Re-Imagination and Disney Princesses

[This post is dedicated to my sister Erin, the most Disney Princess girl I’ve ever known. She’s all about Belle.]


Dr. Logan structured our course so that each of the ten students presents a text to the rest of the class in a 30-45 minute presentation; we are also responsible for the creation of a handout to guide and focus our discussion of the selected text.  Last night’s class was on The Female American, attributed to Unca Eliza Winkfield.  Spencer was our presenter, and on the handout, he included an art deco image of Pocahontas.  In The Female American, Unca Eliza’s Native American mother is a Pocahontas figure, saving her future husband from death at the hands of her tribe, of which her father is king.  Unca Eliza, a bi-racial character, frequently references her skill with a bow and arrow, which makes the selected image particularly suitable.

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Part of our assignment included browsing through the images in Edward J. Gallagher’s Pocahontas Images gallery to acquaint ourselves with the ways in which the persona and image of Pocahontas has been appropriated by cultures throughout time.  There is an astounding amount of images available on the site, and apparently, Pocahontas can, with the stroke of an artist’s paintbrush or pen, transform from a Native American woman into a hybrid into a white woman.


So, during our class discussion (or was it last week’s discussion?  Oh old age, you are wrecking havoc on my memory), the subject of the Disney princesses came up, and Dr. Logan asked us, “Do any of them end their story not married?”  As we sat there thinking, we realized – no, all of the princesses, except Pocahontas, end up married.  However, even Pocahontas cannot escape the fate of a Disney tale, and ends up married in the sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (thanks to Jen for saving the day with this trivia tidbit).  

The Homosocial Network

If, as Dr. Logan’s Early American Women’s Words undergraduate class postulates, Facebook is a modern version of the commonplace book, then the movie The Social Network is worth taking a closer look.  I have not seen the movie, and have very little desire to do so, but after reading through some of these movie reviews, I might have to see it – in the name of research, of course.


The first review that caught my eye was on Slate (I am addicted to Dear Prudence).  I glanced through it and a reference to another article, “The (Homo)Social Network” is what snagged my attention.  The homosocial is on my mind almost twenty four seven thanks to this project, so there was no way I could let this opportunity for a modern connection slide past me.


So, I gathered a list of articles reviewing The Social Network, which wasn’t too hard because some of the reviews refer to other reviews.  This list is by no means exhaustive, obviously, but it heartens me to see reviewers grappling with the role of women within the movie, and its social consequences.  Enjoy.

• From Bitch Magazine: "Tube Tied: Stephen Colbert Asks About Women, and Maybe that's All I Need" by Michelle Dean

• From Jezebel: "The Social Network, Where Women Never Have Ideas" by Irin Carmon

• From Women and Hollywood: "Stephen Colbert Asks Aaron Sorkin About the Ladies in The Social Network" by Melissa Silverstein

• From IFC: "The (Homo)Social Network: "The Social Network" doesn't have a problem with women -- its characters do." by Alison Willmore

• From Slate: "Is the Facebook Movie Sexist?" by Dana Stevens

• From Salon: "Sorkin explains "Social Network" sexism" by Tracy Clar-Flory and "Female programmers on "The Social Network."  How accurate is the Facebook movie's depiction of women as trophies in the world of Web 2.0? We asked the experts." by Tracy Clark-Flory

• From The Daily Beast via Business Insider: "Groupies, Sexed-Up Asians, Vengeful Sluts, And Feminist Killjoys – Meet The Women Of The Social Network" by Rebecca Davis O'Brien

• [Edited on 19 October 2010 to add another link] From Tenured Radical, The 2.0 Edition: "Straight People, Listen!  The Pervasiveness of Cruelty in Mass Culture" by Tenured Radical

Give Me All Your Lovin’

This postcard was sent to PostSecret, and posted on the site October 3, 2010 (I think, I’m pretty sure it was last week).  (An unofficial archive of the submitted secrets is hosted on Tumblr here).  As soon as I saw it, it reminded me of Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality.  And since today is National Coming Out Day, I thought it would be appropriate material for a blog post.  I have to wonder, are there lesbian and homosexual versions of Cosmopolitan magazine?  I honestly don’t know.

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On a slightly related note, check out this short film by Don Hertzfeldt of Bitter Films, titled “Ah, L’Amour.”

