Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse
The opinions, writing and ideas of Little Mumbles. A gender studies student with one large eye. A girl with eclectic interests and a strange passion for filing. A girl who likes dancing, burlesque, women, organic vege boxes, recycling, ginger tea, drawing, skinny dipping, growing things, sex, fair trade, food, feminism, trashy movies, soy milk, Gender Studies, queer theory, fairytales, writing bad poetry, corsets, fashion, and being generally outrageous. To see what inspires me, go to Scones with Jam and Cream.
March 27, 2011
October 24, 2009
On girls and food…
Women aren’t trusted to make decisions about their own bodies…
The hardest thing for a girl is not the fact that her body is always on display; it is the fact that she has no rights to make decisions about her own body, especially about food.
There’s a lot of pressure on girls to eat. If she tries to say that she won’t eat, people assume that there is something wrong with her, that she has developed some kind of warped sense of her own body and is now trying some ridiculous magazine-encouraged diet.
If a man makes a decision not to eat, or to eat this rather than that, his decision is respected. It is assumed that he is in control of his body, that he has every right to make that choice for himself.
It is assumed that he is, in fact, “choosing.” Whereas women are seen to be influenced or coerced by external forces. Her decisions about her own body aren’t respected. We all step in, as though we can’t trust her decide what does and doesn’t go into her own mouth.
People respond negatively to these ideas…
When I started talking about these ideas people responded negatively, either with shock or indignation. One person said, “This sort of thing would only be said by someone conscious of entertaining their own bad eating habits, and being guilty of knowing them of being wrong. If this girl had no problems with eating then she wouldn’t think that way, I wouldn’t try to listen to this person they don’t seem to be in a stable head space.”
Well… I will admit that I have experience with eating disorders, that I continue to struggle with body issues, and that writing this article is part of my need to understand what is happening to me. But this kind of response just proves my point that a woman’s body is not her own. It is a public body, available and open for comment at any time.
We are quick to assume that her decisions about her body and her eating habits are “bad” and “wrong.” We don’t want to listen to her own feelings about her body and food; we would rather write her out of the question by saying that she isn’t in a “stable head space.”
The person went on to say, “I think this person has been looking at too many magazines and doesn’t get enough love. The author of this quote is bonkers.”
Deep-rooted inequalities remain unchanged…
Despite contemporary society’s supposed gender equality, we are quick to make negative judgements about the rational capacity of women. On some deeply unconscious level, women are still seen as porous, uncontrollable, emotional forces without capacity for reason. It is an old misogynistic dynamic that favours men’s feelings and views about women’s bodies over their own (see the work of Luce Irigaray).
A woman’s own feelings about her food and eating are discounted as the ‘madness’ of woman who is out of control, who doesn’t know any better, and who needs the assistance of others. Anyone, and everyone, can comment with more authority than she can on her physical, and mental, health and appearance.
Men with eating disorders
My critic went on to claim that men have eating disorders as well. “It’s even worse for them because no one realises that they need help because of preconceived ideas that only women are stupid enough to starve themselves. In which case that just makes them feel less ‘man’ly and even more embarrassed to possess a ‘woman’s’ disease.”
I am aware that body issues are not restricted to women, but it is important to note that they continue to be treated differently. Our idea of men and women’s bodily self-control remains divided along sexist gender lines. If men are “stupid enough to starve themselves” they become like women in their lack of control over their own bodies. They become automatically feminised, possessing a “woman’s disease” (historically called “melancholia,” read more in Breitenberg’s Anxious Masculinities).
Woman remains the irrational and senseless body…
On a deeply submerged cultural level, women are still not trusted to make decisions about their own bodies. The debate about abortion diverts to a question of the foetus’s right to life, side-tracking the issue of the woman’s body, and the woman as subject of that body. The debate over the Henson case could only assume one version of events: that the man abused the girl because the girl herself was incapable of rationally consenting to be photographed.
As a society, we accept both the continuous monitoring of women’s bodies, and the perpetual distrust of women’s ability to manage their own bodies. Women’s bodies are public bodies – open for discussion.
Another person tells me, “Dieting is only a recent thing in the last 50 or 60 years. It’s more likely for women to go on ridiculous diets and that’s why women have become the focus of all this media attention about it.” But this doesn’t adequately address the fullness of what is going on.
Women are not trusted with their bodies because society assumes that they are mad. We must recognise that men diet too. Men have always dieted, men have often been anorexic, but we don’t think about it as dieting because we trust them to make decisions about their own bodies. We don’t trust women.
