A Gendered Humanity
The concept of universality in
theatre and film has always appealed to me as a utopian ideal, but never as
something truly achievable. I had to look no further than the open scenes we
worked on for a short while during our acting class;
A: Good morning
B: Good morning
A: How are you feeling?
B: Great
A: I’m sure.
B: What do you want for
breakfast?
A: Whatever
The above characters are sexless,
ageless, nameless beings, but even as I read that short exchange, it wasn’t
difficult to establish a relationship. And within that relationship, it wasn’t a
far reach establishing gender roles within the parameters of the exchange.
These assumptions emerged out of a need to understand the material with which I
was working, just as assumptions arise in my day to day interactions with the
world. Universality then becomes heavily dependent on the subjective
consciousness of an objective mass. If enough people understand the world
through binaries, then this ‘norm’ becomes pervasive beyond the surface connotation
of sex.
In the eighth episode of the
sixth season of Friends, Joey gets a
new female roommate and begins taking up an interest in decorating, flowers and
the like. Chandler (his old roommate) comes by often and misses no opportunity
to remind Joey that the activities he is engaged in are turning him into a
woman. By foregrounding feminine connotations of his actions, Chandler others
Joey from his status as a sexually dominant, white American Male. Even though
the episode ends with Joey moving the flowers and ‘feminine’ decorations into
his own room (because he genuinely like them), it has already made a clear
statement about the status, desires and predictable nature of the feminine sex.
Even though this episode was released in 1999, many of the sentiments expressed
manifest themselves in new ways in our modern world.
Marcia Belsky’s project The Headless Women Of Hollywood is a
fascinating deconstruction of the role, status and function of the female body
in the film industry. I was unaware of this construction until I began to look
closer…
“By decapitating the woman, she
becomes an unquestionably passive object to the male gaze. The question of her
consent is removed completely alongside her head…”
This project was begun by the
comedian/feminist/podcast host/musician/writer/badass in April 2016, and
regained traction and popularity alongside the #MeToo movement. It features Hollywood
movie posters in which all the women are headless, and foregrounded through
their sexual appeal as opposed to their…character? Brain? Human-ness? On
different social media platforms, these posters are accompanied by snarky
comments made by women from all walks of life, and call attention to the
unabashed objectification of the female form in this industry. It is at this
point that I am hard-pressed to agree with Sarah Schulman’s unabashed finger pointing
at the money-hungry-male-dominant nature of, not only the theatre industry, but
the movie industry as well. To quote Marcia;
“Men in these industries, and
others who are equally invested in maintaining the status quo, are not going to
change their priorities willingly. However, there are always people who
genuinely do want to do the right thing. And increasingly, people stepping into
those roles have [gained] a social consciousness from these conversations and
critiques becoming more mainstream, or because they are personally interested in
the conversation. So, my hope is that as the social consciousness changes, we
can actively correct how female sexuality is marketed and who it is marketed
for. And in the meantime, laugh about it.” Below is a neat example of how the “headless
women” trope is being challenged within the machine:
So. Universality is impossible if
based upon the grounds of gender. What if there was a universality of the human experience, and not of the gendered experience? Dog Days (An opera by David T. Little,
set to a libretto by Royce Vavrek after the short story by Judy Budnitz), was
the first opera I have ever seen, but it took me for a ride. I haven’t experienced
rationing, domestic violence, starvation or cannibalism, but I have experienced
a mother at wits end, a helpless father, and sibling rivalry. Although much of
the production flew over my personal experiences as a black woman, most of the
themes of family and struggle resonated with me;
But this is the catch. The binary
gender norm into which society has pretzel-ed itself forms such a large part of
universality that it would not have been possible for me to identify with these
themes outside the traditional roles of male (protector, provider) and female (nourisher,
nurturer) in the household portrayed in Dog
Days. Here, I recall the essentiality of the gender binary which we touched
on in one of our classes. Perhaps the reason that we cannot detach ourselves
from this binary is due to its deep roots in our ways of understanding and
making meaning with one another. We have made the gendered experience essential to the human experience.
Taking Arcadia as an example, the story of Thomasina was moving because of
her place as a young female person in England in the 1800’s. Her intellectual brilliance
shines a light on the growth of equality through history specifically because
there was such inequality to begin with. Similarly, Hannah’s dedication to her
work, and her no-nonsense attitude towards Bernard’s condescension carries
Thomasina’s beacon of fierce and incontestable feminine potential.
Would patriarchy exist without
the female ‘other’? Would feminism exist without the male gaze? Would
solidarity exist without a point of mutual experience and progressive
understanding of systematic oppression? Would progress exist without a
realization of the limitations of this binary? Certainly not! I am not
purporting that gender is the only place we can touch base and truly connect
with each other, I am proposing the possibility that perhaps the gender
binaries of female and male have to do with so much more than biology, sex and
sexual preference. Even the creation of a new gender pronoun “ze” as in Taylor
Mac’s Hir was born of a realization
of the limitations of the existing binary.
And so, I am back to where I started.
