Tag: The F Word

Quote of the Day: Susan J. Douglas

Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done by Susan J. Douglas

Note: all boldface is my emphasis, not the author’s.

Today, feminist gains, attitudes, and achievements are woven into our cultural fabric. So the female characters created by Shonda Rhimes for Grey’s Anatomy, to choose just one example, reflect a genuine desire to show women as skilled professionals in jobs previously reserved for men. Joss Whedon created Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he embraced feminsim and was tired of seeing all the girls in horror films as victims, instead of possible heroes. But women whose kung fu skills are more awesome than Jackie Chan’s? Or who tell a male coworker (or boss) to his face that he’s less evolved than a junior in high school? This is a level of command-and-control barely enjoyed by four-star generals, let alone the nation’s actual female population.

But the media’s fantasies of power are also the product of another force that has gained considerable momentum since the early and mid-1990s: enlightened sexism. Enlightened sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism–indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved–so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. After all these images (think Pussycat Dolls, The Bachelor, Are You Hot?, the hour-and-a-half catfight in Bride Wars) can’t possibly undermine women’s equality at this late date, right? More to the point, enlightened sexism sells the line that it is precisely through women’s calculated deployment of their faces, bodies, attire, and sexuality that they gain and enjoy true power–power that is fun, that men will not resent, and indeed will embrace. True power here has nothing to do with economic independence or professional achievement (that’s a given): it has to do with getting men to lust after you and other women to envy you. Enlightened sexism is especially targeted to girls and young women and emphasizes that now that they “have it all,” they should focus the bulk of their time and energy on their appearance, pleasing men, being hot, competing with other women, and shopping.

Enlightened sexism is a manufacturing process that is produced, week in and week out, by the media. Its components–anxiety about female achievement; a renewed and amplified objectification of young women’s bodies and faces; the dual exploitation and punishment of female sexuality; the dividing of women against each other by age, race, and class; rampant branding and consumerism–began to swirl around in the early 1990s, consolidating as the dark star it has become in the early twenty-first century. Some, myself included, have referred to this state of affairs and this kind of media mix as “postfeminist.” But I am rejecting this term. It has gotten gummed up by too many conflicting definitions. And besides, this term suggests that somehow feminism is at the root of this when it isn’t–it’s good, old-fashioned, grade-A sexism that reinforces good, old-fashioned, grade-A patriarchy. It’s just much better disguised, in seductive Manolo Blahniks and an Ipex bra.

Susan J. Douglas is the author of Where the Girls Are, The Mommy Myth, and other works of cultural history and criticism. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, Ms., The Village Voice, and In These Times. (taken from the jacket cover of Enlightened Sexism)

Quote of the Day: Nina Power

Below is an excerpt from Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, in which she raises some interesting points and questions about the so-called Bechdel Test (or Ripley’s Rule, as we generally refer to it).

What does contemporary visual culture say about women? Here a thought experiment comes in handy: The so-called ‘Bechdel Test’, first described in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, consists of the following rules, to be applied to films, but could easily be extended to literature:
  1. Does it have at least two women in it,
  2. Who [at some point] talk to each other,
  3. About something besides a man.

Writer Charles Stross adds that

“if you extend #3 only slightly, to read “About something besides men or marriage or babies, you can strike out about 50% of the small proportion of mass-entertainment movies that do otherwise seem to pass the test.”

Once you know about the test, it’s impossible not to apply it, however casually. Stross is right–huge quantities of cultural output (possibly even more than he suggests) fail. Several questions emerge from the test:

  1. What is so frightening about women talking to each other without the mediation of their supposed interest in men/marriage/babies?

  2. Does cinema/literature have a duty to representation such that it is duty bound to include such scenes, as opposed to pursuing its own set of agendas? Why should literature/cinema be ‘realistic’ when it could be whatever it wants to be?

  3. Does reality itself pass the test? How much of the time? Can we ‘blame’ films/TV for that?

Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She has published widely on topics including Iran, humanism, vintage pornography and Marxism. (taken from the jacket cover of One Dimensional Woman.)

Equality Now: Joss Whedon’s Acceptance Speech

In 2007, the Warner Brothers production president, Jeff Robinov, announced that Warner Brothers would no longer make films with female leads.

A year before that announcement, Joss Whedon, the creator of such women-centric television shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Dollhouse, accepted an award from Equality Now at the event, “On the Road to Equality: Honoring Men on the Front Lines.”

Watch as he answers the question, “Why do you always write such strong women characters?”

Quote of the Day: Ellen Page

I think it’s a total drag. I’ve been lucky to get interesting parts but there are still not that many out there for women. And everybody is so critical of women. If there’s a movie starring a man that tanks, then I don’t see an article about the fact that the movie starred a man and that must be why it bombed. Then a film comes out where a woman is in the lead, or a movie comes out where a bunch of girls are roller derbying, and it doesn’t make much money and you see articles about how women can’t carry a film.

