Poppy Shakespeare: A Movie Review

“If you gone up to the eighth floor you never come back, just disappeared like crap up the hose of a hoover.”

For those who are unfamiliar, Poppy Shakespeare is a made for Brit TV film based on the book of the same name by Clare Allan. It aired for the first time in March 2008 and tells a story of failing mental health care and stigma through the eyes of Black British mental health patient Poppy Shakespeare and her guide through treatment, N.

From the beginning we know that Poppy’s story will not end well because N tells us “you can’t blame me for what happened. All I done was try and help Poppy out.” Her comments stand in stark contrast to the vivacious Poppy Shakespeare we meet a few minutes later. She sweeps into the room, and on to camera, well-dressed, articulate, and beautiful, demanding to know why she has been sent to the Dorothy Fish Day Hospital for the Mentally Ill. The other patients, mill around her in various states of disarray further marking her out as different.

The film intentionally trades on ablism related to mental health that marks sanity on the body; if you are fashionable and articulate, you must not be “crazy.” And thus, we believe Poppy when she tells us that she is not insane and that something has gone horribly wrong. Surely, a fashionable mother of a young girl concerned about paying her bills and making her family happy is no more insane than the rest of us. We are also meant to believe that N is insane despite her seeming high function and ongoing narrative about all of the ways she works to appear insane to her doctors so as not to be discharged. (Her attempts include filling out forms with her left hand and marking up the back of her pants with a chocolate bar on evaluation day.) And though N clearly has issues, when she starts to wear makeup and fashionable clothes The Dorothy Fish tries to make N believe she is sane; N herself knows the deal, choosing to dawn these same visual cues when she goes to be an advocate for Poppy after being discharged.  More subtly, the film contrasts the various stages of disarray of the Dorothy Fish patients with the increasingly sophisticated clothing and decor of the Dorothy Fish and its employees. As the hospital becomes more dysfunctional, both its staff and interior design become more high end.

These subtleties stand in contrast to the mental health patients in the film, who besides Poppy and N never really become three dimensional. Instead, their various quirks are played out in snippets in the background to establish the futility of the treatment they are receiving from the mental health system and how it would weigh down on anyone mandated to be there. While many will interpret this as an ablist failing on the part of the filmmaker, the physicians and clerks in this film are no more three dimensional than the mental health patients. All of them are treated as tangential to the real action of the film which is these two women trying to navigate a system that is “crazy making.”

Unlike the film adaptation of Girl Interrupted, which failed to transfer the book’s scathing critique of the mental health industry and its policing of women, Poppy Shakespeare puts the British mental health system on trail and finds it severely lacking. The patients in The Dorothy Fish are “lifers”, people who have been in and out of institutionalization for so long that they have become dependent on the system for meaning in their lives because all other meaning has been stripped away. They show up to the day center to sit in an empty rec-room and spin paranoid delusions about what the doctors are up to while they wait for their meds. Like overworked bureaucrats that have long given up on getting the right kind of funding from the government to do their jobs or never really cared to begin with, the doctors of the Dorothy Fish treat patients like hopeless cattle. They talk in sing-song voice, make them do ridiculous exercises, and only evaluate them once a year. They are so checked out that they do not even realize that patients have created a pill swapping market inside The Dorothy Fish to swap out their meds for “better ones”; some trade for cigarettes others trade nutri-bars for appetitite suppressants. Any sign of independence that challenges this system is promptly discouraged or marginalized to the point of ineffectiveness, while quiet compliance is rewarded with continued meds.

Patient advocacy is also put under the microscope in this film. One of the patients in the film, convenes a “patients’ rights board” meeting in the rec room on a regular basis, clearly delusional about why the patients are all left to mill around. While he often outlines some of the core issues of the film, like questions about the warehousing of mental health patients, the privatizing of mental health services that leads to less care, and the permanency of diagnosis based on sometimes arbitrary review, his speeches are also riddled with general paranoia. The other patients oscillate between egging him on and ignoring him, while the doctors take the latter approach. His failed attempts at advocacy point to how ineffectual a patients’ rights board is in an ablist world where patients are never seen as credible enough to assess their own needs.

On the other end of the spectrum are the Mental Health Legal Aid Specialists who are respected lawyers mandated to help people caught up in the system. They are paid directly by the state to help advocate for patients who feel their rights are being violated. Early on, N takes Poppy to see one such lawyer, who tells her she has “a good case.” Unfortunately, even though he believes Poppy has likely been admitted under dubious circumstances and is being made worse not better by mandated treatment, her is unable to help her because she is not receiving social security benefits for mental health issues. The only way the lawyer can do pro-bono service is if he is paid through the social security fund which means she has to be a recipient; the only way for Poppy to be a recipient is to have the state declare her legally insane.

Part of what causes Poppy’s decline is the illogical assertion that the only way to prove she is sane is by first being declared insane. The more she tries to advocate for herself the more the system knocks her down with its rules that seem to make no sense. Besides being declared crazy to fight being declared crazy, she’s been mandated to treatment but receives none; instead, she sits around in a room with other mental health patients becoming increasingly anxious about providing for her daughter and how she will be judged by her peers. This anxiety follows her in the rest of her life, making her less and less able to be involved in her child’s school and with her friends. Although she is already mandated to day treatment, in order to qualify for social security she must fill out a series of forms that if she answers correctly will lead to her being rejected from assistance. In order to survive the system, she must emulate the patients around her who are experiencing various forms of clinical distress but the more she emulates them the less likely the mental health system is to release her. And while she appears to be the most high functioning patient at the Fish, other patients with much larger issues are being released daily while Poppy is forced to keep coming to treatment.

It is no wonder that Poppy Shakespeare falls into a major depression as a result of being mandated to the Fish. Worse, her growing list of symptoms are largely ignored b/c the patients believe she is just trying to fit in and the doctors are too busy discharging other patients to bump up their success rate and keep their funding. Her  major depression soon burgeons into Trichotillomania (pulling out ones hair) and self-abusing (burning her arms with boiled water b/c she is cold) and repeated suicide attempts. When she finds herself so desperate that she has to turn to N to prove her sanity and keep her child, it all becomes too much.

There is no happy ending here, neither Poppy nor N get their needs met. The Fish still warehouses patients and the system still reduces them to symptoms. While some have criticized Clare Allan’s prose for being too heavy handed in its critique and transparent in her execution, the film plays out in very moving and recognizably disconcerting ways. Allan herself was institutionalized for 10 years and like Susanna Kaysen seems to be trying to tell us the story of systemic oppression in the mental health system that resists the idea that you must be sane to recognize what is insane or that health care providers must be completely evil in order to participate in a system that may in fact cause horribly unjust things to happen.

* A Note on Race – because of the racial difference of the film’s two leads, it would be easy to read this as a binary story in which N gains sanity on the back of Poppy’s increasing insanity. Certainly the scene where Poppy begs N for help but receives none b/c N is “too caught up in her own issues” could be read as an all too familiar dynamic. However, both women in this film are suffering both from the system that has taken over their lives and permanently labeled them and the internal issues that complicate the way they live their lives. Watching the film through the unspoken rules that N lives her life by makes it easier to understand the relationship the two women have and why N occasionally seems out of step or uncaring. Subtle moments, like when N allows Poppy to touch her (observant viewers will not N keeps her sleeves up over her hands to keep from making physical contact with others) or cries over Poppy setting herself apart remind us of how invested N is in Poppy’s success. Their symbiosis is thus less about racial oppression and more about the ablist ones.