Men make insane food “choices,” but we think of it as a rational “choice” rather than an irrational media-induced “diet.” We don’t see a need to scrutinise men’s eating habits the way we scrutinise women’s eating habits.
October 23, 2009
Aboriginal Elders speak out to raise awareness about the Northern Territory Intervention
At a recent talk at the University of Sydney, Aboriginal elders Richard Downs and Harry Nelson offered their perspectives on the Northern Territory Intervention. Many people in the audience were well aware of the issues, but unfortunately for many Sydney-siders, news of the Intervention has been a confusing muddle of contradictory reports.
Richard and Harry believe that the walk-off is the only means of making themselves heard. Richard, an Alyawarra Elder from the Ampilawatja community, 300kms north-east of Alice Springs, says, “The majority of Australian people are feeling real uneasy now that the truth is coming out more and more about the NT Intervention.”
Aboriginal people are again being paid in rations and the government is taking back control of their land. People in the Northern Territory are being divided along government instituted colour lines. At supermarkets, white people queue at the normal checkouts while Aboriginal people, with their green cards, queue at a separate check-out. Richard says, “We thought we were coming forward but in actual fact we’re going back.”
Harry, a Walpiri man from Yuendumu, 350kms north-west of Alice Springs, stresses that the blame must not go to the Australian people. “It’s the people who make laws, who change the laws. They’re the ones that are racist. The Australian people are not responsible.”
The national speaking tour aims to raise awareness of what is going on in the Northern Territory, to explain why the elders have once again walked off their land, and to honour the still living members of the first walk-off in the 1960s.
“We’re here for those elders who remember that,” says Richard. “Why are we pointing the finger at those old people in their late 80s who’ve given their lives to the Australian people? We’ve got to show a bit more respect for our elders.”
According to Richard and Harry, the Intervention is treating Aboriginal people like animals, removing the leaders to get control of the pack. “Communities rely on their leaders,” Richard says. “[But] our voices have been silenced… we’ve got no say at all, no involvement… we’re just tokens.”
Richard questions how a community can possibly build strength and stability when the leaders are constantly undermined by racist government policies. Members of the audience expressed their support drawing connections to the Stolen Generation and South African apartheid: one person saying that the government’s paternalistic policy was putting the blame on Aboriginal culture, attacking the leaders in order to destroy and assimilate the people.
“Harry and I can be picked up and locked away for three months without any reason just because we’re standing up, we’re rebelling,” says Richard.
This “rebellion” consists in moving away from dependence on government welfare. “Politicians are still digging up our country, still sending pollution up in the air,” Richard says. “[But] we are caretakers of a lot of the country, of the dreaming, of the spirits.”
Richard says the Ampilatwatja walk-off aims to set up a sustainable Aboriginal community that is self-sufficient and gives back to the environment. They want to grow their own food and use renewable energy, as well as establish nurseries for the preservation of native plants and bush medicine. Overall, Richard says, “A more family, community oriented program. It’s about looking out for each and every person, looking out for all our tribes across the country.”
October 22, 2009
Notes on giving birth…
On the ferry, the mothers with their babies strapped to their stomachs make arrangements for the transferral of prams; folded up, carried onto the ferry. A woman in earth coloured cloth says goodbye to her friends. They try to get a smile out of the baby. Its head wrapped in a green woollen beanie. The mother’s eyes are beautiful and almond shaped, her lips pink and pretty, her teeth crooked.
The ferry pulls away from the wharf. We begin talking, this mother and I. She is from the mountains. We talk about dancing: ferry drivers, public transport, moving house, giving birth, smiling babies. We catch the train together. I help her with her pram. We say goodbye. I never learnt her name.
We talked of giving birth. The way it is mis-represented in film. After she had her baby she was angry with all the films she had even seen with a birth scene. All we get, she said, is the image of the screaming woman panting on the bed, and the man standing by, fists clenched not knowing what to do. The room is all white and clean, and full of doctors – it’s not like that, there’s blood all over everything. Her partner said it was horrific. And it was, she said, it was bloody and gross but what she felt in her heart was beautiful. Nothing could feel more natural.
“Adrienne Rich writes about motherhood.” I said; “About how our ideas of mothering, birth, and babies are controlled by masculine modes of knowledge.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” she said. “It’s women’s business. It’s got nothing to do with men. So why are most obstetricians men?”
