daly on LA’s 97.1 AMP radio, Gaga remarked that the video’s concept revolves around a critical look at the inundation of media in our modern lives and the sort of brainwashing the mass marketing of everything from tampons to pop artists to fast food creates when it tells us what to think. This makes me want to ask you girls some study questions: Is Lady Gaga trapped in a prison of what pop music is expected to be? Is that why she is so determined to escape? Is her “punishment” for being an independent woman — represented in the extreme by killing her sadistic boyfriend — a metaphor for being stuck behind the bars of what the record labels demand of their cookie-cutter pop artists? But wait a second, there are hot lesbians in prison. Is being sent to a jail full of sexy women a reward for ditching some man she didn’t really want? Where is the intersection of queerness, prison culture and femininity? Is homosexuality a behavior, an all-encompassing identity, or a complicated blend of both? So many layers here, like peel-and-eat lingerie (did I just say that?)
Because if there’s one thing that we’ve seen a thousand times over the past few decades, it’s old-style sexism dressed up as new-style irony. Does the fact that Gaga seems to be winking knowingly at the camera as she dances in a bikini make the vision any less predictable, any less boring, any less reminiscent of sexist video after sexist video that you’ve seen in the past few years? Nope. It’s a disappointment from someone who seems to be popping with so many ideas. Gaga will do something great, I’m sure. But this isn’t it.

If you find/have written any interesting Gaga-analysis related to “Telephone,” leave your links in the comments!