tracy bealer

Did Quentin Tarantino’s Feminism Take a Step Backwards in Django Unchained?

djangoFrom A Bride with a Hanzo Sword to a Damsel in Distress: Did Quentin Tarantino’s Feminism Take a Step Backwards in Django Unchained?

by Tracy Bealer

One of the pleasures of being a Quentin Tarantino fan for the last (gulp) twenty years has been enjoying his development as a writer-director, especially in terms of his ever more complicated representations of women. To move from Reservoir Dogs, the female characters of which are limited to “shocked woman” and “shot woman,” to Kill Bill volumes 1 & 2, a film (Tarantino insists they be considered a single work) that masterfully investigates the multiplicity of feminine identity, is a dizzying and exhilarating evolution.

However, Django Unchained, Tarantino’s eighth feature, seems to further expand his interest in exploring the intersection of cinema, history and violence, but is rather regressive in terms of female characterization.

-Spoilers follow- Read more

Posted on January 7, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture, Racism 5 Comments

The Invisible War Exposes the Banality of Misogyny and Sexual Violence in the US Military

by Tracy Bealer

In Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she argues that profound historical evils are not usually committed by deranged psychopaths, but rather otherwise ordinary people who have been conditioned through state institutions to accept and perpetuate dehumanizing fictions about other human beings.

The Invisible War (now available on DVD and streaming on Netflix), filmmaker Kirby Dick’s 2012 documentary on the epidemic of sexual violence in all branches of the United States military, extends this thesis to not only the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault, but also the command structure that actively colludes with military justice to shield these criminals from prosecution, and to stigmatize and in some cases criminalize the male and female victims.

There isn’t anything particularly innovative or groundbreaking in the form or style of The Invisible War. What is shocking, sickening, and enraging is the content. The film chronicles the stories of a half dozen former servicewomen and servicemen in detail, with their individual traumas meant to stand for the thousands of women who endured the twin betrayals of physical and institutional violation while serving. To the film’s credit, it also includes the often overlooked voices of male victims of sexual assault. In so doing, The Invisible War implicitly asserts the truth that rape is not about sexual desire, but rather violence and domination.

Though each interviewee’s story of escalating harassment and stalking culminating in rape is treated with dignity and care, the similarities among the accounts, particularly in the treatment of the victims after reporting the crimes, reveals the way misogyny and sexual violence have become institutionalized into military culture. The women and men endure not only physical but also emotional and professional violation, as their experiences are alternately dismissed, devalued and denied by the military commanders who held (until a recent directive by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta) the sole authority to prosecute their rapists. Read more

Posted on November 29, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Politics, Pop Culture 1 Comment

Where Does Artist End and Art Begin?

by Tracy Bealer

While watching the 2010 documentary The Woodmans, I was reminded of the Yeats poem “Among School Children,” where he posits the seemingly unanswerable question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” And the movie left me with some questions, of various answerability, of my own. The film centers on the surviving family of avant-garde photographer Francesca Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981 at the age of twenty-two.

Woodman’s body of work includes thousands of black and white images, many of herself, which focus on the female body in various stages of undress. The prints are exposed so as to make the figures seem ethereal, blurred, or otherwise impermanent. Woodman’s lack of early success as an artist, along with her documented struggles with depression, are a few of the narratives her family and friends offer for her suicide in the series of interviews that comprise the documentary. The film is, thankfully, less an attempt to “explain” Woodman’s death and more an investigation of how art and love can heal an unfathomable loss. (Both of Woodman’s parents, along with her brother, are also visual artists.).

Woodman’s mother Betty, a well-known ceramics sculptor, mentions her frustration with devotees of her daughter’s work who insist upon a biographical interpretation of the photographs, insisting that Francesca was most healthy when she was creating, and ceased taking pictures in the months leading up to her death. However, it is difficult to look at the images of Woodman produced of her naked body, distorted and vulnerable, and not imagine she was revealing something of her troubled mind. Read more

Posted on October 29, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture Leave a comment

Is Laughter the Best Medicine? Tig Notaro’s “Live”

by 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.

In July of this year, comic Tig Notaro took the stage at Largo comedy club in Los Angeles, and opened her set by announcing, “Good evening . . .  I have cancer. Good evening.” What no one in the audience knew, and what friend Louis C.K. had only learned moments before, was that she wasn’t kidding.

Notaro’s now legendary thirty-minute set chronicled a year that one might expect to find in the plot of a melodrama, or reality show on TLC. She lost her mother unexpectedly, endured a break-up with her girlfriend, and survived pneumonia and an intestinal infection. Treatment for the latter revealed tumors in both breasts, leading to Notaro’s double mastectomy. Though in a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air Notaro shared that her treatment has thankfully been overwhelmingly successful, when she began her performance in July, she fully expected to die from the disease. Read more

Posted on October 17, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture Leave a comment

“Revolution” and Women in Radical Politics

Revolution poster

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