To celebrate, read Islamic Revolution Barbie.
The video posted below is from the make-up trailer on the movie set of Soldier’s Girl (F. Pierson, U.S., 2003), and it shows how actor Lee Pace, who you may or may not recognize from the tv show “Pushing Daisies,” transforms from man to woman.
I’ve never seen this movie before, but a friend of mine posted this video on my Facebook wall. Soldier’s Girl is based on the true story of a soldier who gets “beaten to death for falling in love with a transgendered night club performer.”
See the trailer for it here!
NB: I apologize for writing this as a post, but I have an original image that I couldn’t put in a comment.
1) I think I’m still really stuck back on the first topic, ‘technologies of gender.’ I see a strong causal relationship between technology and gender; the processes by which our use of different technologies genders us makes sense to me. I’m still struggling, however, with how we (where most of us are gendered individuals) can be gendering technology.
I guess I see the entire process by which technology genders us (from the first section of the class) as one big circle of implications. We (individually and collectively) have certain conceptions of gender that we apply to how we use technology which in turn reinforces our conceptions of gender. My point here is that everything comes full circle. As my diagram illustrates, I understand that we can ‘cut’ the circle in the ‘conceptions of gender’ side. In this way, we can say that we start with our conceptions of gender which lead to the rest. What I don’t understand is how our gendered use of technology stands on its own to influence our conceptions of gender. That is, I don’t think we can cut the circle on the ‘use of technology side,’ because I don’t think we can think of our use of technology as being independent from our conceptions of gender, whereas I do think we can think of our conceptions of gender without considering our use of technology.
So I was visiting my best friend in philly yesterday and I of course cannot help but talk about this class to her. She actually loves contributing to the ideas I’ve shared to her about the class and I’ve encouraged her to come to the site and comment on some of the posts. Anyway, I couldn’t help but mention Johnathan’s very educated and poised statements about bugchasing. She had never heard of the group before and we then continued to have quite a heated debate about the subject. She then told me something I had never heard before: One of our friends is a second year med school student. My friend told me that she had asked her if she was scared at all going out into ambulances and on accident sites and possibly contracting HIV. She said that of course she was scared but there was something else she was even more concerned with. According to state law, if a victim at an accident site chooses to tell one EMT that he or she is HIV positive, then that EMT is forbidden to disclose that information to the other EMTs on site. They should keep that information to themselves and treat the patient no differently than any non-inflicted patient but engage in movements that hopefully the other EMTs will “pick up” and realize from to indicate that the patient is HIV positive without explicitly saying the words.
Now, I thought this law to be a conflict of interest. I understand that this information is private and that the victim has a right to keep these facts away from public ears. But if another life is in danger of being harmed, shouldn’t the victim be obligated to tell the EMTs or better yet, the EMT that knows this information be able to tell the other EMTs treating the patient that he or she has the disease? I’m not trying to be insensitive here. I happen to know a handful of people that are HIV positive and I have yet to ask them this question. In the context of the class, the technology used to treat ths patient will be different from that used for other patients . But in wielding this technology to treat, are the EMTs themselves de-humanizing the patient and withholding that technology that would be most beneficial in order not to be harmed themselves? I’m interested to see where others fall in regards to this law. Also, please understand that I do not wish to offend anyone. I am a humanist and believe that every human life should be saved. I apologize if I have hurt anyone.
(Sort of) Live Blogging Re-thinking Sex: FOMS vs. FOHBT
Wednesday night, March 4, 2009
So: there I was, sitting under the astonishing rotunda of the Harrison Auditorium of Penn’s Museum, waiting for Gayle Rubin to speak—and so kick off the much-tooted “historical,” state-of-the-field” conference on Re-thinking Sex. I had the bright thought to follow Laura’s shining example and live blog the conference, but there are a number of obstacles to realizing my vision→a guy behind me saying “are you keeping that computer open through the whole talk?…because it’s really very distracting.” Not to mention the lack of access to wifi.
So: I took notes and then transcribed some of them here.
Not quite “live,” but…as close to it as I can manage….
An interesting discussion about the way the media has portrayed gender issues that have cropped up as a result of the recession. They discuss relationships, housework and more.
“Everywhere you look TV, movies, and advertisements keep shoving the same photocopied version of beauty down your throat. SuicideGirls was created to demonstrate that beauty comes in many forms, not a single cookie cutter shape and look. What some people think makes us strange or weird or fucked up, we think is what makes us beautiful…We’re a collection of over 1,800 pin up girls who are devoted to changing your idea about what makes a woman beautiful and we’re naked…”
This is a mission statement of sorts for The Suicide Girls, who define themselves as “beauty redifined” and “the daughters of Bettie Page.” Many of the girls that are a part of this group list body modification, the piercings and tattooos kind, as interests and by main stream standards could be considered to look very “hardcore.”
A friend of mine mentioned something about Suicide Girls to me awhile ago. I never really looked into it, pretty much forgot about it actually, but after today’s discussion about Playboy I was reminded of it. Not unlike female popstars there seems to be a “Playboy centerfold” formula, Caucasian blondes with small waists, big breasts and curvy hips – an appearance that is unattainable without the help of cosmetic surgery, the perfect lighting, and retouching. The Suicide Girls – to me are a combination of Playboy (uhm – naked women…) and Roller Girls (more hardcore women of all shapes, sizes, and colors).
