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Hoping/Failing: Ruth

I was really struck by both the Femme Erasure and Cis Passing videos. Christine’s points about some of the problems in the first video is very well founded and researched. Even after reading them I was left with the feeling that some of what she was saying from her own experience has validity. She did fall into the trap of trying to bring incorrect statistics into a conversation about her experiences to back her self up. Part of what the video was getting at was that passing has disadvantages too, not necessarily that it is more difficult than presenting as lesbian.

As a person with high-functioning anxiety this is actually something I think about a lot. I am constantly told that I can’t be struggling as much inside because I look like I’m happy and doing well on the outside. Some days, I don’t want anyone to see how hard it is for me to participate, and some days, all I want is for someone to notice and make the effort so I don’t have to.

This was one of the things that I took from the Cis Passing video as well. He articulated that in some ways it is nice for him to pass, in fact he had really wanted to pass. He feels in some ways safer because of it as well. Despite that he felt like he lost out on being a part of the gay/lesbian community because he passes. I think that the cards that he was talking about are a really interesting middle path. They allow him to pass but also enlighten others that there is more to him than meets the eye.

How can you tell me who I am when I don’t even know?

One of the things that struck me in both the spoken word poetry and the movie was the idea of someone (in the movie a white man) constructing what Asian femininity is. In Ex Machina, Nathan is trying to build a robot woman, trying to make her as “real” as possible but he is constructing his own view of what her femininity is. In his understanding of women, their sexuality is a tool, a means to a selfish ends. Ultimately this clearly backfires, leading to his own death.

One thing that I took from the readings is how difficult it is to understand your own identity, when you feel this tension between your Asian and American identity. This tension makes it so that in no situation do you ever feel entirely at home in your identity or accepted by others, you always feel different and confused (a feeling I can relate to as a Jewish American/ American Jew).

On top of that, as the spoken word piece so passionately said, everyone has an opinion on who you are and what you like, attempting to construct your identity for you when it is hard enough to reconcile the different parts of your self. How can a person who has no idea what it is like to be you, construct your identity for you?

Who made me who I am.

Professor Hungerford’s analysis of the Bluest Eyes brought to mind a issue in Jewish liturgy which has always troubled me. In the daily prayer service, there are a series of thank you blessings, traditionally including one which can loosely be translated as thank you God for not making me a woman and thank you for not making me a non-Jew. Egalitarian movements have transformed these phrases from the negative to the positive and inserted options for each gender. (Hebrew is a gendered language, every word has a gender.) Other movements have replaced the negative phrase with the positive phrase, who made me as I am. Of the options, I prefer the last, though I wasn’t introduced to it until after a different version was muscle memory. As a high school student, I struggled with who I was, trying out different identities, and levels of Jewish outward appearances. At times, I felt this intense pride and wanted everyone on the street to see I was Jewish, so I wore more traditional modest clothing, though at summer camp, amongst only Jews, I didn’t feel that urge to be seen as what I was. Before this, in middle school, I wanted desperately to fit in and be just like my classmates, and so I straightened my hair constantly. I am completely aware that I speak from a position of privilege, in that here in America I can pass, if that is even the right word for it. Obviously, this is different from what Skyler is talking about because I could make these choices. It took a long time for me to realize that I was always going to struggle internally with this until I internalized this thankfulness for being who I am, instead of trying to get people to see me as Jewish or non-Jewish.

53rd and 3rd Standing on the street 53rd and 3rd I'm tryin' to turn a trick 53rd and 3rd You're the one they never pick 53rd and 3rd Don't it make you feel sick?

Dee Dee Ramone

Vaginal Davis’s music and art really struck a cord with me as a part of the history and flawed nature of punk as a community. For early punk, especially in New York, anything went and it was a community of all of the outcasts. They weren’t outcasts because they liked punk. They came to the music and the community because they were queer, junkies, runaways, screw-ups that got kicked out, mentally ill and the list goes on. For a while those identities interacted both in individuals and in the hodgepodge communal identity. Take junkie DeeDee Ramone, who solicited men on 53rd and 3rd to get drug money and then performed at CBGB’s with drag performer Jayne County. The song 53rd and 3rd seems on the surface to be homophobic (a fact which can’t really be denied given that he kills the john who does pick him up in the song) but it also reveals a fluidity to sexuality in this community. It was later that, a sort of “mainstream punk culture” developed. Suddenly there were rules and a dress code and a homogenized punk culture which dictated your taste. Vaginal Davis strikes me as the intersection between carving out her own space in that homogenized punk culture and in the world of homogenized drag and queer identities (a world I will admit that I feel far less qualified to talk about). She is in a place in each of those cultures where she challenges what is considered the accepted mainstream culture of two groups which are already pushed, to some extent, to the side of mainstream American culture. All this is leaving aside the issues of race which are clearly at the heart of her work.

#performingwomen2016 #displacingthesubject #the ramones #ruth

Digital Divides: Ruth

For me, the “Touchscreen” video and the Popat & Preece reading both brought to mind a TV show called Caprica, a spinoff of Battlestar Galactica. In it there are these visual worlds accessed by holobands, in which a person interacts with that virtual world by inhabiting a digital avatar. These virtual world often has no laws and violence is quite common. When virtual pain becomes too much, the avatars “de-rez”, returning abruptly to their physical body, much like in the reading when the performer’s avatar was struck.

What really strikes me though is the extreme lawlessness which abounds in these worlds. Anything goes! In the first episode, we see the V-Club in which there are orgies, human sacrifice and more. Later on, we are also introduced to New Cap City, where the only rule is that if you die, you can’t come back. This virtual world has no real consequences for any actions aside from self preservation.

