Enjoy my gf’s favorite holiday of the year with this pumpkin from SciFi wire:
It would be better if it glowed, but you know it is still mad cool. If you’re old enough to remember when Star Wars was good and a gay guy could be cast as a hero of a major motion picture franchise, then you know: Good life was.
Since I am going to bed finally tonight, I thought I too should “pray like Aretha Franklin” 
There have been a lot of black face incidents in the fashion industry of late. Since fashion is no less removed from culture than anything else, and since it is guilty of many messages that demean women (from glorifying violence against women, reducing women to parts, and starving women so that girls watching hate their bodies), I have not really weighed in on the issue. However, last night on America’s Next Top Model, a show I do not watch, Tyra Banks decided to not only put together a photo shoot that depended on superficial cultural appropriation but also paint white models brown or black:
Under the guise of celebrating interracial relationships, and our President, Tyra Banks informs wannabe models that Hapa means 1/2 Hawaiian and 1/2 something else and that they will all be given bi-racial identities to emulate for their photo shoot. As seen in the video, most of these girls have no clue about the cultures they have been assigned and are given no help in learning anything about them. So there are three layers of wrong here:
This continues a longer thread in Tyra Banks’ career, starting with her Talk Show. Often on that show, she tries on identities of marginalized people for 24-48 hours and then reports on the experience while showing clips. She then, inevitably, informs her audience how much she has learned from passing for the day with a full camera crew at her side. Under this superficial consciousness-raising model, Tyra has put on a fat suit, dirty designer jeans and sweat shirt to be homeless for the day, altered her facial features to be “ugly”, etc.
Her narrative, like that of the models in last night’s show, does less to provide the credibility she so desperately wants and instead reveals how ridiculous her behavior is in the face of real oppression. Thus “homeless Tyra’s” biggest issue is that she is bored b/c there is nothing to do when you are homeless and she is humiliated because she has to use a public bathroom to brush her teeth. Real homeless people worry about where they are going to sleep, how they are going to stay safe from physical and sexual violence, whether they will need to engage in extra-legal activities to eat, sleep, or live another day, or simply where they will go if the weather drops below freezing or a heat wave settles in their town. “Fat Tyra” is astounded that people don’t open doors for her or smile at her when she is buying coffee, while real large women worry about being harassed by random men and children calling them ugly and unlovable on public streets, picked on or mocked by passersby and friends and family alike, ostracized from economic and social events including jobs, or provide demeaning health care that compromises their level of care or ability to receive preventative care. Her minor moments of clarity pale in comparison to her colossal failures to understand the basics of the oppressions she attempts to expose. And her revelations are like a sitcom in which gross inequalities are solved in the course of an hour.
No matter how insulting this formula is however, Tyra Banks has always made the pretense of learning about her subject and consulting experts before and after playing dress up in the house of oppression. She makes no such claims on last night’s Supermodel, instead informing the models how important their clothes and make up will be in order to pass for bi-racial. In short, she encourages the grossest kind of cultural appropriation because of its seeming “harmlessness”.
As a black woman, standing beside a queer man of color, she capitalizes on their shared status as people of color and intersectionally marginalized identities to justify cultural appropriation and black face. As the second most successful black woman in media, she harnesses considerable following and economic power in order to reinscribe practices that are inexcusable. In a desperate plea for ratings, she tries to hide this offense in a 5 minute lesson about Hawaii that is as superficial as the task she sets for the models. Besides convincing a handful of young girls, some of whom are clearly poorly educated, that trying on cultures for fashion is acceptable and fun, she also provided every racist watching, an out for the next time they put on black face. And as if encouraging it, the episode aired just 3 days before Halloween.
I am insulted as a woman of color, as a biracial girl, and as a thinking human being. And despite all I know about history, I am astounded that this show got a greenlight from the network; though I don’t doubt the fact of Tyra’s blackness made them think they’d get away with it and they are likely right.