You can watch Poppy Shakespeare on DVD or Hulu. The book upon which it is based is out of print in the U.S. but available in the U.K.

Dr. Who The End of Time Pt I Review (spoilers)

UPDATE: My extremely positive review of pt. II here

As the clock winds down on David Tennant’s time as The Doctor, Russel T. Davies and crew offer up another hit or miss episode. On the positive side, Tennant shows off the immense acting chops that made most fans sit up and take notice of the reboot of the beloved Dr. Who. There is nothing more compelling in this episode than when Tennant as Doctor Who ponders what it would mean to die, either for real or as the man he is now to become the tween he is set to be. John Simm, as The Master, also gives his most powerful performance when opposite Tennant as the two discover that the beating in his head is in fact real.

Simm seemed quite the match for Tennant back in the days of Martha and it seems like such a shame to have wasted him here. But wasted he is, as The Master’s role in this episode is mostly to point to the gluttony of the human race and mimic comic book villains of days gone by. The obvious reference to Skeletor, b/c he keeps fazing from normal head to electric skeleton head, is made by Dr. Who himself when he asks aliens masquerading as humans where The Master is being held.  The other villains should be equally recognizable to scifi fans: General Zod and crew from Superman II, right down to the bad special effects and Dr. Who’s flying cape-like coat, and the bad immortals in Highlander; the first of many showdowns between The Master and The Doctor takes place in an abandoned, ruined, part of London with electricity and explosions all around just like any number of final sword fights on the Highlander series. In some ways, The Master’s mania coupled with his cheap effects “flying” is like a bad live action import ala Power Rangers. Whatever they envisioned, his initial high speed vaulting while menacing quickly devolves into circa 1980s Superman movie shame with the addition of electricity shooting from the Master’s hands.

The storyline is also convoluted and, dare I say, a little stupid. First, Davies goes back on his word to take life and death seriously in Dr. Who and Torchwood by bringing back a character that he has definitively killed off. Even David Tennant sounds a little incredulous trying to explain how that happened in the special extras attached to these final episodes. The long and the short of it:  The Master, anticipating losing against Dr. Who for reasons that are unclear & inconsistent w/his meglomania, stores a part of his essence in a ring; he then trains minions to bring him back in the event of his death. Despite having had the ring this entire time, it takes some time for them to get access to his wife who has the essential DNA needed to complete his resurrection. However, she is no passive woman and while The Master is gloating about his impending resurrection, she manages to gum up the works by blowing up the building. He survives but in an incomplete state that has turned him into a cannibal of sorts and only the Doctor can help him; but of course, he does not want the Doctor’s help. Enter some poorly fleshed out Black British villains, their aliens in disguise helpers, and a machine that can rewrite genetic code of entire planets & you have the plot for the final episode of both Davies and Tennant’s successful careers with Who.

In the midst of this story, “The End of Time” wraps up Donna Noble’s story. Donna is on the verge of marrying her working class boyfriend, living out a frustrating and lonely life, when The Master gets lucky and takes over the Earth once again, triggering her memories and her brain implosion.

While Davies gives us a wide array of Black British charactersin this episode, they are tangential at best. The two “master minds” of “Earth’s future” are in fact puppets of aliens masquerading as human and so self-absorbed that when they die I almost cheered. Donna’s fiance is also black and while he is not a servant to a spider queen this time around, her grandfather states that she is “settling” and that the marriage is another sign of how pathetic Donna’s life has become sans Doctor Who. There is also a black homeless teen, while he is cared for by an older white homeless man who genuinely wants him to survive, the teen is too stupid to keep his thoughts to himself when The Master starts on one of his looney binges attracting the Master’s attention and leading to his gruesome death. Yep, real winners in this bunch. Add to that ongoing references to President Obama, that seem oddly out of place, and the reference to “The Master Race”, an intentional joke that lacks any humor, and you have a hodge podge of unflattering images of blackness unbecoming the show. I expect more from Davies no matter how much criticism I dish out for lapses in the Martha-Doctor storyline or the death of Lisa on Torchwood.

(There is one exception, an elder black man who is friends with Donna’s grandfather is smart and helps find The Doctor when the older people in London figure out there is something wrong; his part is small but significant given these other portrayals.)

On the bright side, not only are Tennant and Simm giving their all, but one of those aliens I keep mentioning is played by the lovely Sinead Keenan from Being Human. Though her part is fairly small, she infuses it with the same wit and presence scifi fans have come to expect. It’s a pleasure to watch her work, especially in scenes that would otherwise be setting of my racial critique mode. Her energy is matched by an equally subtle performance by the actress who plays The Master’s wife. Her quiet resolve upon discovering The Master’s plan to return reminds me of the same quiet Toshiko had when Jack frees her from prison to join Torchwood. There is also a mysterious older white woman, who could be a Time Lord, popping in and out of the story. She acts as a guiding voice to Donna’s grandfather, who also turns in a poignant performance here. Finally, Donna is also her usual bossy self rounding out the roles of women that are mostly empowered and in charge.  On the negative side, there is one black British woman in this episode who is a pretty, pretty, princess who thinks she can manipulate alien technology and The Master in order to harness the future and live forever. For a villainous Mastermind she is a woman of few, and mostly insipid, words who has little more presence than the fuzzy pink sweater she wears. In light of the other female characters in this episode, or in the Who universe, she is a joke unworthy of the last episodes.

Besides the compelling melancholy of Dr. Who, his pathos filled conversation with The Master, and the exciting changes in the evolution of the Ood, the music score also creates a lot of tension and drama in an episode that is mostly just Dr. Who and The Master running around in the wastelands of London’s poor areas playing jump over the rock pile.

Even more exciting: The whole episode is narrated by Timothy Dalton as a Time Lord. While my gf likened his voice to the narrator in the Grinch, I’m chalking that up to too much eggnog and not enough Flash Gordon nostalgia. Dalton is the perfect mix of all knowing and dark. More than that, the idea that this hodge podge of a plot might lead to the return of the Time Lords for good and the rebuilding of Gallifrey is enough to forgive its failings.

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all images BBC 2009 Dr. Who “The End of Time Pt. 1″

Repost from 2007: Queering Christmas-Remembering Kwanzaa

It’s is late and we have many house guests this holiday season that should be @ home with their families, except that those families have disowned them for daring to cross gender or sexuality lines that are not nearly as rigid as we are taught to think. As I made my way through all of the packed rooms in our house tonight, having finally put the last cups in the dishwasher and the last dog toy safely back in the doggie basket, I found myself thinking about Christmas with the boys two years ago. So here is the post from back then, oddly so like this Christmas:

Today is the first day of Kwanzaa. The principle: Umoja (Unity). The promise: to strive for strength of family, community, race, and nation. As this day dawns, I find myself looking back on the unity marginalized youth have to forge in this season and what it means.