 On the controversy created by Juno:
I was like, “You know what? You all need to calm down.” People are so black and white about this. Because she kept the baby everybody said the film was against abortion. But if she’d had an abortion everybody would have been like, “Oh my God.” I am a feminist and I am totally pro-choice, but what’s funny is when you say that people assume that you are pro-abortion. I don’t love abortion but I want women to be able to choose and I don’t want white dudes in an office being able to make laws on things like this. I mean what are we going to do — go back to clothes hangers?

Guest Writer Wednesday: On Sam Mendes’s Almost Feminist Revolutionary Road

Winslet and DiCaprio star in Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road (2008) is almost a feminist film. It also just falls short of being something more than the hackneyed anti-suburbia types of film Sam Mendes revels in making.
A couple, who once fell in love over common artistic dreams, pulls off to the side of a highway to engage in verbal combat, sparked by the kitschy play the wife has just acted in, that threatens to turn physical. Each blames the other.
April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) reflects on their life together throughout the next day. As she drags her metal trash cans to the curb to join the others aligned down both sides of their anything-but-revolutionary road, she recalls her real estate agent introducing her and her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), to their future home, the typically perfect white suburban house. Later, as she looks through old photographs, a second flashback recalls a conversation with Frank where she told him he was the most interesting man she had ever met.
As April reminisces about the hopes of the past, Frank woos a secretary at his cliché-ridden office job in a sales department. He gets her drunk, uses her as a shrink to confess that he has turned into his father despite his best intentions, and—as you already have guessed—sleeps with her. When he returns home past dusk, April meets him with smiles, an enthusiastic apology, and a birthday cake with thirty lit candles. Frank cries as his wife and two children—one girl, one boy—sing to him.
At this point I thought to myself, à la SNL’s Seth Meyers and alum Amy Poehler, “Really? Really? Do we really need to see another suburbia-is-the-ninth-circle-of-hell film? Really?” Hadn’t Mad Men already taken this trite formula to its farcical limits? The irony has lost its whip; there’s no need to tell us that life on Revolutionary Road is the conservative fast lane to Hades. We’ve been wise to the parable for some time: American beauty is anything but.
When I saw Frank washing away his infidelities in the shower, I puked a little in my mouth.
But then something unexpected happened. Instead of Kevin Spacey throwing a plate against a wall and toking up with his teenage daughter’s boyfriend, April lays bare the message of films like American Beauty. Road becomes meta-cinematic when she tells Frank:

Well, I happen to think this (suburban life) is unrealistic. I think it’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a place he can’t stand, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things. You want to know the worst part? Our whole existence here is based on this great premise that we’re somehow very special and superior to the whole thing, and you know what I’ve realized…? We’re not! We’re just like everyone else. Look at us!  We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion. This idea that you have to resign from life and settle down the moment you have children. And we’ve been punishing each other for it.

With this piece of dialogue, a character within the film’s diegetic reality provides an accurate account of the predicament of the film’s starring couple…near the beginning of the film! Road replaces Beauty’s device of a dead male narrator who knows the foibles of his life only after it is over with a living, breathing, and INTELLIGENT female character who knows them and wants out before it’s too late. In a later scene, she tells one of their neighbors that she actually wants “in” to life, a nice reversal that equates suburban living with death, that favorite topic of anti-consumerist zombie films.
After some initial resistance, Frank agrees with April’s analysis and her diagnosis. They will move to Paris so that he may figure out what he wants to do with his life while she supports the family on secretary’s wages (thanks to France’s fairer treatment of women workers). Although such a plan seems anti-feminist on the surface, and one neighbor says as much upon hearing it, there is something liberating about it. Shots follow of April and Frank almost glowing with the prospect that they will soon be leaving the humdrum rhythms of Eisenhower America.
Of course, the best-laid plans of mice and couples often go awry, and the Wheelers fail to make it to Paris (I mused that their voyage would be cut short somewhere in the north Atlantic anyway). The Wheelers’ plans go awry when Frank comes up with a business slogan that impresses his higher-ups so much that they offer him a promotion. The irony is that Frank’s sudden show of corporate creativity only comes after he has convinced himself to leave. The mere thought of becoming a class traitor opens the wells of inspiration trapped inside him not a moment too late, which is so often the case, but a moment too early. The prospect of becoming a well-compensated company man leads him to waver on his early retirement. As if this were not enough, April discovers that she is pregnant with their third child. Although they convince each other that Paris is still in the cards, the odds seem stacked against them.
Here is where our co-heroes separate into their roles as protagonist and antagonist. I assert that Frank betrays April by buying into the “realist” narrative of his friends and colleagues, i.e. the American middle class. Notably, in the key scene where he dismisses Paris as a pipe dream, he responds to April’s proposal of an abortion like a Right-wing conservative. 
April, a normal woman, a normal sane mother doesn’t buy herself a piece of rubber tubing to give herself an abortion so she can go live out some goddamned fantasy.
He reduces her to a scolded child, the idea of moving to Paris now considered a “childish dream.” Frank promptly resumes fucking his secretary like the mad man that he has become (and unconsciously always was and desired to be despite himself).
The ensuing fight between the Wheelers parallels the one that opens the film with one significant difference: although they both recognize that Truth has just spake, only April refuses to ignore it. She no longer loves Frank precisely because he is no longer the man she married, the man who wanted more from life than a cookie-cutter existence, and she reaffirms this fact. Frank cannot handle the Truth, and does his best to defend against it. He speaks for April, putting words in her mouth that she cannot express because she no longer loves him. April has not grown cold to him because of his unfaithfulness with another woman—April sleeps with another man, too—but his infidelity to himself.
The film should end with the two most disturbing scenes of all.
First, Frank awakens to find April playing Stepford wife. She pauses from cooking breakfast when he enters the kitchen and apologizes, just as she does earlier in the film with the birthday cake and party, except this time her words sound eerily scripted. Because Frank no longer cares about Truth and desires only to live in bad faith, he plays along, a bit surprised but also pleasantly amused. When he leaves, one gets the sense that he has bought into the male-centric American Dream. One knows that April hasn’t.