If you would like to complain, and I hope you do, here is the contact information for both Tyra Banks and the WB. Please tell them that cultural appropriation and black face are never acceptable:
Tyra Banks Production Company:
Bankable Productions 6310 San Vicente Boulevard Suite 505 Los Angeles, CA 90048 Phone: 323-934-4308Tyra Banks Manager:
Benny MedinaCW Network:
Dawn Ostroff, CEO
Warner Brothers Network
4000 Warner Blvd., Building 34R
Burbank, CA 91522
(818) 977-5000
E-Mail The WB
Sadly, this stunt got Tyra exactly what she was looking for, the internet is lit up with discussion of this week’s show. In some ways, I think the best thing we can all do is send our letters of concern and education to the network and to Tyra and then refuse to discuss anything she does again. Sometimes the deafening silence is the best solution to a person who would sell out their own for ratings.
This CFP sounds like something every African descended woman/girl and everyone who loves them can find something to write or should. Since so many bloggers of color write about looking for ways to love themselves or to pass that love on, which breaks my heart every time, it also seems like an exercise in coming to love through writing. So get to it already.
To love a black girl is a radical act. In a society that says black girls are ugly, useless, laughable, difficult and expendable loving ourselves and loving each other is revolutionary, dangerous, a delicious risk. On the heels of yet another study about how black girls are ohso hopelessly lonely and unwanted we want to think about how we as black girls can critique the images, the stereotypes, the one dimensional representation of black women in the mainstream media. How do we create a vibrant black girl loving culture in the face of that mis- representation? As black girls who love black girls and the brilliant universe transforming potential that we represent we are creating an online zine that we really see as a big ‘ol collaborative love letter to black girls from black girls. We are seeking collages, poems, letters, comix, images, short essays, games, worksheets, puzzles, playlists and shout outs that respond to the following questions:
- What do you want to say to black girls? What do you wish someone said to you when you were younger?
- Can you write a letter to a specific black girl you know? What would you like to say to her?
- Can we talk about and to black girls as complex, different, loving, strong, beautiful?
- Can we write about black girl sexuality and innocence? Can we imagine a world where black girls can be sexual and innocent simultaneously?
- Are there black girls who inspire you? Who are they?
- Can we talk about black girls’ styles? Not only how it is appropriated and vanilla’ed by mainstream media, but also how we take our style back.
- What are the questions that we want our daughters and mothers asking each other?
- What is the future that we are envisioning? What specifically do we mean when we talk about loving black girls as themselves?
- How do we re/define beauty, love, faith, courage, survival, life, expression, freedom so that we are centering black girls?
- Who are we? Who do we love? How do we love them? And why?
- Can we write a love letter to black girls in general? Can we love ourselves enough to love each other?
Please send your contribution to quirkyblackgirls@gmail.com.
love,
QBG
www.quirkyblackgirls.ning.com
A 3 Day Weekend Honoring Your Visionary Self! Healdsburg, California
Join us for an inspired gathering celebrating and empowering women’s work!
What Inspired This Conference?
Visionary women are gathered together to share their wisdom, resources and creative tools with you about a very important topic: BEING BOUNTIFUL!
Our focus is:
CHOOSING HAPPINESS NO MATTER WHAT
PRACTICING CREATIVITY AND PERSONAL PEACE
CREATING A PASSIONATE PLAN OF ACTION
BEING BOUNTIFUL DURING CHALLENGING TIMES
Through community, self expression, wisdom teachings and creative exploration, each woman will be inspired to take action on her visions and dreams! Join us for this annual event!
Cost: $300 for full conference $380 Conference + Dinner Party Friday Night & Reception w/ Alice Walker
Speakers: Shiloh Sophia McCloud, Christine Arylo, Shakti Gawain, Mary MacDonald, Ali Weiss, Lavender Grace, and Alice Walker
More info & Program: here
While the debate rages in Washington about who deserves health care and how, many groups have begun to fall out of the overall vision of who will ultimately be covered. I have already written posts about how the exclusion of reproductive choice from any of the bills currently being considered places women, especially working class and subsistence level women, in jeopardy. Increasingly however, stories have emerged about currently insured women being excluded from health care that should raise flags about any bill using “gender neutral norms” (ie assuming a male patient) or excluding women’s health (like that advocated by Senator Kyl of Arizona).