A thought piece on youth and the young ones who shared our home and/or holidays.

Memory:

I was obsessed with David Bowie as a Kid (oh yes, we have talked about this) & while some find this rare video “strange,” I loved it. In it’s own way it was the first real queering of Christmas at casa pbw.

One of the reasons this video is special, besides DB, is that it was playing when my grade school friend came out on my couch. He had taken refuge in my house while my parents were at work, something he did regularly to escape the drunkness of his adopted mother and the abusiveness of his adopted father. I would bring him home at great risk in the strict Catholic-Southern Baptist house of my childhood because I recognized the signs of brokenness and fear long before I even knew what had happened to him. He would come because of the hope his mother would be passed out by the time he got back and she would think he’d been there the whole time.

On this particular day, a few days before Christmas, MTV was playing “old christmas songs.” As we drooled over DB, my bestfriend told me both about the beatings and his desires. I wanted to never send him home again; as long as DB sang his peaceful song, I knew I wouldn’t have to.

Like many of my early childhood friends, S didn’t make it out. He ran away. lived downtown for a while. then disappeared.

Two events this Christmas made me think of him and be grateful that at least in our house it is safe:

1. A meal with former mentees in my neighborhood
2. Christmas dinner and a movie with the youth of myspace drooling fame

Uncounted Service to the Uni

The first, as you may recall from a previous post, was a gathering of people of color primarily from the Spanish speaking and Anglophone Caribbean but including all poc and some radical white folks. My mentee and his new bf, whom I met in passing back in November, another mentee and her gf, who moved here because it is “the gay mecca” (mmmhmmm, sure it is), and a bunch of their new friends recreated a meal I had come to love back in my days of teaching at Middle of Nowhere College. We sat, as one big family, sharing our favorite meals, cooked family style in their kitchen, and telling stories of then and now.

It was amazing to see them all grown up building lives and connections forged in undergrad and born out socio-political activism and power on the margins. They made me proud to have been a part of their educations. And though I made them stop telling me how important my role as mentor had been to them, I will carry their stories with me for those days when academe is kicking my butt.

Collegiality

The other meal was less “work related,” at least for me. As I have said before, my housemates invited some queer youth into the house against their agency policy because they had nowhere else to go. I believe in boundaries but I also believe that you don’t leave anyone behind. Mostly they have sat around goofing and planning campaigns, oh and stalking people on myspace with the main computer (yeah I said it) and then going off to work their case plans. Since they haven’t moved in and besides the myspace thing, they have been so great and fun, it wasn’t that big a deal.

I wasn’t really sure they would be here for Christmas. I honestly thought they might have been better off going to the former mentees’ holiday party where they could be around queers their own age, but they didn’t come around that day. Yet, on Christmas, there they all were, bright eyed, and ready to help out in the kitchen or with the youngest ones in our midst.

We did not have enough room to accommodate everyone around the dining room table this year and many of us have family food issues that makes formal dining painful anyway. So we moved buffet style from kitchen to tv room to watch Latter Days.

Before the movie started we went around the room and said one good thing about the person beside us, & thanked all of our cooks & wanna be cooks. Finally we were ready to let the queering of Christmas sink in with the best, cheesy, pseudo-holiday movie ever.

The wee ones did their best to pretend they were completely unmoved by having a home for the holidays but you could see happy in their eyes.

A funny thing happened on the way to dessert. The movie caught on “the slap heard around the queer world” scene and we had to turn on the lights to fix it. Two of the boys who had instigated the whole myspace dramarama were huddled together, wet faced, weeping, on the couch. Like the little girl curled up on the couch with my bestfriend watching DB, I suddenly stopped being Dr. Black Woman and became social service me.

What ensued was a conversation that never ceases to break my heart no matter how old. We all know how the story goes. We all know why these boys & girls & bois had no place to go. The film in all its cheesy goodness had reminded them what they had survived and some what they might have to face. As we talked, old and new, coupled and single, straight and gay, I remembered again how hard it is to be so young (and yes, why places like myspace are not the root of all evil).

It’s been a while for me, having had the whole semester away from PU where queers and angels fear to tread. My lesbian class was so full of internalized homophobes with their hate on that it was hard to remember how important it was to be there for the gogo boot and wings wearing sweeties in the front of the class – made brave because they knew I was taking names and kicking homophobic arse – and the grad students whose queerness was proud and yet often masked in their pedagogy. For me these moments at PU were always shaped by a culture in which violence was acceptable and where homophobic graffiti almost never got washed off the buildings or the walls. I never quite knew how much all that hate affected me until I was on a campus recently where every other person mentioned their partners and their kids without blinking; they do not know how lucky they are. Every time they did it, I stopped and stared, my silence a slow crying pain that finally broke out at dinner when I couldn’t not mourn all of the secrets and darkness my students at PU endure without sorrow any longer.

Having these kids in my midst all raw and desperate for life, reminded me that their catty-cuteness was a mask placed on so tight lest it slip and reveal the wounds they held too deep inside. Sadly having to be Foxy Brown on a rampage at work had made me almost forget how to recognize their angst or maybe I was still shut down from the things I saw and heard over the past month. In a war, the casualty can sometimes be your own heart.

J got the movie working, long before he let us know. When the trauma was sifted and the time was right he said triumphantly “the good part is coming.” A hush fell over the room, the lights went back off, and in moments we were witnessing that amazingly over the top moment in the restaurant. One of the kids beside me, laid his head on my shoulder and smiled. Much later, a femme in training, who speaks through various eye rolls and giggles, whispered “thank you” before ret
reating back to her dissafection.

Radical Pedagogy

Christmas can be about a lot of things. One of them, for me, has always been healing.

From the time I was little until now, I have never been able to see a broken person flailing to breathe and not share a piece of precious clean air with them. Every school yard altercation, every cliquish moment, every temper flare, I have ever been implicated in my life, boils down to me refusing to be silent in the rift between those society deems it is ok to target and those who have the privilege to look away. It is true that many times I have stood up for my own, but many more I have stood up for someone else’s identity. One thing we learned early in my house was: When one is oppressed, we are all oppressed. One one is broken, we are all bleeding.

One of the things the first queer woc I met at PU said to me was “I will have your back, but do not leave me twisting in the wind b/c I am so sick of that.” I thought she was kindred until I felt the lash of the dessert wind against my exposed chest and she was nowhere to be found. More recently I stood up for someone who tore me down days later to save his image of himself & his lover.

I think often people look away, stay silent, forget basic human kindness because they know that human beings wielding power from the margins or the centers will beat you down until there is nothing left to break. Worse some of them are trying to beat themselves through you. It is a cycle we share with the oppressors, taught to us by them, and enforced by them when we do not accept the ghetto and die there (Baldwin). Afterall, for us all to be free we must all be liberated both oppressed and oppressor (Mandela).

Umoja

Yet the lesson this Christmas was all it takes is a warm meal, an open heart, and ears to listen. All it takes is eyes that see and words, spoken and unspoken, that say “I know”, “You are worthy”, “You are loved.” There is a powerful difference between the politics of staring and the politics of caring.