Perhaps it is best to make reparations in the wheel as opposed to tearing it
down. Perhaps not. In conclusion, I will paraphrase my colleague; “We need to
break this – thing – and create a new place where everybody is welcome. The
question we then need to ask is; What pieces can we carry over to the new way
of being?”
BONUS: Marcia Belsky is also the creator of Handmaid’s Tale: The Musical, which was received with positive critical acclaim. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any footage of the
production, so here is an uncomfortable SNL sketch of the Hulu Original series:
First of all, you are to be commended for reminding me/showing me yet another example of a white male dominant in mainstream culture that I hadn’t thought of, and for the introduction of Belsky’s “decapitation of woman.” I would categorize both of these examples as something a friend of mine once referenced as, “casual misogynism.” That is misogyny handled so deftly that it when it is slipped into our media/society, we scarcely even notice it because that’s just “the way it’s always been.”
ReplyDeleteI love Friends! I’ve probably seen each episode at least twice and some I’ve seen probably five or more times. I love Joey and Chandler, and I remember laughing really hard at the episode you referenced. Yet my love of the show de-sensitized me to the fact that Joey was being put forth as a sexually dominant white American male. Which made me take a closer look at Joey’s character. He’s a dumb and lovable actor, but if you have to recognize, he’s also a man-whore. He has numerous sexual encounters and often forgets the names of the women he’s been with. Which they make jokes about- and I’ve laughed at! Somehow, in the context of the sitcom, it’s been made okay to praise and celebrate the male conquest over the often-objectified female. And I tuned in time and time again! I feel like a horrible person.
Belsky’s project investigating the “headless woman” trope is, again, one that I’ve noticed time and time again, but haven’t spoken out against it. I’ve always taken it in, rolled my eyes and thought, “that movie is gonna be terrible.” Because I don’t want to see a movie where men are sexualizing woman in that manner. Yet, I guess I just let it be because I figured the marketing wasn’t directed at me. But Belsky makes a valid point that we all need to work toward correcting how female sexuality is marketed.
I’m pondering the questions you raised about the possibility of the patriarchy existing without the female ‘other.’ And I’m not sure if feminism can exist without the male gaze. As I begin to delve deeper into queer theory, I keep coming back to the ways in which “Straight” relies on “Non-Straight.” As Dr. Fletcher said in class this week, there must be gay people in order to prove straightness. People want the ability to say, “I’m not that.” Yet, as gender fluidity begins to be recognized, the binary begins to break. Actually, it’s already been broken, but fear is getting in the way of society recognizing that. But while the shattering of the binary scares some, it makes me hopeful. I think of the phrase, “can’t we all just get along?” My hope is that, at some point, the answer will be yes. And to your point, if we strip everything back down to the foundation, are there strong enough parts of the structure left behind that we can use to re-build something new? Or do we have to start from scratch?
I completely forgot about open scenes, but like you I also struggled with not identifying gender roles. It's amazing that I can place different races in other roles with ease, but gender is not as fluid (pun intended). This just goes back to concept of gender being so ingrained into our identity; race is too but gender is at a more visceral level.
ReplyDeleteWhat I think of is tradition. Growing up in a very conservative Indian household, you better believe there were gender roles. The thing is gender roles were definitely "performed." Both my parents worked and after my mom stopped working the night shift my dad would cook and clean, for example. However, when other "Indians" were around gender roles became much more "traditional." This was mainly on the part of women.
My dad and my uncles would try to help and the women would shoo them away and literally say that "this is a woman's job." But my mom never did that when it was just us or my extended family. What I found fascinating (actually more infuriating) were the "rules." This is proper and that is not. What will people say? All that came more from my mom than my dad. I never understood why, but it kind of makes sense.
My grandparents drilled it into her head that she had to behave a certain way because she's a woman. Even though she's changed, it's hard to get rid of that voice in the back of your head. I remember taking issue with these gender roles and appeared propriety to satisfy the archaic and simply wrong ideas of an older generation at a very early age. So much so, that whenever someone (mom, dad, random asshole my parents like to call friends) my sister (mainly my sister) what she should be doing, I'd tell her to do the exact opposite. But as a grown woman today I can still see the effects and the internal conflict she has when choosing to do something that would be considered unladylike or improper because it goes against tradition. But maybe it's easier for me because I'm a man and men have more freedom in that culture.
I think we, as a society, experience the same thing. We all have that voice in our heads. We have to actively challenge ourselves and our way of thinking and raise the next generation that way too. I guess eventually it'll be easy a few generations down the road.
The concept of "the headless woman" is also interesting. It's so "normal" for that type of a movie poster to exist I never even think twice. But I do know what it means instantly. "Oh, there's going to be an attractive woman and that guy is going to chase her at some point because she's beautiful." What about the opposite though. I've definitely see that "Girls Trip" poster and didn't think twice about it. Maybe because it just didn't appeal to me, but maybe because it was "geared" toward heterosexual women and not heterosexual men. It's just something I never thought about and thought was interesting.