“Women have been both mothers and daughters,” writes Adrienne Rich. “But have written little on the subject; the vast majority of literary and visual images of motherhood comes to us filtered through a collective or individual male consciousness. As soon as a woman knows that a child is growing in her body, she falls under the power of theories, ideals, archetypes, descriptions of her new existence, almost none of which have come from other women (though other women may transmit them) and all of which have floated invisibly about her since she first perceived herself to be female and therefore potentially a mother.” (1976, Of Woman Born, NY; WW Norton & Co., p. 61-2)
October 21, 2009
Single Gender Education
I went to an all girls school and a coed school. At the coed school, the girls spent all their time trying to impress the boys with makeup, mini-skirts and see-through shirts, whereas at the girl’s school it was much more relaxed with no need to impress anyone and more focus on academic work. This could be related to a difference in public and private education, which also comes into the question of how much students focus, and on what they focus on. When you’re parents are paying, there is often a lot of pressure to do well.
I really enjoyed the girls school that I went to, not having the boys around suited me. However, I am aware of research that shows boys benefit by having girls around, it helps them focus, whereas girls benefit from not having them around. Also, in Sydney at least, it seems problematic that private boys schools foster a lot of warped ideas about hyper-masculinity and encourage negative kinds of sexism in their enforced codes of chivalry. Whereas, in coed schools, relations between the sexes form and express themselves much more naturally and realistically. All I can say for sure is that I think primary schools should all be coed. I’m not sure about high schools.
October 20, 2009
Why does each man kill the thing he loves?
He kills the thing he loves because he is afraid that he might lose himself to it. Afraid that in the consummation of his desire he will no longer retain any potency as a man, he will have given way to passion, become fluid, blurred his boundaries, become like a woman. Masculinity is fraught by its continual rejection of the Other. In order to be a contained self, the man must not be porous to love or women. He must be fixed, he must not change. He must be rational. And so he is continually anxious that he will not be able to maintain this excessive policing of his own boundaries. He stages and enforces loss and vulnerability for the purposes of maintain control over his own identity and the identities of those defined as “Other.”
October 19, 2009
Race in Beyonce and Britney’s Video-Clips
Beyonce’s Single Ladies (Put a ring on it) presents layered mimicry of motion. She performs white moves appropriated from black culture and splices original black moves in-between.
Race in Beyonce’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
The use of sustained long shots creates a strong stage-like presence unlike the conventional music video that splices and fragments bodies by rapid editing. The stage presence emphasises the art and skill of the dancers, drawing attention to bodily control. This confuses the boundary between the controlled, rational, white body and the senseless, passionate, black body.
The wide border of empty white space that surrounds the dancers means, on one level, that the dancer’s dark angular bodies give meaning to the space. They fill it, inform it, and make it signify; like words on a page. But on another level, the framing of this stage-like space contains the dancers’ moves and skin colour safely within the realm of sterilized and westernised jazz and tap moves.
The lighting alternately emphasises the “whiteness” and “blackness” of the performers. When the choreography in Single Ladies borrows from black moves (0:53), their bodies get low to the ground and the screen blacks-out emphasising the darkness of their skin and the contours of their muscles. The screen then whites-out (1:03) as the choreography rises and returns to vertical, westernised dance moves.
Music Video Trends
Songs by white pop music celebrities, such as Madonna, Britney, and Pink, deal with issues relating to being human: misunderstandings, people not loving you enough, and so on. However, songs by African American celebrities, such as Rhianna, Beyonce, and J-Lo, exemplify white ideals, such as heterosexuality, wealth and fame. They play with, and resist, categorisation as “sub-human”.
In Beyonce’s Sweet Dreams, costuming, make-up and lighting emphasise the whiteness of her skin. In each of Rhianna’s clips she conform to a different ideal of classic Western pin-up girl beauty. However, in other clips, such as Beyonce’s Baby Boy, cosmetics and lighting emphasise the darkness of her skin, and this is combined with costuming and choreography that references tribal sexuality.
Black Sexuality Survives Cyborgian Integration
According to Weheliye, “New World black subjects have privileged access to the post-human because they were denied the status of human for so long.” In Beyonce’s clips there is a playful sense that her black ‘soul’ can withstand cyborgian integration, that it does not threaten the reproduction of whiteness, and that it safely encloses blackness within a realm of futuristic ‘otherness,’ an ‘over there’ enclosed in robotic obsolescence.
Many of Beyonce’s clips emphasise robotic, video game ideals of feminine beauty. Costumes emphasise small waists, large hips and broad shoulders, revealing the easy slippage between sub-human and super-human. In Single Ladies, the dance moves are short and sharp, reminiscent of animation or techno/porn-dollies, but also of traditional African styles of dance. Body language is open and rigid, the body is poised and the moves hit the beats with fashion-editorial boldness. The three dancers, for the most part, maintain geometric triangular shapes in the placement of the legs and their hands on their hips.