If everybody had walked in Umoja this past holiday, how would today have looked different?

As you celebrate your own holidays this season, take some time out to wish those marginalized folks around you (not just the queer fam but also the elderly, the guy who lost his job, or the mother with the mounting health care bills, whoever) a happy holiday and maybe offer to take them out to coffee or brunch, so they don’t have to be alone.

Toronto’s Women’s Bookstore Needs You

One of the most influential feminist bookstores in our hemisphere is about to close due to financial troubles. The Toronto Women’s Bookstore has been a voice in both feminist and LBT communities for almost 40 years. They have been a hub for both queer and feminist organizing, and people working with the store or who met there have organized and edited anthologies, started independent publishing houses, and even been inspired to become writers; many of these women represented marginalized groups that are often left out of both feminist and queer communities. Generations of feminists have passed through their doors or found their political selves there. And unlike another feminist bookstore that was recently saved by internet organizing even tho it moved from it had once been boycotted by differently-abled feminists for being inaccessible & claiming poverty to get out of fixing the issue and then moved into a historically black neighborhood on the edge of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood next to a pre-existing radical feminist bookstore collective and without hiring any women of color, or having woc volunteers, for several years TWB has always been a diversity honoring space attached to its community and supporting other feminist business efforts.

Toronto Women’s Bookstore needs everyone who can to give $10  or more to save the store. Here is there letter asking for help:

Dear TWB community,

The Toronto Women’s Bookstore is in crisis and we need your help!

Independent businesses and bookstores have been closing their doors this year, and after 36 years it is possible that we will have to do the same if we are not able to raise enough money to survive. TWB is one of the only remaining non-profit feminist bookstores in North America, but despite all of the events, courses, workshops, community resources and additional services we offer, the fact that we are a store means that we do not receive any outside funding and rely entirely on sales and the support of our customers to stay in business.

Over the past few years, our sales have not been enough to sustain us and this is why we are coming to you, our community, for help. If every one of you donated $10 we would raise enough to keep going for 3 months, $20 each would keep us in business for 6 months, and $30 each would be enough for us to keep our doors open, hopefully for good. All donations will go directly towards covering the bookstore’s costs, and are a part of a larger plan of action and structural change to make the business sustainable in the current economy.

In the past, when feminist bookstores were closing down all across North America, the support of the community is what kept TWB alive. You are the reason that we are still here today, and we believe that with your help we can once again work together to save this organization where so many of us as readers, writers, feminists, artists, and activists have found a home.

You can make donations over the phone, on our website www.womensbookstore.com (a paypal link will be available soon), or in person at the store. As a non-profit store we are not eligible for charitable status and cannot offer tax receipts, but we are hoping to be able to offer tax receipts for donations over $100 in collaboration with a non-profit charity who shares our mandate, and if that can be arranged we will have that information available on our website and in store as soon as possible.

You can also help by spreading the word to your friends and community, contacting us if you know of any funding we might be eligible for, promoting this fundraising drive in your paper or on your blog, website or radio show, organizing your own save the bookstore fundraisers or just passing the hat at your holiday parties, giving a TWB donation as a gift, and of course, coming in and bringing all your friends to the store for some holiday shopping!

Thank you all for your support,
The Toronto Women’s Bookstore Board, Staff & Volunteers

Please do what you can. You can send money to:

73 Harbord Street,
Toronto ON
M5S 1G4

Phone: 416-922-8744
Toll free (within Canada only): 1-800-861-8233
Fax: 416-922-1417

Last Minute Gift Guide for the Social Justice Set

This is the one where I lay down the guilt trip in the hopes of getting you to give twice, three times if you use your gifts as a way to open discussion about women’s rights globally, this holiday season.

Remember the days of North American decadence when people named stars they weren’t even sure existed after their partners or friends and gave away the galaxy as gifts as if everything was up for grabs and everyone had the right to own and sell? Well those days are gone. However, the continued traffic in conflict goods that show the a similar reckless abandon for consumption without conscience and some other feminist bloggers, namely Bianca Laureano and Feminist Texican, have inspired me to offer up an alternative holiday guide both fluffy and political. Instead of giving the gift of neo-colonialism, ie diamonds, electronic items made from materials illegally mined in the DRC, or “earth friendly” gifts that were either unfairly traded or equally made from products harvested during government instability or under neo-colonial trade agreements, why not buy some things that might help make the world a little better and won’t break your piggy bank?

Arts and Crafts

buy hand made cards by Columbian feminist collective Taller de Vida ($6 each or set of 5 for $25) – cards, and bookmarks not pictured, are made by a feminist collective in Columbia that is empowering women through art and self-sufficiency, run by and for Columbian women. They make the cards exclusively out of flowers and plants, by hand, images vary. These cards not only make great art work, killing two birds with one stone, they support the work of indigenous feminists.

Jewelry from the Mitra Bali Artist Collective ($20 and up) – These beautiful gifts support subsistence level artists, primarily women, who use sustainable local resources to meld artistic vision and skill with the desire to be self-sufficient and they are as gorgeous as any conflict diamond you might be tempted to buy otherwise.

African Mudcloth bags and totes from One World Projects  ($14-$40) – these wallets and bags are helping Mali women and men become self-sustainable, they encourage a discussion of cross-gender cooperation as traditionally men make the cloth and women do the intricate designs and they look good when you have drag books from class to class or office to home

Love Shrines from Crafty Chica ($12.99)- these gifts are unique because they meld the basic design of the kit with your own mementos. You can make one for the person you are gifting in advance or sit down with them and make it during the time when the holiday gets too be to hectic and you need arts and crafts to bring you back down from tensionville, they also make great healing arts work and can help teens work on their issues creatively opening the door for a joint project that could help you talk to your teen without prying, and they support a Latina artist all at the same time.

Shirts/Blouses from Shona Crafts ($15.99-22.99) – These shirts are made by differently-abled women in the DRC to help turn the tide of ableism against women and ensure sustainable development that includes them.

Window flower Journals from General Welfare Pratisthan and Free A Child ($14) – These journals not only give your gift recipient the chance to explore both their inner and outerworld but help provide needed sustainable sources of income for young women and girls escaping sex-trafficking.

Handmade Jewelry from Swaziland Women’s Artist Collective ($12 and up) – You can get a unique piece of Jewelry and support over 750 women artists working to sustain themselves and participate in discussions about women’s issues and women’s rights.

Jewelry and Bags from Conserve India ($12 and up) – These beautiful items are not only made by women but are made out of discarded plastic bags that are ruining the environment.

Peace Baskets from Darfur ($38) – These baskets are made primarily by female refugees in Darfur looking to escape the poverty of displacement and refugee camps and the make great heavy duty alternatives to shopping bags at the grocery store (ie helping you help the environment) or stand alone art pieces in your home.

Silk Bags from Vietnam ($38) – handcrafted silk bags from Vietnam are made by women, helping to revive artistry from pre-Vietnam war era, and ensuring rural women and girls have alternative economic choices to trafficking and hard labor.

Tortilla Holders from Mujeres por La Dignidad ($10) – handcrafted, simple decoration, keeps your food warm and supports women.