Crazy, right?  This film is begging to be examined through the lens of the female grotesque.  The women literally turn into absurd, caricaturized monsters that violently kill, dismember, stab, rip off skin, set on fire, and eat the man.  Their replies are composed of stereotypical feminist / male-hating rhetoric: “stop smothering me,” “I need my space,” “I just want to be friends,” “—“ (no verbal response, just a gunshot, and “no means no, you bastard.”  The fat woman is passed over and ignored, because she is fat, ugly and therefore not sexually appealing.  The last woman, upon hearing that the man has money, simply replies with “I love you!” insinuating that women are motivated by money, which implies prostitution.

That being said, I laughed my ass off the first time I saw this cartoon, probably at the Enzian’s Florida Film Festival back in high school.  They used to present Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival at midnight showings.  Anyways, as I watched “Ah, L’Amour” before putting it on this page, I laughed again.  Does it make me a bad feminist that I laughed?  I personally don’t think so.  I just think of this cartoon as another text to be explored, examined, and cataloged.  For those not familiar with Hertzfeldt’s work, check out his other films on YouTube and provide yourself with some context - "Rejected" and "Billy's Balloon" are my favorites.  No subject matter is safe from ridicule and absurdity, and they’re all hysterically funny.  At least, in my opinion. 

Lazy Sunday

On this lazy Sunday afternoon, I present another pretty word cloud, made possible by Worlde.  I find these word clouds fascinating, and I wanted to see how Hannah Griffitt’s poem, “An Essay on Friendship,” would rearrange itself.  The poem is available on this post, Happy Happy, Joy Joy.  The more frequent the word in the chosen text, the more prominent it will appear in the word cloud.  I wanted to see how often friend and friendship would appear, and what other words, such as soul or dear or hearts, would be large or small.  Check out the results for yourself.

 

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This is the word cloud that appeared with the maximum set to 175 words, which is far less than the 1,260 words included in the poem.  The program allows you to set the word maximum, and when I chose 200, the words in the cloud were too small and crowded.  I set the program to erase out common English words (think the, and, of).  


Do me a favor - keep in mind this is not exactly scientific and we’ll be all right.  The biggest word is, unsurprisingly, friend, followed by friendship and love, soul, joys, joy, and ever.  Ev’ry, dear, care, feel, nature, mind, find, grief, tender, known, sweet, and friend share the same font size.  I’ll let you linger over the word cloud to figure out the next set of words connected by font size.  If one were to conduct an analysis of “An Essay on Friendship” based solely on this word cloud, the themes of friendship, love, a connection between souls, tenderness, and grief are still visible and viable.     


I think it would be interesting to give this word cloud to students and ask them to create a poem, or short story, based on the words within (and using the words within).  If I had time, I would try it, but for now, the idea is shelved.  


Now, I’m off to continue my reading of Susan Stabile’s Memory’s Daughters.  Enjoy your Sunday!   

I Want To Go To There

Last night, I stumbled across the article “Lit-snobs, hot librarians, and the rise of the literary tattoo” by Eugenia Williamson because I follow @AdviceToWriters on Twitter.  The article talks about a forthcoming book titled The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide (available through many retailers).  It’s a book with pictures of people who have literary-themed tattoos.  A brief quote from the article:

With any luck, the book will be used as a primary source by anthropologists of the future who have set out to understand what happened to bibliophiles when physical books began to disappear. At the very least, they'll learn that literary passions ran broadly, and deep, and weren't readily digitized. (Williamson)

You can look at some of the tattoos on The Boston Phoenix website here, but the pictures are cropped weirdly and often cut off the tattoo.  Instead, you should go straight to the source and check out lovely Tattoo Lit site.  I spent half an hour last night pouring over the pictures, ooohing and awwwing, and plotting my next tattoo.  Reading the accompanying information sent in with the actual pictures is fascinating – these people really love both literature and tattoos.  They are passionate about both.  


I too love literature and tattoos, and I have five tattoos, although only one of them is literary themed.  Wanna see it?  I’ve wanted this tattoo design ever since I was a little girl, and finally had it inked in April of 2009 by Sideshow Jen at Devotion Tattoos in Orlando, which has since closed.