Among these cases are:
In all of the cases, issues particular to women’s bodies or women’s care responsibilities have been considered “abnormal”, outside of the general medical purview, because they require “extra” medical service. IE, both pregnancy, rape, physical/emotional/sexual abuse entail a whole set of medical visits and potential complications, some of them permanent, that men either do not encounter or are presumed to not encounter (ie the myth that men do not get raped). By assuming a “gender neutral” insurance policy, most of women’s health issues are shoved outside of normal expectation of medical need. While Congress has done away with pre-existing conditions in all of the bills being considered, some of these bills do not provide sanctions against charging more for insuring people with higher medical needs. By failing to specifically account for women’s health care needs nor providing sanctions on charges, current versions of health care reform leave women open to continued disparate treatment and exorbitant insurance fees. By thoroughly ignoring the needs of trans women, either by lumping their needs into existing models that call things like breast augmentation cosmetic surgery or by directly denying the right of transgender people to live in the bodies of their choosing, Congress has also left one of the most medically vulnerable groups of women open to continued persecution and exclusion.
You can help put women’s health back on the agenda of health care reform by:
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A queer approach to the issue would question the norm of a health care delivery system that privileges those people who are willing and/or able to organize their lives into a traditional household
One of the major stumbling blocks for me around the marriage debate has been this idea that marriage will solve all of “our” class woes by extending tax breaks, inheritance, and health care to married queer couples. The reality is that while marriage will extend these benefits to those who have them, they do nothing for those who do not. In other words, people who do not have insurance or property to extend to their partners will still go without and people who do not make enough to qualify for certain tax breaks requiring marriage (or who are childless) will still go without those as well. Like other mainstream models of social change, the marriage movement has taken middle class status for granted from the foundation of its organizing outward. And when called on this presumption, the answer has often been to:
There are critical merits to all three of these arguments that cannot be ignored. Both in terms of hegemonic processes (ie perception) and actual gains, marriage equality does offer something to everyone in our community/ies from the smallest move toward being more equal under the law to the larger issues of being able to visit one’s loved one in hospital. make critical decisions about partner and child care, or take their body home should they die.
At the same time, the energy put into the marriage movement has left other issues out in the cold both in terms of social justice action and discourse. By focusing on middle class liberalism at the national level, the queer community/ies have lost the ability to examine radical social justice and put that radical social justice on a national agenda. In terms of health care, this has meant a buy in to a family based health care system that at this point only extends to people who have insurance and whose employers and wages allow for full coverage of families. It neither questions the sexism or classism at the root of “family health care” nor does it confront the homophobia and transphobia of the health care provided. Given that part of the queer community is represented by two female incomes of color, the least likely group to be insured or provided adequate care, especially when those women are transgendered, the queer community/ies should have been at the forefront of re-imagining health care reform from provision to insurance. And in so doing, we could have articulated a national platform that would ultimately have benefited not only our entire community/ies but also helped heterosexual groups like female heads of household, unemployed and uninsured, poc experiencing health care disparities, and trans women and men in het relationships. They “gay agenda” could have become the model for the “national agenda” and given our cause(s) more credibility with the people who continue to deny them as “special interest.” Instead, a middle class focus has left much of our community’s/ies’ health care needs unexamined and reduced are piece of the health care reform debate going on in Congress to HIV/AIDs funding. That marginalization has in turn left many in our community/ies ambivalent about gay marriage all together.
I saw this PSA from Ireland a little over a month ago, by way of @queerty, and actually teared up:
Long time readers know that I believe in two things when it comes to the marriage issue:
That means, for the most part I support gay marriage efforts by writing about pending legislation on the blog, signing and circulating petitions and materials, and working on education campaigns, but I am not married myself nor do I imagine I ever will be. I also agree that gay marriage organizing has not taken into account transgender people (see my post on this) but I believe that is an issue of expanding the marriage discourse.
