Magazine: a (not) love letter

by Jarrah Hodge

Back in March I participated in Media Action Média‘s first REPRESENT 3-minute video contest as a submitter and guest judge. I was really impressed to see all the creative and thoughtful submissions from young people all across Canada around the issues of representation of women and girls in the media.

I realized today that I’d forgotten to share with you the excellent winning video, by Kathleen Clark of Ottawa. Her “Magazine: a (not) love letter” has a creative and unique visual concept combined with humour to clearly convey just how messed up magazine representations of women are. Enjoy!

Read more about what the other judges have to say, and more about Kathleen at the REPRESENT blog.

Posted on April 13, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture Leave a comment

Downton Abbey’s Lessons for Ladies

by Roxanna Bennett

-Spoiler Alert to end of Season 3-

The third season of Downton Abbey is over. We feminist fans shed some tears when Lady Sybil died, cheered when under-butler Thomas Barrow informed Mr. Carson his lifestyle is “not revolting” and learned a lot more about what it means to be a Lady.

We learned that it’s difficult but not impossible to challenge the social norms (Mrs. Crawley helps Edith move from sex work to domestic employment), that older women may be romantically pursued but it’s sometimes a relief to turn down a suitor (Mrs. Patmore is wooed by a player who wants a captive cook, Mrs. Crawley deftly shuts down Dr. Clarkson). We discovered that slut-shaming is an old tradition (Lady Mary, Lady Rose, Edith, pretty much every unmarried woman in Downton gets a taste of this at some point or another) and that sometimes challenging class and station in life works out for the best (Sybil and Tom), huzzah!

Below are 10 Georgian-era life lessons about femininity and ladyhood we learned from the women of Downton Abbey.

Appearance is everything

It’s imperative that, as a Lady, you spend several hours a day being dressed and undressed for various meals and events and that you sit still as you are groomed, brushed, petted and scolded in front of a mirror that will highlight your every fault and charm. Eating dinner with your family is the high point of your otherwise meaningless existence and heaven help the Lady who is not suitably attired.

Always a doctor’s wife, never a doctor

Yes, you spent years a trained nurse and were married to a doctor and competently treated patients and understood as much as your late husband about medical procedures. That’s all well and fine, but you’re a widow and a Lady and therefore, shut up and stop with the whining about saving the lives of dying patients with your fancy, think-you-know-better than the Man Doctor ideas.

Know your place!

A chauffeur should never sleep with a Lady, but if he does convince her to marry him, he’ll be reluctantly received as one of the family with all the money and comfort that entails. If a woman, however, sleeps above her station, such as a housemaid sleeping with an enlisted officer who happens to be convalescing in the home of her employer, look forward to a life of shame, hunger and misery. It’s alright for a man to marry up but not for a woman. If you are a Lady you are expected to find a consort within your class, and not make merry with farmhands or – far worse – editors and publishers, who are so gauche as to be inconceivable as marriage material.

Being a sex worker is contagious

A sex worker is the lowest form of life. Serving her in your shop is to invite shame upon yourself, your business and your family. Associating with a sex worker means that you, too, are also a sex worker because prostitution is contagious. Employing a sex worker as anything other than a sex worker is to allow your home or business to become defiled with her dirty ways. Never mind the reasons that she became a sex worker, (because you fired her for sleeping above her station [see #8, Know Your Place] and then she got pregnant and had no way to feed her bairn because you FIRED HER) now she is worse than trash and anyone seen speaking to her is assumed to also be frolicking in the muck of unwed intercourse. Read more

Posted on February 25, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 1 Comment

Hannah Horvath, will you be my BFF?

by Alicia Costa

The second season of the HBO hit show Girls is barely off the ground and writer/executive producer/director/actress Lena Dunham is already been raked over the coals for her creative decisions for this season.

Girls, the brainchild of Dunham and comedy-gem maker Judd Apatow, has been widely written about since its debut last year. The premise of the show revolves around four white and seemingly wealthy 20-something women living in New York City.

The first season of Girls was widely criticized for the lack of racial diversity in the casting. Dunham stated it was unintentional and agreed that the casting choices were not reflective of the racially and culturally diverse New York City. So, in the second season African American actor/comedian Donald Glover was cast as Hannah Horvath (Dunham)’s new beau and this was met with mixed reviews. Most critics claimed that by casting Glover in a main role she was using him as the “token” minority in an attempt to make the show appear more diverse.

“… I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, ‘I hear this and I want to respond to it.’ And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can’t speak to accurately.” (Shalomlife.com)

Dunham stated that the decision to cast Glover was made before critics lambasted the casting of the first season and was due more to the fact he’s a brilliant comedian than about him being black. In my opinion critics claiming that Glover’s whole role was written only to add colour to the cast greatly diminish how well written and smart the character of Sandy the hot Republican (Glover) was in the storyline of Girls.

However, Dunham has received the most amount of criticism over her body. She has the audacity to be naked and sexual AND not look how everyone expects actresses to look naked. She is not afraid to act out her own sex scenes and own her body. Read more

Posted on February 9, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 1 Comment

Contributors Pick the Best of 2012

Person on podium Happy New Year, everyone! As is our tradition, I asked the Gender Focus contributors about some of their highlights from how they spent the past year, and here’s what they came up with:

Favourite Movie:

Ashli Scale: Prometheus

Chanel: I have two: How to Survive a Plague is a documentary about the activism around the AIDS crisis. I went in expecting to spend two hours analyzing direct action tactics, and left feeling devastated, but weirdly hopeful.

From the Black, You Make Color is a documentary (yes, I only watch documentaries) about a beauty academy in Tel Aviv and its students and staff, all folks on the periphery of Israeli society. It’s an important, insightful piece about identity and class.