The second scene finds April crying in front of her mirror after Frank has left. She makes a fitful call where she threatens to break down at any moment to the babysitter watching her kids to ask if she can prolong her duties. The egg yolks that the camera focused on her scrambling in the prior scene retroactively become a foreshadowing moment, as she methodically carries out the abortion. When she descends the stairs, the camera focuses on her unsteady feet. Her face is pale. She goes to the window. The sun shines upon her and she lets out a small smile. Then a drip of blood falls to the carpet. The camera pans back to show a pool of blood expanding on the back of her skirt. She slowly moves out of the frame to make a phone call, “I think I need an ambulance…Yes…One one five Revolutionary Road…”

A perfectly disturbing end, right? No! Mendes cannot help but steal the show from his now ex-wife. Instead of ending with a shot of the blood on the carpet—the blotch in suburbia that betrays it a violent, life-draining lie—and April voicing the title of the film offscreen, Mendes includes a coda, a series of short scenes that a) turn the film anti-feminist and b) reinstate the generic codes of the cinematic anti-suburbia tract. 
Instead of being left with a woman who may or may not be in critical condition, we learn that April dies, and her death acts as a sacrifice to return the men to normalcy. Frank moves to the city with his kids, thus finding some compromise between Paris and the American suburbs. The neighbor, who professed his unrequited love for April after she slept with him, becomes closer with his wife. We might brush these scenes against the grain to argue that they are the most feminist part of all because they show that female sacrifice undergirds the American Dream of the middle class, but they also inspire an unwarranted sympathy for Frank. The men are allowed to mourn almost as an act of contrition.
The final insult comes in the concluding scene where Mrs. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) tells her husband about how the new couple who has moved into the Wheelers’ house seems perfect for their abode. When the husband reminds her that she said much the same when the Wheelers moved in, she claims that she always knew that something was not right about the Wheelers, showing us that she, too, continues to live in bad faith by refusing to treat her Truth-telling son as the normal one (and not the folks she sells houses to). In my vote for the platitudinous scene of the decade, the husband is shown turning down the volume on his hearing aid.

Road should resolutely not be framed as a film about all suburbanites remaining deaf to the truth of their existence, as Mendes’s grandiloquent closing sequence suggests. The film is resolutely not about everyone’s bad faith. One woman, in the great tradition of Ibsen’s Nora Helmer, remains faithful to reality in an unreal setting and demonstrates her sanity despite her insane husband and unfaithful director.

Kirk Boyle has previously contributed a Flick-Off of The Day the Earth Stood Still to Bitch Flicks.

Quote of the Day: Margaret Cho

courtesy of margaretcho.com

Whenever anyone has called me a bitch, I have taken it as a compliment. To me, a bitch is assertive, unapologetic, demanding, intimidating, intelligent, fiercely protective, in control–all very positive attributes. But it’s not supposed to be a compliment, because there’s that old, stupid double standard: When men are aggressive and dominant, they are admired, but when a woman possesses those same qualities, she is dismissed and called a bitch.

These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one sucks. Not being a bitch means not having your voice heard. Not being a bitch means you agree with all the bullshit. Not being a bitch means you don’t appreciate all the other bitches who have come before you. Not being a bitch means since Eve ate that apple, we will forever have to pay for her bitchiness with complacence, obedience, acceptance, closed eyes, and open legs.