Yet watching this commercial made me think about what the world would be like if everyone literally had to go beg everyone in their town for permission to marry. (Or, as is currently the case in Washington and was the case in California just this summer, beg yearly or almost yearly for permission for their marriage to remain valid.) I could not help but think that maybe my own cynicism about marriage is getting in the way of seeing why it is seems so dire to others in our community/ies. And all the more committed to the reality that as long as we are denied access to basic rights granted the majority, and upon which many discourses of morality and economic and social gain depend, we cannot hope to be seen and treated as equal by the nations in which we reside.
I recently sat down to watch the film festival favorite, “lesbian” “women’s” empowerment film The Guitar this weekend. I’ve been looking forward
to seeing it since I saw the seemingly naked Saffron Burrows backed up against her guitar in huge relief at the local video store. Unlike those flocking to the image because of Saffie’s aristocratic beauty, I was instantly drawn to the juxtaposition of girl and guitar a trope of female empowerment that is often born out in night clubs, woman centered music festivals, coffee houses and lesbian bars across the world. And while “a girl with a guitar” often conjures up images of long-haired white women whining about their broken hearts to my college age male students, many a guitar playing female has captured the feminist angst of a generation, spoken to the rebellion, strength, needs and desires, and infinite whimsy of being women. Poets, philosophers, and activists come in all shapes and sizes, but for many young women they are born on the strings of a guitar.
Couple the way this stark image defines the film with a female director, a highly regarded avant garde No Wave male screen writer, selection at Sundance (and two other film festivals), and the heady choices Saffron Burrows has made in her own career and anyone could see why this film would intrigue. Add to that the very subtle media blitz coming from the queer dvd industry, tla and wolfe in particular, and The Guitar comes with a pedigree that should make any feminist, especially a queer one, and certainly any hipster film geek rush right on out to the video store with fist proudly in the air …
Why I call this film “mainstream” then is not its independent credentials or distributor, but rather its content. The plot is a typical mainstream mantra with a predictable ending. The fact that it is loosely based on a true story makes it no less trite.
The film opens with Saffron Burrow’s character Mel finding out that she has two months to live. Mel, a mousy working class woman with an obnoxiously self-centered boyfriend and a dead end job, has throat cancer that is literally stealing her voice from her. Her doctors tell her that she is going to slowly grow silent and then die, an all too obvious metaphor for the trajectory her life has already taken.
On that same day, Mel loses her job and gets dumped by her boyfriend.
Alone and dying, Mel takes her severance pay, her credit cards, and her disappointments and transforms them into a fantasy life where she can afford her every heart’s desire and act out on all of her repressed whims. For a generation raised on consumption as revolution (yes, I am talking to you organic coffee drinking, American Apparel wearing, green car driving, gentrified neighborhood living, hipster extraordinaire) her choices are empowering. After all, in just two short months Mel has gone from a dowdy, frowning, peon, who no doubt lived in a hovel, to a top floor condo with posh furniture, one of a kind designer clothes and jewelry, take out every night from the finest restaurants and people who seemingly adore her.
Scratch the surface of this story however, and underneath you will find nothing but suffocatingly stale air. Mel is just as locked away in her fancy condo as she was in her dead end job. She talks to no one, she goes nowhere. In fact, her supposed road to empowerment is even more small and isolated than her pre-cancer life. Her only connections are to material things and the people who deliver them. Everything she buys is essentially stolen, excused away like the bankers on Wall Street because she is dying. And while she revels in many fine pieces, none of it seems to have much real substance to her. In fact, as the boxes arrive, she is almost always busy ordering more.
What kind of empowerment is trading being ignored in the real world for being Rapunzel locked in her tower? Are we to believe that feminism lies in her fancy things and her ever brightening smile like a singing bird in a gilded cage? Certainly some forms of mainstream feminism have said as much with their emphasis on consumption and the power 
embedded in affording and pursuing one’s own materialist desires free of the income of a man. And while not being beholden to male power purse strings is empowering, shopping does not a revolution make. In fact, when one thinks about where most of the items she ordered were made and by whom, it can in fact unmake it as we have seen in the rifts between feminists far too often.