It’s a bookworm, just like me.  I had Jen base the design off Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm character.  I caught the reading bug at a very young age, and luckily both my parents and schools encouraged voracious reading.  I don’t really remember this because it happened in elementary school, but apparently my parents bought me the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods.  They told me if I read the whole thing and liked it, they would buy me the rest of the books.  Well, in what they deemed to be too short a time period for me to have the entire book, I finished reading it and demanded the next.  They thought I was a liar.  I must have convinced them that I had indeed read the entire book, because I still have my boxed set of Little House on the Prairie books.  The point being, I was, and am still, a very quick reader of pleasure books.  I used to “steal” my dad’s books and return them to him within a day, finished, while he was still on the second or third chapter.  And I am incredibly lucky in that my request for books was never refused by either one of my parents, even if they were “ridiculous” books by authors like Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine (which I still own!).   


So, do you have any literary tattoos?  Do you want to get one?  If you did, what would it be?

Talk Nerdy To Me

I enjoy reading literary theory, but sometimes, the jargon is just too much.  If it takes me ten minutes to read a few sentences because I have to “unpack” (a Dr. Anna Jones term) every other word, I one, get annoyed and two, become extremely frustrated.  That being said, I love the terminology of literary theory.  I get a thrill out of hearing these words spoken, or just reading them on the page.  Sometimes, when I hear the same term repeated over and over again, or I write it over and over again, it doesn’t even seem like a real word.  This happened the other day with book, it was very surreal.  Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order.  (Please note: not all the terms are strictly literary theory terms, but since this is my blog, I can do whatever I want).

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Do you ever picture the authors of these terms saying the word?  Or maybe someone you like?  Can you see their lips forming the word, hear their voice tripping or gliding over the constants and vowels?  Does it make you giddy?  Do you get goose bumps or the shivers?  Do you get the giggles?  Does it thrill you?  Does it make you blush?  Am I weird for suggesting such bodily responses?  Probably, but hearing these words, in certain circumstances, cause me to react in unexpected ways.  And I’m betting I’m not the only one.


And if you think my fascination with jargon is limited to literary theory terms only, you’re sadly mistaken.  I recently re-read Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and it is filled with an abundance of military jargon, which I fell in love with.  The scenes with Mat Cauthon were my favorite because he’s the general of the Red Hand (Shen an Calhar).  Not only that, he has the memories of hundreds of men stuffed into his head, all of whom were involved in the military, so his vocabulary is quite expansive.  I also recently re-watched Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galatica, and my love affair with military jargon was rekindled: KAG, bring in the cat, Viper jocks, Raptors, Cylon Raiders, mutiny, insurrection, civvies, FTL (faster than light), ambush, and action stations, action stations, this is not a drill, set condition one throughout the ship.     

What are some of your favorite jargon terms, literary or other?


[Word cloud created on the Wordle site.]

Say It Isn’t So

My math teacher from high school, Mrs. Deborah Costello, posted a link to the article “National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse” on Facebook and stated, “Mathematicians and poets... its all good! :).”  Let me state for the record: I suck at math.  Sometimes you’ll find me using my fingers to count or frantically searching for a calculator to do what others think of as simple adding and/or subtracting.  So when I saw this article, I was intrigued – what is math doing messing around with poetry?


Here are two short excerpts from the article, which is available here.

Overblown as Erasmus Darwin's verses might seem nowadays, the point of poetry was pattern; to use a strict structure of rhythm and rhyme as a framework for words of passion or pedantry that would become fixed in a reader's brain. Robert Frost put it neatly when he wrote that "Poetry without rules is like tennis without a net".

Poetry, in other words, is mathematics. It is close to a particular branch of the subject known as combinatorics, the study of permutations – of how one can arrange particular groups of objects, numbers or letters according to stated laws (Jones).

I’m not quite sure that I completely agree that poetry is mathematics because it seems to leave out all the passion and creativity that is involved in the creation of said poetry.  And please note, I’m not excluding passion and creativity from mathematics, because I have plenty of friends who are passionate about math in the same manner that I am passionate about literature.  That being said, I did always enjoy writing poetry that was confined to strict patterns because it was like a puzzle; I knew I was on track when all the pieces (aka the words) of said puzzle fell into place.  In some ways, it was more freeing to write within a confined pattern, if that makes any sense.  Anyways, I hope you enjoy the article and Happy (Early) National Poetry Day!


Works Cited:

Jones, Steve. "National Poetry Day: Unlock the Mathematical Secrets of Verse." Telegraph. 5 Oct. 2010. Web. 5 Oct. 2010. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/steve-jones/8043205/National-Poetry-Day-unlock-the-mathematical-secrets-of-verse.html>.