Jewelry from Native Harvest ($9.95 and up) – these items, and other more expensive items in the Native Harvest store, help support Native American Education, Fair Trade and Environmental activism by indigenous peoples, and the feminist work of Winona LaDuke.

Magazines For the Reader and/or Budding Activist in The Family

Gift Subscription to:  Left Turn Magazine ($25) – Left Turn Magazine is one of the oldest ongoing independent magazines of its generation, and covers decidedly activist, radical, feminist, critical race, and class issues. It is made by activists around the world engaged in critical praxis for social justice. You can pick up a few choice editions for $5 each, bundle them with pretty wrapping and a little card promising a full year of enlightment. Might I suggest bundling Issue 32: Igniting the Kindred (LGBTQ), Issue 24: Say it Loud (black left), and Issue 18: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (the feminism issue is sold out). Even if you just give a card with a not about getting the subscription, you can always type up a nice note on a card stock with the words “better than money” at the top and put in the money pocket of one of those cards pre-designed for you to insert money.  Either way, this gift subscription will not only provide hours of enlightenment and news for the person you are gifting, but it will also ensure the continued survival of one of the last truly independent media magazines of its caliber.

Gift Subscription to: Make/Shift ($20) -  Make/Shift is an anti-racism,  transnational, pro-queer rights feminist magazine produced by a women’s collective (which includes woc, trans women, differently-abled women, etc.) and featuring many of the women of color and LBTQ feminist bloggers who are traditionally overlooked by mainstream-”alternative” publishers and feminist magazines. Again, you can do a bundle with a card for $5.95 per back issue; might I suggest issues 3, 5, and 6 (but any issues would delight). Or you can use the card stock/money card idea to make a subscription sans issues look fancy. Either way, this gift subscription will not only encourage critical thinking about women and feminism from a perspective that centers all women, you can trust that you are giving to a magazine whose main head quarters are not in a gentrification hotspot that has shoved out most or all of its elder residents and residents of color like other feminist magazines, and know that you are helping keep decolonized feminist thought in print.

For the Young/er Adult Reader (& a few adult reads as well)

How about a bundle of books that don’t reduce women to self-abusing whiny girlfriends or mask their considerable intellectual talents by centering the stories of the boy/s they hang out with? Each of the sets listed below feature strong girls and young women who never give up who they are to make friends or date. Forthcoming reviews of all of these bundles will be on the blog.

The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld ($34.99 for 4 books) – The Uglies is about two girls trying to find there way in a world that privileges beauty and conformity. On their 16 birthday, everyone in the world receives plastic surgery to become “pretty” and part of the surgery also includes the loss of their will to question or engage in advocacy of any kind.On the eve of their 16 birthdays, two girls find themselves face to face with the authorities behind the procedure and they must decide what kind of world they really want to live in. As the series unfolds the conflict between the two girls, and that they have with themselves about who they want to be and how, unfolds amidst a back drop of intentional and unintentional revolution. Westerfeld’s world is white and his characters are described in detail so there is no imagining your way out of it, the third book includes people of color outright and the fourth offers a multicultural world, including Asian American main characters, but is largely unconnected to the central plot of the other three books. There are no centered queer characters either.

The Morganville Vampire Series by Rachel Caine (1st 2 books 9.99/ series is 6.99/bk) – Young Claire Danvers arrives in a dead-end town with a low ranked college hoping to do her two years there as she promised her parents and move on to MIT, unfortunately, she falls afoul of the meanest girl in town and finds herself living with a ghost, a goth, and a slacker trying to avoid her and the vampires who protect her. Unlike other vampire stories, Rachel Caine creates a world where vampires are unapologetic, ruthless, and yet markedly vulnerable and human beings are neither infatuated with them nor ignorant of the prices they have to pay to stay alive and free in a town run by them. Claire Danvers is strong, intelligent, and willful and she often weighs all sides with insight beyond her years while always coming across as a typical teenage girl, falling in love, making friends, and wanting to live her life free of nagging parents. Morganville is a decidedly white world that suffers from mildly offensive stereotyping when the occasional character of color arrives; However, Caine leaves much of the description of the characters to the reader to fill in which means you can imagine them anyway you’d like (except for Michael and Eve who are described in detail), and she does try to bring in pivotal African American characters closer to the end of the story whose centrality to the plot cannot be overlooked. (There are no queer characters, but Caine did choose an out gay actor to depict Sam Glass, a key secondary character, on her website, which cracks me up).

An Octavia Butler Bundle ($9.50/ book) - You will have to make this one yourselves as they are not bundled together or part of an ongoing series, but these books by Octavia Butler all feature contemporary themes in Sci Fi fantasy with African-American main characters and multicultural, and some times queer, casts of characters. For the vampire lover, Fledgling, a world populated by vampires and genetically modified 1/2 human and 1/2 vampires who are being hunted by pure breds who don’t like them or the humans. It’s a complex world that weaves issues of race, gender, and environment together with a battle royale near the end. Post-Apocalyptic fans will enjoy The Parable Sower and The Parable of the Talents, like other great works in this genre, Butler creates a wide tapestry of critique about consumerism, environmental degredation, and the rise of gated communities into a scifi meets fantasy thriller. Unlike many of these stories however, Butler also offers a tale of hope and rebirth rather than just the simply myopia of self-centered community fail that has become the norm in this genre. All three of these books center black women and girls, make diversity a key imperative to our survival, and the latter has a strong critique about the way the world views black female leadership. They also include queer characters.

A Nalo Hopkins Bundle – again, you will have to make the bundle yourself which makes it more expensive. Start with Brown Girl in the Ring ($11.89), an Afro-Caribbean Canadian novel set in a future where the rich have abandoned the inner city except to harvest body parts from the poor and one young Afro-Canadian girl learns to fight back through old ways and new spirituality, Midnight Robber ($7.99), a story of an Afro-Caribbean girl who has to find a way to transform herself into the Robber Queen in order to save herself from magical world of New Half World, The New Moon’s Arms ($9.60) , the story of a young girl who develops psychic powers as she approaches puberty.

Multi-Culti Magical Realism Bundle: Esperanza’s Box of Saints by Maria Escandon ($14), tells the story of a grieving mother’s search for her presumabl,y dead daughter after a saint comes to tell her she is still alive, When Fox is a Thousand by Larissa Lai ($5.95) a novel that combines Chinese mythology, real historical female figures, and API women’s stories through time and space in a trickster tale, The Bone Whistle by Eva Swan ($7.95), the story of a Native American girl who is knowingly caught between two world, rez and western world, and unknowingly caught between two others, human and supernatural, as she comes to terms with one she learns how to navigate the other, and Cimmerian City by Rae Lindley, Pharmacuetical companies search for ever increasing prophet has split the world into two “races” the vampire-like people changed forever by bad meds and the human beings where medical companies are the aristocracy, a secret agent in the vampire-like race is about to change it all, ideal story for today’s current issues. Night Biters by AJ Harper (), the author wanted to provide a multicultural series of alt fiction for YA b/c she missed it herself, this is the first novel in her proposed series featuring a multicultural cast of vampires and vampire slayers living in LAHere are some other places to look to make your bundle: La Bloga “Sci Fi, Latinos, Chicanos and Aztecs in Outer Space” and SciFi Latino Blog (note, many of her posts are similar to mine in the sense that they find minor or secondary Latin@ characters in the U.S.)