Perhaps, we are meant to see Mel’s empowerment in her new found sexual expression. As I said earlier, when we meet Mel, she is in a crumbling relationship with an inattentive self-absorbed man who takes her for granted and dumps her to focus more on himself. As the film progresses, Mel’s only contact to the human world, the delivery workers who bring her food and clothes, become her lovers. A married African immigrant named Rosco Wasz, played by award winning actor Isaach de Bankole, lugs all of her heavy boxes up to her home, often unpacking them while she is oblivious to his presence.
One day Rosco inquires about her life, critiquing her seeming theft and/or materialism, for which he later apologizes. Within moments of that apology, she flaunts her big baby blues at him, plants tentative kisses on his forehead, and all his moral authority melts in between her open thighs. Thus begins an extramarital affair in which film viewers are given no information about the delivery man or their relationship; now besides lugging her heavy boxes Rosco is regularly there for sex. This fantasy black man, moving from menial laborer doing drudge work she will not do herself to readily available sexual stud, flies under the radar of most viewers trained not to see the exploitation of black bodies or working class people in the interest of centering the em/power/ment of realizing ones own class and sexual desires.
Mel’s other delivery person is a working class woman of color named Cookie Clemente, played by Paz de la Huerta. I believe she is meant to be read as at least half Italian in this film, but that is played as ethnic Other just as much as racial Other. Like Rosco, she comes from immigrant roots, at once calling up the multiculturalism of NYC that is largely missing from the rest of this film and the specific domestic 
exploitation of immigrants of color that has become common place amongst the rich in the City. Notably, the only other people of color in the film are two Asian immigrant women who enter the elevator immediately after Mel finds out she has terminal cancer and an Indian cabby who yells at her near the end of the film. What these characters have in common is their foreign languages, something that will come up later to literally establish the objectification of poc in this film. The failure of the director to translate the dialogue highlights how little the dialogue of any of these poc characters matters to the trajectory of the film or its star.
In stereotypical gendered fashion, the film’s Asian women gossip to Mel’s chagrin, the black man lugs the heavy furniture & throws off his wife of 7 years and the brown woman offers up good home cooking to keep the misses well. Cookie delivers almost all of the food Mel eats. The more often she brings it, the more intrigued she is by the rich [white] lady locked in her posh tower.
Mel picks up on Cookie’s interests and propositions her one day over the newly delivered food. A scene that could have played like a seduction over wine, instead reinforces the sense of difference between Cookie and Mel. Cookie’s enthralled by all of her things, while Mel, who is equally working class, seems at ease and accustomed to those same things. Cookie’s sense of wonder leads Mel to tell her the meaning of her collection in what is perhaps the most transparently directed moment of the film:
They speak to me, the objects. They whisper in a strange language. The language of objects. They give me hope by whispering rumors of my redemption.
In one simple recitation of Smith’s actual words, Mel both seduces Cookie and lays bare the way she sees the two people of color in her life. They are objects in her collection leading the way to her self-absorbed redemption. Like Rosco’s name or the unnamed Asian women in the elevator, they speak “strange languages” and have no real place beyond the attempt to find herself. It is a sad misreading of Smith, flattened out by overtly racialized directing.
Both of these characters in one way or another represent colonial fantasies about people of color that continue to permeate the meaning of white female empowerment even on the left. They come and go on the whims of the main female character with little character development of their own. More than that, they exist simply to serve her; whether it is carrying her things, feeding her, or offering themselves sexually, it is always and forever about her. In fact, according to this plantation mistress fantasy, both people of color willingly throw off their other commitments and relationships at the promise of her touch. Rosco forgets his wife with one look and Cookie forgets her boyfriend Vitto with a simple smile. 
Both of them come to check on Mel long after their work is done, despite the way she has treated them b/c like Mammy they just naturally love her. And even tho they are all working class, having these two people of color serving her credentials Mel’s upper class passing as much as any of the things she buys.
(It should be noted that Mel also has a white male phone service worker who is equally stereotypical. He is overly chatty and speaks in a contrived vernacular seemingly mimicking the way Amos Poe imagines working class people speak. Not only is he another example of classism issues in the film but his sexuality is never exploited, illustrating the racialization of sexual awakening in this film.)