There is a dangerous myth going around this country that sexism doesn’t exist anymore, that we have gotten past it and that “alarmist” feminists are an outdated nuisance. Warnings like “Oh, watch out–here comes the feminazi!” abound in our culture, as if for a woman, entitling yourself to an opinion puts you on a par with followers of the Third Reich.

 from the Foreword to bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine

Guest Post: Deciphering Island Patriarchy: Finding Feminism in Lost

This guest post originally appeared at Girl with Pen!
With the 6th and final season upon us, will Lost finally zoom towards a feminist future? With the number of female characters dwindling and the simultaneous deification of hetero white males, can feminist Lost fans hope for a satisfying island conclusion?
Previous seasons have been a mixed bag on this count.
Lost has many strong female characters, many of whom I could easily see wearing a “This is what a feminist look like” t-shirt. As noted by Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, an admitted Lost junkie, “Generally, the female characters are more well-rounded than just about any other female characters on television, especially in ensemble casts.”
Lost has often presented ‘gender outside the box’ characters, suggesting being human is more important than being a masculine man or a feminine woman. After all, when you are fighting for your life, ‘doing gender right’ is hardly at the top of your priority list.
While Jack and Sawyer try to out-macho each other in their love triangle with Kate, neither hold entirely to the Rambo-man-in-jungle motif. As for the women, they just might be the strongest, bravest, wisest female characters to grace a major network screen since Cagney and Lacey.
Though the island is certainly patriarchal, one could make a strong case that male-rule is not such a good thing for (island) society. Kate or Juliet would be far better leaders than any of the island patriarchs (and as some episodes suggest, would make great co-leaders – what a feminist concept!)
McEwan, in her discussion with fellow Lost fanatic, Brad Reed of Sadly, No!, agrees, stating “the show looks increasingly to be making an oblique but advanced commentary about the patriarchy.” As she argues:
“The Lost fathers (Benry, Widmore, Paik, Shephard the Elder) are archetypical patriarchs-rich, powerful, well-educated, well-connected, straight, and white, with the exception of Mr. Paik, who’s in the ethnic majority of his country of residence. It is within the battle among these patriarchs that everyone else is caught; it is to their whims, and their arbitrary rules and preferences, that everyone else is subjected. That’s clearly framed as Not a Good Thing, which rather suggests a feminist critique of the patriarchy.”

However, as the two hour season premiere revealed, one of the strongest female leads, Juliet, is dead. Kate is still rocking the strong-woman action, yet the fact remains that “We’re just about out of female characters to root for” (as Cara of Feministe points out).
This slow decrease in female characters means that a show that had more males to begin with has become decidedly testosterone weighted. Moreover, the (white) males left are being deified with Jabob/Lock/Richard/Ben all seemingly having godlike powers. This turn is all the more frustrating given that supposedly Kate was initially conceived as the island leader. Alas, as reported by Jill at Feministe, “execs thought that people wouldn’t watch the show if a chick was in charge, so they gave that role to Jack and turned Kate into one corner of a love triangle.” Grrrr.
The 30-minute season recap that aired last week kept implying women viewers are wooed by the romantic motifs that dominate many of the narrative arcs. Apparently ABC is unaware that women are interested in more things than romance (and shirtless hotties).
Sometimes the writers seem oblivious to the fact that women are more than man-seeking baby-making machines, too. Season five was particularly dire in this vein. Drawing on the Freudian ‘baby as penis replacement’ motif, Kate was depicted as trying to repair the loss of Sawyer with baby Aaron. (For more on this line of argument, go here.)
Yet, overall, Kate is arguably one of the smartest, most daring female characters to lead a contemporary mega-hit television series. Her back-story ain’t bad either – she was on that doomed flight as a result of fighting back against her mother’s abusive partner. And, though Juliet sometimes seems more focused on her various Romeos than on other matters, she heroically detonated the bomb that launched us into season six. Who knows, maybe this final season will launch us into some sort of feminist utopia led by Eloise Hawking or Rousseau. At the very least, let’s hope it doesn’t culminate with Kate all happily married and duly domesticated!
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. She previously contributed posts about The United States of Tara and Nurse Jackie.

Guest Post: Nurse Jackie as Feminist Id?