Mystery Bundles

For older readers who can’t get enough of female centered mysteries these bundle or some combination of them should work the trick:

Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place ($6.95) and Stay ($8), these two books tell the story of lesbian feminist detective Aud Torvignen and her investigation into both homophobic and domestic violence related criminal cases, they are packed full of pain and haunting, intense mystery, and astute feminist critique on violence against women. They are among my favorite lesbian detective novels, though they have no characters of color.

The Virginia Kelly Series by Nikki Baker (between $2-$6.95/book), black lesbian detective Virginia Kelly tries to manage a hit or miss love life with female centered mystery cases in a series that has been called a breath of fresh air in a decidedly segregated genre.

Blind Eye Mystery Series by Diane & Jacob Anderson ($12 each), these intensely pulpy detective fiction novels center lesbian detective Yoshi Takamoto who is going blind but still more competent than her perfect vision friends. If you buy the trilogy you also get the added knowledge that 10% of the profits are going to a queer youth shelter.

Chicana Myster Bundle – Mary Beal’s Angel Dance ($1.50) detective Kat Guerrera is former military turned PI who is trying to solve a case while also wooing a feminist writer in a mystery that once again centers violence against women, sexuality, and feminism and The Conquest by Yxta Murray ($12.30) a literary mystery in which  a female book restorer who endeavors to prove that the memoir of a lesbian Aztec woman who plots ways to stop Cortez from destroying the “new world.”

Direct gifts

Instead of donating money in someone’s name or simply donating money in your own name this year, why not give gifts to women that will help them empower themselves and move beyond the cycle of charity and poverty that has become all too normal on the left?

Tool kit ($25) – this basic carpenter kit by Women for Women International, includes the tools and training a woman needs to become a basic skilled carpenter in her own country. Not only does this gift help a woman become self-sufficient, it challenges gender norms in most countries, and invites the recipient of your gift (if you give the donation in some else’s name as a dual gift) to think about what decolonized feminism really means.

donation to Danish School for Girls in Afghanistan ($25 and up) – RAWA run Danish school for girls is the only girls school in rural Farah Province. It has been educating and empowering rural young girls since 2002. A gift to the school helps curb teenage pregnancy, female poverty, and exploitation of girls all of which go down when girls educated at similar rates to boys, it also supports internal efforts to educate girls divorced from U.S. war interests, and finally, when given in the name of someone else as a dual gift, it empowers your gift receiver to not only think about decolonized feminism but also to invest in learning about Muslim feminism.

Sterile Childbirth Kits from Partner in Health ($15 for 3 women) – These kits provide basic sterile equipment (exam gloves, razors, umbilical cord clamp, sterile gauze, washcloth, and soap or antibacterial wipes) for rural clinics in Haiti, Rwanda, Malawai, or Lesotho. These kits will help up to three rural women hoping to give birth to healthy babies and turn the tide of avoidable infant mortality while encouraging your gift recipient (if you donate in someone else’s name) the opportunity to discuss what real decolonized reproductive rights look like.

Scholarship to Women with Disabilities and Development Leadership Program ($10-$100)- You can donate directly to Mobility International and earmark the donation to support their women’s programs, which include the Leadership Program to train and share information about supporting differently-abled women around the world and has previously funded women’s sustainability projects like building functional wheelchairs in developing countries or advocacy for accesible roads, sidewalks, and housing. Not only does this donation help women become self-sufficient, it helps women train each other for self-sufficiency and ensures your gift recipient remembers that women includes both temporarily able bodied and differently abled women and that ensuring their success globally means more than exporting discarded aids from the “first world.”

Time Lord Victorious (Dr Who Waters of Mars Review)

By now you have all seen Waters of Mars, the latest installment of Dr. Who and the third to last episode staring David Tennant.  For me, despite the hype surrounding this episode, it is the most uneven episode of the season so far.

fan art for Waters of Mars/Lazy John

The Plot

Dr. Who arrives on the first human run Mars base in history moments before a virus/alien race begins infecting the crew.  While the Doctor makes a point of saying that he needs to leave the base because there is nothing he can do, he ultimately interferes with a time line both he and the Daleks have determined is fixed in time and must not change.

The Cons

On the negative side, the “monsters” and the “companion” in this episode leave a lot to be desired.  We are told Captain Adelaide Brooke inspires human exploration of space and her descendants even start a new race of people. Though the Doctor clearly idolizes her in some ways, Capt. Brooke comes across as a stand-offish woman who barks orders at her crew, is invested in a top down model of leadership, and is most of all, afraid to die. When it comes time to make critical decisions about the base, Capt. Adelaide has to be reminded about protocol from her second in command, a male officer who clearly thinks he knows better than she does. And when Dr. Who tells her she will eventually have to blow up the base in order to save the Earth, she initially refuses on the basis of not wanting to die. By the time Captain Adelaide begins to live up to the Doctor’s expectations she has already come across as dictatorial, unapproachable, and afraid. Her moments of heroism on the base, from her attempts to save the crew to her ultimate decision to blow up the base even as the Doctor is trying to work his magic, all ring a little hollow as a result.

The monsters are also a disappointment, partially because they seem like an after thought. Within moments of the Doctor’s arrival one of the botanists working to create sustainable food on Mars becomes infected with a virus that transforms him into a cracked-face, crazed-eyed, water producing creature that wants to infect the crew.  He quickly infects his female counterpart and then the only physician on the crew. Visually, they just aren’t scary. The make up is something more akin to a bad SyFy Saturday Z rate movie than Dr. Who and their motivation, though frightening, never really rings true to the episode. It would have been much more effective to simply see the shifting of water to break through various barriers they remaining crew erect without close ups with the infected crew while Dr. Who’s explanation of the infection “water waits” “water always wins” “one drop will change you” played in the background. That, coupled with a slightly longer, slower shot of the ice, while Dr. Who explained that it may have been the Ice Warriors who trapped the aliens/virus on Mars and then the scene of the ice cracking  would have been up to par with the terror and intensity we were supposed to feel.

As it was, I seldom cared about the threat nor connected with the fear that the crew was feeling.

The pros

However, I would argue that the virus was never the point of this episode. Instead, Waters of Mars asks us to consider what it means to be the last of the Time Lords. By this point in the new series, Dr. Who is a broken man in many ways. He has survived a great war that left him torn and shaken. Even though his companions have all helped him begin to heal from the loss of his people and his planet, they have also all torn a piece of his heart. From the loss of his great love, Rose to his shame about the dual  failures to look out for the feelings of his equal Martha and the destruction of the empowered woman Donna had become, Dr. Who is a traveler unhinged from time and companionship. He is man accountable to no one and mourning everyone.

Into this profound sorrow comes a moment in time that cannot be changed and yet, we are told, is a great tragedy.