For many, the film seemingly redeems itself both in the subtle subversions the actors of color engage in and when both Rosco and Cookie ultimate leave Mel for their real lives. The former involves Mel acting in seemingly elitest or potentially racist ways and being called on it. When she meets Rosco for the first time, she makes fun of his name and he in turn makes fun of hers to expose the slight. But this soon turns to bonding when Mel explains her name has meaning, assuming that her name is special and his is not, and he tells her that his has meaning as well. For Cookie the slight is misunderstanding: when she delivers the first pizza to Mel’s condo she has no clothes and won’t let Cookie in and Cookie takes offense. She slams the door in Cookie’s face and then does not tip her, which Cookie calls her on. Again this moment of privilege is quickly excused away when Mel explains she has no cash, as if a tip cannot be put on credit with all of the other purchases she cannot afford. Later when she almost bludgeons Cookie with boxes she is discarding out the window, b/c apparently she is too delicate to walk to the garbage shoot or recycle bin, Cookie calls her a b—h, but then promptly helps her carry a heavy package into her house and get it situated. For me these moments serve to mask underlining issues of inequality just as clearly as the “finding oneself through sexual abandon with lesbians and poc” storyline precisely because the ability of the characters she offends to talk back allows the audience to consider the matter dealt with, without ever questioning how these scenes work to establish expected racial narratives that renders each character known without ever really giving the poc subjecthood in the film. Like the Indian cabbie who is just there to yell in a foreign language, these moments of disdain and judgment from Cookie and Rosco follow a particular racial script.
The departure of Cookie and Rosco are equally unsatisfying. Rosco’s wife of 7 years is pregnant and he stops by long enough to tell Mel he is going to be a daddy. While he can throw over his black wife of 7 years for Mel, Rosco’s patriarchal commitment to fatherhood is more important; with a whiff of stereotypical black masculinity and denigrated black femalehood, he is gone. Cookie arrives at Mel’s condo with a huge bruise on her cheek explaining that her boyfriend called her a “d–e” and stabbed her in the cheek with a fork. In an utterly unsatisfying scene, Cookie breaks up with Mel as much to protect them as she does because of 
the sexual slur that clearly rocks her self-definition. This woman, whose only real power in the film comes from her initiative in connecting to Mel is lost in a word that inspires more fear than a fork to the cheek.
The hate crime reinforces the image of poc and/or ethnic misogyny and homophobia while at the same time introducing a critique of class and classism. While Mel wants to call down to the restaurant, Cookie reminds her that if she gets fired she will lose her everything. While I don’t think it is the director or writer’s intention, this scene opens a comparison between the vicarious position of actual working class lesbian/bisexual of color Cookie and fantasy land Mel. When Mel was faced with losing everything, she walked away from her job, her boyfriend, and her working class trappings, and found empowerment through a credit card and poc servants. The film tells us, Cookie has no similar access to mobility, however fantastical that mobility may be.
With Cookie’s exit, so goes the “lesbian” storyline. A forgiving reading of this film would cast both women as bisexual and questioning. For Cookie this questioning, much like the rest of her identity, is missing from the film to highlight Mel’s sexual desires. For Mel being a bisexual with internalized homophobia that prevented her from acting on her same sex desires until she is diagnosed with cancer could fit a more well-executed film. However, partially because of the intersecting of race and sexuality in this film, and partially because of the overall execution, homosexuality in this film is always tangential to an overarching heterosexual narrative. The failure to flesh out the people with whom Mel is having sex in any real way makes these relationships smack of slumming or “out there” experimentation rather than anything real or meaningful that challenges a heterosexist reading of her sexual identity. Mel moves from her white boyfriend, to her black handyman, to her brown lesbian lover with little sign of attachment, discussion, or desire beyond the ever pressing collection of foreign objects. In a scene that defies reality, Rosco even walks in on the women and ultimately joins in. Thus any semblance of homosexuality is subsumed by male heterosexual fantasies of lesbians just waiting around for a man to really get it done. (There is some redemption in this three-way, in that it centers Mel as the object of desire rather than Rosco, ie both partners work for her pleasure rather than the porn fantasy where the “lesbians” take turns with their male third. At the same time, through the lens of whiteness, the centering of Mel’s sexual pleasure while she simply drifts of in sexual ecstasy without an ounce of reciprocity to her poc lovers is hardly revolutionary.) And while she shows some real affection for Cookie, the final scenes of the film imply a return to heterosexuality, that thoroughly marks Cookie as the anomaly.