The rigidity of the post-human performance de-sexualises the black bodies. The moves are “tamed” and “whitened” through less use of the pelvis; less percussive thrusting, undulation, or rotation; opening of legs is lessened; hips and chest stay in strong vertical alignment and there is no bend in the legs (Desmond, 34). Even Beyonce’s early clips with Destiny’s Child, where the dance moves are more fluid, de-sexualise their bodies by emphasising the bright and girlish playfulness of women made “super-human” and independent by consumerism.
Constructing White Sexuality
Britney Spears and Madonna work hard to construct their sexuality. The relaxed and fluid motion of the body creates an illusion of giving way to senseless passion. The camera watches them from all angles, focusing in close-up on crotch, breasts and mouth; filming them from the side to emphasise forward and backward body rolls.
The choreography works to hide the art and skill of their own dance training, and thus to reject the expected self-mastery of the white subject. Their bodies move in continuous, fluid and circular movements, rolling their shoulders, hands, and hips. They are surrounded by ‘tribes’ of orgiastic dancers who incite raw sexuality.
Unfortunately, this liberated performance of white female sexuality is purchased at the expense of orientalising the other. These ‘tribes’ of dancers are always multicultural, featuring at least one Black and one Asian dancer. However this token representation of cultural difference really only shows their ability to appropriate the bodies and movements of other cultures; showing their own access to, and control over, minority cultures.
Summary
White and black celebrities move in particular ways that speak of their relation to racialised and gendered sexuality. Neither would get away with the kind of moves performed by the other. White performers fight to be sexualised while black performers resist sexualisation. For sexuality is already inherent and implied by the blackness of their skins, just as sexuality is automatically denied by the whiteness of the white performers.
Beyonce’s performance eliminates cultural difference just as much as Britney and Madonna. It is subsumed into her own personal style. Kumar says “self-objectification of identity [is] necessary when an individual moves into a larger structure where constructs such as race, ethnicity, and nationality are threatened” (76).
Individuals, says Desmond, come to stand in as generic racial stereotypes, not necessarily true to culture, often a hybrid formation of different cultures and styles with varying cultural meanings within their original cultures. Beyonce performs a “racial cross-dressing” where she becomes a genre unto herself: a hybrid genre of mixed and forgotten origins and meanings into which her own identity will eventually be subsumed.
References:
Desmond, Jane C. (1997) “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” in Jane C Desmond (ed.) Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 29-54
Kumar, Anita (2006) “What’s the Matter? Shakti’s (Re)Collection of Race, Nationhood, and Gender”, TDR: The Drama Review, 50 (4), pp. 72-95
Weheliye, Alexander G. (2002) ““Feenin”: Posthuman Voices In Contemporary Black Popular Music”, Social Text 71, 20 (2), pp. 21-47
October 18, 2009
You’re not becoming one of those lesbians are you?
A friend rang me recently who I haven’t seen in years. As we engaged in a brief catch up session over the phone, I told him I was slowly converting to hardcore feminism and loving every moment of it. His reply was confusing at first, then upsetting, until I later realised it was downright disgusting. He responded:
“Oh you’re not becoming one of those lesbians are you? That would be such a waste!”
I felt sullied, like I had to justify my sexual preferences, as if that was any of his business, as if sexuality was something you had to justify, something that changed who I was as a person, and how I should be valued. He went on:
“You know I love you. If things hadn’t been different, if I hadn’t met my girlfriend before you, we’d be married with 8 kids by now. You know I love you. Don’t be a lesbian. That would be such a waste.”
Again, like as if choosing or not choosing to sleep with another woman changed my intrinsic value as a person, sullied my chances of achieving my full potential for qualifying as a “real” girl, as an upstanding hot straight chick.
I made hesitant excuses about being too crazy busy and disorganised to make a time to meet up for coffee right then and there. I said I’d text him a time. I’ll text you. You’ll text me. Ok? Ok.
Days passed. I kept thinking about the abrupt strangeness of hearing from him again, the possibility of having him back in my life. The oddness of what he had said. Weeks passed. I felt resentful. I didn’t want to make a time.
Eventually, I explained to a friend how odd it was that guys that used to be in my life can’t seem to let me go, and a message was sent from my phone saying something like “I don’t want to see you. It would be weird and inappropriate.”