While in this show, the digital world creates a place of safety for religious outcasts, it also allows people to act out their darkest fantasies. What the creators of this show and Battlestar Galactica aim to do in the scifi genre is to show us an extreme and make us question if it is really that distant from us at all. While social media can provide a window to the larger world and help people find their own place in it, it can also provide a place for people to say and do things which personally scare me more than I can express.

#bsg #performingwomen2016 #caprica

(via GIPHY)

Preface: Everyone’s mental health is different. This is how I deal with mine.

Both Evie’s post and the Ted Talk really struck a personal cord with me this week. I struggle with social anxiety every day, and for a long time, before I was strong enough to accept the help that I needed from a trained professional, I would blame my symptoms on hormones, on PMS (for which I was prescribed birth control which in turn caused more symptoms) and on what I called “being a little OCD”. By giving myself these medical symptoms, I was able to cope with my real problems by avoiding them.

In diagnosing, it implies that beneath the symptoms there is a perfect person, a ladylike woman. I have come to understand, though a lot of hard work and self care, that I can’t just act like my emotions are merely symptoms, to be ignored them and muscled through. I can’t use the fact that they may be symptoms to devalue them as valid feelings. I need to unravel the knots my warped logic ties around my emotions and understand if the emotions are true valid feelings or born of that warped logic. Symptoms are not excuses.

When I was senior in high school, two of my friends opened up about their own mental health struggles, one with OCD and the other with trichotillomania (an impulse to pull ones own hair out). Both expressed that for them hearing people say they were “a little OCD” hurt because it made them feel like their real struggles with compulsion were pushed aside because “everyone is like that sometimes”. I have come to understand that it isn’t the same when a person without social anxiety walks into a room and sees no one they know and when I do.

When we use the language of symptom and disorder to talk about normal emotions or body functions we minimize people’s real struggles. In this era of WebMD, everyone thinks they have something wrong with them but sometimes our body is just working though it’s natural processes. Mood swings can happen to healthy people and cramps are often a part of a normal menstrual cycle. I’m not saying that our periods don’t suck, but they mean our body is functioning as it should be.

#giphy #bit #ocd #performingwomen2016 #denaturingthebody #myperiod #pms #anxious #ruth

What Makes the Red Man Red?

In response to DaMonique’s question on this song, when I first watched this movie, I was pretty much oblivious to the problematic elements. I didn’t always understand that it was bigotry because people in my life didn’t speak that way. But I absorbed everything I watched and everything I read and I repeated it and I am certainly not alone in that.

To me it raises difficult questions about how we look at movies, artwork, plays and so on that are a part of our culture but are problematic, due to their primitivism and associated racism and how we show them to children. One of the first things I learned as a camp counselor is that my campers were always watching to see how we did so they could mimic. It we wanted to promote positive body image, we started with ourselves and stop criticizing ourselves in the mirror.

By that same token, I think that we should still keep showing paintings like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to our (future) children, but we can’t just say this is a masterpiece, we have explain that the faces are based on African masks and that Picasso was a part of this primitivist moment in modern art. Context is important and though it doesn’t excuse it, at least it keeps you from passively viewing and regurgitating into our lives without understanding.

#primitivity and postmodernism #performingwomen2016 #picasso #ruth #peterpan

Sex Sells (Ruth)

This week’s curation really got me thinking about what these musicians are really selling in these music videos. Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez do seem to be selling themselves in a straightforward way, often straight to the camera in a way which becomes ripe for parade. What Kanye is selling seems to me to be a bit more complex. Bear with me on this because I am admittedly a large Yeezus fan. What I think Kanye is selling isn’t just sex, it is his art. Kanye doesn’t see himself as just a rapper selling his music, he “feels like Pablo”, meaning, to me, that he wants his work to be looked at as art and delved into and analyzed deeply, not passively consumed.

On the surface his Fade video does reenforce heteronormative sexuality and the male gaze in a way which does feel problematic at time. But the video also throw details in there that throw you off that passive track, such as her disregard of the camera lens until the last shot and her transformation into a cat woman at the end of the video. There is something off-putting which transforms it from pure passive pleasure viewing to something different. It made me think, about Venus Hottentot, about race and portrayals of PoC as animals, about acknowledging the male gaze and so on.

#yeezus #performingwomen2016 #rookiemag

desingyouruniverse

This week’s curation and the readings made me think a lot about the way that I consume performances in different contexts. The Dolan readings clarified for me two ways that I think that I and others consume performances. Dolan’s teaching philosophy, of providing her students with theories so that they can observe and think critically about what they are seeing constitutes a learning mode of consumption. Her thoughts, and Mulvey’s, on looking and observing passively in the viewpoint of the creator of the performance constitutes a looking mode of consumption.

As Evie articulated, and Magary in the “The Internet has a ‘Problem’ Problem”, each of these are problematic in their own ways. It is important to be aware and critical of the underlying biases in performances like Foreman’s and fight against the prejudices that cause them but performances are also about enjoyment, humor and awe of aesthetic beauty. “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

This is a difficulty which I often face as a theater student and a person who simply likes to enjoy a good show. For example, usually when I watch Adult Swim videos, I am watching with my friends as a late night form of amusement, not to analyze it. But my friends and I, like most college students are guilty of not looking to closely at the things we enjoy, because we might see something we don’t feel comfortable with.

The reverse is also true for me. Seeing a show has become a exercise in analysis and I forget to laugh. Lesbians Who Kill is hilarious but I was so focused on applying the readings that I lost the humor. And it is always important to laugh.

#performingwomen2016 #lookinglearning #ruth