At film’s end, Mel has stopped trying to find happiness in people and things and embraced her own happiness and creativity. And while this is a powerful anti-consumption message that runs counter to much of the action of the film, it is still mired by questionable racial and sexual 
narratives. After all, if the message of the film is that money and things are not the answer, we cannot forget that both people of color and her same sex activity in this film are counted among those “things.” This is hardly the revolutionary and open life that Patti Smith lived, one in which both sexuality and racial consciousness, as well as outspoken feminism, were definitive aspects of her personality. As much as it pains me to say this, much of the failing of this film is in the directing. Rather than trust her subject and her actors, all of whom have garnered critical praise, Amy Redford shoots people, at least people of color, like the objects that Mel is constantly ordering over the phone. Despite taking the time to shoot scenes where the characters are obviously talking to one another Redford consistently presents these scenes sans dialogue or stripped of any meaningful development. Where we could have seen three-dimensional characters getting to know each other and revealing critical ways that they impacted each others lives, these scenes play like credentialing music videos. Worse, ever single person of color in this film is an immigrant and most don’t speak English further otherizing poc in N. America as foreign specifically to capitalize on gross misreading of Smith’s poetic description of the meaning of passing moments in her life, a gross misreading that is wholly the director’s responsibility. Her handling of sexuality is equally non-commital failing to walk the thin line between sexuality normalized through lack of examination, ie centered and naturalized, and sexuality exploited. Mel comes across as a Freshman WS major experimenting before marriage rather than an adult woman opening herself to the possibilities. Ultimately Redford’s directorial decisions render her actors two-dimensional and the film’s cinematic gaze both sexually and racially questionable. It does a disservice not only to the actors of color but to the real life of the woman upon whom Mel is based. And as storytelling, it reduced a film that should have showed us an anti-racist, feminist, queer consciousness forming under the most adverse conditions to one of self-absorption and thinly veiled oppression. Even the film’s metaphors are overwrought from the throat cancer induced silence to the fact that Saffie is naked for the first 20 minutes in her new apartment symbolizing rejection of her old life and the rebirth of her new one.
Unlike Smith, Mel doesn’t build a multicultural, polymory, life at the end of this film, where she loves openly and embraces all of the pieces of her we have seen. Mel just becomes a supposedly more enlightened, seemingly straight, [white] woman who can now play the guitar.
So where is the girl with the guitar that so poignantly graces the movie poster and the film jacket? It seems, when Mel was a young girl, she stole a red electric guitar that her parents forced her to return, and she had wanted to learn to play ever since. Among the many purchases she makes 
on her two month spree is a similar guitar which she learns to play in the background of the action of the film. Thus many of the night time scenes of the film, when the poc have gone back to their real lives only to come a runnin’ in the morning, are punctuated by Mel rocking out on her guitar. As expected, her skill increases exponentially over time, so that by film’s end she can play with the best indie bands.
As shot, the guitar is totally sublimated in this film despite being the core part of the story. Had the director spent more time showing Mel learning to play and what that meant for her, and less time cataloging frivolities, we would have gotten some sense of the little girl who lost her way and found it again in the power of music. The message of the movie, stripped of all its race-class-sexuality madness, is the girl with guitar finding her voice and embracing her life. It was a powerful message that director and writer lost track of to the point of rendering her final on stage triumph cliche and uninspired.
For those who can tune out all of the questionable issues in this film and simply lose themselves in the hegemonic fantasy of individual female empowerment through riches gained and lost, sexual “freedom”, and finding oneself, you will still have to contend with the slow pacing of this film and the ultimate failure to tell the story of the girl and her guitar. Given who this film is really about, that is as much a travesty as the issues of oppression. For viewers like me, ultimately, The Guitar is just another “feminist film” that fails to be very feminist.