This guest post also appears at Professor, What If… and the Ms. Magazine blog.
In the second-season premiere of the Showtime series Nurse Jackie, a feminist id was on full display. According to Mr. Penis Envy, Sigmund Freud, who published The Ego and the Id in 1923, the id acts according to the “pleasure principle,” seeking to avoid pain and experience pleasure with no thought to consequence.
While Jackie (Edie Falco), a hospital emergency-room nurse, does seem aware of consequences (she hides her drug addiction), she in large part functions according to id impulses. According to Freud, the id is ruled by libido, sexual and otherwise, cannot take “no” for an answer and is represented as infantile. It wants what it wants when it wants it. All of which is true of Jackie Peyton.
But, what makes Jackie’s id feminist? While it might seem contradictory to claim that the unthinking part of the self can have feminist tendencies, Jackie’s pleasure-seeking self can be read as a reaction to the confines of the patriarchal world. As a nurse (and a woman), she is supposed to be selfless and outward-directed, nurturing and caring. Who cares about her chronic pain and 24-hour work/life demands? Her feminist id responds “F you” to the nurturing/suffering paradigm, and she ingests drugs to numb the pain of daily life.
In this episode, Jackie’s feminist id refuses to bend over backwards to ameliorate her rather annoying daughter, Grace, while the family is on a beach excursion. She rejects the “super-mom” role, instead rolling her eyes and voicing frustration. Then, when two young men partake in sexist “I’d tap that” banter, she shoves one of them down and storms off. Her husband warns them “Don’t fuck with her,” voicing the “don’t mess with me” aura Jackie exudes most of the time. That’s an aura that women are not supposed to have but, as the scene indicates, her husband can literally voice.
Jackie’s id also ignores her lover Eddie’s texts–why should she have to placate him just because he can’t get over his jealous response to discovering she is married? The show’s representation of him as seeking vengeance because “his woman” is “taken” can be read as a feminist critique of the ownership model of love. If he were angry at the betrayal, that would be one thing, but he is angry that she is not his alone–to which feminist-id Jackie says “F you, dude.”
Her shenanigans with Coop, the doctor who’s enamored with her, also have a feminist pleasure principle at their core. How fun is it that she takes down this ego-inflated ninny and yet he remains hopelessly infatuated? Our super-ego might feel her teasing kisses and sharp barbs are cruel, but our own ids cheer as Jackie skewers Coop’s self-important bravado.
Even the flourish that closes the episode, her delivery of cake for a family dinner, can be read as a feminist id response. Not only is she saying no to all the rules about what and how one should eat, she is again refusing to live up to wife/mother ideals. Perhaps this is a veiled response to husband Kevin’s recent declaration that she is such a great wife because she cooks him breakfast even when she is exhausted.
More generally, id-Jackie reveals that sexual desire is overly regulated and refuses to buy into “you can only love and have sex with one person at a time” paradigm. She proves that the “just say no” response is unrealistic, that our drugs–be they cake, sex or morphine–sometimes are the only things allowing us a tenuous grip on our capacity to be functional beings.
I agree with The Feminist Spectator, that this series is “smart and morally, emotionally and ethically complicated.” We may not be able to fully embrace Jackie’s id behavior, but we can certainly recognize what drives it. And, as Michelle Dean notes at Bitch, “All of the female characters on the show spend considerable time satisfying the Bechdel test–women, speaking to women, about subjects other than men.” These characters offer subtle and provocative critiques of the privilege/oppression matrix, revealing that, given the regulatory practices of society, it’s surprising we are not all popping pills like candy.
I hope that during the rest of this season, Jackie, a wonderful feminist id, will have her cake and eat it too.
Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate. She previously contributed a post about The United States of Tara.

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!

Guest Post: Tara is Better Not United

 
This guest post also appears at Professor, What If… and the Ms. Magazine blog.

As I began watching the second-season premiere of the Showtime series The United States of Tara, I eagerly ask what I always do before an episode starts: “Which ‘alter’ will it be this time?”

Alas, to my dismay, the show’s bubbly focus on a recovered Tara Gregson (Toni Collette) meant that the “alters”–alternate personalities of this 21st century Sybil–were gone, thrown out like the unwanted clothing ceremoniously dumped into a charity bin in the show opener. Instead, we have happy, functioning Tara, and an upbeat musical soundtrack trying to manipulate us to believe that, indeed, all is well in the Tara-verse.

But we soon learn that Tara as one person, no longer suffering from dissociative identity disorder, is not nearly as fun or interesting as she is as five different people. Instead, the “true Tara” now displays some of the most annoying traits of all five of her alters.

She incorporates her Alice-esque alter by donning a 50s-style apron and throwing herself into a dinner party with the neighborhood’s token gay couple. She speaks her mind Buck-style (Buck was a beer-swigging male alter) when a neighbor commits suicide, bragging “The lady with all the personalities is not the most fucked up person on the block.” After the dinner party, her T-proclivities (that was the teenaged alter) come out, and she performs a manic Bollywood number, ending with provocative thrusting in her hubby’s face. Her sister Charmaine assures her new beau that Tara has not actually “transitioned” into the other personality, indicating that perhaps it would be better if she did, while Tara’s husband Max is visibly worried that the new “sane” Tara might be more insane than before.

Given the show’s emphasis on the self as performative, and on the impossibility of performing to societal standards (especially if one is female), this suggestion that Tara’s recovery may not be a step forward is intriguing. Though the show reveals all the difficulties Tara’s disorder causes for her and her family, it also seems to be indicating that the real problem is a society that expects us to perform in very particular, stable and normative ways. These regulatory ideals are so oppressive that we either bind ourselves into limited roles (i.e., Alice-the-50s-housewife) or run the risk of being seen as “crazy”–as “normal” Tara is when she laughs too loud, makes a suicide joke or has too much fun at a dinner party.