Much more than a companion, Captain Adeliade is a mirror. Like the Doctor, she wants to live even when she knows she is meant to die. And like him, faced with the facts, she fights again reason, time, and even the future to stay alive. But unlike the Doctor, Captain Adelaide ultimately realizes that there is more at stake than her fear of death. Where the Doctor stumbles, believing in his own unchecked power, she puts him and time back on track by making the ultimate sacrifice.

One could also argue that the virus/aliens in the water are an equal mirror to Dr. Who’s dilemma. They too want only to live in the face of a kind of death. Like Dr. Who, they have lived and died and have hope of living again. And also like the Doctor, they have decided that their survival is more important than the lives of others. This is why they are the monsters in the story. And while I have argued that the makeup on this episode is sub-par, one could easily argue that the infection of humans and the slight but disturbing alteration of their appearance is a metaphor for the ways that the Doctor we have come to love has been infected by fear of death and that slight alteration transforms him from hero to potential monster.

Ultimately, the Doctor is reminded of his role in time and the universe. Like a child who falters, he stands alone in the snow and asks “Does this mean it is my time?” And though he gets no answer, he knows that the end is around the corner.

While it is hard to see the Doctor this way, especially since what makes him so endearing after all this time is the bravado and the bravery that comes with knowing you are essentially immortal, it is a take that is both unexpected and ultimately poignant.

Other points of interest

• The base is named Bowie Base One a clear nod to David Bowie in the good old days (I’m surprised there was no Major Tom)
• The crew is multicultural and includes both men and women in prominent roles – though the two highest ranking roles are both white
• There are no queer characters nor queer window-dressing which is always too bad b/c Davies does it so well
• There is an adorable reference to K-9 both verbally and visually

Major Spoilers

• Davies has seemingly gone back on his snipe about killing Ianto, when he responded to criticism about killing major characters by saying people die and that fans who didn’t like it could watch Supernatural instead, by bringing back The Master
• There is also some indication that characters from the past will make an appearance in the two part finale

—–

all images are the property of the BBC except where indicated

Goodbye Brittany

Brittany Murphy died today at the age of 32. The initial coroner’s report says she died of a heart attack but the police have already requested an autopsy. It is frightening to lose anyone in the 30s to heart disease, but it is more frightening to me when I was just speculating about her health a few days ago.

Britney Murphy is one of many female actresses I highlight in my course on Women, Media, and Body Image. In that course, I show my students before and after photos of female actresses that have gone from a healthy size to unbelievably thin, from “ethnic features” to “white or whiter”, from sexually ambiguous to hyper-heterosexual and/or from androgyny to hyper-feminine. These transitions follow a specific pattern some have masked as the shift from childhood to adulthood in Hollywood. As most women know, however, bodies get larger and generally proportional not smaller and top heavy. More than enough has been written about how adult-female-body hating fatphobia driven myths of the female body permeate and warp Hollywood. And it is this myth that Brittany Murphy, who went from a round faced, dark-haired, white ethnic young girl to an emaciated, blonde, ocassionally duck lipped woman helped perpetuate to her own detriment.

In fact, Brittany Murphy’s transformation has garnered some of the most negative attention of her contemporaries. No other woman rapidly losing weight has been called a “crack whore” in a rap song or “meth addict-chic” by movie reviewers for similar transformations. And yet, Murphy’s often hidden talent and the unspoken understanding that it was better to look like a famine victim than a healthy N. American woman, kept Murphy in film. Despite the criticism that surrounded her, she went from critically acclaimed supporting actress, to inconsistently praised leading one. Murphy herself openly mocked the irony of Hollywood’s expectations of women in one of her better romcom’s, Love and Other Disasters, when her character states that “if this had been a movie, she would be blonde.”

One has to wonder if the level of criticism her rapid weightloss, or rather the vehemence with which some spewed that criticism, has more to do with the roles she played than any real concern for her health. While her career has gone from playing complicated characters in dramas and thrillers to wide-eyed romcoms that have been largely hit or miss at the box office, Murphy has always gravitated toward complexity. In her short life, she has played a young woman dealing with ongoing sexual abuse, a girl trying to survive and thrive despite being crushed by the weight of an alcoholic and abusive mother, and a girl suffering from PTS.  A large number of the young women she has played were working class and most were trying to find there way and maintain their dignity in a classist and sexist world. And though she has made an endless slew of throw away romantic comedies, many of her films also highlighted the stories of marginalized women trying to find not only love but also to love themselves or make their single mothers’ proud. In 2009, she seemed to be trying to get back to the complexity she had once embodied in her career with films like Deadline and Across the Hall that dealt with domestic violence and infidelity.

In her own life, Murphy eschewed Hollywood for family. Though she married a screenwriter, he was neither famous nor unusually attractive; in fact, horror of horrors, by US standards he was overweight. His appearance was under so much scrutiny that people even speculated it was “a green card marriage” despite Brittany’s repeated interviews doting on him. No doubt this intense criticism reinforced the cult of thinness that seemed to surround Murphy. And while she put on a public smile and talked of love and happiness, her mania in interviews and on movie sets raised red flags for those of us used to the tell-tale signs of addiction. (Murphy herself claimed the manic episodes were related to her diabetes.)

When Murphy was fired from her latest film in Puerto Rico this past month, many trades said it was because of “diva-esque sporadic behavior on set.” But I found myself wondering if perhaps it was because the woman who had once made a living playing mentally disturbed young girls who were abused or shoved to the background b/c of the intersections of ableism and sexism had finally broken under the weight of trying to be “normal.”

While there is no concrete evidence that Brittany Murphy used drugs to get thin, several people referenced drug use when she emerged as a dirty blonde emaciated woman from the shadows of her pudgy, brown haired,  haunted youth. In 2005, Murphy was summarily dropped from representation by both her agent and her publicist right when she was co-starring in the box office hit Sin City amidst rumors of drug addiction; Murphy denied the rumors on Jay Leno.

Yet, it is common knowledge that many actresses and women in the public eye have been encouraged to lose weight by using meth or coke and several high profile women in Murphy’s age group, from reality tv stars like Nichole Ritchie to former top rated tv show stars like Mischa Barton, have all gone to rehab after following that advice. Murphy’s own mania seemed to reek of addiction at one time or another, and her recent firing and attempts to keep her husband from medical attention when he was thought to be having a heart attack by physicians (she claimed it was asthma), are also recognizable flags.

We won’t know what really happened until the autopsy. What we do know is that an incredibly gifted child actress, who took complex roles depicting women’s issues that are largely ignored by Hollywood mainstream, wasted away before our eyes while the media mocked her. When I show her before and after pictures to my students, I am horrified to see them pick over her bones with comments like “well she might be too thin, but I wonder how she did it?” and “well she needs to get her roots done, but she looks better; she used to be fat.” It seems that talent has very little sway and that an emaciated, sporadic, Murphy in crappy romantic comedies was still better than an average sized Murphy exposing classism, ableism and violence against women. And while we will never know with what demons she wrestled or the extent of her actual physical health issues (like diabetes, flu, etc.), I think we can be clear that the need for thinness that surrounds actresses, and women in general, ultimately cost a 32 year old woman her life and any number of girls there sense of safety in their own bodies.

Say what you will about her, there is a lesson in Brittany Murphy’s short life that I hope we can finally learn.