I still feel kind of bad about the message, as if I wasn’t being faithful to what had been, in the past, an awesome friendship. But really, in the end, I don’t think I want a friendship with someone who treats such destructive and shallow stereotypes as trivial conversation. Even if he was just flirting with me, it wasn’t funny. We both have long term partners. I’m pretty sure that, although the text was almost mean, it was the right thing to do.
October 17, 2009
Little Red Riding Hood
For a long time fairytales have been based on, and reinforced, by binary oppositions: male/female, nature/culture, passive/active, etc. They encouraged us, as little girls, to be small, beautiful, innocent and good, and so be well loved and cherished by our daddies, and one day rescued from danger by a dashing young (white) prince.
In the Grimms version of Little Red Riding Hood, the strong, male figure of the woodcutter saves the innocent little girl by killing the big bad wolf and thus removing the threat of the dark, feral sexuality that is found in the forest (of course, and what kind of forest might that be exactly?). The woodcutter cuts the grandmother out of the wolf’s belly and reinstates her safely into the large lacy bed of female passivity.
Helene Cixous argues that the figure of the grandmother regulates female sexuality according to patriarchal ideas of women. “Grandmothers are always wicked: she is the bad mother who always shuts the daughter in whenever the daughter might by chance want to live or take pleasure… [She] is there as jealousy… the jealousy of the woman who can’t let her daughter go.” (Cixous, p. 43-4)
But contemporary adaptations of fairytales (including a recent fashion spread in Vogue) actually encourage a blurring of traditional binaries and stereotypes, revealing that the tall, dark, evil stranger is not always lurking outside in the unknown, but often lives within us and alongside us.
In Angela Carter’s reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves, as we try to “keep the wolves out by living well” (Carter, p. 115), the violent, sexual and dangerous are always present within the home, and within ourselves. You can “call on Christ and his mother and all the angels in heaven to protect you but won’t do you any good.” (Carter, p. 116)
What we are dealing with is not dangers, or wolves, from the outside but an inner sexuality, violence and darkness, that sometimes we cannot repress or keep down. For “men really fear not that they will have women’s sexual appetites forced on them or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether.” (Rich, p. 1770)
In traditional versions of the tale, the wolf is a large, dangerous and cunning predator, the only site of sexuality. Whereas, in Carter’s version the grandmother is killed by the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood deliberately strips off her, and the wolf’s, clothes. She initiates sex “laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat” (Carter, p. 118). She is a capable young girl with a knife in her basket “too much loved to ever feel scared” (Carter, p. 113). The wolf, no longer the only site of sexuality in the story, becomes an agent of the girl’s own independent sexuality and desire.
It seems we are beginning to accept a new kind of woman figure, one that embraces rather than decapitates or drowns the mad, feral, sexualised, mystical and witchy aspects of herself. She is in a realm that is potentially outside the traditional roles and binaries prescribed by fairytales. She no longer gives and gives in an economy of desire, continually reinforcing male desire and reflecting male sexuality. Now she is wraithlike, and she laughs and laughs, in the company of wolves.
Carter, Angela (1979) “The Company of Wolves”, The Bloody Chamber, Penguin.
Cixous, Helene (1981) “Castration or Decapitation”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7 (1), pp. 41-55
Rich, Adrienne (1983) “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, NY & London: WW Norton & Co.
October 16, 2009
The Autonomy of Feminism
My idea of feminism is that it is a fight for women’s equality with men. The key part being ‘with men’. We have to work together if we are ever to move forwards with the issues that we want to advance. The point, for me anyway, is to make a world where we can work together, rather than continuing to divide ourselves down a superficial binary that contributes to the oppression of one or other group.
Men have to change their ways, and women too. We can’t achieve equality if we reject men, put them down, and see them as inferior or different. It is this difference that allows for oppression, and if women oppress men, then we are not really achieving equality.
I don’t want to downplay the importance of women’s oppression, or the horrific things that our culture’s version of masculinity can encourage and sanction in men’s behaviour. But oppression is an intrinsic part of the whole system, upheld by masculinity, femininity and even feminists.
Feminism’s project to end women’s oppression is something which we will all have to work together if we want to change it. But my discussion is returning dangerously to a gender binary, so I will say again that there are many different kinds of masculinity and femininity. Sex and gender are not fixed categories but are constantly shifting and being re-defined based on our values. So lets not fight about hierarchies of exclusion. Let’s work towards a politics of multiplicity, and of inclusion. Rather than defining ourselves against an ‘Other’ who is ‘not like us’, who is inferior and who we want to be different from. For if we continue to make that distinction, we engage in the same politics that has oppressed women for centuries. So let’s work from within the system, with the help of the male identifying among us, to change it.
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