The show’s underlying critique of such normative ideals, and the relatively freeing notion of embracing the self as performance, is evident in other characters as well. Marshall, Tara’s closeted gay son, tries hard to be serious, smart and talented, but finds that flaunting his identity by sitting at the “gay-ble”–the school lunch table where gays and their allies sit–is a welcome relief, and results in him joining a campaign at his school aimed to raise queer visibility.

Charmaine, Tara’s sister, struggles with regulatory norms in choosing between a relationship with traditional hunk Neil vs. unattractive and vertically challenged Nick, who is personality-privileged and emotionally supportive. Charmaine tried to follow normative requirements in the past by augmenting her breasts to please her then-husband, a choice that resulted in lopsided and off-center nipples. Now that she has had these “corrected,” she seems to believe she can do better than short, balding Nick.

The character of Tara’s teenaged daughter Kate has thus far been largely challenged around the regulation of her sexuality, as indicated with Tara’s concern that she was not able to “micromanage her daughter’s vagina.” Kate’s struggles with a creepy boss and an abusive boyfriend expose a society populated by males wishing for similar micro-managing power.

Max appears to be the character least affected by social norms. He doesn’t seem to care that his wife is far from typical, worrying only about her health and happiness rather than what others think. He does not condemn or regulate his son’s sexuality nor attempt to micromanage his daughter. If any character seems too good to be true, it’s him. This is perhaps why Max is a bit empty as a character: a sort of dad/husband placeholder who comes off as boring and conventional in a cast of otherwise entertaining family members.

While Robert Abele laments at L.A. Weekly that “United States of Tara plays like surface feminism with an added gloss of snark and a bewilderingly blah sentimentality,” I would counter that the snark is integral to the feminist critique the show enacts. The snark reveals that our “normal” selves are “blah,” and thus we should embrace those aspects of our identity that subvert regulatory norms lest we end up living in a world full of bores.

Diablo Cody, the show’s creator, readily admits that she asks of everything she writes, “How am I going to sneak my subversive feminist message into this?” With Tara, she sneaks in this message beautifully, conveying that societal ideals–be they a stable self, heterosexuality or conventional attractiveness–do not an exciting world (or episode) make.

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.

Movie Review: An Education

*This is a guest post from Jesseca Cornelson.

An Education is a perfectly fine film. The performances are pleasant enough to watch, but much of the plot and characterization seemed to me to be yet another retelling of the popular “how to make a proper woman” story, complete with yee olde stereotypes of the necessary dowdiness of smart women in popular films and a shot of Carey Mulligan, dressed like Audrey Hepburn, shrieking with joy at winning at the dog track à la My Fair Lady. The “how to make a proper woman” story has as much to do with class as it does gender. In this incarnation, Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a smart, pretty girl being groomed for Oxford by her middle-class family—or rather, I should say, by her father Jack as her mother does almost no talking. The whole family’s being seems to pin its hopes on Jenny’s hoped for acceptance into Oxford. The family’s aspirational longing is as keenly felt as any teenage lust, though for Jenny it means living the life of an intellectual bohemian, and for her father it means marrying her off to a lawyer. This longing renders the whole family vulnerable to the charms of smooth-talking David, impeccably played by Peter Sarsgaard, a sometimes art thief who turns out to be married (oh noes!). Predictable stuff predictably ensues. Both Jenny’s English teacher and the uptight school headmistress warn her that her Mr. Rochester figure (of course there are Jane Eyre reference—this movie is highfalutin!) will likely disappoint her and worry that Jenny (wait, Jane E?) may squander her chance at Oxford before she comes to her senses. Jenny, of course, will have none of it and, of course, David disappoints. So, of course, she once more pins her hopes for the future on Oxford. Wanna guess whether or not she gets in? The last few minutes play out with all the suspense of an uplifting afternoon special of redemption.

I had high hopes when I saw that the screenplay was adapted by Nick Hornby. His story “Nipple Jesus” ranks among my favorite ever, and I was impressed with his book How to Be Good, which is written from the first-person point of view of a doctor mother who strays from marriage to her househusband. In each of these—the story, the novel, and the film—I find his presentation of the moral ambivalences to be the most striking element. Each, it turns out, is concerned with how people negotiate the appearance of morality with actual morality, and each implicates pretty damningly middle-class values of maintaining an appearance of morality while being oh so quick to compromise any actual morals the moment it becomes convenient or self-serving. It makes me wonder how much of Hornby himself we hear in David and Danny when first one tells Jenny not to be bourgeois in her moralizing and then the other turns her moral condescension around on her by noting that she had watched them steal from little old ladies without saying much either. I guess I should admit that I’m using “morality” and “moralizing” to stand in not only for everyone’s obsession with Jenny’s virginity and the various duplicities perpetrated in the film, but also for that middle-class form of snootiness that is so quick to judge others in its desire to be respectable.