Jessica Mason McFadden: I’ll go with the one movie I saw: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.

E. Cain: The Odd Life of Timothy Green. I didn’t watch many movies this year, but this one is a super cute family film.

Favourite Book Read in 2012:

Sarah Jensen: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. A fascinating look into curb heights, street widths, and the importance of parallel parking. Really interesting to learn how crucial city planning is to building strong communities.

E. Cain: Prisoner of Tehran, A Memoir by Marina Nemat. My boss gave me this book for Christmas, a powerful memoir written by a strong woman - I highly recommend!

Chanel Dubofsky: The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg. If Jami Attenberg writes it, I will read it. The Middlesteins is her latest book, about a Midwestern Jewish family trying to avoid, deal with and make sense of each other. It’s startling, meaty and gorgeous.

Jessica Critcher: Why Have Kids? by Jessica Valenti. The title is all snark– it’s a rhetorical question. It’s a great read for someone happily living child-free (who occasionally finds herself defending that lifestyle choice). It’s also great for moms because it gets past all of the “mommy wars” crap that the media keeps creating and circulating. My mom loved it too– we recommend it to all of the moms we know.

Issue/Cause That Most Inspired You:

indigenousrightsrevolution

Chanel: Occupy, Occupy, Occupy.

Jarrah: #IdleNoMore. It’s been incredibly powerful to see a grassroots movements led by Indigenous people for Indigenous rights spring up and spread so quickly across Canada. It’s an almost unprecedented opportunity for non-Indigenous Canadians to put action behind our words by standing behind and supporting First Nations people in Canada.

Sarah: Food. In the last year I’ve learned so much about the impact that food has on my own health and the health of our environment.

Jessica Critcher: This is always hard! But since I have to pick, I would say the WAM! (Women, Action and the Media) campaign to build a grassroots direct action network for gender justice in the media. They had an Indie-Go-Go campaign over the summer and raised more than $10,000 to build a new state of the art website. Pretty legit.

Ashli: I’ve been most active in the Body Acceptance movement by doing body image presentations in schools. I’ve been so inspired by Kate Harding’s blog “Shapely Prose”, which closed up shop in 2010 but you can still access the great resources on it like Kate’s visual BMI Project. Read more

Posted on January 1, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism, Politics, Pop Culture Leave a comment

On Beyoncé’s Run The World (Girls)

by Librarian Karen. Librarian Karen is a librarian in Toronto, where she enjoys coffee, chocolate, photography, music, films, yelling at sexist television commercials and complaining about gender stereotypes in the media.

I don’t usually pay much attention to popular music, but sometimes a song comes along which, when I hear the lyrics or see the video, I think, “What the heck was that?” For example, Beyoncé’s song “Run the World (Girls)”.

There are so many things I don’t like about this song, and video. I realize that most commercial music is created for entertainment (and subsequently monetary) purposes, but claiming that this song is an anthem for girl power or for female empowerment is absurd, leaving me confused and frustrated.

In particular, I am astounded by Arielle Loren’s article “Is Beyoncé The Face of Contemporary Feminism?”, for Clutch magazine. Is Beyoncé the face of contemporary feminism and an inspiration for a fourth wave of feminism? No. Here’s why not and why she shouldn’t be.

Posted on December 10, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 1 Comment

Feminism F.A.Q.s: What is Objectification?

Feminism FAQs Title Screen

by Jarrah Hodge

My latest episode of Feminism F.A.Q. is on the issue of objectification, specifically sexual objectification, and why this is an issue for feminists. Check out the video below and read my notes and the transcript after the jump.

Posted on October 15, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 3 Comments

“Revolution” and Women in Radical Politics

Is Revolution NBC’s Hunger Games?

Gender Focus welcomes new contributor Tracy Bealer! Tracy Bealer has a PhD from the University of South Carolina and currently teaches writing at Metro State University of Denver, where she regularly lets her students watch movies in class. She has published on Quentin Tarantino, the Harry Potter series, and sparkly vampires.

NBC’s latest conspiracy-driven sci-fi drama series reveals its interest in political radicalism with its title. Revolution imagines a post-apocalyptic America in which, fifteen years prior, all electrical power was mysteriously, suddenly. and permanently shut off, rendering cities overgrown wastelands, and driving citizens to small, rural communities where they scrounge out a meager existence and try to remain in the good graces of a totalitarian militia—the Monroe Republic. The third episode, “No Quarter,” reveals the existence of a band of rebels committed to overthrowing the militia and restoring democratic rule.

So far, Revolution’s women characters have been represented as not only nominally powerful, but crucial to the narrative structure of each episode. In fact, the only all-male sphere appears to be the villainous Monroe militia. Two women hold priceless information about the source of, and possible cure for, the blackout. The show’s main protagonist, Miles Matheson, also seeks out Nora, a female former comrade, to aid his niece, Charlie, to find her brother who has been kidnapped by the militia. When they find Nora in “No Quarter,” Miles and Charlie discover she has joined the rebel movement and follow her to the group’s nearby stronghold.

While camping with the rebels, Charlie, a young woman who was entrusted with her brother’s rescue as her father was dying, experiences a political awakening. In earlier episodes, her only interest was in ensuring her family’s survival. She expressed no interest in resisting the militia’s regime beyond getting her brother back. But, after witnessing the death of a young fighter, the episode implies that Charlie’s consciousness about the larger communal cost of political oppression is raised. She demands to stay and fight alongside the rebels against overwhelming odds, rather than saving herself and her uncle.

I’m curious to see if Charlie’s political resistance will be developed in further episodes, especially because of her similarity to another young female political radical in pop culture: Katniss Everdeen. Read more

Posted on October 9, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 3 Comments

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