——

images

• Britney Murphy as Tai. Clueless. Paramount, 1995.
• Unattributed
• Britney Murphy & Simon Monjack @ airport after “heart attack” incident/TMZ

I’m Tired of Saying It

On twitter, they have this thing called 6 word stories. The point is exactly as it sounds, tell a story that people can immediately recognize in 6 words or less. I have written a ridiculous amount of posts on the meaning of “woman” in women’s studies or the feminist blogosphere or even in the mainstream feminist movement from the perspective of a feminist scholar and activists, as have so many of my blogging peers and intellectual goddesses/foremothers. So I thought I’d respond to a new post, on a highly decorated blog, that claims female directors just need to clit up and take their rightful place in Hollywood instead of complaining about female exclusion, bad scripts, and chauvinist directors, with 6 words:

When you say women, mean everyone.

You can read my series on black female directors and the extensive body of work they have done while being largely shut out of Hollywood by clicking on the African American Herstory page at the top of the blog. You can also read about many female directors who have refused to define their success by Hollywood inclusion in my movie reviews. And if you are feeling really ambitious, you can read Yvonne Welbone’s dissertation turned documentary and website Sisters in Cinema or give money to Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project.

There are a lot of women who have spent their whole lives working on making films while shut out of Hollywood, including Maya Angelou. Some of those women were critically acclaimed directors or even won awards with no subsequent embrace from either Hollywood or the “new female power” in Hollywood. (Though many others were aided by the now replaced female studio exec at one of the big 5 studios in 1980s-90s) More than that, there are a lot of women who would never define their success by how many Hollywood films they have made. Do you really think Daughters of the Dust would be recognizable if Paramount had funded it?

And the next time you get the urge to write a post about “a great women’s movie” or “cool women directors” or “what women need to do to be successful in Hollywood” etc. ask yourself:

• is there any diversity amongst the women depicted in this film or their stories?
• If there are diverse women, do they fill non-stereotypical roles?
• does this film’s female director or producer hire or work with a diverse groups of women behind the scenes on this film?
• does this film actually show empowered women?
• Is their empowerment bought on the backs of marginalized women or other marginalized groups or include jokes or stereotypes about marginalized people, including women?

After all Katherine Hiegl’s latest anti-feminist disaster romcom was produced by a woman and written by a woman, tho directed by a man. Honestly, I’m grateful none of those women thought about anyone but people who look like them to be in it.  However, I still wouldn’t call that film a Hollywood female success story anymore than I would call the Drew Barrymore backed He’s Just Not That In To You, with its female screen writers, female producers, and female star power behind it & also based on a book co-written by a woman a feminist bildungsroman. Not only do both of these films posit an outdated-sexist and heterosexist view of women but the latter not only includes a pack of gaggling gay men but repeated racist encounters between Latino construction workers and a rich white woman losing her husband to infidelity meant to highlight her breakdown not her racially tinged elitism and its pack of gaggling gay men.

I could give a synopsis of many of the failures of both fluff films like these and the more “serious feminist” films that have failed to think beyond the navels of the privileged folks behind them, but I do that enough on this blog as it is. Instead I go back to my six word story:

When you say women, mean everyone.

or if you prefer:

If you’re a feminist, mean it.

Racist Hit List at Oregon High School

Is it Christmas break for high school and middle school youth yet? Because it seems to me with all the racially charged incidents happening from Coast to Coast, these youth need a break if for nothing else than to get some body armor together.

Parkrose High School mural (moves from Egypt to Rome to Enlightment to wagon trial to cowboys & pic of Khan)/Larry Kagas

This morning, Oregon high school Park Rose joined the list of schools with racist incidents this semester. An African-American freshman reported that he saw his name written on a stairwell wall surrounded by swastikas and the word “Kill”.  The school confirmed that there were at least 5 student’s names written under the word “kill” and surrounded by racist images. They also said they were taking proactive steps to deal with the situation. So far those steps include:

1. an ongoing investigation of who was responsible for the graffiti
2. notifying the parents of the targeted students
3. an existing safety plan for “incidents such as this”

There was no reference to racial tensions at the school or addressing any climate of racial conflict. However, African Americans in the community have indicated that Parkrose High School has “never been a particularly safe place for African American students.” While they have pointed to no particular incidents to back these claims, people seemed confident in believing that both the school and the neighborhood in which it is located have not traditionally been particularly “friendly areas of town.” The presence of swastika graffiti in the area is one indicator; it was not only present in the current hit list incident but also spray painted near Portland Christian High School, another Parkrose neighborhood school, by arsonists who tried to burn the school down. In that incident, both students and police minimized the presence of both racist and sexist graffiti as “the work of punks who probably did not know any better” (see East PDX News for full story on PCHS). The neighborhood was also one of a handful embroiled in the rise of neo-nazis in Oregon in the 1980s.

Parkrose has been the site of racist incidents in the past as well. In 2003, an Asian American student yelled racial slurs at an African American student off school grounds. The African American student found the Asian American student at lunch with several of his friends and a fight broke out. Several other fights primarily between African Americans and Asian Americans erupted throughout the end of the day as a result. By day’s end, a white student had threatened to kill all the African American students in the school. (oregonlive has taken down its free link to this story and the only copy is on a white supremacist site, where a white Parkrose student used the incident to disparage African American students and to a lesser extent Asian American ones, hoping they would kill each other so the school could “go back to being majority white.” He was also proud that he and his friends were known around the school as “the racist kids.”)

At the same time, Parkrose High School administrators point to the fact they crowned an African American this past Spring as the Rose Festival representative of their school. They also note that the school has been becoming increasingly diverse not less so. Both the current Principal and Vice Principal of Parkrose High School are also women of color, though none of the people of color in administrative roles are African American.

At least one mother has said she does not feel safe returning her child to the school and it is unclear if he, and others named, will in fact return.

In Praise of Women of Color Poets

I’ve highlighted a lot of different woc poets on this blog in the past, each of whom has a different definition and relationships to the words “woman,” “feminism,” “race,” and “desire.” On Dec. 6th while working on a proposal to link local Latin@ artists and the social sciences on campus, I found myself coming back to these poems in my head.  For me they bridged forms and spoke of creation in ways that resonated for me in terms of the project I was working on, ie being in the middle of taking creativity and creation back from institutions that demean and twist them and rebirthing them as wholly ours, women of color creating art and using that art to cross forms and communities.

Here are the poems:

Poet Kantuta reads her poetry about Indigenous women’s empowerment and finding strength to open the June film showing of Bringing the Circle Together Native American Film Series:

Artist “Queen GodIs” poem at Brave New Voices 2009 reworks the Madonna figure while critiquing modern intersectional oppressions, all while embedding hope and rebirth:

Youth Poets Alysia and Alysha poem “hir” discussing the struggle of a transgendered youth to be seen and heard at school and his world

(There has been a lot of advocacy on the internet against using gender neutral terms because they ungender people who have chosen a gender identity; I want to point out that though this poem is about a person who also has a chosen gender identity, the poets were using the double entendre of hir/here to make a point about being seen, heard, and acknowledged as real in our society.)