An Education is at its best when it subtly complicates and plays against audience expectations. The scenes where Alfred Molina’s jolly but domineering Jack practically stutters and falls over himself as he is charmed by David are delicious. We, wise audience, see how easily the big man’s desires for upward mobility are used to seduce him as well. Dominic Cooper’s Danny, David’s art thief buddy, is worried enough that Jenny will get hurt that he says something to David about it, but then doesn’t actually do anything about it except dance flirtingly with Jenny.

What bugs me is how tidily Hornby’s script draws on familiar types for characterization and sets up a whole series of foils. Take Olivia Williams’ portrayal of Miss Stubbs, Jenny’s English teacher. The movie tells us in a conversation that Miss Stubbs is both smart and pretty (unlike some films which present pretty actresses as ordinary—Kate Winslet is a Plain Jane in Little Children, puh-lease!). And yet the film presents Miss Stubbs as dowdy, as if smart women are incapable of doing anything other than wearing severe buns (or, for one all-too-brief scene, a ponytail that manages to be both severe and sloppy) or compulsively quaffed with prim bobs, like the headmistress’, something like an upper-class, executive severity. Yawn. And how convenient that after Jack’s rant about Oxford trees, school trees, private tuition trees, and pocket money trees growing out in the garden, David justifies his art theft by saying that “these weekends [in Oxford and Paris], and the restaurants and the concerts don’t”—here it comes!—“grow on trees.” Convenient, too, the discussion in Jenny’s English class on Mr. Rochester’s blindness in Jane Eyre and King Lear, with its own themes of blindness. When it comes to David, Jenny and her family are so hungry for the world he offers that they are willingly blind to his deceits. Jenny watches gleefully as he forges the signature of C.S. Lewis, whose acquaintance he falsely claims in order to get Jenny’s parents’ permission to take her to Oxford for a week, and Jack later tells Jenny that he and her mother Marjorie (Cara Seymour) had heard on the radio that Lewis had long since moved to Cambridge and rather than accept David’s lie they convinced themselves that the radio announcer had it all wrong.

The script isn’t bad. After all, if movies didn’t routinely take shortcuts by using familiar, stylized codes for characterization, they couldn’t tell their intricate tales in about 100 minutes. It’s just that the script is so tidy and effective that it doesn’t come anywhere close to transcending its form. At times I wondered if the film would have felt as artful if it had been cast with more familiar Hollywood types, say Julia Roberts as Miss Stubbs or Anne Hathaway as Jenny, both of whom I find exude a sweetness that always makes me aware of how terribly charming they are. Would the film have been as engaging if everyone had American accents? I wonder if audiences’ own aspirations to sophistication might make us a bit blind to how ordinary this film is.

And here’s where I want to shift gears and put An Education in conversation, however briefly, with another film from this year that blew me away, Lee Daniel’s Precious, which also features a young woman, who’s been manipulated by an older man and whose hopes for the future are likewise pinned to her education. I know Precious has been accused of being exploitative, and maybe it is, but it is a far more interesting film, in terms of characterization alone. Here we have another female teacher who reaches out to her young student. And while Paula Patton’s Ms. Rain is also smart and pretty, she’s a fully developed character and not just a type. She in fact is presented as pretty and well groomed (a pretty, neatly dressed, well-groomed lady English teacher, oh my!) and, in another surprise, she’s a lesbian! Ms. Rain’s relationship with Precious, far from being limited to a few words of encouragement or knowing warnings, is central to the film. In An Education, all of the relationships seem comparatively superficial. Jack’s semi-mock anger at having to pay for so many lessons and longing for social standing is nothing compared to Mo’Niquie’s brilliant turn as Precious’ self-loathing and enraged mother, who is herself starved for affection.

And back to that ending. Holy voice over! It’s never a good sign that all of a sudden you need a voice over to close a movie after a minute-long montage of redemptive studying. How tidy, how comforting: see Oxford was the way to go after all! I would have preferred if the film had ended with the long closing shot of Jenny hugging her knees on the stairs, her face caught somewhere between relief and worry, not fully capable of enjoying her victory. Yeah, I know: The Graduate. But we all get off easy when the movie lands very near where it would have had Jenny never met David. Oh, sure she’s now been to Paris and all the boys she dates at Oxford are, we’re told, really boys. But her earlier questions about the value of an education and the limited options for women go unanswered. She was right to tell Emma Thompson as the headmistress that “it’s not enough to educate us anymore. You’ve got to tell us why you’re doing it.” It is indeed “an argument worth rehearsing”—an argument that the film fails to rehearse even as it resolves with Jenny’s acceptance to Oxford. What is the value of an education if the only things you can do with it are teach or go into civil service? Compare that to Precious, whose closing moments of victory aren’t tinged with yet another level of superior condescension, but rather present a young woman, HIV-positive before the AIDS cocktail, walking into the sunlight hand-in-hand with the children fathered by her own father. It’s a much more genuine ending. What do I mean by that? I suppose that the victory is both more humble and more hardly earned. As Precious walks down the street, we know her life cannot help but hold more difficulty and heartbreak. As Jenny cycles carefree down a different street, we suspect that the Oxford education will serve her just fine. So maybe what I mean by genuine is that Precious offers up the rare ending that opens out, leaving the audience with a sense that the character’s life and struggles will continue in spite of her current moment in the sun.