While Playboy centerfolds are used by the technology that genders them Suicide Girls are using technology to their advantage – presenting a more universal, less stereotypical image of beauty. The Suicide Girls homepage includes boards, news feeds (with actual news on them), a Twitter account, as well as Myspace and Facebook pages, this doesn’t include the coffee table books, magazines, DVDs, CDs, calendars along with other typical merchandise that is available through the website.
- Jonathan– you exposed a topic today that for me was novel, baffling, and disturbing, to say the least. As with any eye-opener, I much appreciate it, and hope this post isn’t stealing any of your thunder. I liked the fact that you saw “gift givers” as using technology (the internet) to infect, because I saw gift givers as shunning technology–the technology of condoms– to do so. In a quick google search, I came across a youtube video of CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewing the director of “The Gift”, Louise Hogarth. After a clip of a bugchaser who had contracted the HIV virus and was now seemingly at ease, Cooper asks, “is he an idiot?” Hogarth’s response was that no, he wasn’t an idiot; as Jonathan talked about in class, AIDS for some represents the “in-group” in the gay community, and this drives bug chasers to those who can assure them a position of acceptance.
Isn’t it incredible to think that people would risk their lives so consciously to feel accepted? That people could be so heavily influenced by what they perceive as ideal that they would die to achieve it? But wait… What about teenagers that would DIE to fit in with their drug abusing friends? What about girls that die starving themselves to achieve what the media portrays as normal? No. This is not incredible at all.
And I cannot stress how bizzare and ironic it is, that as I sit here totally charged on this topic… I’m watching CSI: NY, “Heart of Glass”. This episode is about a man who has killed himself by crashing his body into an industrial glass fishtank. The crime scene is covered in blood and shards of glass, and as one detective attempts to collect evidence, she cuts herself on a piece of this glass, which was inevitably covered in blood. read more…
Live Blogging Collective Panel #3
We started with the final round of 21st century introductions…
and then….
At today’s panel I will be analyzing the Guerrilla Girls, a group of female radical feminist artists who have taken it upon themselves to call attention to the obvious sexism and racism that has plagued the art community for centuries. Here are some tidbits of information:
- started in 1985 and is still active today
- members wear gorilla masks (a play on the word “guerrilla”) to public performances/ speaking engagements and adopt the names of deceased female artists in order to maintain anonymity
- use statistical analysis to prove the biases of the art community
- have a tongue-in-cheek approach in their protests
In the panel today, I’ll be talking about male belly dancers. Hpwever, this category in and of itself is extremely problematic. The term “belly dance” is a Western invention designed to titilate Western audiences in the 1890s, and circumscribes forms of folk dance which originated throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa and parts of the Mediterranean.
I was interested in exploring the ways in which men participated in this dance form, simply referred to as “dance” (raqs) or “homegrown dance” in Egypt. In its originally context, the dance form was not gendered. Sources disagree about how heavily tied it was to prostitution, but it was and is central to ceremonies like those surrounding marriage and circumcision. Male dancers were as common as female dancers in both urban and rural settings, but other than that, there does not appear to be much documentation of the dance before the Western influence. The Western gaze which arrived colonially changed the perception and the construction of the dance dramatically in several ways. But first, this is Tito Seif, one of the more famous male dancers: (sorry the video isn’t great quality, it was the best I could find!)
In class when Alex was representing the girls scouts, and then, when we were talking about women’s bodies as technology, I thought about the movie “Troop Beverly Hills.” I realized it brings up a lot of the issues we have discussed. Here are two clips that I think pertain to our current conversation:
Ok, I really have to stop watching television (well, actually Hulu videos) but in my procrastination I was lucky enough to stumble upon this Today Show segment by Katie Couric that assessed the accomplishments of the 1970’s Feminist movement and whether those achievements can still be observed today. From what I deduced it seems that 1970’s Feminism was more radical in ideology than my personal notions of Feminism. There seems to be a shift in the definition of what it means to be a feminist. In the interview, Gloria Steinem mentions that my generation sees sexuality as an empowering tool when in the 1970’s, feminists were “threatened by it”. The show also points out the idea of the movement becoming more evident in domestic settings than in the workplace as more and more women choose to stay at home and raise families rather than to join the workforce. I’m intrigued by this idea that being a contemporary feminist is to have the ability to make these family decisions and that choosing to raise a family over having a career is not a slap in the face to the 1970’s movement. We have to keep in mind that the battle over reproductive rights was fought in order to give women the ability to make choices on whether or not to raise a family. It is evident that gender roles are starting to become obsolete especially in the home as more men share in the responsibilities of child rearing by becoming stay-at-home dads.
Note: The segment mentions Margaret Sanger as being a feminist of her time. Although she did champion contraceptives and women’s reproductive rights, I do have to add that she was heavily involved in the eugenics movement. I fear that her motivations for reproductive rights had a racist and elitist underlining. She rose to prominence in a time when women’s colleges such as Bryn Mawr College were in their infancy. As more and more women of wealth (aka women born into wealth, not women who earned it) entered college thus delaying their creating families, the colored and lower class populations continued to grow. I believe that Sanger used her stance on reproductive rights in order to discourage women of color and of the lower class from having any(more) children.
Cosplaying D.Gray-Man
I’m representing the anthropological view on “cosplayers” in tomorrow’s panel, so I figured I’d provide some background. Cosplay is the Japanese shortening of the term “costume-play” and refers to people who dress up based on characters from anime, games, books, television, anything really. As far as records go, cosplay is said to have originated in Japan around 1978, and it wasn’t until 2000 or so that cosplay became popular in the US.