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A new calendar has been released in Spain by LGBTQ activists featuring trans women models as La Virgen. It seems the ideal subject for a Sunday post here on the blog where I try not to get to religious on you all until today. As a Catholic girl in Catholic School I was taught that we can only truly know the Divine when we imagine Him [or Her] in the body of the most marginalized among us. That teaching was part of a core ethic of stewardship, service, and ultimate understanding of the “Body’” (faith as embodied and interconnected) that is often lacking in the images of the modern day church and the arch-conservatives who seek to [mis]represent our faith. Moreover, it reflects the stories of Jesus’ life, which was a life spent among the most marginalized by choice and by recognition of the humanity and faith of people pushed to the margins. If Jesus taught nothing else, He taught us to see the Divine in those society abuses and throws away and called us to be like them. So when I look on the majority of the images for this calender, I see our Body taking the next step in an ongoing reclamation of the Divine by the faithful not, as some others have claimed, blasphemy. For me, it is a long over due celebration of who we are as believers.
While some of the images for the calendar have more nudity than Vatican I Catholics are likely to stand for, and at least one looks more like the seduction than the virgin, many are hiding behind issues of the naked form and sexuality to mask transmisogyny and cissexism. They argue that trans women’s bodies are not fit to represent the Virgen nor can they do justice to the Madonna and child. These arguments are erroneously biological, assuming that trans women do not have children. Not only is that categorically untrue but it also negates faith based on the mysticism of the virgin birth. If G-d can will a virgen to have a baby, why not a trans woman as well? Worse, the dissmisal of this calendar as profane relies on the oppressive disregard for the gender identity and right to personhood, let alone access to the Divine, of trans women. It denies the teaching and life of Jesus in order to recenter cis female bodies and privileged readings of Christianity that are more institutional-cultural than faith based. Accompanying this anti-trans sentiment, is no doubt homophobia against the gay male aesthetic present in every image that have gotten other [non-transgender] queer renditions of the Madonna in trouble in the past. (see Alma Lopez’s work for example of female queer aesthetic, La Virgen, and censorship surrounding it.)
As the calendar’s images circulate the blogs, you may be able to anticipate my one complaint about this effort: there is only one trans woman of 
color in the calender (pictured left). Modern day Spain is an international country with Middle Eastern, African, and Asian people and Latin@s living within its borders as new comers or third and fourth generation Spaniards. It would have been fairly easy to include trans women of color under these circumstances. The links between Spain, Africa, and the Middle East are never more evident than in the Moor section of Madrid or the images of the black Madonna that are loving carved into municipal buildings and storefronts. I once spent a whole day simply photographing all of the different places where you could find her likeness in the city. On the one hand that renders the one twoc who did make it into the calendar common place and still sadly, extraordinary as the only one.
So while I applaud the calendar and the bloggers standing up for it across the internet, I also want to remind that once again we, women of color, are still not included in the vision of the Divine even when the vision is queered, radical, or transgressive. Neither the mainstream queer community nor the religious community imagines people of color as part of the Body. Even when correcting the transmisogyny of traditional Christian images, queer activists continue to make these dual exclusions, except for the month of April. (If it was a N. American calender I bet it would have been February.) In choosing one of the many white trans women depicted the bloggers talking about this calendar further the process. So that trans women of color are erased and marginalized on all sides.
At the same time, I cannot help but stand in solidarity with the sentiment behind this project precisely because of the ways it writes/rights members of our faith community/ies back into the foreground by demanding equal footing for the transgender community/ies. We are all children of G-d, whichever g-d or spiritual being you choose to believe in, and this calender forces hypocrites who would quote doctrine to remember the most basic tenets of our faith. Either we embrace those teaching by seeing the Divine in all of G-d’s creations or we fail.
But don’t take my silly Catholic ramblings for truth. Instead, listen to the most powerful and poignant discussion of this effort by the trans women involved. Featured trans model, Carla Antonelli, said it best:
“I posed myself the following scenario: Why is it that a transsexual woman can’t represent a religious icon given life by so many other actors and actresses throughout history? To not do it would be akin to internalizing the same discriminatory principles that people want to throw against us” – Carla Antonelli (as quoted by @Blabbeando)