And isn’t that more like real life anyway? I know boatloads of smart, pretty women who find disappointment in their careers and relationships as much as those of a plainer sort, but we don’t really get the sense that Jenny will struggle with the difficulties of being a smart woman in 1960s Britain that she had so clearly articulated earlier in the film. And that seems a bit counterfeit.

Jesseca Cornelson is currently working on a collection of documentary poems about the history of Mobile, Alabama, which will serve as her dissertation for a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She blogs about her research and writing at Difficult History.

Movie Review: Persepolis


Persepolis. (2007) Written and directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

I rented Persepolis before the recent Iranian election, and have been thinking ever since about the film.

Persepolis is adapted from the autobiographical graphic novels written by Marjane Satrapi (which I haven’t read), and represents the first graphic-novel-as-film. Other graphic novels have been made into films, but none (to my knowledge) have remained as true to form as this. Visually, the film is lovely, stark, and at times deeply disturbing.

In Persepolis, we meet Marjane, a young girl living in Iran at the time of the Islamic revolution of 1979. The society changed drastically under Islamic law, as evidenced by Marjane’s teacher’s evolving lessons. After the revolution, in 1982, she tells the young girls, who are now required by law to cover their heads, “The veil stands for freedom. A decent woman shelters herself from men’s eyes. A woman who shows herself will burn in hell.” In typical fashion, the students escape her ideological droning through imported pop culture: the music of ABBA, The Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, and Iron Maiden.

While the film is a personal story, it does offer a concise history of modern Iran, including the U.S. involvement in the rise of Islamic law and in the Iran-Iraq war. This time in Iranian history is especially important right now, with the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ensuing protests. One scene in particular depicts a group of people protesting when a young man is shot, bleeds to death, and is hoisted over his fellow protesters’ shoulders–eerily reminiscent of what happened with Neda Agha Soltan, whose public murder has rallied the Iranian protesters and people all over the world.

The history of Iran, while it determines the course of Marjane’s life, really is a backdrop—especially in the second half of the movie. In other words, the film is more about the experience of one woman than a documentary-style account of Iranian history. Once Marjane escapes the society she grew up in, her problems become much more ordinary for a Western audience, more commonplace. She vacillates between different crowds of people. She falls in love and has her heart broken. She feels angst and confusion over who she is and what she wants. She goes home to Iran for a time and, like so many others, ultimately finds she cannot return home.

As evident in the film, Satrapi grew up in a wealthy, educated, progressive Iranian family. They sent her to Vienna as a teenager so she didn’t have to spend her adolescence in such a repressive society, and because they feared what might happen to such an outspoken young woman there. While acknowledging her privilege, not many women in circumstances other than these would be able to accomplish what she has. Satrapi isn’t afraid to show missteps she makes in growing up, either. Young Marjane learns that her femininity, even when repressed by law, offers great power—and shows how she misuses that power. Missing her mother’s lesson at the grocery store about female solidarity, she blames other women for her troubles (“Ma’am, my mother is dead. My stepmother’s so cruel. If I’m late, she’ll kill me. She’ll burn me with an iron. She’ll make my dad put me in an orphanage.”), and falsely accuses a man of looking at her in public to avoid the law coming down on her.

Persepolis is, in every definition of the term, a feminist film. There are strong, interesting female characters who sometimes make mistakes. The women, like in real life, are engaged in politics and struggle with expectations set for them and that they set for themselves. They have relationships with various people, but their lives are not defined by one romantic relationship, even though sometimes it can feel that way.

As much as I like this movie, I can’t help but write this review through the lens of an interview Satrapi gave in 2004, in which she claimed to not be a feminist and displayed ignorance of the basic concept of feminism. I simply don’t believe gender inequality can be dissolved through basic humanism—especially in oppressive patriarchal societies like Iran. I wonder if feminism represents too radical a position to non-Westerners, and if her statements were more strategy than sincerity. Making feminism an enemy or perpetuating the post-feminist rhetoric isn’t going to help anyone. That said, this is a very good movie and I highly recommend it.

The official trailer:

A couple of good articles about women’s role in the recent Iranian protests:

The Nation: Icons of the New Iran by Barbara Crossette

Feminist Peace Network: Memo to ABC: Lipstick Revolution FAIL

Post your own links–and thoughts about Persepolis–in the comments.